I’ve repeatedly spoken with people who found no one to talk to within their own circles. They stood alone and longed for more contact. Such a longing usually comes in these forms:

• A desire for contact with other believers who take their questions seriously.
• A desire for contact with like-minded people.

Both seem reasonable. The situation is demanding. Let’s dig a little into the challenges, since that also gives us insight into what a better faith community requires. Better than what? Better than the experiences these people describe.

Anyone who believes is usually part of a faith community. That could be a church, a free church, a house church, a Bible study group, or something similar. Community matters. But every community comes with its own particular stamp. That stamp determines whether and how people with questions have a place in it.

As a rule, faith communities distinguish themselves from other groups through their convictions and their culture. There’s an expectation, at least in confession (!), that everyone in the community shares a similar foundation (!). Such uniformity is both understandable and unsettling.
Concrete examples:

1. Anyone who wants to become a pastor or minister of a particular denomination is expected to sign that group’s statements of faith.
2. The bylaws of a Baptist community I know required members to be baptized. What they meant by that was “baptism by immersion, as an adult.”
3. When a couple of lives together without being married, that’s frowned upon outright in many communities because, in their view, it’s “not biblical.” I’ve seen how such situations lead to people being demoted to second-class Christians, no longer allowed to fulfill any public role in the community.
4. Anyone who questions the community’s teaching—say, someone who can’t find hell in the Bible—is met not just with disagreement but sometimes even has their faith called into question or is accused of demonic influence. Helpless answers that serve only to deflect from one’s own lack of competence.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced all of these reactions myself or watched them happen up close to others. So you’re part of a group with certain ideas, and then one day honest questions arise, or a challenge in everyday life comes up, for which the community doesn’t seem prepared. You ask questions that don’t fit the concept. The community often responds not with understanding, but with outright rejection. This reaction is all the stronger the more the community’s ideas are held up as absolute truth.

• Of course I understand that there can be delicate, difficult, or even unfamiliar situations that challenge a community.
• Setting boundaries can certainly be necessary. But the questions are: when, and why?
• Does the community allow growth, or prevent it? How does one support those who ask questions?
• Not every question is honest. Some people are only trying to win others over to their side, or to disrupt order in some other way. Self-righteous people and narcissists shouldn’t be given a stage. Setting boundaries makes sense there. But not every question belongs in that category.

Why are people with questions threatening? There are various reasons for this. But we also need to ask: threatening to whom, and why?

In rigid forms of community, it takes an incredible amount of courage to want to think things through for yourself. Many sense from experience that their questions probably won’t be well received. Still, many of the people I spoke with were surprised by the sheer intensity of the rejection. Friends, even family, turned away from them. Rejection by the community’s leadership was all but guaranteed. They had dared to think differently. What audacity!

People don’t like being disturbed in their thinking.

• Community leadership can feel threatened.
• Community members may reject any change once the community’s identity is sold as security and its views as absolute truth.
• Friends and family may feel more obligated to the community than to the individual.

All of these points revolve around fear. These are fear-driven ways of believing. But fear is a poor advisor when you want to build community or foster people’s growing into maturity.

Anyone who has experiences like the ones I’ve just described finds themselves in a difficult position. There are only two options: either deny yourself and your own questions or submit to the community.

Whatever the questioner chooses has serious consequences. There’s no easy choice, and that’s not because of the questions (whatever they may be), but because of the community’s reaction. When a community only wants to protect its own image and resists change and serious questions, it leaves the questioner with two bad options: leave, or fall in line.

Suddenly you can find yourself standing alone. First came your own questions, then came the community’s rejection. The harshest form of rejection is being branded a heretic. That’s the ultimate, and rather arrogant, way of communicating that one has no intention of engaging with the question. You don’t fit the others’ internalized concept, and so you’re excluded, avoided, and branded.

The questions may not even be resolved yet, but the people around you have already reacted and pulled away. Then you suddenly carry two burdens instead of one: your own questions on one hand and the community’s rejection on the other. That’s how many people end up standing alone, even though they never chose it.

One example: when Luther stood in the church with doubts and many questions, his first concern was to renew that church from within. With his theses, he wanted to spark a debate within the church, to stop what he perceived as abuse and correct people’s misunderstandings. That wasn’t appreciated. The Reformation that followed was, on one hand, unavoidable, but it was also a reaction to the rejection by his own church. It wasn’t just the sale of indulgences that was a problem, but also his criticism of the pope. It took a few years, but Luther was eventually branded a heretic—that is, formally declared a heretic and excommunicated by the church in 1521.

Something similar happens to people who ask questions today. Of course, there’s nothing at stake on the scale of Luther’s situation, but the mechanisms are similar. Once again, it involves questions about the Bible, but also a Christian culture that turns inward and seeks to protect itself against change and in favor of preserving power structures. Whoever expresses doubt or criticism loses out within these religious systems.

A reorientation is possible, perhaps even unavoidable, but it comes at a price. Once you become aware of that price, you have to make a choice. It can involve weighing advantages against disadvantages.

• One option is to choose your own integrity and leave. That’s what I did. You accept the rejection as the cost.
• Others, by contrast, fall back in line and set their personal questions aside. They don’t want to lose their contact with friends and family and consider those relationships more important. Their own questions get shelved.

Both responses are legitimate. But the community’s stance remains unchanged. That’s where the real problem lies. One observation here is that many Christian communities that set themselves apart from other ideas see this as mainly grounded in their theology. In doing so, they usually can’t distinguish what actually stands where, how, and why in the Bible, from what stems from a particular tradition.

It follows, then, that a reorientation in one’s thinking has to question that theology. That’s not easy, because the ideas supposedly found in the Bible are tightly bound up with a particular Christian subculture. So it’s not a matter of individual questions, but of an entire framework of understanding that, through countless interconnections, has become a fortress. Paul already had to deal with such fortresses of the mind (2Cor 10:4).

No one can believe on your behalf—not the pastor, not your partner, not the community. Everyone stands alone before God with their own faith (Rom 14:22). Taking responsibility for yourself is healthy and necessary. Sometimes that also means learning to set boundaries. Religious abuse is a real thing. In the US, it’s been a topic of discussion for a while now. So-called Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) is classified as a form of post-traumatic stress reaction (PTSD). In various European countries, a similar assessment is slowly starting to follow.

Many people are already familiar with one form of abuse: sexual abuse. But that’s not the only problem. Abuse takes many forms. Religious abuse isn’t one specific form—the term describes abuse that arises within a religious context. That can happen in any kind of community, and therefore within any religion. Some forms of community are more prone to it than others. It can result in emotional abuse, or take shape in sectarian structures. In such cases, people end up being manipulated in their decisions.

German text:

Your personal story deserves to be heard. Religious communities are meant to help you grow, both as a person and in your understanding of faith. Questions are essential to that. When questions aren’t welcome, and conformity and submission are demanded instead, something is wrong. That’s not normal, and it’s not healthy. Rigid faith communities, however, treat such manipulation as normal.