(RNS) — When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, for some, it wasn’t just a matter of political disappointment—it was spiritually shattering.
“It completely broke me,” said Tia Levings, author of the forthcoming “A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy.” “The evangelical embracing of a rapist is not something I will recover from.”
Raised in a Southern Baptist megachurch in Jacksonville, Florida, where religion and politics often dovetailed, Levings remembers her pastors, flanked by Christian and American flags, introducing Republican politicians as an orchestra blared “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
When her marriage ushered her into fundamentalist Christian Quiverfull churches, which typically reject family planning and promote large families, homeschooling and purity culture, the gap between faith and politics narrowed further. “Family values” and “moral leadership” were synonyms for Republican beliefs.
The breaking point, said Levings, was the election of Trump. “The Christians who raised me in purity culture were endorsing a candidate who was openly speaking of assault,” said Levings, who writes in her book that she suffered abuse and assault in her marriage and her Christian community. She felt Trump’s rise as “a primal betrayal.”
For Americans of all political backgrounds, the mix of religion and politics in our political rhetoric can trigger trauma symptoms, ranging from panic attacks to chronic pain. As politicians wield religion in more obvious and extreme ways and religious leaders grow bolder in their political endorsements, experts say, those symptoms can spike as campaigning surges and voting day gets closer.
“The experience of it is dysregulating,” said Levings, for whom the 2016 election was a disorienting and traumatizing event. “Our bodies recognize that we’re being activated and pushed into trauma responses and that the same abusive techniques are being used on us. Even if our brain wants to deny or shut off, we know when we’re being gaslighted, we know when we’re being manipulated.”
As more therapy clients talk about similar experiences with elections, mental health practitioners are meeting them with resources. Laura Anderson, a psychotherapist specializing in religious trauma, launched a minicourse in 2020 on election-related religious trauma with Brian Peck, a fellow religion trauma therapist. The response, Anderson said, was “unbelievable.”
“People were just in desperation to say, ‘What is happening? I need some sort of support,’” she said.
Now, she’s launched a new version of the course, Religious Trauma and the Elections. The self-led format includes lectures on topics such as strategies for navigating religious trauma triggers and the intersection of religious trauma, race and politics.
Clinicians who specialize in religious trauma say the 2016 election changed the way many of their clients view religion. Abbi Nye, an advocate for church-abused Christians, points to the 2016 election as a moment when Christian voters and leaders bent their religious values to suit their political ones. Nye, who was raised in a high-control faith, said that betrayal was accompanied by community-wide denial, which brought her back to her childhood.
