Christian organisations are very likely to be infiltrated by evildoers

It only takes one or two evildoers in an organisation to undermine and enfeeble the stated goals of the organisation.

Consider how many incompetent people there are in organisations. Large organisations often have incompetent people in middle-level positions; these people may have been competent at lower-level jobs, but for various reasons (think nepotism in churches!) they get promoted beyond their level of competency. Many of these incompetent people will be unwittingly greasing the wheels of the evildoers’ schemes. Evil infiltrators are able to achieve their goals because so many people do not have the competence, the courage, and the willingness to restrain them.

If an organisation has been doing honest, equitable, righteous things that benefited and protected non-predatory humans, it only takes a few evil infiltrators and a few incompetent individuals in that organisation to change that organisation into one that does more harm than good. The change might be gradual, or rapid. Most often it is effected gradually, so the majority of people will not notice.

Of all types of organisations, Christian organisations are the most likely to be infiltrated by evildoers. The Bible tells us so. For example, see Philippians 3:2 and 2 Corinthians 11:13, 14 (HCSB):

³ Watch out for “dogs,” watch out for evil workers, watch out for those who mutilate the flesh.

¹³ For such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.
¹⁴ And no wonder! For Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

Why do evildoers especially like to infiltrate organisations that are trying to bring good to the world?

By infiltrating organisations that are trying to help humanity, the evildoers will be able to destroy the organisation’s mission from the inside.

They will be able to covertly engineer and steer the policies and procedures of that organisation, so that the organisation ends up harming and re-harming people who have already suffered abuse and injustice from other sources. And the organisation will cease to provide much benefit to humanity at large.

In addition, evildoers who infiltrate these kinds of organisations will strategically engineer things so they can access any confidential info which victims of interpersonal abuse may have disclosed to that organisation.

Having accessed that info, the evildoers will then be able to pass that info back to the victim’s former abusers.

Note: When I talk about victims in this post, I’m going to use female pronouns, because I’m writing from my observation and experience. (I’m a survivor with lived experience and an activist crying out for justice in the field of interpersonal abuse. As a writer and digital content creator, I focus on domestic abuse, family violence, sexualised violence, and spiritual abuse. In those forms of abuse, there are more female victims than male victims.)

When an evil infiltrator has passed the victim’s confidential info back to her former abusers, those abusers will then be able to re-traumatise her. They will punish her for escaping their control. They will take vengeance on her for exposing them as human predators.

They will want to strip away her capacity to be an effective whistleblower. They will want to maliciously utilise her gifts and strengths by coercing her into doing or saying things that will enhance their “good public reputation” and extend their power and control over other individuals, groups, communities, and organisations.

Re-traumatising the victim may involve sexualised violence, extreme financial abuse, torture, and mind-control programming which is designed to make the victim forget her memories of the abuse she has suffered. 

The goal is to muzzle the victim; strip her capacity to care for her children, her loved ones and herself; and make her desperately preoccupied with obtaining the basic necessities of life.

They will do their level best to diminish her capacity to recover from the abuse she has suffered. They will undermine and dismantle her support network. They will engineer her environment and destroy her possessions with the aim of making her so emotionally stressed that she can barely function.

Most abusers know how to discern, manipulate and exploit a survivor’s unmet needs. If the victim grew up in an abusive family or institution, she may be looking for a good, wise, generous older man will be like to father to her: a father-figure who will not exploit her sexually or emotionally. If her original mother was abusive, neglectful, or absent, she may be longing for a good older woman who will be like a mother to her. She may also be looking for good people who will treat her like a sister, to replace the hard-hearted siblings she grew up with. Depending on the abuser’s age and gender, he or she will be able to pose as the good father-figure, the good mother-figure, or the kind-hearted brother or sister that the survivor is looking for. The abuser(s) will draw her in by hinting and promising that they will meet her needs. The victim will be grateful, and in her tenderheartedness she may feel obliged to return their kindness in spades. She will come to trust them. Then, having sucked her into trusting them, they will abuse and betray her.

Whenever an evildoer infiltrates an organisation, he or she always has a malevolent agenda.

When an evildoer infiltrates an organisation, he or she may be following the orders of evildoers who are higher up in Satan’s kingdom of darkness. Those orders may come through “handlers” — the handlers are usually people who are obeying the commands of higher-up evildoers because they are being blackmailed, or threatened with loss of income, or loss of status, or injury to their loved ones, or injury or death to themselves.

Satan often gets his followers to destroy each other. Satan thinks that everyone except Satan is disposable. The more power a person has in the kingdom of darkness, the more fear they will be living in. This is because when people (or families) have fully given their souls over to Satan, other people in Satan’s kingdom will want to disable and destroy them. High-level evildoers generally want to be able to exploit the minions that other evildoers are exploiting. So they often take each other down. But high-level evildoers will also cooperate together (trusting-untrusting) if that enables them better to slake their lusts.

People who have given their souls over to Satan are living in fear. But this doesn’t mean we ought to sentimentally pity them, offer them cheap forgiveness, and allow them to personally communicate with us and invade our lives. The best policy is to allow them zero contact with us and block them on all our devices. Society’s institutions and systems seldom allow us to do that fully. And the internet will probably continue to empower evildoers and magnify darkness until Jesus returns… then God will wind up this cosmos like a scroll and bring in the new heavens and new earth, and those of us who are trusting in Christ will be safe from human and demonic predators. 

It only takes a few co-operatively networked and skilled evildoers to turn large institutions and organisations into systems that harm the masses of non-predatory humans.

The masses of non-predatory humanity are simply trying to work, eat, and sleep in safety, in good-enough but not perfectly loving families and communities. They want to be able to do this without having to destroy their health in order to put bread on the table and a roof over their heads. They usually aspire to live out their lives without unduly harming others. They try to obey some form of the golden rule (“treat others as you would wish to be treated”). But a small number of skilled and networked evildoers can turn the masses into mind-controlled, desperate people who are debt-ridden and dependent on the wage-slavery of other oppressed people.

Most of humanity is simply trying to survive in this sin-blighted world, while the elite few who have played Satan’s system to the hilt are enjoying all the worldly pleasures which they have stolen by sadistically injuring others.

Desperate people who aspire to follow the golden rule do not always have the capacity to follow the golden rule.

So, when a non-predatory human has been unable to follow the golden rule, let us extend compassionate curiosity towards them, while setting up appropriate restraints and boundaries if those things are necessary to protect ourselves and others.

The same applies to me: I need to extend compassionate curiosity towards myself when I realise I’ve fallen short of who God made me to be. And sometimes it’s been appropriate for me to set boundaries and restraints on myself, so I don’t harm myself or others.

For the health and survival of humanity, we need more survivor-led advocacy in our communities, and we need to listen to victim theologians.¹ Victim theologians are survivors of abuse who are authoring theology which is biblically sound and is consistent with what all reasonable people know about good and evil. Victim theologians speak theologically about interpersonal abuse, offering robust and better balanced theologies to the Church and the world regarding this reality. Many victim theologians publicly acknowledge that other humans have deliberately and maliciously abused them, but they refuse to allow their status as victims to be vilified or shamed. Instead, they rightly insist that the shame belongs to abusers, to those who shelter or abet abusers, and to bystanders who look the other way, dismissing abuse as unimportant.

Those of us who have been abused up-close by human predators can become advocates for other victims — so long as we stay humble and are scrupulously honest with ourselves, our colleagues and our fellow survivors, recognising that each of us lacks many things, we can all make mistakes, and when we make mistakes we need to offer repair and reparation to those we have harmed.

Often victims of abuse rush to become justice-seeking advocates for other victims. It’s an understandable impulse. But it doesn’t always end well. (For things that can go wrong when victims of abuse rush to become justice-seeking advocates, check out this article by Chuck de Groat: Getting Into The Work Without Doing The Work: How Helpers Harm. Internet Archive link here.)

To be good advocates, we must always be watching out for evildoers who have infiltrated organisations that purport to be helping victims. 

We must also be watching out for less than competent “experts” who have their own pet agendas and who may be greasing the wheels of the evildoers. It’s wise to have our spidey-sensing antennae on high alert in churches, Christian groups and networks, whistleblower journalism, private Facebook groups, advocacy platforms, addiction recovery programs, and places that claim to offer “trauma-informed counselling”. Not all such groups are bad; but there is always a chance that they will be (or have already been) infiltrated by one or more evildoers who are covertly manipulating things to betray survivors and destroy the good work of the organisation.

Our capacity to keep up our antennae up will vary moment to moment, depending what is happening in the environment. So let’s not be hard on ourselves when we’ve been triggered and are feeling overwhelmed and our antennae to go offline, or we partly misinterpret the signal because the trigger has spun us out.

To be good advocates, we must resist the baubles of “making a name for ourselves”. We will mess up everything if we are gaining influence while inadvertently re-harming survivors and coddling abusers. Advocates who are re-harming survivors and coddling abusers need to be respectfully admonished and invited to reform their practices. We can help them become better advocates, if they are willing. If they do not respond well to our respectful correction, it is wise to dis-associate from them, even if that results in our own influence being diminished.

Help me dear reader, and let me help you. Let us not slip back into what we’ve all been conditioned to do by society, which is to coerce, control, and give scant regard to emotions and genuine human needs and personal preferences.

And let us disregard the “needs” of people who are exploiting others for their own selfish pleasure.

Let us prioritise human dignity. Let us notice, appreciate and honour all dignity-preserving and dignity-enhancing responses to interpersonal abuse and oppression.

Let us prioritise the safety and well-being of the non-predatory portion of humanity.

***

1. To my knowledge, Ruth Barron coined the terms Victim Theology and Victim Theologians. I have taken the definitions which Ruth and her husband Joshua Barron co-wrote, and adapted the definitions for this post. For proof that Ruth and Joshua co-wrote the original definitions, see here.