Suffering Is Part of Reality, Too

Imagine a woman who has spent several nights writing about what happened in her religious community. She still has friends there. In a photograph in her living room, she stands beside some of the people she is now trying to write about. That makes it difficult to find the words.

She wants to describe how they began interfering in her decisions and what happened when she asked to leave. She deletes a sentence because it seems too harsh. Then she writes it again: that is what happened.

When she publishes her account, someone tells her she is confusing her emotions with the truth. They explain that a painful experience does not invalidate a doctrine. Perhaps they add a word she has never needed before to describe her own life: emotivism.

There is something reasonable in that warning. Suffering while receiving a teaching does not, by itself, prove that the teaching is false. But no one has examined what this woman is actually describing. Who was interfering in her decisions? On what authority? What did they tell her when she wanted to leave?

The conversation began with events and became an examination of the storyteller’s philosophical education. She now seems to need to demonstrate that she understands the relationship between experience and truth before anyone will investigate her experience.

Do we really need that requirement?

What Suffering Can Tell Us

Philosophical realism holds something simple and valuable: things do not become true because we like them, or false because they make us uncomfortable. We can be completely certain of an interpretation and still be mistaken.

I share that commitment. That is precisely why I believe we should apply it when someone tells us they have suffered.

We call an experience subjective because it is lived from a particular person’s perspective. The difficulty begins when we use the word as though it meant invented or irrelevant. Fear happens within someone, but that does not make it imaginary. Understanding what causes it, and whether the thing they fear could actually happen, is a further question.

Someone may be mistaken in believing that God has rejected them while accurately reporting that a religious leader threatened them with God’s rejection. Correcting their understanding of God does not resolve what that leader did.

They may also attribute to an entire religion what happened in one particular community. That generalization deserves examination. Finding an error in their explanation, however, does not turn their entire account into an error.

Something similar happens with the word emotivism. In philosophy, it refers to a theory according to which calling something good or bad expresses approval or disapproval rather than making a claim that can be true or false. It is a position about moral judgments, not a word for anyone who speaks with emotion.

A woman can cry while saying she was humiliated and be asserting much more than “this made me feel bad.” She may be saying that someone treated her unjustly and should be held accountable. We will need to examine that claim. Her tears do not prove it, but they do not refute it either.

Listening does not require us to accept every conclusion or condemn the person being accused. It means allowing that there may be something important to learn. The person describing what happened should be able to take part in that inquiry without first having to conceal what they feel.

A General Teaching Does Not Explain What Happened

Suppose someone responds to this account by saying that obedience is a virtue.

Even if we accept that statement, we still need to know whether this particular instruction was legitimate. Was the leader entitled to demand such a thing? What happened if the person refused?

The distance between a principle and its application matters. Thomas Aquinas recognized this when he explained that prudence requires knowledge of both general principles and the particular case. Acting well requires more than knowing a rule; we must understand the situation in which we intend to apply it (Summa Theologiae, II–II, question 47, article 3).

Listening to the person is therefore part of reasoning carefully. Their account may contain precisely the facts we need to judge what happened.

Saying “faith can require sacrifice” does not establish that every sacrifice demanded in its name was just. Someone made a particular decision affecting another person’s life. We need to examine it.

We must also acknowledge that a legitimate moral demand can hurt. Accepting responsibility or repairing harm does not always feel good. Pain is not automatic proof of abuse. Yet we cannot assume that every experience of distress reveals resistance to a truth the authority already understands. We have to look at what actually happened.

That is why I find it insufficient to reduce this problem to a lack of kindness. A leader can exercise unjust control in a gentle voice. Another may speak awkwardly and still listen to an objection and correct their conduct. What matters is how much freedom the person had to decide, and what consequences they faced for disagreeing.

“We did it for your own good” may express a sincere intention. It does not relieve us of asking whether what we did was right.

When Only Positive Experiences Count

Now imagine that this same community enthusiastically welcomes accounts from people who describe how much they benefited from belonging. Their emotions feature in publications and gatherings. Tears of gratitude are celebrated.

But when someone describes suffering, the response is that personal experiences cannot establish the truth.

In that case, subjectivity does not seem to be the difficulty. The positive experience has already been welcomed. The problem begins when someone’s account asks us to reconsider something.

I would call this selective way of attending to experience a lens. We can recognize it without assuming that those using it have bad intentions. The question is whether we give the same care to accounts that reassure us and those that unsettle us.

Another expectation deserves attention: that someone who has been hurt should explain their experience in theologically flawless language. They must have resolved their doubts, moderated their anger, and learned to make every distinction their listener considers important. Any imprecision can become a reason to dismiss the whole account.

We are asking them to arrive with their experience fully understood at the very place where they needed help understanding it.

Catholic teaching itself recognizes that feelings belong to human and moral life, while also acknowledging that their intensity does not determine whether something is good or bad. We do not have to exclude them from the conversation in order to reason seriously (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1764–1768).

We can listen to anger without assuming every accusation is true. We can also point out an inaccuracy without making it a reason to abandon the inquiry. Both belong to the care we owe the truth and everyone involved.

Asking Questions Does Not Mean Anything Goes

Sometimes questioning a teaching is enough to invite an accusation of relativism, as though asking “Is this true?” meant that every answer was equally valid.

Yet someone may ask that question precisely because they care about knowing the truth. Perhaps they have encountered a contradiction. Or something has happened that no longer fits the explanation they were given.

Saying “I could be mistaken” does not mean that truth depends on my preferences. It means recognizing the limits of my understanding.

This applies to those who teach as well. Believing in objective truth does not guarantee that we interpret it correctly in every situation. Authority can offer knowledge and guidance; its particular decisions still need reasons.

The problem arises when there is no acceptable way to ask a question. If disagreement proves disobedience, and seeking another opinion confirms a lack of faith, the person is trapped in a conversation whose conclusion has already been decided.

This is one of the mechanisms I want to examine through the concept of abuse of conscience: the use of spiritual or moral authority to undermine someone’s freedom to examine and make decisions about their own life.

Doctrinal disagreement is not enough to establish abuse. The concern arises when threats or relationships of dependence are used to prevent someone from exercising judgment. For example, when seeking help outside the community is presented as a betrayal of God.

The Second Vatican Council explicitly connected the search for truth with psychological freedom and freedom from coercion. It recognized that people need freedom to undertake that search responsibly (Dignitatis humanae, 2).

From this perspective, listening to a doubt is not a concession to relativism. It can be part of the respect owed to someone trying to understand.

Religion Is Lived by Human Beings

What about the accusation of “psychologizing religion”?

That would be a justified criticism if we tried to reduce all faith to a need for comfort, or determine the truth of a doctrine by how pleasant it feels to live with it.

But studying how someone learned to believe does not mean their faith can be reduced to that learning. Investigating the fear associated with a teaching does not, by itself, settle whether the teaching is true.

Psychology can help us examine what happens when a person believes they will lose God’s love for questioning their leader. It can investigate how they experience that threat and what makes it difficult for them to decide what to do. These are questions about a human experience taking place within religion. Excluding them would leave part of that experience unexamined.

We should also resist an explanation that comes too easily: “You believe that because you are wounded.” Someone’s history may help us understand their convictions, but it is not enough to refute them. We still need to examine what they are saying.

The metaphor of the lenses begins with something familiar: we interpret what happens to us through a personal history, and we may need help reconsidering that interpretation. This includes all of us. The person who suffered may have conclusions to revise; so may the person listening.

Realism misses an opportunity when it is used only to remind someone else that they might be wrong.

For Those Still Trying to Understand What Happened

Perhaps you are clear about some of the facts and still do not know what they mean for your faith. You may remember what was said to you and continue wondering why it affected you so deeply. You do not need to resolve everything before you speak.

Your emotions matter. So does what happened to you, including the parts you still struggle to name.

In time, you may reconsider some conclusions. Recognizing that you generalized about a religion does not require you to deny what particular people did. Changing your mind about one part of your story does not make the rest irrelevant. Nor does it make you responsible for other people’s actions.

You deserve the chance to understand what happened without having to defend, forever, every explanation you reached while you were suffering.

These questions are at the heart of The God-Given Sunglasses, the book I am writing. In it, I explore how we can come to attribute human ways of interpreting and exercising authority to God. The nine lenses I propose are tools for examining that possibility; they do not, on their own, constitute a diagnosis or establish that abuse occurred.

My own explanation needs to remain open to criticism. If I answered every objection by saying that the reader “has a lens,” I would be closing the conversation in the very way I am questioning.

I return to the woman at the beginning. We can discuss her conclusions and help her distinguish what she knows from what she is still trying to understand. Meanwhile, somewhere in her account is a request to leave and the response she received from someone who held authority over her life. I would like us to stop and read that part.