In the circles I grew up in, we had a shit ton of rules (like never saying "shit ton"), but we didn't call ourselves "legalistic;" we reserved that for the people who forced women to wear skirts all the time.
Obviously, it was okay for women to wear pants during the week so they could work the garden more easily. But when you were in church on Wednesday and Sunday, God needed for you to remember your place in the patriarchy and dress accordingly: “Woman, you don’t wear the pants around here!”
I remember the first time I wore pants inside a church on a Sunday night. I was in high school. I was pretty sure I was going to hell. But we weren't legalistic. It was a relationship, not a religion.
But I digress.
St Patrick’s Cathedral, Downpatrick, Northern Ireland
Here's the thing. I am in a lot of circles where folks are deconstructing from toxic religion. And when we run across bigtime religious trauma, we’re likely to recognize it.
But many more of us can’t identify a certain event that caused us spiritual trauma, it’s just that we feel extremely yucky in certain religious spaces that we might be able to say are a tad legalistic. Or maybe just not quite as gracious as they could be.
And when we get in those spaces, and we feel so bad, we judge ourselves for being judgmental, and suspect that we’re unloving for not wanting to be there.
Here’s my real talk for this situation that so many of us experience.
Legalism is, by definition, spiritual abuse.
Spiritual abuse is about using God and religion to control people, and that's exactly what legalism does: it uses God-rules to control people.
Abuse of any kind causes trauma, especially when it isolates people from support.
And legalism does that in spades by making everyone look super spiritualspitshiny, so if you can't get the rules right, it's just you. Everybody else is as holy as the 4th member of the Trinity. You are the problem.
When I put it like that, most of us can see that legalism is a bad thing, even the milder forms.
But the way I saw legalism when I was in it was this: up to a certain point (our point), it was the way of righteousness. Maybe some people took it a bit farther than they had to, but that was all in good faith. They were just being more holy than they needed to. Maybe they didn't quite receive grace like they could, but wow, were they ever sincere.
In most of the missionary communities I've ever been a part of (and I was born into this game), the more legalistic you were, the more power you had in the community. The more respect you were likely to garner. The more legalistic members of the community got to decide group norms because they were so damn offended about everything, in Jesus' name amen. So they tried to make everybody else act as legalistic as they did.
Witness how difficult it is for us to tell the truth about “the grace given to us.”
Try telling people that you don’t believe that a God of Love would ever burn people in hell for all eternity, because only a sociopath would do such a thing.
Having that kind of access to love and grace?
It's literally the quickest way to learn that you 're headed for hell.
But here's what I think, as I witness the ongoing impact of legalism, years and decades later, on myself and countless others.
Legalism is not some benign form of hyper commitment by spiritual people who just happen to love god a lot better than the rest of us, without understanding grace quite as well as they might.
Legalism is an attempt to control people, using God and the Bible to do it.
It's time to call legalism what it is: spiritual abuse.
And to name what it does: cause religious trauma.
And for anyone who has to re-enter spaces that did this to you, or to live in spaces that continue to do this, know for sure: this abuse is not your fault, you are not crazy. You are not unloving for wanting to be far, far away from a system of abuse.
You are whole, safe, and beloved, and you deserve to be safe, always. Safe and loved without the attempt to control you in any way. Especially by the poisonous use of the spiritual abuse of legalism.