Sep 8, 2026
Content note: This article discusses spiritual abuse, clergy sexual misconduct, coercive control, religious trauma, and sexual coercion within marriage.
Netflix’s Death of the Pastor’s Wife has generated conversation about coercive control, spiritual abuse, and what can happen when religious authority becomes intertwined with intimate relationships. The documentary tells the story of Mica Miller, whose husband was also a pastor and had previously occupied positions of spiritual authority in her life. While the circumstances of her story are specific, the broader dynamics raised by the documentary are not. For therapists who work with religious trauma and spiritual abuse, the series raises familiar and important questions.
What happens when a pastor crosses relational or sexual boundaries with someone who looks to them for spiritual guidance?
Can consent be freely negotiated when one person holds significant spiritual authority over another? (NO.)
What happens when religious concepts such as submission, sacrifice, forgiveness, obedience, and marital duty are used to discourage someone from trusting their own boundaries?
And what happens to sexual consent when a woman has been taught that providing sex is part of what she owes her husband?
These questions matter because spiritual abuse does not always look like abuse.
Sometimes, it sounds remarkably like 'faith'.
Spiritual abuse generally refers to the use of religious beliefs, practices, scripture, or spiritual authority to manipulate, coerce, silence, or control another person. It is important to distinguish spiritual abuse from religion itself.
For many, faith can be an important source of meaning, belonging, resilience, identity, and community. Religious beliefs about marriage, sexuality, or gender are not inherently evidence of abuse simply because they are traditional or differ from another person's beliefs.
The concern is how those beliefs function within relationships and systems of power.
Does a religious teaching invite someone into a freely chosen practice, or is it used to make refusal morally unacceptable?
Can someone question their pastor?
Can a wife disagree with her husband?
Can someone establish a boundary without being accused of selfishness, rebellion, bitterness, or disobedience?
Can a person leave a harmful relationship without being told they are abandoning God's plan for their marriage?
When religious language is repeatedly used to increase one person's authority while decreasing another person's autonomy, faith can become part of the mechanism through which coercive control operates.
One of the most important conversations prompted by Death of the Pastor’s Wife concerns clergy sexual misconduct and abuse of pastoral authority. Pastors, clergy members, and spiritual leaders occupy positions of significant trust. People may disclose information to them about their marriages, sexuality, fears, trauma, morality, family relationships, and understanding of God.
This is not an ordinary social relationship.
The person seeking pastoral care may believe the clergy member possesses spiritual wisdom or authority. They may depend upon the same religious community for friendships, belonging, employment, identity, or practical support. That creates an inherent power differential.
For this reason, sexual or romantic involvement between clergy and people receiving their pastoral care cannot always be understood through the same framework we would use to assess a relationship between two people who meet as peers.
The question is not merely:
“Did both people participate?” The more important ethical question is:
“What power existed before the sexual or romantic relationship began?”
A person can admire a religious leader, feel attracted to them, become emotionally attached, initiate contact, or believe they are willingly participating in a relationship. Those experiences do not erase the power attached to the pastoral role.
The responsibility for maintaining appropriate professional and pastoral boundaries belongs to the person entrusted with that authority. This is why describing clergy sexual misconduct simply as an “affair” can be misleading. The language of an affair implies two people crossing a marital boundary from relatively equivalent positions. Clergy misconduct requires us to consider whether spiritual authority, trust, vulnerability, counselling, mentorship, employment, or institutional power were also present.
Consent cannot be evaluated separately from power.
This becomes particularly concerning when the former spiritual authority becomes a spouse within a theology that positions the husband as the spiritual leader and the wife as called to submit.
Spiritual bypassing is commonly understood as using spiritual ideas or practices to avoid engaging meaningfully with painful emotional, psychological, or relational realities. Within unhealthy relationships and religious systems, however, spiritual bypassing can also redirect attention away from power and harm. For example:
A woman describes controlling behaviour and is encouraged to pray for her marriage.
She expresses anger and is cautioned against bitterness.
She asks for accountability and is reminded about forgiveness.
She considers leaving and is told that marriage is a covenant.
She establishes a boundary and is reminded about submission.
She does not want sexual contact and is reminded about her responsibilities as a wife.
Notice what has happened. The boundary itself has been bypassed, through the use of spiritual concepts being enforced. Instead of asking whether her boundary should be respected, the conversation becomes about whether establishing that boundary makes her a sufficiently faithful woman. This is one of the ways spiritual bypassing can silence women's consent without anyone explicitly saying, “You are not allowed to say no.”
Few concepts demonstrate this problem more clearly than submission theology. There are Christians who understand submission within marriage as voluntary, reciprocal, contextual, and inseparable from mutual care. Others interpret scripture differently altogether.
The clinical concern is not adjudicating theology, it is recognizing what happens when submission is used to override autonomy. Submission becomes dangerous when it means that one partner's authority is presumed while the other's resistance requires justification.
A woman may be told that a good wife trusts her husband's leadership, prioritizes his needs, avoids creating conflict, forgives his failures, and sacrifices for the marriage. Over time, the question can shift from:
“What do I want?” to: “What am I allowed to want?”
That shift has profound implications for consent. Consent requires more than the theoretical possibility of saying no, it requires sufficient autonomy to make a genuine choice. If refusal is associated with spiritual failure, marital failure, selfishness, disobedience, shame, or responsibility for a partner's subsequent behaviour, then the conditions surrounding that choice deserve careful examination.
This is where spiritual abuse intersects directly with duty sex. At VOX, we have previously discussed duty sex as sexual participation driven by a belief that sex is an obligation owed to a spouse or partner. Duty sex is not exclusively a religious phenomenon; gender socialization, cultural expectations, relationship dynamics, and longstanding beliefs about marriage can all contribute to sexual obligation.
However, patriarchal religious teachings can give that obligation additional moral authority. A woman may learn that meeting her husband's sexual needs is part of being a good wife. Refusal may be portrayed as selfish, withholding, or contrary to her marital responsibilities.
The result is a fundamental distortion of sexual consent:
She may technically be permitted to say no while simultaneously being taught that a good wife should not.
That is why understanding consent requires more than asking whether someone eventually participated.
We also need to understand the conditions under which that participation occurred:
Could the person decline?
Could they change their mind?
Would refusal be respected without punishment, pressure, shame, or spiritual condemnation?
Did they believe their body remained their own within marriage?
Or had they learned that another person's sexual needs created an obligation they were morally responsible for fulfilling?
These are questions about sexual autonomy, not simply sexual behaviour... Marriage does not eliminate the need for consent.
Within some discussions of marital sexuality, language about spouses belonging to one another can be interpreted in ways that obscure individual bodily autonomy. Mutual intimacy can certainly involve generosity, responsiveness, vulnerability, and consideration for a partner's needs. But generosity is meaningful precisely because it is freely chosen.
Once sexual access becomes an entitlement, the relational framework has changed. For the sake of making it abundently clear:
A partner's disappointment does not create consent.
Marriage does not create consent.
Religious commitment does not create consent.
Past consent does not create future consent.
And a theological expectation cannot substitute for the ongoing participation of the person whose body is involved.
Healthy intimacy requires room for both yes and no.
The broader issue connecting clergy sexual misconduct, submission theology, spiritual bypassing, and duty sex is power. Patriarchal systems do not necessarily announce themselves through obvious domination. They can operate through assumptions about whose leadership is natural, whose needs take priority, who should accommodate, and whose resistance requires explanation.
Within religious communities, those assumptions can become particularly powerful when they are presented as divinely ordered:
Male authority becomes leadership.
Female compliance becomes submission.
Self-erasure becomes sacrifice.
Sexual obligation becomes marital duty.
Pressure to remain becomes commitment to covenant.
Avoiding accountability becomes forgiveness.
Silence becomes protecting the church.
The language matters because it can make an unequal distribution of power appear not merely normal, but morally desirable.
Spiritual abuse can be difficult to identify because many of its individual components may appear completely ordinary within the surrounding religious culture. If submission has always been described as virtuous, it may be difficult to recognize when submission is being used to override autonomy.
If sexual availability has been framed as part of marital responsibility, unwanted sexual experiences may not immediately be understood through the language of coercion.
If forgiveness is considered evidence of spiritual maturity, anger may feel morally dangerous.
If pastors are understood as possessing special spiritual authority, questioning leadership can feel like questioning God.
And if preserving marriage is treated as a moral imperative, leaving may feel like evidence of personal or spiritual failure.
This is why spiritual abuse can produce such profound confusion. A person may recognize that something feels wrong while simultaneously believing they are wrong for feeling it.
In fact, one useful way of differentiating healthy spirituality from coercive spirituality is to examine whether the system can tolerate human autonomy:
Can someone ask difficult questions?
Can religious leaders be challenged?
Are pastors accountable to meaningful external structures?
Can women hold authority?
Can a wife disagree with her husband?
Can someone seek therapy or professional support outside the church?
Can harmful behaviour be named without immediately invoking forgiveness?
Can someone leave an unsafe relationship?
Can a person say no to sexual contact without their faithfulness being questioned?
A healthy community should not require people to surrender their boundaries in order to demonstrate belonging.
The broader significance of Death of the Pastor’s Wife is not that it establishes religion as the cause of abuse. It asks us to examine something more complicated: What happens when spiritual authority and intimate power occupy the same space?
The documentary explicitly explores allegations of emotional, spiritual, and sexual coercive control, and Netflix describes a relationship in which pastoral authority, marriage, faith, and identity became deeply entangled. Those themes deserve attention beyond a single documentary.
We need greater literacy around clergy sexual misconduct, because sexual involvement within pastoral relationships cannot be understood without examining power- where there is power, there is not consent.
We need greater literacy around spiritual abuse, because religious language can be used to make coercion appear righteous.
We need to examine submission theology, particularly when submission is expected primarily from the person with less authority.
And we need more sophisticated conversations about duty sex and sexual consent within marriage, because participation and freely given consent are not always the same thing. Perhaps the most useful questions from the documentary are:
What happens when someone says no?
What happens when a congregant says no to a pastor?
When a wife says no to her husband?
When someone refuses to forgive before they are ready?
When a person questions authority?
When they establish a boundary?
When they leave?
If saying no consistently produces shame, punishment, spiritual condemnation, loss of belonging, or accusations of moral failure, we should pay attention to the system surrounding that no. Because healthy faith should not require someone to relinquish their autonomy in order to prove their devotion.
Recovering from religious trauma or spiritual abuse can involve much more than leaving a church or recognizing an unhealthy relationship.
People may need to disentangle beliefs about faith, sexuality, marriage, gender, authority, and their own worth. They may grieve a community they once trusted while simultaneously questioning whether they are permitted to be angry about what happened there.
For some people, healing involves reclaiming their faith. For others, it involves leaving religion entirely. Many people find themselves somewhere in between. Therapy does not need to determine that outcome.
At VOX Mental Health, our therapists support individuals navigating religious trauma, spiritual abuse, coercive relationships, sexual autonomy, consent, boundaries, and complicated family or faith-system dynamics. The work can begin with something much simpler than deciding what you believe:
Learning that you are allowed to ask questions.
Learning that boundaries do not make you selfish.
Learning that another person's spiritual authority does not invalidate your experience.
Learning that marriage does not remove your right to consent.
And learning to distinguish the voice (vox) of your own values from messages shaped by fear, shame, obligation, or control.
Faith and autonomy do not have to be opposites, and no relationship should require the loss of your voice in order to preserve it.
