How do you heal from 'Church Hurt?’
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.7 • 9.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While some have found community, joy, support, and love in their church home, others have faced isolation, shame, abandonment, and even deep traumatic wounds. But if you don’t necessarily want to give up your religion or leave the church - what does repair look like? What does spirituality look like for those who have ‘church hurt?’ To get into it, Brittany is joined by Candice Marie Benbow, theologian and author of Red Lip Theology: For Church Girls Who’ve Considered Tithing to the Beauty Supply Store When Sunday Morning Isn’t Enough, and Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez, author of Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging.
Candice and Timothy show Brittany how ‘church hurt’ stretches out from the pulpit and into cultural norms around gender, sexuality, acceptance. And they teach Brittany what it means to create a spiritual relationship on your own terms.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oftentimes, people try to root their justification for their behavior in Scripture or in the holy text, but it isn't there. |
| 0:12.3 | Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. |
| 0:23.3 | Religion can help or it can hurt. But for those who experience a rejection from their religious |
| 0:29.7 | community, that hurt can feel like emotional trauma. And those feelings of abandonment and rejection |
| 0:35.9 | is what many people now call church hurt. |
| 0:39.5 | And it's not just in Christian churches either. |
| 0:42.6 | Church hurt can happen in the synagogue, the mosque, or any other religious community you might be a part of. |
| 0:48.7 | Today, I'm here with Candice Marie Benbow, author of The Red Lips Theology and Timothy Schrader Rodriguez, author |
| 0:56.4 | of Conversion Therapy Dropout, to learn more about church hurt, how to heal from it, and how it's |
| 1:02.7 | impacting us all, no matter where we spend our Sunday mornings. Candice, Tim, welcome to it's been a minute. |
| 1:09.5 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:11.0 | So glad to be here. |
| 1:12.1 | So happy to have you both. |
| 1:14.2 | We're going to talk about church hurt today. |
| 1:17.0 | And some people may know all too well what that means. |
| 1:19.7 | But other people might not. |
| 1:21.4 | Let's just lay some groundwork in this conversation and get a definition of terms together. |
| 1:27.2 | How does each of you define church hurt? |
| 1:32.1 | I think I would define it as anything that is done to an individual in the name of God |
| 1:38.6 | that diminishes who they are or diminishes the goodness of God that is within them. It's pain that's |
| 1:46.2 | inflicted on us by people who are a part of our spiritual community. How do you define it, Candace? |
| 1:52.1 | What I'll add to his definition is that oftentimes people try to root their justification for their behavior in scripture or in the holy text, |
... |
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