Sara Hughes-Zabawa offers a guided meditation to accompany our journeys into Stage Four:  The Individuative-Reflective stage of faith.

Sara Hughes-Zabawa returns to discuss one of the most emotionally and spiritually challenging stages in Fowler's Stages of Faith;  the development of an Individuative-Reflective Faith.   In high demand or fundamentalist faith traditions Stage Four is poorly understood and often poorly responded to by families,  hurch friends and leadership.

Sarah calls for the celebration and normalisation of the individuative-reflective stage of faith and for more openness and acceptance of its necessity in everyone's spiritual becoming.

As my interview with spiritual trauma therapy specialist Kathleen Shannon will indicate, a definition for religious abuse is difficult to nail it down.  But according to Caswell and Swindle (2018) religious abuse occurs within three categories. 

1. Abuse perpetrated by religious leaders.
2. Abuse perpetrated by a religious group.
3. Abuse with a religious or spiritual component.

There is a good amount of literature about religious and spiritual abuse and what comes up, again and again, is that firstly, religious abuse is ubiquitous in conservative and fundamentalist faith traditions.  And secondly, religious abuse has a profound effect on personal well being and mental health.

In this interview, Kathleen and I will be talking about the dominant forms of religious abuse which are:

1. Power-posturing and authoritarianism
2. Double Talk and hypocrisy.
3. Lifestyle rigidity and a preoccupation with performance.
4. Top-down communication and the control of doubt and dissent.
5. Image control and the pressure to keep everything looking sweet.
6. The tendency to think that everyone has to wrong but your group.
7. Legalism.
8. The extra religious tax on women.

What’s interesting in this interview is that as two people who come from two different backgrounds we soon realise that we have a great deal in common.  Which begs many questions about what is going on society that Christianity that denominations have been captured by a form of church that has great potential to cause harm.

Jan Tyler has been an active campaigner for women's rights since the early 1970's.

Her first job was at Weber State University as the Women's Dean.  It was there that she met the incoming President, Joseph Bishop.  He became so problematic that she eventually hired a lawyer and took out a discrimination case against him.

She was later employed by BYU where she went head to head with Dallin Oaks (the then president) over women's rights.   She took three top Utah State administrators to court over sex discrimination.  And as the head of the coordinating committee for the Utah International Women's Year convention in 1975, she stood for women's rights against a 13,000 strong Mormon contingent who were hell-bent on disrupting the proceedings.  

Jan went on to champion the cause of women and Mormon women in one of the most patriarchal and conservative states in the USA. 

Her story is one of plucky and determined resolve to support women's rights in the face of institutions, culture and even her own faith tradition.

Sam Young was recently excommunicated from the LDS Church.  His sin was 'advocating' for a change of policy to prevent Church Leaders from asking children sexually explicit questions.  He had collected the testimonies of hundreds of abuse victims,  but this was not enough to prevent his ousting.   Sam's Disciplinary Council and Stake President were more disturbed by his challenging the Church leaders than they were by the hundreds of instances of abuse he presented to them.

In this interview, we explore the spiritual journey that brought Sam to a reckoning with the church to which he has given his life.