“Spiritually Traumatized” Areas Hypothesis

States the hypothesis that one of the drivers of historical change is repeated spiritual trauma affecting conquered or subjugated cultural groups in some specific areas of the world where movements often start.

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A second process which appears to have been important in arriving at our present messy world I term the “Spiritually Traumatized” areas hypothesis. This hypothesis is geopolitical. My main example of it, though not the only location where it has some application, is as follows: the spread of certain early “heretical” movements, from central and northern Asia Minor to the Balkans and ultimately to what is now southern France and northwest Italy, each such “heretical” movement then being forcibly suppressed in its own turn, left these areas spiritually “spiritually traumatized.” Then the cycle would repeat itself a few centuries later, in some of the same places. The cycle occurred repeatedly in roughly the same places. The key to this process was the fact that, during each cycle of conquest or repression, it was only the ruling elite–from a different ethnic and social class than the mass of the affected people–that changed, forcing its thinking on the locals. The ethnicity of the masses, and, hence, the “folk” ways of the region, changed much more slowly. Each forced change to satisfy new masters injured the spirituality of the local population.

Where earlier historians have often gone wrong is that they dismissed the possibility of effects of earlier-suppressed movements on later groups unless they could find active transmission of specific doctrinal formulations from the earlier group to the later group. Previous histories have usually also required that a person who actively promoted the older group’s doctrines must be alive at the time of transmission and pass them on to a member of the newer group for any effect to be recognized. But I hypothesize that what was actually transmitted down through the centuries in “spiritually traumatized” geographical areas is not specific “heretical” organizations or doctrinal formulations, but, rather, a spiritual injury, pain and distrust, accompanied by certain attitudes or frames of mind toward Christianity, the possibility of direct contact with the divine, and the claims of any outside church hierarchy. These general attitudes left the populace vulnerable to ways of thinking, believing or feeling that invited the later groups to arise, including, in logical order of their appearance:

1. Distrust of outside authorities, including their secular and ecclesiastical conquerors.
2. Resentment of appointment of the conquerors’ foreign clergy by foreign bishops.
3. Resentment of official denigration of the local people, their language and culture.
4. A resentment of the conquerors and their official Church’s pronouncements that only the bishops appointed from among their upper nobility, and possibly a few of the conquerors’ other great men, could actually hear from God.
5. A resentment of the “Christian” message that all that a subject people could ever have was a “hope of salvation” if they were pious, observant of all Church requirements, and consistently submitted to and obeyed their social “betters” with the right attitude.
6. Some degree of anarchism or antinomianism, at least toward leaders and institutions outside their own group.
7. A distrust of the official Church and its priests, leading to a practical denial that the mediation of these priests is necessary to maintain a relationship with God.
8. A feeling–a folk belief retained from past periods of “heresy”– that some direct relationship with God must be possible.
9. A vague belief or feeling that God can speak directly to his people, which is often amplified by the cultural memory of both pagan and “heretical” Christian groups that once operated in the area and held similar (and more formal) beliefs in direct contact between God (or pagan deities) and non-elite humans.

Where attitude #9 is present, the area is likely to accept, or even to spontaneously generate, new teachings which promise a restoration of direct contact with God, without the mediation of the resented formal priesthood, even though the new teaching has no demonstrable personal or doctrinal ties to the “heresy” that existed in the area in an earlier century. Subsequent exile of people bearing the new doctrines from these areas when a new wave of repression occurs then sometimes spreads people bearing these doctrines–and, more importantly, attitudes #8 and 9, above–to new and sometimes distant areas.

Other geographical areas to which this concept of “spiritual trauma” appears to have applied in a historically significant manner, some only for a few centuries or in a modified way, include the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Northwest Africa (the ancient Berber domain), old Bohemia, and old Lithuania and Pomerania (now mostly in Poland). I would anticipate eventually discussing each of these in one or more separate posts.

Next in This Historical Overview Series: Top-Down or Bottom-Up Repentance:  Shift toward group conversions

Previous Posts:

Brief Introduction to the Politicization of Christianity and its Consequences–From Jesus to 312 CE

Concurrent History of the Organized Church Institution, Divisions Among Christians, the Rise and Influence of Islam, and the Present State of the West