Category: abuse
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Ugly and Angry: Things you can expect from my book
Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s the amount of violence I’ve witnessed in white Christianity. Maybe it’s the amount of secondary violence people have inflicted on me, when I and others I know (especially women) have spoken about violence. Maybe it’s the fact that someone in my life told me explicitly not to write about…
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No Love in War: A Story of Christian Nationalism
“We are all soldiers in the Third World War, and people do not make love in wartime.” Former United States Congressman Larry McDonald My next book, No Love in War: A Story of Christian Nationalism (forthcoming, Mayfly Books), is an auto-ethnographic account of the everyday – and often violent – realities of life without love,…
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“God, you come back with the head of my enemy”: Hillsong, Bethel and Emotional Manipulation in Worship Music
Their songs are better than everyone else’s and they can kind of infiltrate into other churches by having good music. What Hillsong did was kindof marry the music that they wanted to sing in church – the themes – with contemporary music. So early Hillsong music from 2000 sounds like 2000’s pop. Today’s Hillsong music…
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The Heroic Abuser: Christian News Headlines about Saeed Abedini’s Abuse of Naghmeh Panahi
I wrote this short piece in 2016 and am now republishing an updated version, in support of Naghmeh Panahi’s decision to go public with her abuse. Occasionally, opportunities arise to discuss domestic violence in the context of widely known families whose stories have been covered by the media. The case of Saeed Abedini and Naghmeh…
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“Calm down”: Campus Crusade aka Cru leaders debate racism and critical race theory
In November, 2020, a group of staff in various positions of leadership at Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru, published an astonishing document aiming to confront their belief that “Cru has embraced a secular system of ideas that divides humanity into victims and oppressors.” Over 174 pages, the document puts forward the views…
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Linguistic Gaslighting: Disclaimers as anti-performative discourse
This is another post in a series on the language of abuse, connected to an online catalogue which I hope will help others to identify and resist linguistic harm. In this post, I look at how disclaimers (a form of anti-performative discourse) can be used to minimise violence, to coercively control, to manipulate and to…
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Invoking and Distancing from Sacred Authority: Church Leaders’ Responses to a Report on the Rev. Jonathan Fletcher
This post forms part of a catalogue I am building on the subtle language of abuse. In this installment, I consider a common discursive strategy within texts that carry religious meaning: the invocation of sacred legitimating authority and, conversely, distancing from an illegitimate (often formerly sacred) authority. This strategy often works within an overall us…
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“A temptation to eliminate:” Purity culture and other complementarian discourse in white male violence against women
Robert Aaron Long, a white man, aged 21, has been charged with murder over the killing of eight people at massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia. Among the victims were six Asian women, prompting discussion about the intersectionality of Long’s alleged crimes, the ways these horrific acts of terrorism reveal how Asian and other minority women…
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Relative Abstraction and Concreteness: The example of the non-apology
“Impersonalisation abounds in the language of bureaucracy, a form of the organisation of human activity constituted on the denial of responsibility, and governed by impersonal procedures which, once put in place, are wellnigh impermeable to human agency.” Theo van Leeuwen, The Representation of Social Actors In my most recent blog post, I introduced a catalogue…
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Introduction and Overview of The Subtle Language of Abuse: A Catalogue
An organisation or culture that perpetuates abuse will question the motives of those who ask questions, make the discussion of problems the problem, condemn those who condemn, silence those who break silence, and descend upon those who dissent. Wade Mullen, in Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse When you expose a problem…
Religious Language 