What Is Moral Injury?
“I thought we were different.”
This was a sentence that was often said by my coworkers and I in the summer and fall of 2024. In April, we learned that our Founder and the current CEO had been in an “inappropriate relationship.” Of course, this wording was not indicative of what was really happening: clergy sexual abuse. We would go on to learn that the founder and former CEO did not just have an affair, but had been sexually abusing women for decades. However, while sexual abuse was the worst offense, we also learned of spiritual, financial, and emotional abuse that had been happening at our organization for years.
What we were all learning was that our organization wasn’t different.
Many of us had chosen to work at Orange because it felt different from other fundamentalist, complimentarian, and money-hungry evangelical organizations in the Christian Industrial Complex.
In the years prior we had often processed other church scandals with our coworkers, thankful that we didn’t work in those types of places.
Turns out we did.
For many of us, we didn’t just work at Orange. We had given our lives to it. We had also invested deeply in projects led by the executive team. We had given late-nights and weekends to creating books, tours, and conferences that were all part of one person’s empire.
The mission we once believed in now felt like a money making scheme we were complicit in. Not to mention, we began to see clearly the toxicity our work culture was ripe with.
There were feelings of both grief and guilt, clarity and confusion, betrayal and complicity.
I didn’t understand the experience until I came across the words moral injury.
What is moral injury?
Moral injury is the strong cognitive and emotional response that can occur following events that violate a person's moral or ethical code. Potentially morally injurious events include a person's own or other people's acts of omission or commission, or betrayal by a trusted person. Some of the most well-known examples of moral injury include the experiences of veterans or health-care staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moral injury is a specific trauma that often results in guilt, anger, and a consuming sense that someone cannot forgive themselves or others. Moral injury threatens someone’s deeply held beliefs and trust–both in themselves and others.
How do we heal from moral injury?
There are no validated treatments for moral injury as research in this area is still new. Some people make progress with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), but there is one dilemma with using this treatment. Often CBT is often focused on correcting distorted thought patterns, but when someone experiences moral injury their ethical distress is genuine. Their perception of events is not distorted, so retraining their thoughts would possibly leave them either unsatisfied or in denial. Interestingly, approaches that focus on self-compassion, making amends, and forgiveness might hold promise.
Lament and Repentance
While it is often harmful and erroneous to equate spiritual practices with clinical therapies, it is interesting that even mental health professionals consider spiritual care a possible effective approach to healing. Truthfully, for many people wrestling with moral injury due to a church scandal this is both unsurprising and frustrating.
Throughout Scripture we see prophets call people to lament over injustice and repent of their evil ways. Many of us were taught that the very basis of the Gospel was recognizing our sinfulness and asking for forgiveness. We have psalms and liturgies of lament and repentance. We have a Gospel that helps us reckon with the evil of this world and experience forgiveness and restoration when we have misstepped. We know how to name what was done wrong and seek to make amends because we have been doing it our whole lives.
However, it is also maddening.
The same Gospel that helps us experience healing was presented to us as children with an emphasis on our own depravity which resulted in shame, legalism and fear. For some of us, we have the skill of repentance and asking for forgiveness not just because it is a part of our spiritual journeys, but because it has been a part of our spiritual trauma before any church scandal. We grew up walking a tightrope of moral and religious perfectionism, asking for forgiveness for the smallest offenses, hopeful it would keep us from tumbling into an eternal hell. So, needless to say watching a Christian institution refuse to name, lament, and repent of far-reaching abuse, is a betrayal and trauma of its own.
Why does understanding moral injury matter in this current cultural moment?
While church scandals are more prevalent than they should be, not everyone can relate to experiencing moral injury within that context. That being said, moral injury is still a relatable experience for many people within the American Evangelical Church or even just the United States generally. It’s important to note that I am not saying that these experiences are similar in scale to being a veteran or nurse during the pandemic. Of course, those experiences are far more traumatic. I am just saying that understanding moral injury could help both those who experience the utterly devastating impacts of war and also those who are untangling Christianity’s promotion of it (war and violence).
Deconstruction as an act of naming moral injury.
For many people, the catalyst for deconstruction was the betrayal felt when learning about the ways Christian leaders and institutions were purveyors of slavery, genocide, violence against the LGBTQ community, and war. For me, it wasn’t just reckoning with the ways White Evangelicalism contributed to these atrocities, but also reckoning with the harmful things I had done and believed. Deconstructing the theology, disengaging from religious institutions that do harm, and changing political views felt like practicing repentance. Often every new understanding of theology or our history is also paired with a sense of betrayal and the practice of lament.
And again, it is a jarring experience to have the very spiritual practices of engaging in repentance and justice to then be called out by Christian leaders and loved ones as being deceived or walking away from faith. Of course, some people do walk away from church, faith, and Jesus in the process. However, even that should be held with empathy and understanding as they do so because they are walking towards the values the Church taught them to pursue.
For most people deconstructing, pain and betrayal are apart of the experience.
No matter where their deconstruction leads them, we must show empathy and acknowledge that the Church’s sins was the impetus.
The Bad Place
In the show, The Good Place, there is a moment where they discover why no one was sent to The Good Place. There is a points system ranking everyone’s morality–points given for good deeds and points taken away for harm. The problem is that even actions as simple as buying a tomato aren’t good or morally neutral because it was probably grown with pesticides and unethical labor. Even the most generous and just people in the world couldn’t escape from doing harm and therefore going to the Bad Place.
There has never been a more accurate picture of what it looks like to exist in capitalism in the United States. Every purchase is complicated. Every day our tax dollars go to funding initiatives ranging from morally complicated to destructive to the environment to violent and evil.
At this moment, I can scroll on social media to see families separated by ICE, children starving to death in Gaza, and Trump throwing a military parade.
What’s wild is that even if you disagree with me on the evil of those things, you could make your own list of ways the government is acting in ways you deem evil or not in alignment with your values.
For all of us, living in 2025 feels like moral death by a thousand morally injurious paper cuts.
And, truthfully even this is a privilege. It’s a privilege to be on the side of being harmed by complicity instead of being the one experiencing harm or violence. My heart breaks for the people who are actually experiencing trauma, abuse, and violence. They are the victims.
I also maintain that embracing lament and repentance are the path forward both to heal from our complicity and disrupt the evil that harms others and makes us complicit.
I don’t mean just lamenting and repenting at altars and in churches. I mean . . .
Repenting of our complacency and taking actions in ways that are inconvenient or uncomfortable.
Lamenting by actually stopping normal programming and activities to acknowledge what is happening.
Lamenting through protest and repenting through advocacy.
It is through those practices that we begin to name our injuries and make amends.
I’m not a therapist, theologian, or political activist, there could be a million nuances or pieces of research that are not reflected in this blog by a person just reeling from her own experience of moral injury. I write not to claim total understanding but to ask if we can begin to examine this phenomenon together because it could be key to healing together.
CITATIONS:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(21)00113-9/fulltext
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
