Despite freedom of religion being one of America’s founding principles, youth in America do not have the legal right to refuse church, or any religious involvement enforced onto them by their parents. One of the most common ways that parents can oppress their children is by forcing them to be part of a religion against their will. Some parents go so far into extremist religious beliefs that they cannot accept their children differing in any way. Because of this, many religious parents will teach that questioning religion is sinful or dangerous, use threats of hell, damnation, or divine punishment to control behavior, use religion to justify harsh punishment or abuse, and punish children for attempting to explore alternate viewpoints from their parents’ religion. This type of indoctrination can have vast negative consequences for children’s mental health, including leading to anxiety, shame, guilt, depression, isolation and overall long lasting religious trauma.
Along with this, many parents use religion as a tool to abuse children. There have been many cases of beatings, forced starvation and exorcisms of children with religious justification, leading to severe injury or even death of children at the hands of their religious extremist parents.
Extremist religious parents also use religion as an excuse to control every aspect of their children’s lives. There have been many cases of religious parents overly sheltering their children, preventing access to any amount of media that could question religion or be deemed impure, hindering their education through corrupt homeschooling, cutting them off from relationships and support systems that are outside the religion or preventing them from accessing the outside world from their close-knit religious communities. All of this devastates a child’s normal development growing up, and sets them up for failure in adulthood when they gain their freedom, often causing them to fall deeper into the religious community since that’s all they’ve ever known.
On top of this, religious parents can be medically neglectful towards their children. Certain religious communities despise using doctors or trusting modern medicine. Instead, they will attempt to use faith-based healing on their children, often leading to worsened injury or even death. Extremist religious parents will often deny mental health care to their children as well, by seeing mental health issues as a sign of failure or even a demonic presence, instead of being there to support their children in a time of need.
Many religious communities also enforce purity culture on their children, creating severe feelings of sexual shame and guilt—especially for women and LGBTQ youth. This also forces very heavy gender roles into children. One of the major harms of purity culture is it can lead parents to overly control and, directly hinder/sabotage, or even completely restrict romantic relationships of their children, in an effort to prevent any amount of sexual behavior. This has the effect of increased gender segregation among religious communities, and also hindering opposite gender platonic friendships, because religious parents may deem any inter-gender friendship of their child to be inherently romantic or sexual in nature.
In order for these parents to ensure they have control of their children’s lives, they often violate the privacy of their children, and monitor their online presence and communication with others through device/internet monitoring software. By doing this, they can control exactly what their child interacts with, exactly who they interact with, and can even monitor all of their messages between them and their peers, giving them the power to punish children for interactions they deem as problematic, against the religion, or “impure”.
Lastly, parents may exercise their overbearing control of their children’s lives by placing them in a primarily religious school. These religious schools are often private, and therefore not subject to the same level of protections as public schools, making it so they can be much harsher, and enforce strong moral standards through strict policies. These schools can be behind in education, misteach facts and shelter children from relevant information. Along with this, their strict policies will make them very unwelcoming for LGBTQ youth, and any individual who does not completely conform to the religious teachings. Sometimes, these schools will enforce their moral standards through violating student privacy, which can harm students in many ways.
Children deserve the right to choose their own religion, or reject a religion that has been imposed on them by their parents, without facing punishment. Children should have the right to basic freedom of religion, even if it goes against their parents’ wishes. In the following webpage, the National Youth Rights Association explains Parental Religious Indoctrination and Abuse, the harms it has on youth, research on the effects of religious indoctrination of youth, the connection between parental religion and parental oppression, the common child abuses of major organized religions, and many cases of these abuses occurring on young people.
Table of Contents
- Types of Parental Religious Indoctrination, Oppression, and Abuse
- Harms of Forced Religion on Youth
- Research on the Harms of Parental Religious Indoctrination
- Research on the Mental Health Effects of Harmful Parental Religious Indoctrination
- The Intersection Between Parental Religious Indoctrination and Parental Oppression
- Harms of Parents Forcing Children Into Religious Schools
- Harms of Enforced Purity Culture on Children
- Harms of Religious Upbringings for LGBTQ+ Youth
- Common Child Abuses in Christianity
- Common Child Abuses in Judaism
- Common Child Abuses in Islam
- Cases and Stories of Parental Religious Abuse
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share, of being a victim of parental religious indoctrination or abuse, or about a general youth rights violation, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
Types of Parental Religious Indoctrination, Oppression, and Abuse
Teaching that questioning religion is sinful or dangerous – One form of harmful religious indoctrination happens when parents teach children that asking questions, expressing doubt, or exploring different beliefs is itself immoral. A child may be told that doubting religious teachings means they are rebellious, sinful, ungrateful, or at risk of punishment from God. This can make normal curiosity feel frightening and can prevent the child from developing their own beliefs in a thoughtful way. Over time, the child may learn to suppress questions, distrust their own reasoning, and feel guilt or panic whenever they encounter ideas that conflict with what they were taught at home.
Using threats of hell, damnation, or divine punishment to control behavior – Parents can use religious fear as a form of emotional control by repeatedly threatening children with hell, divine wrath, demons, spiritual punishment, or eternal consequences for disobedience. This may be tied to ordinary childhood behavior, sexuality, gender expression, questioning authority, friendships, clothing, media, or other areas of life. When these threats are used constantly, the child may develop intense fear around religion and morality. Instead of learning values through understanding and empathy, they may learn obedience through terror and come to believe that mistakes or unwanted thoughts place them in existential danger.
Using religion to justify harsh punishment or abuse – Some parents use religious teachings to defend physical punishment, humiliation, isolation, or extreme control. They may claim that harsh discipline is commanded by God, that suffering builds obedience, or that resisting parental authority is equivalent to resisting divine authority. This can make abuse much harder for the child to recognize because the harmful treatment is framed as morally necessary or spiritually beneficial. It can also intensify guilt, because the child may believe that objecting to the abuse means they are not only disobeying a parent but also committing a religious wrong.
Forcing participation in religious practices – Religious indoctrination can become oppressive when children are compelled to participate in worship, prayer, confession, religious study, fasting, rituals, dress requirements, or other practices under threat of punishment. Parents may refuse to allow any meaningful choice, even as the child grows older and develops different beliefs. The issue is not simply that families practice religion together. It becomes harmful when participation is enforced through fear, coercion, humiliation, or punishment and the child is denied any safe ability to say no.
Punishing children for expressing doubt or disbelief – Some parents respond to a child’s changing beliefs with anger, punishment, restrictions, or emotional rejection. A child who says they are unsure whether they believe in God, no longer identify with the family religion, or want to learn about other beliefs may lose privileges, be isolated, have devices searched, or be forced into additional religious instruction. In more severe cases, parents may threaten to disown the child or tell them they are destroying the family. This can make intellectual independence feel dangerous and force the child to pretend to believe simply to remain safe.
Preventing exposure to other beliefs and viewpoints – Parents may try to preserve religious control by restricting access to books, websites, classes, media, friends, or communities that expose the child to different religions or secular perspectives. They may describe outside information as corrupting, evil, or spiritually dangerous and discourage the child from independently evaluating what they have been taught. When this becomes extreme, the child is not simply being raised within a faith tradition; they are being prevented from accessing alternative information that would allow them to make an informed decision about their own worldview.
Demanding total religious conformity – Some parents expect not only outward participation but complete agreement with every religious belief held by the family. The child may be expected to share the parent’s theology, political views, moral positions, interpretations of scripture, and attitudes toward other groups without meaningful room for disagreement. Any deviation may be treated as betrayal, rebellion, or evidence that the child has been corrupted. This can suppress individuality and teach the child that love and belonging depend on thinking exactly as the parent does.
Making parental love and acceptance conditional on religious obedience – Parents may communicate that affection, approval, financial support, freedom, or membership in the family depends on remaining religiously compliant. Statements such as “I could never accept you if you left the faith” or “You are breaking my heart by rejecting God” can place enormous emotional pressure on a child. Even if the parent never explicitly disowns them, the child may feel that questioning religion risks losing the people they depend on most. This can keep young people trapped in religious practices they no longer believe in because the emotional cost of leaving feels unbearable.
Using guilt and shame to enforce religious behavior – Religious control can also rely heavily on guilt. Parents may tell children that their behavior disappoints God, shames the family, dishonors their faith, or causes spiritual harm to other people. Normal thoughts, sexuality, anger, doubt, or curiosity may be framed as moral failures. Over time, the child may develop a deep sense that ordinary human emotions and desires are evidence of personal corruption. This can produce chronic shame and make it difficult for the child to develop a healthy sense of morality that is separate from fear and self-condemnation.
Policing sexuality through religion and purity culture – Some parents use religious beliefs to impose intense control over a child’s sexuality. This may include shaming normal sexual development, treating masturbation or attraction as sinful, forbidding dating entirely, monitoring interactions with peers, requiring purity pledges, or teaching that sexual thoughts make the child dirty or immoral. These practices can create fear and shame around the body and relationships. They can also make it harder for the child to seek accurate sexual-health information or ask for help if something harmful happens.
Religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ identity – Religion is sometimes used to reject, shame, or suppress a child’s LGBTQ+ identity. Parents may tell a child that being gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer is sinful, demonic, unnatural, or evidence that they have rejected God. They may refuse names and pronouns, restrict relationships, ban affirming media, force additional religious counseling, or threaten rejection unless the child changes. This can turn the child’s faith environment into a source of self-hatred and fear, especially when the child is taught that accepting themselves means losing both their family and their relationship with God.
Forcing conversion therapy or religious “change” efforts – In more severe cases, parents may send LGBTQ+ children to conversion therapy, ex-gay ministries, religious counseling, prayer programs, or other practices intended to change sexual orientation or gender identity. These efforts may be presented as treatment or spiritual guidance, but they communicate that the child’s identity is unacceptable and must be erased. The child may be subjected to shame, pressure, isolation, confession, forced prayer, or repeated messages that acceptance depends on becoming someone else. This can cause lasting emotional harm and deeply damage the child’s relationship with religion, family, and themselves.
Religious control over clothing, appearance, and self-expression – Parents may use religious rules to rigidly control how a child dresses, wears their hair, uses makeup, presents their gender, or expresses their personality. Some degree of family dress expectation is common, but it becomes oppressive when the rules are enforced through humiliation, punishment, threats, or the message that the child’s body is inherently sinful. This can make children feel ashamed of normal self-expression and teach them that their appearance belongs to religious authority rather than to themselves.
Forcing religious gender roles – Some parents impose strict religious ideas about how boys and girls are supposed to behave. Girls may be taught that their purpose is submission, modesty, marriage, motherhood, or obedience to male authority, while boys may be told they must suppress emotion, dominate, provide, or conform to rigid masculinity. Children who do not fit those expectations may be shamed or punished. This can limit educational goals, career choices, relationships, emotional development, and self-expression, especially when the parent treats religious gender roles as mandatory rather than as beliefs the child is free to evaluate.
Controlling education to enforce religious ideology – Parents may shape a child’s education specifically to prevent exposure to information that conflicts with religious beliefs. This can include removing them from public school, restricting science or history materials, censoring books, preventing comprehensive sex education, or teaching religious explanations as the only acceptable interpretation of disputed subjects. Homeschooling or religious schooling is not inherently abusive, but it can become a tool of indoctrination when the purpose is to prevent the child from encountering outside knowledge or developing the ability to critically compare viewpoints.
Isolating children from people outside the faith – Parents may restrict friendships, dating, extracurricular activities, or contact with relatives because those people do not share the family’s religion. Children may be warned that outsiders are sinful, dangerous, corrupting, or controlled by evil influences. This can shrink the child’s social world and make them dependent on the religious community for nearly every relationship. Isolation also makes questioning more difficult, because the child may have few supportive people outside the belief system to talk to.
Using religious leaders as extensions of parental control – Some parents involve pastors, priests, ministers, elders, counselors, or other religious authorities whenever the child questions family rules or beliefs. Instead of allowing the child to privately work through doubts, the parent may arrange meetings designed to pressure the child back into compliance. Religious authority can make this especially intimidating because the child may feel that an entire community is aligned against them. The parent’s control is then reinforced not only by the family but by trusted adults who are presented as speaking for God.
Forcing confession of private thoughts or behavior – Religious control can violate a child’s privacy when parents demand disclosure of private thoughts, sexual feelings, doubts, relationships, internet activity, or perceived “sins.” A child may be forced to confess directly to parents or religious leaders and then face punishment or shame based on those disclosures. This can make the child feel that even their internal thoughts are subject to authority. It may also discourage honest self-reflection because private feelings become something the child fears will be exposed and judged.
Treating mental illness or neurodivergence as a spiritual failure – Some parents interpret depression, anxiety, trauma, ADHD, autism, or other mental-health and developmental conditions primarily as evidence of weak faith, sin, demonic influence, or failure to pray enough. They may respond with religious discipline instead of appropriate support or medical care. A child may be told that their suffering would disappear if they were more faithful, which can create guilt on top of the original problem. In severe cases, this can overlap with medical neglect if parents refuse professional treatment in favor of prayer or religious intervention alone.
Attributing normal childhood behavior to demons or spiritual corruption – Children may be told that anger, defiance, sexuality, nightmares, mental-health symptoms, or ordinary mistakes are evidence that they are spiritually corrupted or influenced by demons. This can be terrifying, particularly for young children who take religious claims literally. Instead of understanding behavior through normal developmental or emotional explanations, the child may become afraid of themselves and believe their own thoughts or feelings are evidence of evil.
Religious fear surrounding death and the afterlife – Parents can create intense anxiety by repeatedly emphasizing death, judgment, apocalypse, hell, or eternal punishment. Children may be told that they or loved ones could be condemned if they disobey, doubt, or leave the religion. In some environments, children may become preoccupied with whether they are “saved” or whether ordinary mistakes could lead to eternal consequences. This can create lasting fear that continues even after the person stops believing the religious teachings intellectually.
Teaching children to fear outsiders or other religions – Parents may teach children that people outside their religion are immoral, dangerous, spiritually contaminated, or destined for punishment. This can foster prejudice while also making the child afraid to interact with the wider world. If the child later forms friendships with people from other backgrounds, they may experience guilt or anxiety because they have been taught that those relationships threaten their faith. This can limit both social development and the ability to understand people outside the family’s belief system.
Using religious beliefs to control a child’s future – Parents may insist that the child attend a religious college, enter ministry, marry within the faith, have children, follow a particular career, or structure their entire adult life around the family’s religious expectations. They may threaten withdrawal of support or family rejection if the child chooses differently. This turns religion into a mechanism for controlling not only childhood behavior but the child’s future identity and life decisions.
Punishing participation in another religion or nonreligious worldview – A child who becomes interested in another faith, atheism, agnosticism, or secular philosophy may face punishment, confiscation of books, restrictions on friendships, increased surveillance, or forced religious instruction. This can make religious belief uniquely coercive because the child is allowed to hold only one acceptable conclusion. Instead of faith being something personally meaningful, it becomes something maintained through the threat of consequences.
Public religious shaming – Parents may expose a child’s perceived sins, doubts, identity, or behavior to relatives or religious communities as a way of enforcing conformity. A child may be made to confess publicly, be prayed over in front of others, be discussed with church leaders without consent, or be held up as an example of rebellion. Public religious shaming can intensify humiliation because the child risks losing not just parental approval but their reputation and place within an entire community.
Religious surveillance and restriction of media – Some parents tightly monitor books, music, movies, games, websites, social media, and friendships based on religious standards. Media that discusses other beliefs, LGBTQ+ identities, sexuality, evolution, mental health, or culturally disapproved ideas may be banned. When combined with device monitoring and internet restrictions, this can create an information environment in which nearly everything the child encounters is filtered through the parent’s religious worldview.
Preventing independent religious choice as the child matures – Perhaps the broadest form of religious indoctrination is refusing to recognize that an older child or teenager is developing the capacity to form beliefs independently. A parent may continue treating religion as something the child owes them rather than something the child ultimately has to decide for themselves. The child may be permitted to choose hobbies, friends, or career interests but not what they believe about God, morality, or spirituality. When refusal to conform brings punishment, rejection, or coercion, religious upbringing can cross into religious oppression by denying the child meaningful freedom of conscience.
Harms of Forced Religion on Youth
Religious trauma and chronic fear – When religion is enforced through threats, shame, punishment, or constant warnings about sin and damnation, children can develop deep fear around ordinary thoughts and behavior. They may become preoccupied with whether they are sinful, whether God is angry with them, or whether they are at risk of hell, demonic influence, or divine punishment. This can make religion feel less like a source of meaning and more like a constant threat hanging over everyday life. Even after leaving the religion, some young people may continue experiencing guilt, panic, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, or fear tied to teachings they no longer consciously believe.
Loss of freedom of conscience – A child who is never allowed to question, doubt, or explore other beliefs may struggle to develop an independent worldview. If parents punish skepticism or require agreement with every religious teaching, the child may learn that thinking for themselves is dangerous. This can undermine confidence in their own reasoning and make it difficult to separate genuine belief from fear-based compliance. As they grow older, they may feel confused about whether their beliefs are truly theirs or simply the result of years of pressure.
Shame and self-hatred – Religious indoctrination can teach children that normal parts of themselves are sinful or defective. This can include sexuality, gender expression, anger, doubt, mental-health struggles, body changes, or even ordinary curiosity. If a child repeatedly hears that these things make them impure, rebellious, or spiritually broken, they may internalize a deep sense of shame. Over time, this can lead to self-hatred, low self-worth, and the belief that acceptance must be earned through constant self-suppression.
Anxiety and obsessive guilt – Some children become intensely anxious about moral mistakes, rituals, prayers, or religious rules. They may worry constantly about whether they have offended God, committed a sin unknowingly, prayed incorrectly, or failed to meet religious expectations. In strict environments, this can turn everyday decision-making into a source of distress. The child may become overly focused on purity, confession, repentance, or rule-following to the point that religion begins to dominate their emotional life.
Depression and hopelessness – When a child feels trapped inside a religious system they cannot question or leave, it can create feelings of hopelessness and emotional exhaustion. A child may believe that they will never be accepted unless they change who they are, or that their future has already been decided for them. If they are LGBTQ+, skeptical, nonreligious, or otherwise unable to conform, the pressure can become especially severe. The constant sense that they are failing spiritually or disappointing their family can contribute to depression and withdrawal.
Social isolation through over-sheltering – Religious over-sheltering can limit a child’s contact with people, ideas, and experiences outside the family’s faith community. Parents may restrict friendships, media, extracurricular activities, dating, travel, or access to secular spaces because they fear outside influence. This can leave the child socially isolated and dependent on a narrow community for nearly all relationships. It can also make ordinary social situations feel intimidating later because the child may have had little opportunity to interact with people whose beliefs, identities, or lifestyles differ from their own.
Difficulty adjusting to the broader world – Children raised in heavily sheltered religious environments may struggle when they eventually enter college, the workforce, or more diverse communities. They may encounter beliefs, identities, relationships, and lifestyles they were taught to fear or avoid. Because they were not given much opportunity to develop independent judgment, they may feel overwhelmed or disoriented when they are suddenly expected to navigate those differences themselves. In some cases, this can lead to social anxiety, culture shock, or difficulty making decisions without parental or religious authority.
Harms associated with highly restrictive religious schooling – Religious schools can be highly restrictive and reinforce parental indoctrination by limiting exposure to outside perspectives. Some may censor books, restrict discussion of sexuality or LGBTQ+ identities, teach religious doctrine as unquestionable fact, discourage critical discussion, or enforce strict gender and behavioral rules. When students are punished for questioning beliefs or exploring different viewpoints, school becomes another place where conformity is enforced. This can reduce intellectual independence and make it harder for students to develop critical-thinking skills in areas that conflict with religious doctrine.
Educational gaps caused by ideological restrictions – In some homes or religious schools, parents may restrict science, sex education, history, literature, or other subjects because the material conflicts with their beliefs. Children may receive incomplete information about evolution, contraception, sexual health, LGBTQ+ issues, other religions, or political and social history. These gaps can leave them less prepared academically and practically as they enter adulthood. The harm is especially serious when the missing information affects health, safety, or the child’s ability to understand the world beyond their religious community.
Enforced purity culture and sexual shame – Purity culture can teach children and teenagers that sexual thoughts, attraction, masturbation, dating, or premarital relationships make them dirty or spiritually damaged. Girls in particular may be taught that their clothing or bodies are responsible for other people’s thoughts, while boys may be taught that sexual feelings are dangerous or uncontrollable. When these messages are enforced rigidly, young people may develop shame around their bodies and sexuality rather than healthy boundaries and informed decision-making. Later, this can interfere with intimacy, communication, consent, body image, and the ability to develop healthy romantic relationships.
Difficulty recognizing sexual abuse or unhealthy relationships – Strict religious environments can sometimes make it harder for children to recognize or report abuse. If they are taught that sexuality is shameful, that adults or religious leaders should not be questioned, or that family problems must remain private, they may be less likely to disclose inappropriate behavior. Purity teachings may also cause victims to blame themselves after abuse because they have been taught that sexual experiences make a person impure. A child who has never been given accurate information about consent and boundaries may also struggle to understand when someone has crossed a line.
Gender-role restrictions – Rigid religious gender roles can limit children’s development by teaching them that certain careers, emotions, hobbies, responsibilities, or life paths are only appropriate for one gender. Girls may be pressured toward submission, marriage, motherhood, and domestic roles, while boys may be discouraged from expressing vulnerability or pursuing interests seen as insufficiently masculine. These restrictions can narrow educational and career opportunities and create shame when the child does not naturally fit the expected role.
LGBTQ+ rejection and identity suppression – Children who are LGBTQ+ may experience some of the most severe harms of religious indoctrination when parents frame their identity as sinful or unacceptable. They may be forced to hide relationships, use unwanted names or pronouns, avoid queer peers, give up affirming clothing or media, or undergo religious counseling meant to change them. This can produce deep internalized shame and make the child feel that they must choose between authenticity and family belonging. In extreme cases, religious rejection can escalate into conversion therapy, disownment, physical abuse, or homelessness.
Faith-based medical neglect – Parental religious abuse can also directly threaten a child’s physical or mental health when parents substitute prayer, spiritual healing, or religious doctrine for necessary medical treatment. A parent may refuse medication, vaccines, surgery, blood transfusions, psychiatric treatment, or other care because of religious beliefs. In these situations, religious control moves beyond emotional harm and can become medical neglect. Children may suffer avoidable pain, worsening illness, permanent disability, or even death when parents refuse treatment that could have protected them.
Denial of mental-health care for religious reasons – Some parents interpret depression, anxiety, trauma, suicidal thoughts, or neurodevelopmental conditions as spiritual weakness, sin, lack of faith, or demonic influence. Instead of obtaining professional care, they may respond with prayer, punishment, exorcism, religious counseling, or demands that the child become more faithful. This can delay diagnosis and treatment while also adding shame to the child’s existing distress. A young person may come to believe that their mental-health struggles are evidence that they are morally or spiritually defective. This harm is made worse by the fact that in most states, minors are not allowed to receive therapy without a parents’ consent.
Religiously enforced fasting and dietary restrictions – Some religious traditions include fasting or dietary rules, and these practices can become harmful when parents rigidly force them onto children without regard to age, health, or individual needs. For example, during Ramadan, many Muslim families encourage or require older children and teenagers to fast from dawn to sunset, even though younger children and people with health conditions are generally exempt in Islamic teaching. When fasting is imposed harshly or without flexibility, it can lead to fatigue, dehydration, headaches, difficulty concentrating in school, or worsening of medical conditions. Similar harms can occur when parents rigidly enforce other religious dietary restrictions without considering nutritional needs.
Sleep disruption from religious obligations – Some religious practices involve waking early, staying up late, attending lengthy services, or participating in repeated rituals. If parents enforce these practices rigidly, children may lose sleep on school nights or struggle with fatigue during the day. During periods like Ramadan, for example, some families wake children before dawn for meals and prayer, which can affect sleep schedules if not balanced carefully. When religious obligations consistently interfere with rest, the child may experience concentration problems, irritability, and academic difficulties.
Physical strain from mandatory religious practices – Religious practices involving fasting, kneeling, standing for long periods, restrictive clothing, or repetitive rituals can become physically stressful when children are forced to participate without regard to comfort, age, disability, or health. A child may feel unable to say they are tired, hungry, in pain, or unwell because stopping would be treated as disrespectful or sinful. This can teach the child to ignore bodily needs in order to prove obedience.
Fear of disownment or abandonment – Children in highly controlling religious homes may know that leaving the faith, being LGBTQ+, dating outside the religion, or rejecting family expectations could result in being disowned. Even if that threat is never carried out, living under it can create constant anxiety. The child may hide their true beliefs and identity for years because losing family, housing, financial support, or community feels too dangerous. This makes religious conformity less of a genuine choice and more of a survival strategy.
Loss of supportive relationships outside the religious community – Parents may restrict children from forming close relationships with nonbelievers, people from other religions, LGBTQ+ peers, or anyone seen as a negative spiritual influence. This can deprive the child of friendships and mentors who might otherwise provide support or alternative perspectives. It can also make leaving an abusive religious environment much harder because the child may have no meaningful support network outside it.
Fear of authority and difficulty questioning adults – When religious authority is presented as absolute, children may learn that questioning parents, pastors, elders, or other leaders is morally wrong. This can make them vulnerable to manipulation and abuse because they may not feel entitled to challenge harmful behavior. The child may become overly obedient around authority figures or experience intense guilt whenever they disagree with someone in power.
Loss of normal adolescent experiences – Religious restrictions can prevent children from participating in dating, dances, school events, music, movies, sports, sleepovers, friendships, or other experiences considered inappropriate by the family’s belief system. Any individual restriction may seem minor, but when many are combined, the child may miss a significant part of ordinary adolescent social development. This can create loneliness and resentment and make it harder to relate to peers.
Being forced to conceal beliefs and identity – Children who know that honesty will lead to punishment may pretend to believe things they no longer believe, hide relationships, fake participation in rituals, or maintain secret online identities. This constant performance can be stressful and isolating. The child may feel that their parents only love a version of them that does not actually exist.
Research on the Harms of Parental Religious Indoctrination
Research on religion and child development does not show that being raised religious is inherently harmful. In fact, supportive religious communities and personally meaningful religious involvement can be beneficial for some young people. The more concerning findings appear when religion becomes intertwined with parental psychological control, rejection, forced conformity, fear, isolation, or punishment for developing beliefs and identities that differ from those of the parents. Research in several different areas, including parent-child religious conflict, psychological control, purity culture, LGBTQ+ rejection, conversion efforts, and faith-based medical neglect—shows ways these practices can negatively affect young people.
Religious disagreement between parents and teenagers can damage the parent-child relationship
A study published in Social Science Research, “When Faith Divides Family: Religious Discord and Adolescent Reports of Parent-Child Relations”, examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Researchers found that disagreement between parents and adolescents over religion was associated with poorer parent-child relationship quality. Importantly, the relationship was especially negative when the parent considered religion more important than the teenager did. When the teenager was more religious than the parent, the same deterioration in the relationship was not found. This suggests that the problem was not simply two family members having different religious beliefs; conflict was particularly associated with situations where a highly religious parent had a less-religious adolescent.
More recent longitudinal research has found a similar pattern. A 2025 study of 1,391 parent-child pairs, “Longitudinal Associations and Interactions of Adolescent Religious Deidentification and Parental Sanctification on Parent-Adolescent Relationships”, examined what happened when adolescents began distancing themselves from the family religion. Religious deidentification was associated with increased religious conflict and short-term decreases in the warmth adolescents perceived from their parents. Another longitudinal study involving 2,352 young people, “Does Leaving Faith Mean Leaving Family?”, similarly found that leaving a religious identity during adolescence was associated with poorer parent-child relationship quality. These findings are particularly relevant to parental religious indoctrination because they demonstrate how a young person’s independent development of religious beliefs can become a serious source of family conflict when parents are unwilling to accept that change.
Psychological control, the same techniques often used in coercive religious parenting, is associated with depression and other problems
Much of the behavior involved in extreme religious indoctrination overlaps with what developmental psychologists call parental psychological control. This includes guilt induction, invalidating a child’s feelings, love withdrawal, manipulating the child’s thoughts, and attempting to control the child’s internal psychological world rather than simply setting reasonable behavioral boundaries.
A large 2026 meta-analysis, “Intrusive Parenting and Adolescent Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms”, combined findings from 231 studies involving more than 150,000 young people for its analysis of internalizing symptoms. Intrusive parenting—including psychological control, overprotection, and autonomy restriction—was associated with greater internalizing problems such as anxiety and depression and with greater externalizing problems.
Other longitudinal research reaches similar conclusions. A study of rejecting and autonomy-restrictive parenting involving 601 adolescents found that parental coercion was associated with increasing social anxiety and rejection sensitivity, while psychological control predicted increasing depressive symptoms. Research on parental psychological control and adolescent adjustment has likewise associated psychological control with depressive symptoms, anxiety, aggression, poor self-concept, and lower self-esteem. These findings are relevant when religion is used as the mechanism for this control—for example, telling a child that questioning a parent is sinful, withdrawing affection over disbelief, using divine punishment to induce guilt, or demanding conformity in a child’s thoughts and identity.
Restricting adolescent autonomy is associated with poorer mental health
Adolescence is an important developmental period for learning how to make decisions, form values, and develop an identity independently from parents. Research generally distinguishes healthy parental guidance from attempts to dominate a teenager’s internal beliefs and choices. A 2025 study on parental autonomy support, psychological control, and adolescent depression describes low autonomy support and high psychological control as parenting patterns associated with adolescent depression.
A broader meta-analysis examining parenting, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms across 53 studies similarly found that psychological control was negatively associated with children’s and adolescents’ self-esteem. This has direct implications for coercive religious parenting. Preventing teenagers from questioning religion, deciding what they believe, encountering alternative viewpoints, or developing values independently can interfere with the same psychological autonomy that research identifies as important during adolescence.
Research on purity culture has found associations with sexual shame
There is also a growing body of research concerning purity culture, particularly within conservative Evangelical Christianity. Purity culture commonly emphasizes abstinence before heterosexual marriage, virginity as an important component of moral worth, strict gender roles, and the idea that sexual desire or exploration poses a serious moral danger.
A study of 1,273 participants, “Purity Culture and Sexual Shame”, found an association between exposure to Christian purity culture and greater sexual shame, particularly among women who no longer endorsed those teachings. A clinical review published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, “Clinical Considerations of the Evangelical Purity Movement’s Impact on Female Sexuality”, described how purity teachings can promote sexual double standards, female objectification, separation between sexuality and the self, and sexual shame. The review discussed potential consequences including emotional distress, sexual dysfunction, and sexual dissatisfaction.
More recent research strengthens the evidence surrounding sexual shame. A 2026 Journal of Sex Research study, “Being Pure and Being Ashamed”, examined 301 adults divided among survivors of childhood sexual abuse, survivors of nonconsensual sexual experiences during adulthood, and controls. Researchers found that continued acceptance of purity-culture beliefs significantly predicted greater sexual shame for both men and women, while childhood purity-culture exposure itself significantly predicted sexual shame among men. The authors concluded that religious sexual messaging can play an influential role in shaping sexual shame.
Purity culture can create additional harms for LGBTQ+ young people
The incompatibility between rigid heterosexual purity teachings and a child’s LGBTQ+ identity can create another form of religious oppression. A 2025 qualitative study, “Being Yourself Is a Sin: The Impact of Evangelical Purity Culture on Sexual and Gender Minority People Socialized as Women”, conducted in-depth interviews with sexual-minority women and other people assigned female at birth who had grown up with purity culture. Researchers identified effects involving sexual oppression, interpersonal power dynamics, LGBTQ+-specific oppression, embodied experiences, and subsequent healing and resistance. Participants described internalizing messages that produced sexual shame, particularly when their identities fundamentally conflicted with the heterosexual and gender-role expectations they had been taught.
Family rejection of LGBTQ+ adolescents is strongly associated with severe mental-health consequences
One of the clearest bodies of evidence concerning harmful religiously motivated parenting comes from research on LGBTQ+ family rejection. Religion is not the only reason families reject LGBTQ+ children, but religious beliefs are frequently involved in behaviors such as condemning the child’s identity, preventing LGBTQ+ friendships, pressuring the child to change, or sending the child to religious leaders for intervention.
The influential Pediatrics study “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults” examined 224 young adults and their experiences of family rejection during adolescence. Compared with participants who experienced little or no family rejection, those reporting high levels of rejection were 8.4 times as likely to report having attempted suicide, 5.9 times as likely to report high levels of depression, and 3.4 times as likely to report illegal drug use. The study provides particularly strong evidence that parental attempts to suppress or reject a young person’s LGBTQ+ identity can have consequences extending well beyond adolescence.
The opposite pattern has also been found. Research on family acceptance among 245 LGBT young adults found that greater family acceptance during adolescence predicted higher self-esteem, greater social support, and better general health while protecting against depression, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Parent-initiated conversion efforts are associated with depression, suicidality, and poorer adult outcomes
Research specifically examining parents who attempted to change their LGBTQ+ children’s identities has produced especially concerning findings. “Parent-Initiated Sexual Orientation Change Efforts With LGBT Adolescents” studied 245 LGBT young adults and asked about experiences during adolescence in which parents tried to change their sexual orientation themselves or sent them to therapists or religious leaders to do so.
Parent-initiated conversion efforts were associated with depression, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, lower educational attainment, and lower weekly income in young adulthood. The associations were particularly strong among participants who experienced both direct parental attempts to change them and conversion interventions by therapists or religious leaders. This research demonstrates that religious “change” efforts do not simply represent a disagreement between a parent and child; they can be associated with serious and long-lasting psychological and socioeconomic consequences.
Faith-based medical neglect has resulted in preventable childhood deaths
The potential consequences of parental religious control are not limited to psychological health. Some families have refused conventional medicine because they believe prayer or faith healing should replace medical treatment. One of the most significant studies of this issue, “Child Fatalities From Religion-Motivated Medical Neglect”, examined 172 child deaths in families associated with faith-healing practices between 1975 and 1995.
The researchers determined that 140 of the children died from conditions for which survival rates with appropriate medical treatment would have exceeded 90%. Another 18 had conditions with expected survival rates above 50%, and most of the remaining children were also expected to have benefited from medical treatment. The cases involved illnesses that modern medicine could often treat successfully, demonstrating the extreme consequences that can occur when parents’ religious beliefs are allowed to override a child’s access to necessary healthcare.
Research on the Mental Health Effects of Harmful Parental Religious Indoctrination
Research on harmful religious experiences in children and adolescents commonly focuses on negative religious coping, religious conflict, fear, guilt, psychological control, and religious disagreement within families rather than using the broader term “religious trauma.” These studies do not suggest that religion itself causes psychological harm. Instead, the strongest negative associations appear when young people experience religion through condemnation, spiritual conflict, fear of punishment, coercive parental expectations, or rejection when they do not share their parents’ beliefs.
A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of 45 longitudinal studies and 29 intervention studies involving young people ages 10 to 24 found that negative religious coping was associated with greater depressive symptoms and could worsen the effects of stress. Negative religious coping includes experiences such as feeling punished or abandoned by God, interpreting suffering as evidence of divine anger, experiencing intense religious guilt, or struggling with one’s relationship with God. Six of the ten studies examining religious coping in relation to other stressors found negative religious coping associated with increased risks of depression or anxiety. The same review found that simply considering religion personally important was not associated with greater depression overall, further distinguishing harmful religious struggle from religiosity itself.
Studies of adolescents specifically have reached similar conclusions. Research examining religious and general coping among urban adolescents found that negative religious coping was significantly associated with indicators of psychological distress, even after researchers accounted for more general coping styles. In contrast, positive religious coping was associated with better psychological adjustment. This distinction is particularly relevant to children raised with fear-based religious messages: experiencing religion primarily through guilt, divine punishment, abandonment, or spiritual conflict appears very different psychologically from experiencing it as a voluntary source of comfort and support.
Religious fear, obsessive guilt, and scrupulosity
Extreme religious guilt can sometimes develop into scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology centered around fears of sin, morality, offending God, or failing to perform religious practices correctly. A 2025 clinical review on pediatric scrupulosity describes the condition as involving pathological guilt and distress surrounding religion and morality. Young people may repeatedly pray, seek reassurance, confess perceived wrongdoing, avoid supposedly sinful situations, or become consumed with whether ordinary thoughts and actions are morally acceptable. The authors specifically note that youth can be particularly vulnerable because childhood and adolescence are periods in which independent values and identities are still developing, and religious communities can sometimes inadvertently reinforce compulsive religious behavior.
A related clinical review of scrupulosity OCD in adolescents and emerging adults describes intrusive guilt and intense fears of moral or religious wrongdoing, including fears of offending God and compulsive praying, reassurance-seeking, and avoidance. The authors note that religiously framed compulsions can sometimes be harder to identify because behaviors such as prayer, confession, and seeking penance may be viewed positively within a religious environment. This means an adolescent suffering from severe religious anxiety may have their symptoms reinforced rather than recognized as a mental-health problem.
Research measuring scrupulosity has also found significant relationships with anxiety, negative affect, fears, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. A study validating the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity identified two major dimensions, “Fear of Sin” and “Fear of God”, and found both strongly associated with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, while scrupulosity was also associated with state and trait anxiety and broader psychological distress.
Depression and hopelessness connected to negative religious struggle
Depression is one of the most consistently studied negative outcomes associated with harmful religious struggle among youth. The 2023 systematic review of religion, spirituality, depression, and anxiety in young people found that negative religious coping tended to predict greater depressive symptoms over time. In supplementary analyses, the association was statistically significant. The researchers also found evidence that internal religious guilt and negative religious interactions could worsen depressive and anxiety symptoms when young people were already under stress.
This is relevant to parental religious indoctrination because many extreme forms of religious control encourage exactly these patterns of thinking. A child may be taught that suffering means God is punishing them, that doubts indicate moral failure, that unwanted thoughts are sinful, or that family problems are happening because they are insufficiently faithful. When these beliefs are repeatedly reinforced by parents, a child experiencing ordinary stress can also come to interpret that stress through a framework of personal spiritual failure.
Shame and self-hatred
Religious shame can differ from ordinary guilt. Guilt generally involves believing that a particular action was wrong, while shame can involve believing that the person themselves is fundamentally bad, impure, sinful, or unacceptable. Harmful parental indoctrination can reinforce this distinction by repeatedly telling children that their natural emotions, sexuality, doubts, or identity reveal something corrupt about them.
The youth mental-health literature does not always measure “religious self-hatred” directly, but closely related concepts appear in research on negative religious coping, internal religious guilt, scrupulosity, purity culture, and LGBTQ+ religious rejection. The 2023 systematic review found that internal religious guilt and negative religious interactions were among the mechanisms associated with worsening depressive and anxiety symptoms among young people. Research on scrupulosity similarly demonstrates how fear of sin and fear of God can become intertwined with anxiety and obsessive thinking.
For children raised in highly punitive religious environments, these patterns can mean that normal developmental experiences—sexual feelings, anger, doubt, disagreement with parents, or curiosity about prohibited ideas—become interpreted as evidence that something is wrong with them personally. This can create a cycle in which the child experiences an unwanted thought, feels intense religious shame about having it, attempts to suppress it, and becomes even more preoccupied with the thought.
Social isolation and religious over-sheltering
Religious indoctrination can also affect children’s mental health indirectly by reducing access to relationships outside the family’s belief system. When parents restrict friendships, secular activities, media, school environments, or contact with people of other beliefs, children can lose sources of social support that would otherwise protect against distress.
Research on adolescents experiencing religious struggle has found evidence connecting social isolation and spiritual struggle with poorer emotional outcomes. A study of adolescents examining grief found that both school belonging and negative religious coping independently helped explain persistent grief symptoms, with the researchers concluding that social isolation and spiritual struggles can adversely contribute to adolescent distress.
Within extremely sheltered households, these risks can reinforce one another. A teenager may be distressed by religious expectations but simultaneously prevented from forming friendships with people who could validate their experiences or expose them to different perspectives. If all of the child’s relationships are concentrated within the same religious environment, questioning the religion can also threaten the loss of nearly their entire support network.
Religious trauma often involves several harms occurring together
The available research suggests that the symptoms commonly associated with religious trauma, fear, guilt, anxiety, depression, shame, isolation, and damaged family relationships, are often interconnected rather than separate consequences. Fear-based doctrine can produce obsessive guilt; guilt and spiritual conflict can contribute to anxiety and depression; disagreement with parents can damage family relationships; and religious sheltering can prevent children from obtaining social support while these problems develop.
The existing youth literature consistently indicates that religion experienced through fear, condemnation, spiritual conflict, coercive parental expectations, and loss of acceptance is associated with substantially poorer psychological experiences than religion experienced through voluntary participation, warmth, and supportive spirituality.
The Intersection Between Parental Religious Indoctrination and Parental Oppression
There is a clear connection between the types of parents who use religion to control their children, and Parental Oppression. In the most extreme religious households, parents may attempt to control nearly every part of a child’s life in order to prevent exposure to beliefs, people, information, or experiences that could challenge the family’s religion. This can include controlling friendships, education, media, internet access, clothing, dating, hobbies, sexuality, political ideas, religious beliefs, and even private thoughts or questions. Research has found an association between stronger parental religiosity and increased parental monitoring and behavioral regulation, particularly among more orthodox religious families. A study of more than 5,000 adolescents and their parents, “Religious Identity, Religious Attendance, and Parental Control”, found that greater religious involvement was associated with increased parental monitoring and regulation of adolescents’ behavior. In extreme households, these tendencies can extend far beyond ordinary supervision and become a system designed to prevent children from developing identities or beliefs independently from their parents.
One of the most severe forms of religious sheltering is deliberately isolating children from the outside world. Parents may homeschool children or place them exclusively in highly restrictive religious schools, allow friendships only with members of the same faith, prohibit secular extracurricular activities, and limit contact with relatives who have different beliefs. Children can grow up spending nearly all of their time around adults and peers who reinforce the same religious worldview. This can make it extraordinarily difficult for them to evaluate what they have been taught, because they have been intentionally prevented from encountering people who live differently.
Extreme sheltering can also involve restricting access to outside information. Parents may ban books, movies, music, television, websites, social media, news sources, or educational materials because they contain ideas that conflict with religious teachings. Information about atheism, other religions, evolution, sexuality, LGBTQ+ identities, feminism, mental health, reproductive health, or criticism of the family’s religion may be treated as spiritually dangerous. Internet filters and parental-control programs can make this form of isolation significantly easier by allowing parents to monitor searches, block websites, examine messages, and prevent children from communicating privately with outsiders.
Some children are consequently raised inside an information bubble in which the parents’ religious interpretation is presented as the only legitimate explanation of the world. Competing ideas may not merely be described as incorrect; they may be portrayed as satanic, immoral, deceptive, or deliberately designed to corrupt believers. A child can therefore become afraid to even investigate opposing viewpoints. By the time they are teenagers, normal intellectual curiosity may carry the fear that reading the wrong book, visiting the wrong website, or asking the wrong question represents rebellion against both their parents and God.
Religious control can become especially severe when parents treat independent thought itself as disobedience. Questions about scripture, doubts about God, disagreements with a religious leader, or curiosity about another worldview may trigger punishment, increased surveillance, mandatory religious counseling, confiscation of devices, or additional religious instruction. A child may learn to conceal their actual beliefs and perform religious devotion around their parents simply to avoid consequences. Research on adolescents who are less religious than their parents has found that these religious differences can be associated with poorer adjustment when they contribute to deterioration in the parent-child relationship. Research on parent-adolescent differences in religiousness found that relationship quality helped explain the association between being less religious than one’s parents and greater internalizing and externalizing symptoms.
Extreme religious control can also involve constant surveillance for evidence of moral or spiritual disobedience. Parents may search bedrooms, diaries, phones, computers, browser histories, and private messages for prohibited behavior. A teenager’s conversations can be inspected for profanity, sexual discussion, religious doubt, LGBTQ+ content, relationships, or criticism of the family. Location tracking may be used to ensure that the child never visits prohibited places or spends time with disapproved peers. Under these circumstances, privacy itself can become suspicious: wanting a closed bedroom door, deleting a message, or refusing to reveal a password may be interpreted as proof that the child is hiding sin.
Parents may also impose extreme restrictions on friendships and relationships. Children can be prohibited from developing close friendships with atheists, LGBTQ+ people, members of different religions, or anyone the parents regard as spiritually dangerous. Teenagers may be prevented from dating entirely or required to date only within the family’s religion. Some parents monitor every interaction with potential romantic partners or prohibit unsupervised contact. The result can be severe social isolation and a childhood in which meaningful relationships are permitted only when they reinforce the parents’ religious worldview.
This isolation can make children dangerously dependent on the religious community. If almost every friend, teacher, relative, mentor, and trusted adult belongs to the same religious environment, a child who is mistreated at home may have no genuinely independent person to approach. Religious leaders may also reinforce parental authority rather than provide an alternative source of support. A teenager who tells a pastor, rabbi, imam, or other leader that they no longer believe may be returned to their parents for further discipline or pressured to restore their faith rather than having their concerns treated confidentially.
Some parents use religious schools or homeschooling specifically to prevent outside influence. In the most restrictive circumstances, children may receive education almost entirely through materials chosen to conform to the parents’ theology. Mainstream science, comprehensive sex education, other religions, LGBTQ+ issues, or politically controversial subjects may be censored or distorted. A study examining the Accelerated Christian Education science curriculum found substantial problems in how mainstream scientific knowledge was presented, including rejection or distortion of evolution and climate science and an educational approach heavily based on rote learning. When parents intentionally choose an educational environment because it prevents children from encountering conflicting information, sheltering can directly interfere with educational development.
Extreme sheltering can also prevent children from acquiring ordinary practical skills needed for independence. Teenagers who are rarely allowed to go anywhere alone, interact freely with unfamiliar people, make purchases, use transportation, manage money, navigate relationships, or make meaningful decisions may enter adulthood without experience handling these tasks. A parent may believe that constant supervision protects the child from immoral influences, but it can also prevent them from practicing independence while they still have adults available to help them learn safely.
In some households, parents exert control over clothing, appearance, and bodily autonomy because these areas are treated as religious obligations. Girls may face strict modesty rules concerning skirts, sleeves, hair, makeup, swimsuits, or religious clothing, while boys can face rigid expectations concerning masculinity and appearance. Children who object may be told that they are tempting others, dishonoring the family, violating divine commandments, or embarrassing their religious community. Religious rules can therefore turn ordinary experimentation with appearance into a source of punishment and shame.
The same control can extend to sexuality and romantic development. Parents influenced by strict purity cultures may ban dating, prohibit private interaction between genders, monitor children’s messages, punish masturbation, restrict access to sexual-health information, or demand disclosures about sexual thoughts and relationships. The child may be taught that sexual mistakes permanently damage their purity or spiritual worth. Instead of learning about relationships gradually, teenagers can be kept deliberately inexperienced and then expected to navigate adult relationships with little preparation once marriage becomes permissible.
For LGBTQ+ children, religious sheltering can become an especially comprehensive form of identity suppression. Parents may block LGBTQ+ websites and social-media communities, prohibit queer friendships, remove affirming books, prevent participation in school support groups, restrict clothing or hairstyles, and increase monitoring after discovering the child’s identity. The intention may specifically be to ensure that the teenager never encounters anyone who affirms them. In these circumstances, isolation functions as a method of ideological control by surrounding the child almost exclusively with messages that their identity is sinful or unacceptable.
Another extreme form of control is making basic freedoms conditional on religious conformity. A teenager may be told that they can regain their phone, see friends, participate in activities, attend college, receive financial assistance, or remain welcome in the family only if they attend religious services and follow the parents’ beliefs. Parents may threaten to withdraw tuition, housing, inheritance, transportation, or other forms of support if an older teenager leaves the religion. Religion then becomes connected to the child’s material security rather than simply being a belief they are encouraged to hold.
Extreme religious control can also prevent children from reporting mistreatment or seeking outside assistance. Parents may portray government agencies, therapists, teachers, doctors, or secular authorities as hostile to the religion and warn children not to trust them. Family problems may be described as private matters that should remain inside the church or community. Children may consequently believe that talking about abuse is a betrayal of their parents, their religious group, or God. Large-scale investigations of abuse within religious institutions have documented how reverence for religious authority, fear of bringing shame on the community, and distrust of outsiders can become barriers to disclosure. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse’s investigation of religious organisations documented these kinds of barriers across multiple religious settings.
At its most severe, parental religious sheltering can create a closed system of control in which nearly every potential route toward independence has been restricted simultaneously. The child’s parents control their education, church controls much of their social life, approved adults reinforce parental authority, technology prevents private access to outside information, and punishment discourages openly questioning any of it. Under these circumstances, a teenager may have almost no practical way to determine whether what is happening in their household is normal, find supportive outsiders, or imagine a life beyond the religious environment.
The long-term harm of this type of upbringing can extend beyond disagreement about religion. Children raised under extreme control may become highly secretive, afraid of authority, uncomfortable making independent decisions, socially inexperienced, or unable to trust their own judgment. They may have spent adolescence learning that autonomy itself is dangerous and that safety, family belonging, and sometimes even salvation depend on obedience. In the most extreme forms of religious sheltering, the parent is not merely attempting to transmit a faith to the next generation; the child’s access to relationships, education, information, privacy, self-expression, and independence is deliberately restricted in order to make abandoning or even questioning that faith as difficult as possible.
Harms of Parents Forcing Children Into Religious Schools
Parents have considerable legal authority to choose where their children are educated, and religious schools vary enormously in quality, culture, and educational philosophy. The potential for young people occurs in situations where parents force a child into a highly restrictive school that places religious conformity above the child’s educational needs, personal beliefs, identity, or access to accurate information.
One educational concern is that some religious schools use curricula designed to ensure that academic subjects conform to a particular interpretation of scripture, even when that conflicts with mainstream scientific knowledge. A 2023 analysis of the widely used Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) science curriculum found that its materials continued to present evolution as discredited, inserted creationist assumptions into subjects beyond evolution and the Big Bang, denied or distorted aspects of human-caused climate change, and sometimes substituted religious explanations for scientific ones. Researchers also criticized the curriculum’s heavy reliance on rote workbook memorization and concluded that its content and instructional methods could place students at an educational disadvantage, particularly in understanding how science actually works. A child whose parents deliberately place them in such a program may therefore receive substantially less exposure to accepted scientific concepts than they would receive in a conventional science curriculum.
This can become especially important when a student later enters college or another educational setting where subjects such as evolution, geology, climate science, psychology, or sexuality are taught using mainstream academic standards. A student may have to learn foundational concepts for the first time while simultaneously unlearning inaccurate information. The ACE curriculum analysis, for example, concluded that its approach could leave students confused not only about evolution itself but also about the nature and methods of science, because scientific conclusions were sometimes presented as moral or theological choices rather than conclusions that can be evaluated through evidence. The educational harm in these situations is not simply that students encounter religious viewpoints; it is that they may be denied a fair understanding of the mainstream academic material they will later be expected to know.
Religious private schools can also operate under substantially different regulatory structures from public schools. The U.S. Department of Education’s state-by-state survey of private-school regulation shows that requirements concerning accreditation, teacher certification, curriculum, testing, health services, and other standards vary considerably from state to state. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Department of Education notes that schools operated by bona fide religious organizations are exempt from the licensing requirement that applies to many other private academic schools, and state law expressly limits governmental authority to approve their course content, faculty, or disciplinary requirements without their consent. Differences like these can give some religious schools considerably greater discretion over how they educate and discipline students than families may encounter in a public-school system.
A further concern is that highly restrictive religious schools may reinforce the same forms of religious indoctrination occurring at home. A child who privately doubts their parents’ religion may be unable to escape it during the school day if their parents place them in a school where the same doctrine is taught as authoritative across multiple subjects, worship is mandatory, and disagreement is treated as a behavioral or spiritual problem. This can effectively eliminate one of the few environments outside the home where a child might otherwise encounter different perspectives. Instead of school functioning as an opportunity to develop intellectually apart from the family, the school can become an additional institution enforcing the parent’s worldview.
The consequences can be particularly severe for LGBTQ+ students. A large study of 1,293 LGBTQ+ students comparing Australian religious independent schools with government schools found significantly greater exposure to restrictive policies and anti-LGBTQ+ practices in religious schools. In “Religious Freedom and LGBTIQA+ Students”, students in religious independent schools were much more likely to report restrictions on openly identifying as LGBTQ+, requirements that uniforms conform to sex assigned at birth, enforcement of a school’s religion, and religious messages portraying LGBTQ+ identities as sinful. They were also more likely to report consequences such as being reported to parents, punished, suspended, or expelled because of LGBTQ+ expression.
The same research found that only about 31% of LGBTQ+ students at religious independent schools believed an openly LGBTQ+ person would be accepted at their school, compared with roughly half of students at government schools. Religious-school respondents were also less likely to report policies protecting LGBTQ+ students from discrimination and less likely to be permitted to bring a same-sex partner to formal events or use facilities corresponding with their gender identity. For a teenager whose parents already reject their identity, forcing them into such an environment can mean that the rejection they experience at home is repeated throughout the school day by teachers, policies, religious instruction, and peers.
Strict religious schools can also impose behavioral and moral rules that extend far beyond ordinary academic discipline. Depending on the institution, students may face restrictions concerning dating, sexuality, clothing, gender expression, entertainment, religious observance, speech, or relationships. When these rules are backed by detention, suspension, expulsion, public shame, or reporting private behavior to parents, the school can exercise significant control over parts of a teenager’s life that would normally have little connection to education. The LGBTQ+ school study, for example, documented religious schools where students reported policies concerning religious adherence, gender expression, same-sex relationships, pregnancy, and sexual behavior.
These environments may be particularly damaging when the school treats religious disagreement as misconduct rather than intellectual development. Adolescence is normally a period when young people begin examining beliefs independently, but a student at a highly doctrinal school may know that openly identifying as atheist, agnostic, a different religion, or even a different denomination could result in social ostracism or disciplinary problems. Teachers may also hold tremendous authority over how theological questions are framed. If only one conclusion is treated as academically and morally acceptable, students can learn to conceal their actual beliefs rather than openly engage with difficult questions.
There are also concerns about sex education and purity culture. Some religious schools teach sexuality primarily through abstinence, purity, heterosexual marriage, and religious morality rather than comprehensive instruction on contraception, sexual orientation, consent, or sexual health. While delaying sexual activity itself is not harmful, withholding practical information can leave teenagers less equipped to understand contraception, sexually transmitted infections, consent, abusive relationships, or LGBTQ+ health. In schools where sexual behavior is treated primarily as a moral violation, students may also become afraid to ask questions or seek help because doing so could reveal that they have violated school or family expectations.
Religious schooling can additionally contribute to over-sheltering when parents choose it specifically to prevent their children from interacting with people outside their faith. If a child’s school, church, friendships, extracurricular activities, and family life all consist primarily of people who share the same worldview, the child may have very little meaningful exposure to religious diversity, LGBTQ+ people, different political or cultural perspectives, or ordinary disagreement. This can make the parent’s belief system appear to be the only viable way of understanding the world and can leave the child poorly prepared to navigate diverse environments after graduation.
Some highly restrictive schools have also been criticized for reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies. A scholarly review titled “Private Interests, Public Necessity: Responding to Sexism in Christian Schools” reviewed research concerning girls in private Christian schools and identified harms associated with sexist educational environments. The author argued that gender expectations within some Christian schools can constrain girls’ opportunities and conceptions of their future roles. When parents intentionally select a school because it will reinforce ideas that girls should be submissive, boys should exercise authority, or particular careers and family roles are religious obligations, the school can become an extension of parental control over the child’s future.
Religious Schools Enforcing Moral Standards by Violating Student Privacy
Religious schools’ behavior and moral regulations also often lead these schools to violate student privacy. Here are some examples:
Lady Aisha Academy: In 2019, the UK school inspectorate reported that staff at Lady Aisha Academy had questioned female students about their menstrual cycles in relation to non-attendance at prayer. The inspection criticized the practice, stating it did not adequately promote pupil welfare. The privacy concern here centers on compelled disclosure of intimate medical information to school staff, particularly when that information is tied to religious compliance and broadly accessible within the school environment. Menstrual status is sensitive health data, and requiring students to disclose it in order to justify behavior exposes deeply personal information without clear safeguards, potentially creating embarrassment, stigma, and coercion. School staff and teachers should never be allowed to coerce students into giving out personal information about their health and reproductive cycles.
Houston Christian High School: In a lawsuit filed by parents, Houston Christian High School was accused of fostering a system where students were encouraged or rewarded for reporting on classmates, and of administrators asking intrusive sexual questions of a student during an investigation. While these claims were allegations in litigation rather than final findings, they raised serious privacy concerns. Encouraging peer surveillance can undermine students’ expectation of confidentiality in personal relationships and communications, while questioning minors about sexual matters without clear boundaries or parental involvement can intrude into highly sensitive personal territory. Students deserve privacy over their personal relationships and sexual history; schools have no right to coerce this information out of them.
Tennessee Christian Preparatory School: A student sued Tennessee Christian Preparatory School after alleging she was barred from graduation and threatened regarding her diploma following a social media post coming out as gay. The dispute raised privacy issues because it involved the school monitoring or acting upon a student’s off-campus social media expression about her identity. When schools discipline students for personal disclosures made outside school grounds, it blurs the line between institutional authority and private life, particularly when the information relates to sexual orientation, a deeply personal aspect of identity. Schools should never be able to give students consequences over social media posts, especially those relating to their personal identity and sexual orientation.
Harms of Enforced Purity Culture on Children
Purity culture generally refers to a set of religious teachings that place a strong moral emphasis on sexual abstinence before heterosexual marriage, virginity, modesty, and traditional gender roles. The harms of these teachings arise when parents enforce purity culture through shame, fear, punishment, misinformation, surveillance, or the idea that a child’s moral worth depends on remaining sexually “pure.” Research increasingly suggests that these messages can harmfully shape young people’s relationships with their bodies, sexuality, identity, consent, and intimate relationships well into adulthood.
One of the clearest documented effects is sexual shame. A study of 1,273 participants, “Purity Culture and Sexual Shame”, found that exposure to Christian purity culture was associated with greater sexual shame, particularly among women who no longer endorsed purity-culture beliefs. The researchers defined purity culture around abstinence until heterosexual marriage and traditional gender expectations and concluded that sex-negative messages during adolescence may interfere with healthy sexual development. The study was correlational and therefore cannot establish that purity culture alone caused participants’ shame, but it demonstrates a significant relationship between being raised with these teachings and later negative feelings about sexuality.
For children, these messages can make normal sexual development feel like evidence of moral failure. Adolescents naturally begin experiencing attraction, curiosity, sexual thoughts, and changes in their bodies, but a child raised under highly enforced purity teachings may learn that experiencing these things makes them dirty, sinful, or spiritually weak. Instead of learning how to understand and manage sexuality responsibly, they may become frightened of their own thoughts and bodies. Shame can be intensified when parents routinely question teenagers about sexual thoughts, monitor their relationships, punish masturbation, demand confessions, or frame even minor physical affection as a serious spiritual transgression.
More recent research has found that these effects may persist years after childhood. A 2026 study published in The Journal of Sex Research, “Being Pure and Being Ashamed: Purity Culture and Sexual Shame Among Survivors of Nonconsensual Sexual Experiences”, examined adults with and without histories of nonconsensual sexual experiences. Continued acceptance of purity-culture beliefs significantly predicted greater sexual shame among both men and women, while childhood exposure itself significantly predicted sexual shame among men. The researchers concluded that religious sexual messaging can meaningfully shape later sexual shame, particularly when combined with experiences of sexual trauma.
Enforced purity culture can also teach children to associate virginity with personal value. Some purity teachings use metaphors suggesting that someone who engages in sexual activity becomes permanently damaged, contaminated, or less desirable—for example, comparing a sexually active person to used tape, chewed gum, or a damaged object. When parents reinforce these ideas, a teenager may believe that one sexual experience permanently changes their worth as a human being. This can make consensual mistakes feel catastrophic, intensify guilt after sexual activity, and create the belief that a person’s value depends on maintaining a particular sexual status rather than on their character or humanity.
These beliefs can become especially harmful to survivors of sexual abuse or assault. If children have been taught that sexual contact reduces a person’s purity or worth, they may apply those teachings to themselves even when the sexual activity was not consensual. Research examining purity culture and nonconsensual sexual experiences notes that purity teachings often place substantial responsibility on women for preventing sexual activity and can contribute to shame following sexual trauma. A 2026 presentation in The Journal of Sexual Medicine described purity culture as potentially exacerbating sexual shame because of its emphasis on preventing sexual transgression regardless of consent.
Purity culture can therefore blur children’s understanding of consent by focusing primarily on whether sexual activity occurred rather than whether it was wanted, safe, respectful, and consensual. A teenager may receive extensive instruction that premarital sex is sinful while receiving little instruction about coercion, bodily autonomy, recognizing abusive behavior, or how to communicate boundaries. When all sexual activity outside marriage is placed into the same moral category, the important difference between consensual exploration and sexual victimization can become obscured. This can make it harder for young people to understand why something that happened to them was abusive or to explain it to adults.
Relatedly, enforced purity teachings can contribute to victim-blaming. Girls may be told that they are responsible for preventing boys or men from experiencing sexual temptation through modest clothing and behavior, while boys may be taught that sexual desire is inherently difficult for them to control. These messages can cause a girl who experiences harassment or assault to wonder whether her clothing, behavior, or perceived lack of modesty caused the abuse. They can also communicate to boys that aggressive sexual impulses are inevitable rather than something they are fully responsible for controlling.
Purity culture can also foster body shame, particularly during puberty. Parents may suddenly impose increasingly restrictive clothing rules as a girl’s body develops, criticize visible breasts or curves, prohibit certain swimsuits, or tell daughters that their bodies can cause men to sin. Boys may similarly be taught to fear sexual arousal or view their bodies as sources of uncontrollable temptation. Instead of puberty being understood as ordinary development, teenagers can come to experience their changing bodies as dangerous, embarrassing, or morally threatening.
These messages can extend into adulthood and interfere with healthy sexual relationships even after marriage. Purity culture often expects young people to suppress sexual desire for years and then, after marriage, suddenly regard sexuality as healthy and desirable. Psychological conditioning does not necessarily disappear because someone’s marital status changes. Researchers reviewing the impact of evangelical purity teachings have described associations with fear, disgust toward sexuality and genitals, sexual shame, and difficulties with sexual well-being. A 2025 review in Sexuality & Culture, “Taught to Be Ashamed: Sexual Shame, Faith, and Moral Incongruence in Men’s Psychosexual Development”, discusses how religious sexual policing can shape sexual shame and psychosexual development long after adolescence.
Another major concern is inadequate sexual-health education. Families that enforce purity culture may rely heavily on abstinence-only education and intentionally avoid teaching teenagers about contraception, condoms, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy prevention, or safer sex because they fear that providing this information will encourage sexual behavior. However, research does not support the idea that withholding this information prevents teenagers from having sex. A review of abstinence-only education found that such programs frequently withheld or distorted information about condoms and contraception, sometimes contained medical inaccuracies and gender stereotypes, and showed little evidence of preventing adolescent sexual activity. In contrast, comprehensive sexuality education has been found capable of delaying sexual initiation while also reducing risky behavior.
A randomized evaluation involving more than 2,000 teenagers reached a similar conclusion. Researchers evaluating four federally funded abstinence-only programs found no significant differences between participating adolescents and control groups in whether they had sex or engaged in unprotected sex. The programs therefore did not produce the central behavioral outcome they were designed to achieve.
Other research suggests that incomplete education may actually leave some teenagers less prepared to protect themselves when they do become sexually active. A study of 450 adolescents ages 12–14 found that students receiving abstinence-only education developed less favorable attitudes toward condom use and were more likely than a comparison group to report unprotected sex. A separate nationally based analysis found that comprehensive sex education was associated with significantly lower odds of teen pregnancy, while abstinence-only education was not significantly associated with either lower pregnancy risk or reduced likelihood of intercourse.
This means that parents who attempt to protect children by preventing them from learning about contraception and safer sex may actually deprive them of information they eventually need. Teenagers do not necessarily follow every rule their parents establish. A child who becomes sexually active despite purity teachings may therefore face the worst combination of circumstances: intense fear of admitting what they are doing, inadequate knowledge about protection, and an expectation that seeking contraception would expose them to parental punishment.
Enforced purity culture can similarly discourage teenagers from seeking medical care or asking sexual-health questions. A teenager experiencing unusual symptoms, worried about pregnancy, seeking contraception, or concerned about a sexual encounter may avoid speaking to parents because doing so could reveal behavior that the family considers sinful. They may also fear humiliation, punishment, loss of privileges, forced confession to religious authorities, or restrictions on relationships. The more aggressively parents police sexual morality, the greater the incentive can become for teenagers to hide sexual-health concerns until they become more serious.
Purity culture can also create unhealthy expectations for romantic relationships. Adolescents may be taught that dating should occur primarily for the purpose of marriage, that romantic partners should fit strict religious criteria, or that parents should exercise extensive authority over whom they date and how relationships progress. Some families require courtship rather than ordinary dating, prohibit unsupervised interaction, monitor messages between romantic partners, or require parental approval before relationships can begin. This can prevent teenagers from gradually learning how to navigate attraction, rejection, communication, boundaries, and relationship compatibility through age-appropriate experience.
Strict purity teachings may also reinforce gender inequality. Girls can be assigned disproportionate responsibility for sexual purity, modesty, and preventing male temptation, while boys may be taught to pursue leadership and girls to practice submission. Such teachings can shape expectations about power inside future relationships. When obedience and submission are treated as feminine virtues, girls may have more difficulty recognizing controlling behavior or asserting boundaries, while boys may receive distorted messages about entitlement and authority.
The harms can be particularly severe for LGBTQ+ children, because traditional purity culture is generally built around heterosexual marriage and rigid binary gender expectations. A 2025 qualitative study, “Being Yourself Is a Sin: The Impact of Evangelical Purity Culture on Sexual and Gender Minority People Socialized as Women”, examined the experiences of sexual-minority women and other people assigned female at birth who were raised within evangelical purity culture. Participants described impacts across areas including sexual oppression, interpersonal power, LGBTQ+-specific oppression, embodied experiences, and later healing, with researchers finding that participants had internalized messages producing sexual shame.
For an LGBTQ+ teenager, purity expectations can therefore communicate something more severe than “wait until marriage.” If the family’s definition of acceptable sexuality recognizes only heterosexual relationships and strict gender roles, the child may understand that there is no future version of their authentic sexuality that will ever be considered acceptable. A heterosexual teenager may be told sexual desire becomes permissible after marriage; a gay teenager may instead hear that their attractions will always remain forbidden. This can intensify shame, identity suppression, and the belief that they must choose between their sexuality and their family or religion.
Purity culture may also encourage excessive parental surveillance. Parents who are intensely concerned about sexual purity may search teenagers’ devices, monitor private messages, restrict friendships with another gender, track locations, prohibit closed bedroom doors, police clothing, or prevent unsupervised social interaction. Because sexuality is treated as a spiritual danger, increasingly invasive controls can be justified as necessary to protect the child’s soul or future marriage. This can turn ordinary adolescent privacy and independence into evidence of suspected sexual misconduct.
Children may consequently become more secretive rather than more open with their parents. A teenager who knows that acknowledging attraction, a first kiss, masturbation, pornography exposure, or a relationship will result in condemnation has strong incentives to conceal those experiences. This undermines the very parental guidance purity culture is often intended to provide. Instead of asking parents for advice when something confusing or dangerous occurs, the child may deal with it alone because disclosure feels more threatening than the underlying problem.
Religious scholarship examining adolescent adherence to purity teachings has described how these systems can link obedience with promised happiness and salvation while linking disobedience with sin, unhappiness, and even hell. Enforced purity culture can additionally create fear surrounding normal affection. Teenagers may become anxious about holding hands, kissing, hugging, or experiencing attraction because they have been taught to view physical intimacy as a slippery slope toward serious sin. Some may continually analyze whether a particular thought, touch, or interaction has crossed an invisible moral boundary. This can also have the effect of limiting inter-gender friendships between adolescents, which can be harmful for their development, and may cause them to have trouble making friends and interacting with the opposite gender later in life. This is especially harmful when religious parents associate any interaction with the opposite gender as inherently romantic or sexual.
Finally, enforced purity culture can leave young people with the difficult task of reconstructing their understanding of sexuality later in life. Someone who eventually rejects the teachings may intellectually understand that sexual desire is normal while continuing to experience automatic shame, fear, or disgust conditioned during childhood. Others may have to relearn basic information about consent, contraception, LGBTQ+ identities, boundaries, and healthy relationships that was withheld from them as adolescents. The harm therefore does not necessarily disappear once parents lose the ability to enforce the rules. For some young people, years of associating sexuality with sin, danger, contamination, and parental rejection can continue shaping their self-image and relationships long after they have become independent.
Harms of Religious Upbringings for LGBTQ+ Youth
Religious upbringing can be extremely harmful to LGBTQ+ children when religious parents discriminate against a child’s LGBTQ or queer identity. In these homes, a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity is treated as sinful, shameful, changeable, or incompatible with family acceptance. In these environments, young people may be pressured to hide their identity, avoid same-gender relationships, suppress gender expression, use unwanted names or pronouns, or undergo religious counseling or conversion efforts.
Research on family rejection shows how serious these experiences can become. The Family Acceptance Project’s research on LGBTQ+ youth has found that family rejection during adolescence is associated with substantially greater risks of depression, substance use, and suicidal behavior, while family acceptance is associated with better health and self-esteem. A widely cited study on family rejection found that young adults who reported high levels of family rejection because of their LGBTQ+ identity were far more likely to report suicide attempts and depression than those who experienced little or no rejection.
Religious rejection can be especially damaging because it may teach a young person that accepting themselves means disappointing not only their parents but also God, their faith community, and their extended family. This can create internalized homophobia or transphobia, shame, fear of divine punishment, identity conflict, and pressure to live a double life. LGBTQ+ teenagers may hide relationships, censor their online activity, avoid supportive friends, or pretend to agree with religious teachings in order to protect themselves from punishment or rejection.
The most severe version of this pressure can include conversion therapy or religious change efforts. Research on parent-initiated sexual-orientation change efforts found associations with depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts, and poorer educational and economic outcomes in adulthood. These practices can teach a child that love, belonging, and spiritual worth depend on changing an identity they cannot simply choose to eliminate.
Religious restrictions can also isolate LGBTQ+ youth from sources of support. Parents may prevent them from accessing LGBTQ+ websites, books, social media, supportive peers, school groups, or affirming clergy because they fear those resources will “encourage” the child’s identity. This can leave the teenager surrounded almost entirely by people telling them that an important part of who they are is unacceptable, while simultaneously preventing them from finding communities where they would be understood.
For transgender and gender-nonconforming youth, religiously motivated parental control can additionally involve restrictions on clothing, hairstyles, names, pronouns, binders, social transition, or gender-affirming healthcare. When these restrictions are combined with repeated messages that the child’s identity is sinful or illegitimate, the home and religious community can become sources of persistent identity-based stress rather than places of safety.
The central harm is therefore not religious belief itself, but using religion to make family love, safety, belonging, or freedom conditional on an LGBTQ+ child suppressing who they are. When children are forced to choose between authenticity and acceptance from the people and communities they depend on, the resulting shame, isolation, and fear can have lasting effects well beyond adolescence.
Read more about Parental Discrimination against LGBTQ Identities
Common Child Abuses in Christianity
Christianity is practiced by billions of people across many denominations, and Christian upbringing itself is not inherently abusive. The forms of abuse discussed here concern situations in which Christian doctrines, institutions, or claims of religious authority are used to justify coercion, punishment, neglect, discrimination, or exploitation of children. Research on religion-related maltreatment has documented abuse committed by religious authority figures, denial of medical care for religious reasons, and attempts to punish or “rid” children of perceived spiritual evil.
Harsh corporal punishment justified through the Bible
One of the most extensively studied forms of religion-related parenting in Christianity is the use of biblical teachings to justify corporal punishment. Certain conservative Christian parenting traditions interpret biblical references to “the rod” as requiring parents to physically discipline children. Research has found that conservative Protestant parents holding more literalist views of scripture have historically reported using corporal punishment more frequently than parents with less conservative theological views. A study specifically examining Protestant fundamentalism similarly found a strong relationship between biblical literalism and favorable attitudes toward corporal punishment at home and at school.
This becomes abusive when children are hit excessively, punished for developmentally normal behavior, or taught that physical pain is required by God. Religious justification can make the situation particularly difficult for children because resisting punishment can itself be framed as rebellion against both parental and divine authority. The parent may also feel morally obligated to continue punishment rather than reconsidering whether it is harming the child.
Fear-based teachings about hell, Satan, and divine punishment
Some children are raised in Christian environments where obedience is reinforced through intense fear of hell, demons, Satan, divine wrath, or an imminent apocalypse. Parents may tell children that doubting Christianity, disobeying adults, engaging in sexual behavior, being LGBTQ+, or consuming prohibited media could place their souls in danger. In extreme cases, unusual behavior or mental-health symptoms may be interpreted as evidence of demonic influence.
Religion-related maltreatment research has documented cases in which children were physically or psychologically abused during attempts to remove supposed evil or demonic forces from them. In the Name of God: A Profile of Religion-Related Child Abuse A child repeatedly taught that ordinary mistakes or unwanted thoughts could result in eternal punishment can also develop intense guilt and fear even without physical violence.
Enforced purity culture and sexual shame
Within some evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities, children and teenagers are subjected to purity culture, in which virginity, abstinence, modest dress, heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles are given intense religious importance. Parents may prohibit dating, monitor romantic relationships, shame masturbation or sexual thoughts, restrict clothing, require purity pledges, or teach daughters that their bodies can cause men to sin.
When these teachings are enforced through humiliation and fear, teenagers can learn to associate normal sexual development with spiritual contamination. Research on purity culture has associated exposure to these teachings with sexual shame, and clinical literature has raised concerns about their effects on sexual self-concept and later relationships. The harms can be especially severe for LGBTQ+ youth because the child may be taught not merely to delay sexual activity but that the relationships they naturally desire can never be morally acceptable.
Suppression of LGBTQ+ identities and conversion efforts
Some Christian parents and churches use religious doctrine to reject a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Children may be told that being gay or transgender is sinful, forbidden from dating, deliberately misgendered, prevented from expressing themselves, isolated from LGBTQ+ peers, or threatened with rejection from their family or church.
The most extreme form is conversion therapy or religious sexual-orientation/gender-identity change efforts. Parents may send teenagers to Christian counselors, ministries, camps, or clergy members whose purpose is to make them heterosexual or cisgender. Research on parent-initiated conversion efforts has associated these experiences with depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts, and poorer outcomes in adulthood. Religious authority can intensify the coercion because the child may be told that accepting their identity threatens not only their relationship with their parents but their relationship with God.
Faith-based medical neglect
Some Christian denominations and independent religious movements teach that illness should be treated primarily or exclusively through prayer or faith healing. In these families, parents have sometimes withheld antibiotics, insulin, surgery, emergency treatment, or other necessary medical care from children because they believed seeking medicine demonstrated insufficient faith.
Researchers examining religion-motivated medical neglect documented numerous deaths in which children had illnesses that were highly treatable with conventional medicine. Religion-related child-maltreatment research has identified faith-based medical neglect as one of the clearest categories in which religious belief can directly contribute to serious injury or death.
Religious schools, fundamentalist academies, and residential ministries
Christian institutions can become another source of control when parents place children in highly restrictive Christian schools, reform schools, boarding programs, Bible academies, or residential ministries. Some have enforced compulsory worship, strict dress codes, bans on secular entertainment, corporal punishment, isolation, forced labor, censorship, or intensive religious discipline.
Religious education can also become educationally harmful when a school restricts students’ exposure to mainstream science, comprehensive sex education, LGBTQ+ information, or competing religious and philosophical viewpoints. This is different from a school simply teaching Christianity alongside a strong education; the concern arises when schooling is deliberately structured to prevent children from gaining the knowledge necessary to independently evaluate what they have been taught.
Sexual abuse by clergy and abuse of religious authority
Churches, Sunday schools, Christian camps, boarding schools, youth groups, monasteries, and other institutions have also been sites of extensive documented child sexual abuse. The UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found abuse across religious settings and documented situations in which perpetrators used their status as religious authorities to gain access to and trust from children.
The Roman Catholic Church provides the largest extensively investigated example. In England and Wales alone, the Church received more than 3,000 complaints involving more than 1,750 victims or complainants between 1970 and 2015, and the inquiry found institutional failures that sometimes prioritized clergy members and church reputation over children’s protection. Similar risks can occur in any church structure where clergy are treated as uniquely trustworthy or divinely authoritative and outside scrutiny is discouraged.
Silencing children to protect the church or family
Religious communities can compound abuse when children are taught that reporting misconduct will damage the church, embarrass the family, cause scandal, or harm another person’s relationship with God. A child may instead be encouraged to forgive an abuser, pray about the problem, or resolve it within the church.
IICSA found recurring barriers to reporting abuse in religious organisations, including institutional reputation, the authority afforded religious leaders, shame, victim-blaming, distrust of outside authorities, and attempts to manage allegations internally. This can transform religion from simply the setting in which abuse happens into one of the mechanisms that prevents a child from escaping it.
Extreme gender roles and control of girls
Some Christian fundamentalist environments enforce patriarchal interpretations of scripture in which fathers are family authorities, wives are expected to submit to husbands, and girls are prepared primarily for marriage and motherhood. Daughters may face stricter dress requirements, limitations on dating or friendships, expectations of sexual purity, and restrictions on education or career plans. For boys, the same ideology can require rigid masculinity and discourage vulnerability, emotional expression, or interests considered feminine. In both cases, religion can be used to make a parent’s preferred gender role feel mandatory rather than something the child is free to accept or reject.
Over-sheltering and isolation from secular society
Some parents attempt to protect children’s Christianity by minimizing contact with secular culture. Children may be homeschooled or placed exclusively in Christian schools, prohibited from secular music or entertainment, prevented from making non-Christian friends, denied access to certain books and websites, or told that outsiders are spiritually dangerous. Over-sheltering becomes harmful when it deprives children of a meaningful education, healthy peer relationships, basic information, or the opportunity to develop independent beliefs. It can also make leaving an abusive home or church much harder because the child may know few trustworthy adults outside the religious environment.
Common Child Abuses in Judaism
Judaism encompasses secular, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Hasidic, Haredi, and many other communities whose approaches to children differ dramatically. Many of the best-documented institutional problems involve particularly insular ultra-Orthodox or Haredi communities, where researchers have studied the effects of intense religious authority, segregated educational systems, restricted secular education, and barriers to reporting abuse.
Violence and harsh discipline in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas
Research has documented physical and emotional mistreatment of boys within some ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, where religious scholarship can be associated with intense expectations for conformity and achievement. A 2025 qualitative study interviewed 35 young men about violence in ultra-Orthodox yeshivas in Israel and found that boys who did not conform to expected standards of Torah study were sometimes devalued, sanctioned, and subjected to social, emotional, and physical abuse by authority figures. Participants described consequences including risky behavior, changes in religious identity, and declining religious commitment.
Earlier Israeli research similarly found higher reports of staff maltreatment in Jewish religious schools than in nonreligious Jewish schools in the populations studied. These findings show how intense academic-religious expectations combined with strong authority structures can create opportunities for harmful discipline.
Extremely narrow education in some yeshiva systems
Some ultra-Orthodox boys receive full-time education focused overwhelmingly on Torah, Talmud, and Jewish law, with little conventional secular education. England’s IICSA documented concerns about unregistered yeshivas educating boys for long hours while providing no secular subjects, and local safeguarding authorities have raised concerns about both educational adequacy and oversight.
Government research in Israel similarly notes that historically, many ultra-Orthodox boys’ schools devoted relatively little instruction to core secular subjects. When parents require a child to remain in such a system despite the child’s educational needs or desire for a broader education, the result can be difficulty developing English, mathematics, science, or other skills needed for higher education and employment.
Sexual abuse by rabbis, teachers, and other religious authority figures
Child sexual abuse has also been documented in yeshivas and other Jewish religious institutions. A study of 21 men abused as children by authority figures in Israeli ultra-Orthodox institutions found that almost none recognized the behavior as sexual abuse while it was happening. The authority relationship could make abusive conduct appear educational, normal, mutual, or disciplinary to a child who had little framework for understanding sexuality or challenging a respected religious figure.
Australia’s Royal Commission also investigated Yeshiva institutions in Melbourne and Sydney and found inadequate historical policies for responding to child sexual abuse, insufficient oversight, conflicts of interest, and a lack of supportive leadership for survivors and their families.
Pressure not to report sexual abuse outside the community
A particularly serious problem documented in some ultra-Orthodox communities is internal handling or suppression of abuse allegations. A study of 40 Haredi male survivors found that sexual abuse of boys was underreported and that factors contributing to silence included sexual taboo, shame, blind obedience, and strong tendencies toward concealment at individual, family, and community levels.
Another study examining mandatory reporting within Israeli ultra-Orthodox communities found ongoing disputes about whether and how allegations should be referred to formal authorities, while newer research shows that rabbis and other community authorities can remain central figures in decisions following disclosure. This can become dangerous when preserving community reputation or obtaining religious approval takes precedence over immediately protecting the child.
Modesty culture and sexual silence
Strict Orthodox environments may place strong emphasis on tzniut, or modesty, affecting clothing, physical contact, sexuality, and interactions between genders. Modesty practices themselves are not inherently abusive. Problems can arise when parents enforce them through humiliation, body-shaming, extreme surveillance, or punishment, or when children receive so little information about sexuality that they cannot recognize inappropriate conduct.
Research on Haredi male sexual-abuse survivors specifically identified silencing around sexuality as one factor that interfered with recognition and disclosure of abuse. When a child has been taught that sexual subjects must never be discussed, an abuser may exploit exactly that silence.
Gender segregation and rigid expectations
Some Orthodox and Haredi communities maintain extensive separation between boys and girls and strong expectations surrounding future marriage and family roles. Girls may be expected to conform to modest dress and prepare for marriage within the community, while boys can face intense expectations surrounding religious study. Children who do not fit these roles can experience shame, family conflict, or social exclusion. These structures become abusive when children are punished for resisting gender expectations, prevented from pursuing education or relationships they want, or made to believe that departure from the prescribed role will cost them their family or community.
Controlling dating, relationships, and marriage
In highly observant communities, parents and community members can exercise substantial influence over whom young people date and marry. Arranged introductions are not inherently coercive and can be freely chosen. Abuse occurs when family or religious expectations remove the young person’s ability to refuse, when relationships outside the faith are punished, or when threats of rejection are used to force compliance..
Isolation from secular society
Highly insular Haredi communities may organize children’s schooling, friendships, worship, leisure activities, and eventual marriages almost entirely within the community. This can provide strong social belonging for children who want it, but it can also make independent choice extraordinarily difficult for a child who begins questioning the religion.
If parents prohibit secular media, internet access, friendships with outsiders, or alternative education specifically to prevent religious questioning, the child may have little opportunity to learn that other ways of living are possible. Leaving the faith can then mean risking not just disagreement with parents but the loss of school, friends, extended family, and nearly every community relationship.
Shunning and threats of family or community exclusion
Children and adolescents who become less observant may face threats that they will damage their family’s reputation, hurt siblings’ marriage prospects, or be rejected by their community. In an insular environment, this creates enormous leverage over a young person’s choices. A teenager may continue following religious rules they no longer believe simply because noncompliance could threaten their housing, relationships, education, and connection with siblings.
Common Child Abuses in Islam
Islam is practiced across enormously different cultures, countries, denominations, and family traditions. This has led to islamic extremist parents and religious figures using religion to justify abusive behaviors towards children. The concerns of child abuse in islam arise when parents, teachers, imams, or community authorities use religious authority to coerce children, inflict punishment, restrict their development, or prevent them from seeking help.
Corporal punishment in madrasas and Qur’anic schools
Physical punishment has been repeatedly documented in some madrasas, mosque schools, and Qur’anic tuition settings. Children may be struck for making mistakes while reciting the Qur’an, failing to memorize passages, talking, arriving late, or violating behavioral rules. England’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse received concerns from local authorities about corporal punishment in madrasas and identified safeguarding weaknesses within some out-of-school religious settings.
Research in Pakistan has also documented high levels of corporal punishment among children attending both government schools and religious madrasas, with associations between punishment and negative behavioral and emotional outcomes. Such punishment becomes religious abuse when children are taught that physical violence is a legitimate or divinely sanctioned response to imperfect religious learning or disobedience.
Safeguarding problems in mosques and madrasas
Mosques and madrasas often provide important education and community support, but supplementary religious settings can create safeguarding risks when they operate with limited external oversight. UK government guidance notes that out-of-school settings can have inconsistent safeguarding practices and has documented risks involving physical chastisement, sexual abuse, grooming, untrained staff, and inadequate vetting.
IICSA reported that some local authorities received significant numbers of referrals involving religious tutors and madrasas, while uptake of safeguarding training among some providers remained limited.
Sexual abuse by Qur’an teachers and religious authority figures
Sexual abuse has been documented in mosque and madrasa environments. IICSA recorded, for example, four children who were approximately nine years old when they were sexually abused while being taught the Qur’an by a mosque teacher; the perpetrator was later convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The risk can be compounded when children are taught unquestioning respect for religious teachers and have little understanding of sexual boundaries. A teacher who is regarded as morally authoritative can exploit the assumption that challenging or accusing him would itself be disrespectful.
Shame, family honour, and suppression of abuse reports
Some Muslim survivors have described intense pressure surrounding honour, shame, and community reputation after abuse. IICSA documented the account of a girl abused in a madrasah who said an imam discouraged her from reporting because of the shame and dishonour it would supposedly bring to the community. Another survivor who reported abuse in a house-based madrasah described being harassed and sexually insulted afterward. These cases illustrate how religious and cultural concepts can become instruments of further abuse when a child’s responsibility to preserve family or community reputation is placed above their safety.
Forced fasting and rigid enforcement of Ramadan
Fasting during Ramadan is an important Islamic practice for Muslims who are obligated and able to participate, and children before puberty are generally not regarded in the same way as healthy adults. Many families introduce fasting gradually and flexibly. Religious observance becomes harmful when parents force a child to fast regardless of health, age, medication needs, dehydration, exhaustion, or the child’s ability to function at school.
A parent may shame a child for breaking a fast, prevent them from drinking despite illness, or insist that religious performance takes priority over medical advice. In adolescents, altered meal and sleep schedules can also affect fatigue and school functioning, particularly when families do not make accommodations for children’s developmental needs.
Forced hijab, modesty requirements, and control of girls’ appearance
Many Muslim girls and women freely choose hijab or other forms of modest dress as meaningful expressions of faith. The same clothing becomes a form of parental religious control when a girl is forced to wear it through punishment, intimidation, surveillance, or threats, particularly if she personally rejects the practice.
Parents may similarly restrict makeup, hairstyles, clothing, swimming, sports, or interactions with boys based on their interpretation of Islamic modesty. The harm lies in using religious authority to deprive the child of bodily autonomy and self-expression, especially when ordinary mistakes are accompanied by accusations that she is immodest, dishonorable, or responsible for male sexual attention.
Extreme gender segregation and restrictions on girls
In highly restrictive households, religious ideas about gender can be used to impose different freedoms on sons and daughters. Girls may face tighter curfews, prohibitions on dating, restrictions on friendships with boys, limitations on travel or extracurricular activities, and greater monitoring of phones and social media because the family believes their behavior affects family honour. When taken to extremes, these restrictions can interfere with education, social development, friendships, and independence. Religion may also be used to convince the girl that demanding greater freedom is evidence of disobedience or moral corruption.
Forced and child marriage justified as religious obligation
Forced marriage occurs across different religions and cultures and is not an Islamic requirement. UK statutory guidance explicitly states that every major faith condemns forced marriage and requires free consent. Nevertheless, some families invoke religion, family honour, fear of premarital relationships, or ideas about sexual morality when pressuring young people into marriage.
UNICEF research in Muslim-majority communities has documented circumstances in which early marriage is promoted to prevent conduct considered haram or preserve family honour, while also emphasizing that the practice is driven by overlapping social, economic, gender, cultural, and religious factors rather than Islam alone. Child marriage in Islam can end education, increase isolation, expose girls to domestic and sexual violence, and create serious health risks from early pregnancy.
Religious control over dating and sexuality
Some Muslim parents impose severe restrictions on adolescent romantic relationships because premarital sexual activity is prohibited in Islam. This can extend beyond discouraging sex to banning all dating, monitoring messages, restricting opposite-sex friendships, confiscating devices, or preventing children from socializing without supervision.
A teenager who violates these rules may face punishment disproportionate to the behavior, particularly when the parent interprets dating as bringing religious or familial shame. Fear of disclosure can also discourage teenagers from seeking help concerning contraception, sexual assault, pregnancy, or unhealthy relationships.
LGBTQ+ rejection and religiously motivated suppression
LGBTQ+ Muslim children can experience intense conflict when parents interpret homosexuality or transgender identity as incompatible with Islam. Parents may restrict friendships, force children to conceal their identity, increase religious instruction, confiscate devices, prohibit LGBTQ+ information, or pressure them toward heterosexual marriage.
In severe cases, children can be threatened with family rejection, violence, religious “healing,” or removal from supportive environments. Religious oppression becomes particularly powerful when a young person believes that accepting their identity could result in simultaneously losing their parents, cultural community, and relationship with God.
Spiritual healing, possession beliefs, and abusive exorcism practices
Some families interpret unusual behavior, psychiatric symptoms, disability, or distress through beliefs involving jinn, possession, or spiritual attack. Prayer or ruqyah can be practiced non-abusively, but danger arises when parents or religious healers use physical restraint, beating, deprivation, burning, forced ingestion, or other harmful practices in an attempt to remove a supposed spirit.
Broader government guidance on faith-related abuse specifically recognizes that religious belief can be manipulated to justify harm, isolation, or neglect intended to remove an “evil force” or spirit. Children with mental-health problems can also be harmed when spiritual explanations replace appropriate psychological or medical care.
Over-sheltering and restriction of outside information
Some Muslim parents attempt to prevent secular or religiously prohibited influences by tightly controlling entertainment, books, internet access, social media, friendships, and education. A child may be prevented from learning about other religions, secular viewpoints, sexuality, LGBTQ+ identities, or perspectives that challenge the family’s interpretation of Islam. As with Christian or Jewish over-sheltering, the concern is not parents teaching their beliefs. The harm develops when parents deliberately prevent a maturing child from accessing alternative information or interacting with people outside the religious environment, leaving them unable to independently evaluate what they believe.
Finally, religious teachings about respecting one’s parents can be misused to make parental authority seem absolute. Children may be told that disagreement is sinful, that challenging a parent violates Islam, or that God will punish them for asserting independence. This becomes especially harmful when the parent is already controlling or abusive because religious obedience can be used to convince the child that defending themselves is itself morally wrong.
Cases and Stories of Parental Religious Abuse
Mikayla Thornton — beatings, exorcisms, and a cult-like religious upbringing – Mikayla Thornton has publicly alleged that her father, former Color Me Badd member Kevin Thornton, subjected her and her siblings to years of physical, emotional, and religious abuse while raising them in what she described as a cult-like environment. In a 2026 interview reported by People, Thornton said that her father exercised extreme religious control over the family and claimed that she was beaten with a stick wrapped in Bible pages. She also described being forced to participate in exorcisms and other practices centered around her father’s religious beliefs. Thornton said reports were made to child protective services during her childhood, but her parents were never criminally charged over the alleged abuse. As an adult, Thornton became estranged from her parents and began publicly discussing what she said happened to her and her siblings. Her account illustrates an especially extreme form of parental religious abuse in which physical punishment, fear of supernatural forces, and parental authority become intertwined.
The former pastor’s child who was told they could die a martyr before turning 16 – In one self-reported account on r/raisedbynarcissists, an adult survivor described being raised by an extremely religious evangelical parent in a highly sheltered household. The writer said they were homeschooled, socially isolated, moved frequently, and grew up in a family that appeared from the outside to be the ideal evangelical pastor’s family. Inside the home, however, the poster said their mother claimed that God communicated directly with her and taught that because of this, her children were required to obey her. The poster described being repeatedly terrified with predictions about the end of the world. According to the account, their mother would “prophesy” over them and tell them that they might die a martyr’s death at the hands of the Antichrist before reaching age 16.
The pastor’s daughter whose first kiss became a source of purity-culture humiliation – In a firsthand account on r/Exvangelical, a woman described growing up as the daughter of a charismatic evangelical pastor in an environment heavily shaped by purity culture. At 15, she went on what she described as her first real date and kissed a boy twice in a parking lot. What she experienced as an innocent and exciting adolescent milestone quickly became a frightening religious issue after her father learned about it. She described her upbringing as highly sheltered and said that sexual and romantic behavior had been surrounded by extensive religious expectations about purity. As an adult, she described the event as one of numerous experiences that contributed to lasting damage from purity culture. She also expressed complicated feelings toward her father because she believed he genuinely accepted the religious teachings he imposed on her, even while recognizing the harm they had caused. Her story illustrates how parental religious control can transform ordinary adolescent exploration into a source of guilt, fear, and shame. Rather than allowing a teenager to gradually learn about relationships and boundaries, strict purity systems can communicate that even relatively minor expressions of affection represent major moral failures.
Wendy — the abuse survivor who said maintaining the appearance of a “good Christian family” mattered more than protecting her – A 2026 study published in Qualitative Sociology documented the experiences of people who survived abuse while growing up in highly religious evangelical environments. One participant, identified by the pseudonym Wendy, described a childhood in which there was effectively no room to reject her family’s religion. She said that although she was extremely involved in Christianity—reading the Bible repeatedly, attending church, doing daily devotions, and participating in mission trips—her relationship with Christianity was deeply distressing rather than comforting. Wendy also reported severe sexual abuse by her father beginning when she was approximately four years old. She said her mother witnessed the abuse when Wendy was around eight but did not intervene. Looking back, Wendy believed that maintaining the family’s identity as a respectable Christian household and religious teachings surrounding gender and women’s responsibility contributed to her mother’s failure to protect her.
Lydia Joy Launderville — the child who grew up believing she was evil and deserving of punishment – Religious-abuse survivor Lydia Joy Launderville has described being raised in a strict Independent Fundamental Baptist environment in which church occupied the center of her childhood. In a firsthand account published by Baptist News Global, she recalled becoming intensely religious at only seven years old while simultaneously being taught to view herself as sinful and unworthy. She described sitting through sermons terrified that she was evil and beyond redemption and growing up isolated from much of the outside world under strict behavioral standards. She also reported experiencing religious, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse during her upbringing.
The Florida girl beaten by her father after refusing to go to church — In September 2025, Miami-Dade authorities arrested 63-year-old Renel Sanon after deputies said he physically attacked his minor daughter because she refused to attend church with him. According to the arrest report described by Local 10, Sanon entered his daughter’s bedroom after she refused to go, pulled the covers off her, punched her in the chest, and struck her with an electrical cord. Emergency medical personnel treated the girl, and deputies photographed her injuries. This case is a particularly direct example of religious participation being enforced through parental violence: according to police, the conflict began specifically because the child would not attend her father’s church.
Christopher Leonard — the 17-year-old beaten during a church “counseling session” intended to force confession and repentance — In 2015, 17-year-old Christopher Leonard and his 19-year-old brother Lucas were subjected to an hours-long beating inside the Word of Life Christian Church in upstate New York. Christopher later testified that after a church service, the brothers were ordered to answer for what they had done; when they did not provide the answers expected of them, church members—including their parents and older sister—began beating them. Christopher said he was punched, kicked, and eventually taken into another room with earplugs and earmuffs while the assault continued elsewhere. Lucas died from his injuries, while Christopher was hospitalized in serious condition. Police described the violence as a supposed spiritual “counseling session” designed to make the brothers confess sins and seek forgiveness, and testimony indicated the confrontation had begun after Lucas expressed a desire to leave the church.
The 12-year-old Minnesota boy beaten after rejecting his pastor’s teachings about God — In 2016, a 12-year-old boy escaped from Good News Church in Minneapolis in freezing weather and sought help from a stranger after suffering several days of severe physical abuse. Police said Pastor Dong Wook Kim and his adult son repeatedly forced the boy into painful exercise positions, kicked and punched him, struck him with a wooden board, and whipped him with an electrical cord. According to the criminal complaint, the boy had challenged or rejected what he was being taught about God, and the pastor admitted being angry over the child’s rejection of God. The boy’s father was also alleged to have slapped him several times, his parents repeatedly allowed the pastor to take him for this “discipline,” and the pastor told investigators that the parents generally followed his leadership regarding punishment of their children. The child ultimately escaped while the pastor’s son was preparing to beat him again.
Josef Smith — the 8-year-old whose parents used religiously framed corporal punishment before his death — Eight-year-old Josef Smith died in Georgia in 2003 after years of severe abuse by his parents, Joseph and Sonya Smith, who were later convicted of murder and child cruelty. Evidence presented in the case described Josef being beaten with belts, glue sticks, and other objects, confined in a closet or wooden box, and forced to pray while isolated. The family was associated with Remnant Fellowship, a religious organization whose teachings emphasized strict parental authority and corporal discipline, although the church denied responsibility for Josef’s death. Testimony indicated that immediately before he became unresponsive, Josef had been punished while the family was participating in an online Remnant Fellowship religious service. Medical examiners concluded that his death resulted from acute and chronic abuse, and both parents ultimately received life sentences plus additional prison time.
David Weilbacher — the 3-year-old repeatedly beaten in rituals meant to drive the devil out of him — Three-year-old David Weilbacher lived in a Washington household headed by self-ordained minister Leon Cunningham, who came to believe that the child was possessed by the devil. Court records describe the household carrying out nearly daily religious rituals in which David was beaten with wooden boards while being passed among adults in an attempt to remove an “evil spirit.” He was also repeatedly pushed onto the floor as a form of “humbling.” David eventually died after this prolonged abuse, and his body was kept in a bedroom because members of the household believed God might resurrect him. The Washington Supreme Court case concerning the prosecutions provides unusually clear documentation of religion being used not simply alongside the abuse, but as the stated justification for repeatedly inflicting it on a child.
The 9-year-old Dublin girl left permanently disabled following a parental “exorcism” — In Ireland, the parents of a 9-year-old girl were convicted in 2021 in what police described as the country’s first prosecution of “faith-based abuse.” The parents believed their daughter was possessed by an evil spirit and subjected her to an exorcism inside the family home. During the ordeal, the girl suffered catastrophic injuries and was left requiring around-the-clock care; authorities said she was not expected to recover. The case resulted in convictions for child cruelty, and investigators explicitly characterized what happened as abuse motivated by religious beliefs rather than an ordinary disciplinary incident. It provides a particularly severe example of parents interpreting a child’s behavior through a supernatural framework and then inflicting violence in an effort to spiritually “correct” the child.
Demiko Norris — the infant beaten to death by his mother during an attempted exorcism — In Maryland in 1976, 3-month-old Demiko Norris was killed during an attempted exorcism carried out by his mother, Melissa Norris. Court records describe Norris declaring that Satan was inside her baby and then repeatedly punching, poking, shaking, and otherwise physically attacking him while attempting to drive the supposed demon from his body. Another woman present failed to intervene and was initially convicted of child abuse before Maryland’s highest court later overturned that conviction on legal grounds concerning who qualified as a caregiver under the statute. Norris herself was found not criminally responsible because of insanity. Although the mother’s severe mental illness was a major factor in the case, the abuse itself was explicitly carried out through a religious delusion that transformed the infant into something she believed had to be spiritually purified through violence.
Eric Cottam — the 14-year-old starved during a six-week religious fast imposed by his parents — Fourteen-year-old Eric Cottam died in Pennsylvania in 1988 after his parents, Larry and Leona Cottam, subjected their family to a prolonged religious fast. By the time Eric died, the 5-foot-9 teenager reportedly weighed only 69 pounds. His 12-year-old sister was also seriously affected and required hospitalization. Prosecutors argued that the parents watched their son deteriorate while believing that God would eventually intervene and end the fast. A jury convicted both parents of third-degree murder as well as offenses involving the welfare of their children. Unlike ordinary religious fasting by consenting adults, this case involved parents imposing an extreme religious practice on dependent children until one of them died.
Pamela Mortenson — the foster child whose caregivers said the Bible required them to strike her with a paddle or stick — Pamela Mortenson had already experienced abuse before being placed with William and Patricia Backlund as a foster child in Washington. State child-welfare officials later received allegations that the Backlunds were physically abusing her. According to the resulting federal appellate case, the couple acknowledged using a paddle or stick to spank Pamela and explained that they considered such punishment a “Biblical mandate.” Child-welfare workers were particularly concerned because of Pamela’s history of previous abuse and ordered the Backlunds to stop using corporal punishment. The couple refused on religious grounds, prompting officials to arrange for Pamela’s removal. The case is a clear documented example of caregivers continuing physical punishment specifically because they believed abandoning it would violate their interpretation of scripture.
The broader documented pattern of children abused in attempts to remove “evil” from them — These cases are not isolated anecdotes. Researchers studying religion-related child maltreatment examined 249 cases reported to police, prosecutors, and social-service agencies and identified multiple recurring forms of abuse linked to religious beliefs, including attempts to rid children of demons or evil spirits, religiously motivated medical neglect, and abuse committed by people with religious authority. Earlier research drawing on clinicians’ cases identified dozens of incidents involving attempts to “rid” children of supposed evil, and researchers noted that evidence linking religious beliefs to the abusive acts was often unusually direct because parents or caregivers openly acknowledged the religious reason for what they had done. These findings help put cases such as David Weilbacher and the Dublin exorcism victim into a broader documented category of faith-based child maltreatment rather than treating them simply as bizarre isolated incidents.
Cases and Stories of Faith-Based Medical Neglect
Neil Beagley — the 16-year-old who died after his family relied on prayer instead of medical treatment – Neil Beagley was a 16-year-old Oregon teenager whose parents, Jeffrey and Marci Beagley, belonged to the Followers of Christ Church, a religious group whose members traditionally relied on prayer and faith healing rather than conventional medicine. According to the Oregon Court of Appeals decision in State v. Beagley, Neil suffered from a congenital urinary-tract abnormality that progressively damaged his kidneys. As his condition deteriorated, he became increasingly weak, struggled to keep food down, and had difficulty breathing. Rather than obtaining medical treatment, his family prayed over him, laid hands on him, and anointed him with oil. Neil ultimately died from complications of kidney failure in June 2008. Medical testimony established that treatment even during approximately the final week of Neil’s life could have saved him. Although Neil had also been raised to share his family’s faith-healing beliefs and reportedly did not want medical treatment, he was still a minor under his parents’ care. Jeffrey and Marci Beagley were eventually convicted of criminally negligent homicide for failing to obtain necessary medical care.
Austin Sprout — the teenager whose burst appendix was treated with prayer – Sixteen-year-old Austin Sprout became seriously ill while living with his mother, Brandi Bellew, and stepfather, Russel Bellew, in Oregon. The family belonged to the General Assembly and Church of the First Born, whose faith-healing tradition rejects conventional medical treatment in favor of prayer and anointing. According to ABC News, Austin developed appendicitis, but his family did not take him for medical treatment. His appendix eventually ruptured, and he died from the resulting infection. The Bellews later pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. As part of their probation, they were required to contact a doctor if any of their remaining children became ill for longer than a day. Austin’s death demonstrates how faith-based medical neglect can arise from a system of parental indoctrination rather than from one isolated decision.
Alayna Wyland — the infant whose parents allowed a growth to engulf her eye while waiting for faith healing – Alayna Wyland was still an infant when an abnormal mass of blood vessels began growing across her face and covering her left eye. Her parents, Timothy and Rebecca Wyland, were also members of Oregon’s Followers of Christ Church. Instead of obtaining medical treatment, they relied on prayer and anointing oils because of their religious beliefs. ABC News reported that doctors feared Alayna could permanently lose vision in the affected eye if the condition remained untreated. Child-protection authorities eventually intervened and obtained court-ordered medical treatment for Alayna. Her condition improved after receiving professional care, while her parents were convicted of first-degree criminal mistreatment.
Ginnifer and Evelyn Mitchell — newborn twins whose parents relied on prayer while one struggled to breathe – Sarah and Travis Mitchell were Followers of Christ members whose premature twin daughters, Ginnifer and Evelyn, were born at the family’s Oregon City home in 2017. According to the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office, both babies experienced medical problems following the birth. Ginnifer struggled to breathe for hours while adults around her prayed, laid hands on her, and anointed her with oil rather than obtaining emergency medical treatment. Ginnifer eventually died from respiratory distress syndrome. Authorities learned that a surviving twin was still in the home and urged the family to obtain immediate medical care. The parents did not take Evelyn to the hospital until police arrived and indicated that they would transport her themselves if necessary. Evelyn subsequently spent 11 days hospitalized. Sarah and Travis Mitchell pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide and criminal mistreatment and were each sentenced to 80 months in prison.
Cases and Stories of Religiously Motivated Parental Oppression
The former Orthodox child whose parents combined religion with food restriction, isolation, and denial of mental-health support – Another self-reported survivor described on r/exorthodox what they characterized as a “cult environment at home” created by their parents within Orthodox Christianity. According to the poster, their parents restricted food, sometimes including not allowing them to eat; isolated them from relatives and the outside world through homeschooling and limitations on contact; and taught them to fear information that conflicted with the family’s interpretation of church teachings. The control reportedly extended even to information from other Orthodox Christians whose beliefs differed from those of the household. The writer also reported experiencing serious mental-health symptoms, including hallucinations, but said their access to help was restricted to religious responses such as prayer rather than outside mental-health resources. They described being taught shame for questioning religious authority and being expected to demonstrate complete obedience to the head of the household. The account brings together several forms of parental religious oppression at once: physical deprivation, educational and social isolation, restriction of information, suppression of independent beliefs, and potential denial of necessary mental-health treatment.
Kimi Cook — the 15-year-old sent to a fundamentalist religious home where nearly every part of her life was controlled — When Kimi Cook was 15, her parents were worried about her relationship with an older boyfriend and sent her to the Rebekah Home for Girls, a fundamentalist Christian residential program in Texas run under the ministry of evangelist Lester Roloff. Her parents presented the placement as an accelerated boarding school, and Cook initially agreed to try it for a month, but she quickly discovered that the home imposed extensive religious restrictions on everyday life. She was prohibited from wearing jeans, listening to rock music, or using tampons; required to attend church every day, memorize and repeatedly recite Bible passages, and perform cleaning work; and faced escalating punishments for disobedience. Former residents described losing snack privileges, prolonged isolation, being forced to kneel on hard floors for hours, and corporal punishment. Cook’s experience demonstrates how parents can place adolescents into religious environments where ordinary teenage behavior is redefined as spiritual rebellion and where religious conformity is enforced through an extraordinary degree of surveillance, deprivation, and punishment.
Lauren and Jennifer — the homeschooled sisters raised under increasingly strict fundamentalist control — Sisters Lauren and Jennifer grew up in a family that became progressively more fundamentalist after their parents began homeschooling them. According to The American Prospect, religion eventually became intertwined with almost every part of their parents’ control: the girls were forbidden from wearing clothing that could supposedly “shame” their father or brothers, dating was prohibited, friendships were severely restricted, and disobedience was presented not merely as breaking a family rule but as sinning against God. Lauren recalled having almost no independent social life between ages 10 and 12 aside from seeing friends at Sunday school once a week, while both sisters said their parents intentionally wanted them kept naïve and sheltered from the outside world. When Jennifer later used Facebook to discuss animal rights despite her parents forbidding it, they confiscated her computer and graduation presents and threatened that one of the pets she loved could disappear if she refused to eat meat. Lauren eventually described the household as one in which extreme parental anxiety and control were given religious justification, leaving the children frightened that failure to obey their parents could carry spiritual as well as parental consequences.
Tara Westover — isolated from schools, doctors, and much of the outside world by her father’s religious worldview — Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho under a father whose survivalist beliefs were intertwined with an extreme personal interpretation of Mormonism and a conviction that mainstream institutions were dangerous and spiritually corrupting. She was never permitted to attend elementary or high school, rarely interacted with children outside similar families, and said she was 13 before she first visited the home of a child who attended school. Her father also rejected conventional medicine, leaving the children without ordinary medical care even when they were seriously injured while working in his junkyard; Westover did not even receive a birth certificate until she was nine. She later explained that her father would frame these restrictions in explicitly religious terms, teaching that God wanted the family at home and that people who relied on schools or doctors were committing a spiritual offense. When Westover eventually began educating herself and questioning the family’s worldview, the gulf between her growing independence and her parents’ beliefs ultimately contributed to her estrangement from much of her family.
Olivia Plath — raised in an isolated fundamentalist household where her clothing, relationships, education, and expected future were religiously prescribed — Olivia Plath has described having a relatively ordinary early childhood until her parents joined a fundamentalist church, after which she said her life changed dramatically. Her family moved onto land associated with the church, she was homeschooled and socially isolated, clothing such as tank tops was replaced by strict modesty expectations, and by age 13 she was being given books teaching her how to become a good wife. Plath said she understood her expected future to be supervised courtship followed by young marriage, motherhood, and submission to prescribed religious gender roles; even communication with the boy she eventually married was tightly controlled, with the couple at one point permitted to speak by phone for only about an hour every three months. She began quietly questioning the system at around 16, with acts as small as cutting her hair, changing her clothing, or wearing black eyeliner feeling like major acts of rebellion. Looking back, Plath described her childhood as extremely isolated and said the process of later questioning the religious framework was overwhelming because so much of her identity and future had already been determined for her.
Megan Phelps-Roper — raised to believe that even disagreeing thoughts and emotions constituted rebellion against God — Megan Phelps-Roper was raised from birth inside the Westboro Baptist Church, which was led by her grandfather and composed largely of members of her extended family. From childhood, obedience was treated as one of the most important religious virtues: Phelps-Roper recalled her mother reducing the Bible’s message to “Obey. Obey. Obey,” while even a child’s tone of voice or facial expression could be scrutinized as evidence of rebellion in their heart. She began participating in the church’s inflammatory public demonstrations at approximately five years old and learned that doubts, unwanted emotions, and disagreement with the church’s interpretation of scripture could place a person on the path toward hell. Her social world was also heavily circumscribed by the church; she later explained that outsiders could be acquaintances but that only church members were considered acceptable close friends, while her mother continued directing and micromanaging many aspects of her life even as she grew older. The result was a childhood in which independent thought was not simply discouraged but treated as spiritually dangerous, making obedience to family authority inseparable from fear of eternal punishment.
Libby Phelps — taught that questioning her family’s religious practices was itself something she should not even think about — Libby Phelps also grew up inside the Westboro Baptist Church, where her family required children to participate in the church’s demonstrations and taught them to view hostility from outsiders as proof that they were faithfully serving God. The lifestyle left her socially alienated at school, and her parents interpreted that isolation as something spiritually strengthening rather than a reason to reconsider what was being required of her. When Libby was 17, she and another family member wondered aloud what the family would even talk about if they did not spend so much of their lives picketing; her father immediately warned her not only against saying such a thing, but against thinking that way at all. She had also watched relatives who left the church be cut off and forbidden from returning home, giving her a clear picture of what dissent could cost. As doubts gradually grew, Libby had to weigh independent thought against the possibility of losing essentially her entire family and religious community, illustrating how social isolation and threatened rejection can enforce religious conformity even without constant physical punishment.
Daniella Mestyanek Young — raised in The Children of God with virtually no normal education or freedom to experience the outside world — Daniella Mestyanek Young spent her childhood in communes belonging to The Children of God, also known as The Family, after being born into a family deeply embedded in the religious movement. Children lived communally under extensive rules and discipline, and Young was denied a conventional education while growing up in communes across several countries. Religious obedience permeated daily life: punishments could include being forced to stand still for extended periods while holding a Bible with outstretched arms, with movement resulting in further punishment, while the group’s teachings governed relationships, authority, sexuality, and the roles children were expected to occupy. Young’s mother secretly gave her secular children’s books, which became one of her few windows into a world beyond the community. At 14 she escaped from a commune to live with an older stepsister who had already left, and despite having received only a very limited education, she entered conventional school and eventually built an independent life outside the religious system.
Jenna Tracy — the girl whose parents gradually transformed ordinary family life into an isolated fundamentalist upbringing — Jenna Tracy described her family’s transition into the Advanced Training Institute, the homeschooling branch associated with Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, as gradual rather than immediate. Her childhood initially included ordinary entertainment and activities, but after her parents became involved with the movement, family life became organized around a rigid religious hierarchy in which men held authority over women and children occupied the lowest position. Her parents removed the children from conventional school and surrounded the family with other adherents of the same teachings, dramatically narrowing the ideas and lifestyles to which the children were exposed. Religious doctrine came to prescribe education, family structure, gender expectations, obedience, and children’s place beneath parental authority. Tracy’s account illustrates how parental religious indoctrination can develop through progressive over-sheltering: restrictions that individually appear to be family lifestyle choices can accumulate until a child’s education, relationships, information, self-expression, and understanding of the outside world are largely controlled by a single religious ideology.
