Is Your Spirituality Oppressing Yourself Or Others?

How Spirituality Might Interfere With Your Social Justice Activism

As part of our exploration in Love Bigger about spiritual bypassing, let's take a moment to explore the relationship between common spiritual teachings and oppression. While I don't believe there's some Evil Cabal out to control the world, let's consider the actual historical conspiracy of white, cis-gender, heterosexual, property owning men who set out to dominate women, Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC), people living in poverty, people of lower caste, and people with other gender identities or sexual orientations. Given that this makes up the majority of the world's population, how would you get away with something so sinister? If you were to pull off successfully dominating the majority of the population, what kind of psy op would you have to enact in order to get them to go along with the domination without rebelling, rising up, and resisting the oppression?

Well...as sick as it sounds, if you were really interested in dominating the world and getting away with it, you might use God. After all, God is good, right? So if you dress up your domination in the Divine, you might be able to sneak your psy op undercover. 

This is not to suggest that women, BIPOC, the socioeconomically depressed, the caste oppressed, people on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, or other marginalized spiritual folks have not also been guilty of using these same strategies to oppress others through spirituality. But typically, when they do, it’s because they have internalized and parroted the patriarchal, white supremacist, consumerist, heteronormative belief systems that have been used for generations to oppress others.

Let's see if we can decode how this might have actually worked by examining ten ways ruthless people dead set on oppressing people and getting away with it using spirituality could have worked.

Suppress righteous anger. 

If you wanted to get away with oppressing people, dehumanizing them, and taking away their human rights, you damn well better strip them of their natural, boundary-protecting anger and convince them that anger is "unspiritual." Then when their healthy anger arises when their boundaries are being violated, you shame them, gaslight them, tell them to "get out of their victim story," and convince them that if only they pray or meditate enough, their anger will go away (while you continue the oppressive agenda unchecked.) You teach them to turn the other cheek when one cheek is beaten up. You psychologically manipulate them into neurotically tolerating abuse- and maybe even spin it so they feel grateful for the abuse because it's waking them up to their True Nature and teaching them how to love unconditionally. 

Instill learned helplessness.

You won't be able to suppress an oppressed person's healthy anger right away- unless they were already programmed to suppress it from early childhood by brainwashed, oppressed, or oppressive parents. So let's say a Black or Indigenous girl manages to survive childhood with her anger intact because she miraculously wasn't poisoned by her parents, her teachers, the society as a whole, or her religion. Then let's say, as an adult, she seeks out spiritual depth, a community of practice, a deeper purpose in life, or other spiritual quests. 

Now you bring that BIPOC woman into a church, temple, mosque, sangha, or New Age spiritual center. You tell her about karma and how horrific things that happen to her are cosmic retribution for misdeeds in past lives. You tell her she should be grateful she gets to expiate her karma in this life so she can come back with a better reincarnation. You tell her to choose love over fear. You convince her that her soul signed up for this path of growth and she should surrender to it without resistance. 

You convince her that her rage is unjustified when she watches her son get murdered during a routine traffic stop. You suggest she accept that her son must walk his own path to God, and thank the cop for helping him achieve his life's purpose to a better life on the other side of the veil. You insist she prematurely forgive the cop before he even goes on trial, if that even happens, much less before he is held accountable for the murder. You demonize her hatred when the cop who killed him gets off scot free. You tell her to bottle up her despair because dispassionate equanimity is what enlightenment looks like. You shame her grief as "it's just your ego" and convince her to "do The Work" so she can realize that she's fighting with reality to think she's entitled to a world where a teenage boy stopped for a traffic violation should still be alive. 

You hold contempt for her rage and her grief and somehow convince her that you are better than her because you have transcended your rage and grief and hatred and fear- and in your superiority, you have chosen love, unlike her. And over enough time- when her rage is invalidated time and time again, when her grief is ignored, when her legitimate fear is demonized as "the opposite of a miracle," when her desperate cries for help are not only ignored but shamed as somehow unspiritual- this woman experiences what psychologists call "learned helplessness." 

Her learned helplessness may look like spiritual improvement, because her rage is now exiled. Her grief has been effectively suppressed. She can't feel the fear that's meant to protect her from more oppression. Her hatred goes underground, preparing to cause the cancer she'll get years later. Dissociation sets in and she exits her body in order to survive. She no longer even feels the resistance because the domination is complete. She just submits. Oppression wins. And now we praise her for being a more evolved spiritual being and not making the oppressors uncomfortable.. Go Team God!