A look at “Surviving Charitable Hatred: Spiritual Violence and Queer Resilience” by Andi P. Eliza-Christie (2025)
A gentle note: this post discusses religious trauma and spiritual abuse.
“We love you, we just can’t accept your lifestyle.” Many LGBTQIA+ people raised in strict religious communities will recognise that sentence, and the peculiar pain of rejection wrapped in the language of love. This American psychoanalytic paper gives it a name: charitable hatred. It explores how this kind of spiritual violence leaves its mark, and how people survive it.
What it explores
The paper centres on the story of “Sarah”, a queer client who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family. Her childhood included her mother praying over her, speaking in tongues and attempting to drive out “demons”. Years later, these experiences still surfaced in vivid nightmares. The author, a therapist, uses Sarah’s story to explore several threads.
What charitable hatred is. The term describes hostility presented as care: the belief that condemning or trying to change someone is an act of love, for their own salvation. Because it’s dressed up as kindness, it can be especially confusing and hard to name as harm.
How it echoes through the mind. Spiritual violence can leave lasting fear, shame and a fractured sense of self. Sarah’s fear of being “possessed” by something wrong inside her is a powerful image of how condemnation can be absorbed. The author also describes how it can damage a sense of futurity, the ability to imagine a hopeful future for yourself.
Therapy’s own history. The author doesn’t spare the psychoanalytic profession, noting that it once treated homosexuality as a disorder. She warns that some conservative therapy groups that once promoted “cures” for being gay are now active in opposing trans healthcare.
Resilience and continuity. Drawing on the psychoanalyst Winnicott, the author highlights Sarah’s remarkable ability to hold on to her “continuity of being”, a core sense of herself that survived despite everything. Therapy offered a relationship in which that self could be recognised and a future could feel possible again.
A grain of glitter ✨
This is a moving, insightful paper that names an important and under-discussed experience. But it’s a single case study written through a psychoanalytic lens, so it’s interpretive rather than empirical. We see Sarah through her therapist’s eyes, and her experience can’t tell us how common or typical this is.
It’s also rooted firmly in the US political and religious context, and it’s openly political in places. The author is careful to note that religion can be generative as well as harmful. That’s an important balance, since many LGBTQIA+ people find meaning, community and healing in faith.
Why this matters
If you grew up in a religious community that rejected or tried to change who you are, the harm you experienced is real, even if it was framed as love. You may carry fear, shame or a sense that something is wrong with you, long after leaving. Therapy can be a place to untangle those messages. That might mean reclaiming a faith that fits you, leaving it behind, or something in between.
No one should be told their sparkle is a demon. Every unicorn deserves to feel at home in its own skin.