When Trust Becomes Vulnerability: Victims of spiritual coercion, exploitation, or grooming
Understanding Vulnerability
Spiritual abuse can involve grooming, exploitation and manipulation of adults. Survivors often wonder whether something about them made them vulnerable to what happened. This article explores why vulnerability is a universal human experience, particularly within relationships where there is a significant power imbalance, and why responsibility for abuse belongs with the person who held the power.
Why Did This Happen to Me?
Most people who have been groomed or manipulated in a religious setting ask some version of this question eventually. Sometimes it's direct. Sometimes it sits underneath other questions — Why didn't I see it? Why didn't I leave? Was there something about me that made me a target?
These are reasonable questions. This blog post addresses these by considering what vulnerability is.
Why is it important to understand vulnerability
When philosophers and researchers talk about vulnerability, they don't mean a character weakness. Vulnerability is relational — it is a product of trust. We all become vulnerable when we enter a relationship with someone else. Philosopher Judith Butler (2020) makes this point clearly: we don't become vulnerable in isolation. We become vulnerable within specific relationships and institutions when we place trust in them. We become particularly vulnerable when power is unequal — when we place trust in someone who holds authority, knowledge, or spiritual influence that we do not.
Hilde Haker (2020) extends this: a degree of vulnerability is common to all human beings. What differs between people is not whether they experience vulnerability, but what conditions shape it — and whether those in positions of power choose to honour or exploit it.
This means that when people enter religious communities, they do some with a degree of vulnerability. To participate in a religious community is to rely on it: for guidance, for belonging, for a framework through which to understand your life. That reliance is a normal human response to something that presents itself as trustworthy.
How Vulnerability can be Exploited in Religious Settings
Healthy faith communities are life-giving. But like any organisational setting, faith communities carry a risk that power can be misused. Grooming and manipulation in religious contexts can take many forms, but they share a common structure: someone in a position of spiritual authority uses that authority to serve their own interests at another person's expense.
This might look like:
Sexual grooming by a clergy member, pastor or spiritual leader. A leader uses the intimacy of pastoral care — confession, counselling, spiritual direction — to gradually sexualise the relationship. Contact becomes increasingly personal. The person being groomed is made to feel specially chosen, uniquely understood, or spiritually connected to the leader in a way others wouldn't understand. By the time sexual contact occurs, the boundary has been moved so incrementally that the person may not immediately recognise it as abuse — particularly if the leader frames it in spiritual terms.
High-control religious groups. A church or community gradually tightens its grip on how members think, relate, and make decisions. Members are discouraged from questioning leadership, from maintaining outside relationships, or from accessing information that contradicts the group's teachings. People can find themselves, over time, acting in ways that are inconsistent with their own values — cutting off family, handing over finances, or defending behaviour they would once have recognised as harmful. Looking back, many describe a slow process they didn't see happening.
Financial exploitation. A leader uses spiritual authority to direct members toward financial decisions that benefit the leader or institution — through tithing demands framed as moral obligation, pressure to make large donations, or direct requests for money in the context of a personal pastoral relationship. The person's trust in the leader's spiritual judgment makes it difficult to question whether the financial direction is appropriate.
These experiences are different in their specifics, but the underlying dynamic is consistent: a relationship of trust and spiritual authority is used to override a person's judgment, agency, or boundaries — gradually enough that the person often doesn't recognise what is happening until they are some way into it, or until it is over.
How Vulnerability is Exploited through Grooming
Grooming rarely begins with an obvious boundary violation. It works incrementally, as boundaries are eroded gradually. The leader gradually fosters dependency, increases isolation, and makes the relationship feel uniquely significant. By the time something clearly wrong occurs, a person has often been conditioned not to name it as such.
Researchers De Weger and Death (2017) put it plainly: abuse in religious settings does not occur because there is a vulnerable person. It occurs because there is someone in power willing to misuse it.
The most committed are often the most targeted for grooming and exploitation
This surprises people, but it is consistent across research. Doyle (2009) found that victims of clergy abuse typically held an exceptional degree of trust in their clergy, and that the severity of trauma was directly related to the depth of that bond. Diana Garland's national survey (Baylor University) found that many survivors were receiving pastoral counselling from the very leader who went on to abuse them, often seeking support for spiritual, psychological or relational distress.
Deep trust, genuine faith, and willingness to be guided are therefore traits that are utilised by spiritual leaders who misuse power and exploit others.
Why spiritual settings make this harder to recognise
A religious leader doesn't just hold institutional authority. They are viewed as set-apart, God-appointed, or God’s representatives. They often hold interpretive authority over your faith, your sense of self, and your understanding of what God requires of you. Therefore, a person approaching a spiritual leader is already primed to trust them. When that authority is misused, it becomes genuinely difficult to trust your own perception of what is happening.
This is why spiritual abuse tends to be particularly disorienting. It operates in a domain where certainty is already complex, and where high trust in leadership is normal.
Responsibility sits with the person who held power
Across medicine, law, psychology, and social work there is a shared principle: when a person places themselves under professional care, they become vulnerable within that relationship, and that vulnerability requires protection. These frameworks exist because trust creates exposure, and exposure requires safeguarding.
The same applies in religious settings. When a leader responds to a concern, a question, or a perceived challenge with control, manipulation, silencing, or isolation, that is not a pastoral response. It is a misuse of power.
Shifting the Focus to Relational and Structural Vulnerability
Understanding vulnerability as being something we all experience matters for how we respond to those who have been harmed. It means asking not what made this person vulnerable? But what conditions, relationships, and power dynamics allowed this harm to occur?
Doing this has some important implications:
First, when we stop framing those who have been harmed as personally flawed, and recognise instead that vulnerability is inherent to all of us at various points in our lives, we place responsibility where it truly belongs — with the individuals and institutions called to steward that vulnerability with care and integrity.
Second, this understanding offers something meaningful to victim-survivors in their own process of making sense of what happened. Research suggests that it is often the most devout and earnest members of a religious community who are most susceptible to harm within it, precisely because their trust runs deepest. This is one reason why spiritual abuse can be so difficult to process and move beyond. When victim-survivors are helped to understand that their responses within an abusive situation were shaped by genuine trust in a relationship that carried real responsibility, they can begin to locate what happened not as a reflection of something wrong with them, but as a failure of those in power to honour the trust placed in them.
Third, while responsibility for harm always lies with those who hold power, there is value in people who participate in religious communities developing an awareness of their own vulnerability within those systems. This is not about blame or self-protection in place of institutional accountability. Awareness does not make a person responsible for the actions of abusive others. Rather, it is about agency. When people understand that entering a pastoral counselling relationship, for instance, creates a particular kind of vulnerability, they are better equipped to recognise when something feels wrong, to notice the early signs that a boundary is being crossed or a dynamic is shifting in ways that are uncomfortable. Similarly, a person who enters a church community with an awareness that systems of power can be misused — that control, censorship, and isolation are recognised patterns of spiritual abuse — may be more attuned to those dynamics when they encounter them, and more able to trust their own perception of what they are experiencing.
This kind of awareness does not diminish vulnerability. It works alongside it, building the agency that researchers like Haker (2020) describe as inseparable from vulnerability itself. To be informed is not to be guarded against all harm, but it is to be less alone in navigating it.
Fourth, it is recognised that religious leaders and pastors can themselves at times experience vulnerability and harm within religious systems. However, this does not diminish the weight of professional responsibility they carry, including in how they respond when they feel misunderstood or mistreated. Consider a doctor who receives a complaint from a patient. Regardless of how that complaint makes them feel — defensive, hurt, or misunderstood — the professional and ethical expectation is clear. They do not dismiss the patient, restrict their access to care, or rally colleagues against them. Robust systems exist precisely because the power imbalance in that relationship requires that concerns are handled with fairness, confidentiality, and care — not managed in ways that protect the practitioner at the expense of the person who came forward.
The same standard must apply in religious settings. When a pastor or religious leader responds to a community member who raises a concern, asks a difficult question, or is perceived to have stepped out of line, and that response takes the form of control, aggression, censorship, or isolation, this is not a neutral or pastoral act. It is a misuse of power. It compounds the original harm and deepens the vulnerability of the person on the receiving end.
Conclusion
Vulnerability in a religious setting is present wherever there is trust, power, and relationship. When that vulnerability is met with integrity, a religious community can be a place of genuine safety and meaning. When it is met with control, exploitation, or silencing, it becomes a place of profound harm.
Seeking Support
If you have been harmed in a religious or spiritual setting, speaking with a psychologist who has experience in spiritual abuse and religious trauma can help you understand what happened and begin to move forward. I offer faith-affirming support for those that are seeking it.
Visit www.refugepsychology.com.au for more information on spiritual abuse and recovery.
References
Butler, J. (2020). The force of nonviolence. Verso.
Haker, H. (2020). Reframing feminist ethics. Marquette University Press.
Hürten, M., Leimgruber, U., McEwan, T., & McPhillips, K. (2025). The politics of vulnerability concerning sexual and spiritual abuse in the Catholic Church.
De Weger, J., & Death, J. (2017). Cited in Hürten et al. (2025).
