Some of It Was Just Wrong

Not everything taught in the name of Jesus came from Jesus. Some of it needs to be named clearly — not to wound the church further, but because the truth is what actually sets people free.

Scripture: Matthew 23:1–4; Matthew 18:6; Romans 8:1; Galatians 5:1; 1 John 4:18

There is a kind of pain that is hard to name because the people who caused it believed they were doing the right thing.

They weren’t cruel in any obvious way. They loved God, or at least they believed they did. They were passing on what they had been taught, enforcing what their tradition required, protecting what they understood to be the truth. And in doing so, they caused real damage — to real people, in real lives — and called it faithfulness.

This is the hardest tier to write about. Not because the subject is obscure, but because many of the people reading this are carrying it. What happened to you was not a misunderstanding or a theological disagreement. It was harm. And it was done in the name of the God who, it turns out, was not the one who authorized it.

What lives here

Not every difficult or demanding teaching belongs in this tier. The faith makes genuine demands — on our money, our comfort, our pride, our relationships — and feeling those demands is not evidence of harm.

What belongs here is teaching that damaged people. Teaching that operated without scriptural grounding, or used Scripture as a cover for something Scripture does not actually say. Teaching that protected institutions at the expense of individuals. Teaching that made the reach of grace so conditional that it functioned as no grace at all.

The harm tends to fall into a few recognizable patterns.

Harm through a distorted picture of God

The God who must be appeased. Some people were taught a version of God who is primarily watching for failure, keeping score, and withholding love until sufficient conditions are met. This isn’t the God of Scripture. It’s a distortion — and a particularly damaging one, because it turns prayer into negotiation, repentance into performance, and the Christian life into an exhausting attempt to stay on the right side of a deity who is never quite satisfied.

The New Testament is unambiguous: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Not less condemnation. Not conditional condemnation. None. A theology that functions primarily through fear and condemnation is not a stricter version of the Gospel. It is a different gospel.

The God who only loves certain kinds of people. Some people were taught, explicitly or by implication, that God’s love has a specific profile — that it flows more naturally toward certain demographics, certain family structures, certain kinds of lives. That some people are more welcome than others, not because of what they have done, but because of who they are.

This too is a distortion. The scope of grace in Scripture is relentlessly expansive. The people Jesus kept choosing to eat with, heal, forgive, and include were the ones the religious establishment had already sorted out of the category of beloved. That pattern is not incidental. It is the point.

Harm through the misuse of authority

Shame as a pastoral tool. Shame isn’t the same as conviction. Conviction is the Spirit-given awareness that something is wrong, accompanied by the possibility of restoration. Shame is the belief that you are wrong — that you are fundamentally defective, disqualified, beyond full belonging. Conviction leads somewhere. Shame loops.

Churches that use shame as a primary mechanism of pastoral care — that leverage public exposure, social exclusion, or the constant implication that you are not quite enough — are not being faithful. They are being cruel in a way that has learned the language of faithfulness. John says plainly that “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). A community organized primarily around fear is not organized around love, regardless of what it says about itself.

Spiritual abuse and the misuse of submission. Some people were taught that questioning leadership was equivalent to questioning God. That the authority of a pastor, elder, or spiritual director was essentially divine — and that disagreement was rebellion, and rebellion was sin. This teaching has no serious scriptural basis and has been used to cover an enormous amount of harm, including situations of documented abuse.

Authority in the New Testament is always accountable, always in service of the community, always subject to correction. “Do not lord it over those in your charge” (1 Peter 5:3) is not a suggestion for leaders who feel like following it. It is the shape of legitimate Christian authority. Leadership that insulates itself from accountability and punishes those who question it is not exercising authority. It is abusing it.

The protection of institutions over people. When a church’s primary response to harm is to protect its reputation, manage its narrative, and minimize the damage to its structures — rather than to pursue justice for the person who was hurt — it has gotten something deeply wrong. Not accidentally, but structurally. It has placed the institution in the position that Scripture reserves for people.

This is worth calling out because it’s not rare. It is, in fact, a documented and repeated pattern across many traditions and many decades. The response to abuse that prioritizes the abuser’s standing, the church’s image, or the smooth continuation of institutional life over the safety and dignity of survivors is not a mistake in judgment. It is a betrayal of what the church exists to be.

Harm through exclusion

The conditional grace. Some people were taught a version of grace that functioned, in practice, as anything but. Grace that required ongoing performance to maintain. Grace that was withdrawn when the wrong question was asked, the wrong behavior continued, or the wrong identity disclosed.

Grace with fine print is not grace. The moment it becomes conditional on the recipient’s continued compliance, it has become something else — a transaction, a reward, a behavioral modification tool. A church can call something grace and still be wrong about what grace is.

Teachings that told people they were the problem. Some people were told — directly, or through the cumulative weight of everything around them — that who they are is incompatible with belonging. Not what they have done, but who they are. That their presence is a problem. That the only acceptable version of themselves is one in which the most fundamental things about them disappear.

People have not survived this. That’s not a rhetorical point. It is a documented reality. And a teaching that drives people toward self-destruction — regardless of the theological intention behind it — has produced fruit that Scripture consistently associates not with the Spirit but with its absence.

What is not in this tier

Hard teaching is not the same as harmful teaching.

The Gospel makes genuine demands. It calls people to forgive enemies, which is costly. It insists that money is not ultimate, which is countercultural. It says that following Jesus will involve loss, which is uncomfortable. It holds to the reality of sin, which requires honesty about ourselves that does not come easily.

None of that belongs here. Difficulty is not evidence of harm. The Gospel is allowed to be demanding. What it is not allowed to be — what it has never been authorized to be — is a tool for damage, exclusion, shame, or abuse.

The test for this tier is not does this cost me something. It is does this cause damage, operate without scriptural grounding, or contradict what Scripture actually teaches about God, grace, and the reach of love.

That is a different test. And it’s worth applying carefully, not as a way of protecting the institution, but as a way of telling the truth.

What this does not mean

Naming harm clearly does not mean the faith itself is the problem.

The people who taught these things often believed they were serving God. The institutions that protected abusers often believed they were protecting the church. They were wrong — and the wrongness matters and deserves to be named — but the wrongness was theirs, not the Gospel’s.

Jesus reserved his sharpest words not for sinners but for religious leaders who placed heavy burdens on people and would not lift a finger to help carry them (Matthew 23:4) — who used the language of God to serve their own ends, who excluded the people God was drawing in. He saw this pattern clearly. He named it clearly. His naming of it is itself part of the tradition.

A church can call something faithfulness and still be wrong. The faith has resources for critiquing what was done in its name. That is not a contradiction. It is one of the things that makes it worth staying in conversation with.

For the person who is carrying this

If you are reading this and recognizing your own story — if what is described here is not abstract but personal — a few things are worth saying directly.

What happened to you was not God’s design.

The version of faith that damaged you was not the only version. It may have been the only version you had access to, which is its own kind of loss. But it was not the whole of what Christianity is or has been or can be. There are people who have held the same faith and used it to shelter rather than wound, to open rather than close, to tell the truth about grace rather than weaponize it.

You are not required to sort all of this out before you are allowed to grieve it. The grief is legitimate. The anger is legitimate. The exhaustion of having spent years navigating something that should have been a source of life and finding it a source of damage — that is real, and it does not need to be resolved on a schedule.

And if something is still pulling you — if beneath the harm there is something you have not been able to let go of, some thread that has not broken even when everything around it did — that thread is worth following. Not back to the institution that hurt you. Not back to the theology that excluded you. But toward the One who was never the author of any of it.

He is not hard to find. He tends to be wherever the wounded are.

On forgiveness

Forgiveness is real, it matters, and it is something the Gospel genuinely calls us toward. But forgiveness is not the same as minimizing what happened. It is not the same as reconciliation with people who have not acknowledged the harm. It is not the same as returning to a situation that is still unsafe. And it is not something that can be demanded of you on someone else’s timeline.

Forgiveness, in the Christian tradition, is ultimately about your own freedom — releasing the claim that someone else’s debt has on you. It is not a gift primarily to the person who harmed you. It is a gift, slowly and sometimes painfully received, for yourself.

Do not let anyone use the language of forgiveness to rush you past the legitimate work of naming what actually happened.

It does not happen before grief. It happens through it.

Next in the series: Not Everything Old Is True — But Some of It Is — A closer look at Tier Two

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