(RNS) — People who leave tight-knit religious communities often feel anger, resentment or hurt toward religious leaders, family members or co-religionists in the group.
But what if they decided to forgive — themselves, their families, their co-religionists or God? Would it help them adjust to their new lives, become more resilient and happier?
That was the question at the heart of a new study published recently in two prestigious psychology journals, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion and the American Psychological Association’s Psychology of Religion and Spirituality Journal. (One focuses on spiritual harm, the other on forgiveness.)
The study, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, looked at 293 formerly Haredi Jewish men and women who had left the demanding strictures of their Orthodox sects and were living lives outside of the community they had grown up in.
Of those, 278 respondents — or 95% — reported they had been harmed by their religious community. They felt discriminated against, rejected or threatened. All were U.S.-based, most living in New York and New Jersey. Half of the study participants reported that they identify as LGBTQ+, not too surprising given that gay love is considered a transgression in the Haredi world.
Yeduhis Keller. (Courtesy photo)
There are no good studies on the numbers of ex-Haredi Jews in the U.S. or whether their ranks are growing.
The study, based on a series of online questionnaires, suggested the practice of forgiveness correlated with lower levels of distress and spiritual struggle, along with greater levels of well-being and growth among those who left the religion of their upbringing.
While many other studies show forgiveness is associated with good mental health and greater life satisfaction, there weren’t any studies focused on forgiveness among those who have left religious communities, especially what the study calls “high-control, high-cost” religious groups, that make lots of demands on its members.
Yehudis Keller, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, comes from one of those religious communities. She left the Jewish Hasidic group Chabad and was able to recruit some of the participants in the study through her own network of acquaintances as well as from various groups set up to assist people leaving the Haredi world, such as Footsteps, and online support groups such as Off the Derech and a Reddit subgroup called ex-Jews.
“There were two elements of leaving ultra-Orthodoxy that I think stand out,” said Keller. “One is this idea of high cost or high demand, where there’s a lot you do to be part of the religion, and the other element is the high cost of leaving. The adjustment out of these communities tends to be really difficult in multiple ways.”
Unlike other high-demand religious groups, such as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish or certain evangelical subgroups, Haredi Jews often encounter higher barriers to integrating in the outside world. That’s because many didn’t get a broad secular education. They may have spoken Yiddish at home and have only a rudimentary knowledge of English. Many Haredi communities don’t have TVs, and access to the internet is limited through filtering software on smartphones. Men and women are highly segregated, and discussions of sex are often nonexistent.
Members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities protest before a Board of Regents meeting to vote on new requirements that private schools teach English, math, science and history to high school students, Sept. 12, 2022, outside the New York State Education Department Building in Albany, N.Y. (Will Waldron/The Albany Times Union via AP, File)
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The nonrandom study, fielded at the end of 2023, found that 39% of respondents experienced or witnessed sexual, physical or emotional abuse; 27% said they received a poor education; 20% said they experienced a misuse of power by educators and leaders; 19% said abuse was covered up or justified.
Researchers (the study was co-authored by Julie J. Exline, Sarah Swartz and Maria Lindquist) then asked respondents whether they had applied a personal, internal process of forgiveness to deal with the harms they experienced. The study split forgiveness into four types: forgiveness toward people in their former religious community, the religious community as a whole, oneself and God.
With the exception of the forgiveness toward God, it found that forgiveness was positively correlated with resilience and satisfaction in life.
“Actively forgiving God didn’t really turn up anything too clear,” said Keller.
The strongest positive correlation came from self-forgiveness, she added.
“We found that forgiving oneself, which is somewhat interchangeable with the concept of self-compassion, wins out,” Keller said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that it doesn’t matter if you forgive others if you don’t forgive yourself, but in a way, it’s more meaningful for your mental health if you can make sure that you’re OK with yourself for what happened.”
The study did not examine reconciliation.
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