What Makes Good People Uphold Harmful Systems: Trauma, Moral Disengagement, and the Psychology of Religious Power
People rarely step into a faith community expecting harm. Most of us were handed language about love, protection and “God’s best for your life.” And yet, many of us grew up inside systems where fear, shame and unquestioned authority shaped our bodies and our sense of self long before we had the words for any of it. To understand how that happens, we need more than doctrine or personal stories. We need a framework that explains how harm becomes normalized and even sanctified.
As I learn more about systems, power, and control, and the more I listen to survivors. the clearer the patterns become. I can understand experiences with greater depth, and that helps me keep imagining healthier ways forward.
Albert Bandura, a Canadian-American psychologist, helped shift psychology from strict behaviorism toward a more integrated understanding of how people think, learn and act. His research on how humans learn from one another, and how we justify harmful behavior, maps almost seamlessly onto the lived experience of religious trauma. While Bandura wasn’t writing about church fellowship halls or purity culture, his insights help explain why high‑control religion feels so immersive, why it’s so hard to question from the inside and why survivors often spend years untangling what was “spiritual” or “Biblical” from what was simply harmful.
How We Learn What to Fear, What to Trust and Who Holds Power
Bandura argued that we learn primarily by watching the people around us. Not just what they say, but how they behave, who they defer to, who gets punished and who is allowed to take up space. In high‑demand religious environments, children absorb the entire ecosystem: the hierarchy, the gender roles, the silence around certain topics, the way adults talk about sin, desire, doubt, and obedience.
This isn’t just belief formation. It’s identity formation. When a child repeatedly sees adults suppress their own instincts, distrust their bodies or spiritualize suffering, those patterns become the child’s internal script. Bandura’s language of modeling helps explain why so many survivors describe their trauma as something that got “built into” them over time.
When Harm Becomes Righteous: Moral Disengagement in Religious Contexts
Bandura also wrote about moral disengagement — the mental and social processes that allow people to participate in or enable harm while still seeing themselves as moral. High‑control religion often relies on these mechanisms, sometimes intentionally, often unconsciously.
Four of those mechanisms show up with painful clarity in survivor stories:
Moral Justification
Moral justification is when harmful behavior is reframed as serving a higher purpose. In religious settings, this often sounds like:
“Obedience matters more than your feelings.”
“Discipline is love.”
“Your suffering is part of God’s plan.”
Once harm is wrapped in divine purpose, it becomes almost impossible to question.Euphemistic Labeling
Euphemistic labeling is the practice of softening harmful actions with gentler language. The words get nicer; the impact does not.
Shunning becomes “church discipline.”
Fear becomes “conviction.
Suppression becomes “submission.”
Diffusion of Responsibility
Diffusion of responsibility happens when no one person has to own the harm because it’s spread across a group or attributed to an external authority. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
“It’s not me - it’s Scripture.”
“This is just how our church (family, organization, leader, etc.) does things.”Distortion of Consequences
Distortion of consequences is the minimizing or downplaying of harm. This keeps the system intact and keeps survivors quiet.
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“We were just trying to help.”
Why Bandura Matters for Understanding Religious Trauma
Bandura’s work helps us name what many survivors have felt but couldn’t articulate:
Harm is learned relationally, not just theologically.
Power is transmitted through modeling, not only through sermons.
Systems teach people how to disengage morally.
Children internalize patterns they never consciously chose.
This is why leaving high‑control religion often feels like dismantling an entire internal operating system. The beliefs may fall away quickly; the embodied patterns take much longer.
When Unhealed Trauma Fuels the Cycle: How Our Histories Shape What We Perpetuate
Bandura helps us understand how people learn harmful patterns through modeling and how communities justify those patterns through moral disengagement. But there’s another layer that survivors often recognize long before the research catches up: unhealed trauma doesn’t just make someone vulnerable to religious trauma - it can also make them more likely to participate in it. Not because they are cruel or malicious, but because what is familiar tends to feel safe, even when it isn’t.
When someone grows up in an environment where fear, shame, emotional unpredictability or conditional love were part of daily life, those experiences become the internal blueprint for what love, authority and belonging feel like. Without healing, that blueprint becomes the lens through which we interpret spiritual teachings, community norms and our own behavior. A high‑control religious system can feel strangely recognizable, not because it is healthy, but because it echoes the emotional atmosphere we already know.
This is where Bandura’s work becomes especially relevant. His mechanisms of moral disengagement don’t land on a blank slate. They land on nervous systems already trained to distrust their own instincts, reinterpret pain as purpose, silence their needs and equate obedience with safety. When those internal patterns meet a religious environment that rewards compliance and punishes autonomy, the fit can feel seamless. The theology mirrors the survival strategies. The hierarchy mirrors the family system. The certainty mirrors the coping mechanisms that once kept us afloat.
And without healing, people can unintentionally perpetuate the very dynamics that harmed them. They may repeat purity culture teachings because they feel protective, enforce obedience because it feels like care, minimize others’ pain because they learned to minimize their own or defend harmful leaders because challenging authority once felt dangerous. None of this excuses the harm. But it does help explain why some people become enforcers of systems that later break them, and why they often look back with grief and say, “I didn’t know any different,” or “I thought I was helping,” or “That’s just what love looked like to me.”
Unhealed trauma shapes moral reasoning, emotional tolerance, and what feels normal. Healing interrupts that cycle. Healing restores awareness. Healing gives us the capacity to see harm for what it is, not what it was framed to be. And that is why this work matters so deeply. Not only to understand what happened to us, but to understand how we stop passing it on.
Harm Is No Longer Framed as Holy
Understanding moral disengagement doesn’t excuse what happened, and it doesn’t soften the impact. But it does give us language for what so many of us lived through without a map. It helps us see that the harm wasn’t random, and it wasn’t because we were weak, dramatic, sinful or “too sensitive.” It was the predictable outcome of a system that relied on fear, hierarchy and spiritualized obedience to keep itself intact.
Bandura’s work reminds us that these patterns were learned and absorbed through relationships, repetition and the emotional atmosphere we grew up in. Can’t anything learned can be unlearned.? Yes. Slowly, gently, in community, with support. Healing isn’t about rejecting everything we were taught or swinging to the opposite extreme. It’s about reclaiming the parts of ourselves that were never given room to grow: agency, curiosity, desire, intuition and the right to reclaim our spiritual autonomy and agency.
For survivors, this clarity can feel like oxygen or at least a weight removed so they can finally take a deep, cleansing breath. It allows us to name what happened without minimizing it, and to imagine a life beyond the scripts or patterns we inherited. For clinicians, educators and faith leaders, it offers a way to recognize the deeper dynamics at play, not just the beliefs, but the embodied patterns that shape how a person moves through the world long after they’ve left the system.
And maybe most importantly, it opens the door to a different kind of spiritual and relational life: one rooted in consent, mutuality and genuine care rather than fear or coercion. A life where belonging isn’t earned through compliance and where questions aren’t treated as threats.
Bandura gives us another lens to understand the survivor experience. As more people listen, really listen, the hope is that we can build communities, therapeutic spaces and spiritual environments that honor the full humanity and experience of the people inside them.
Not perfect spaces. Not certainty-driven spaces. But safer ones. Honest ones. Ones where we agree that harm should no longer be framed as holy.
Note: Bandura wrote three full volumes unpacking his theory in far more depth than I could ever cover in a brief article.
Social Learning Theory (1977)
Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (1986)
Self‑Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997)
This article does not constitute an endorsement of Albert Bandura or the full body of his work.
This article is not intended to treat or diagnose any condition.
Rebekah is not a licensed therapist or clinician. Any thoughts, opinions or resources given on this site are strictly her own observation and insights based on personal experiences and study. It should in no way take the place of professional assistance.