When the Holy Withdraws: Power, Moral Injury, and Silence.

Abstract

The power to bring forth life has been recognized as sacred in prevailing religious traditions; a generative mystery that has long inspired awe and gratitude (Eliade 1959). Yet alongside reverence, there has also been fear. Depth-psychological perspectives suggest that the asymmetry of generativity—particularly the capacity to gestate and give birth—can evoke what has been described as womb envy: not a literal desire to bear life, but an unconscious struggle with dependence, vulnerability, and limits (Horney 1932; Klein 1957). When vulnerability cannot be held with humility, it may be defended against through the pursuit of control (Benjamin 1988).

This defensive movement is visible across religious history. In some expressions of faith, the sacred becomes masculinized, hierarchized, and tightly regulated. Divine mystery is narrowed into certainty; obedience is elevated over relationality; power is sanctified in the language of order (Daly 1973). What is presented as divine will or cosmic law can, at times, conceal a human anxiety about dependence on life-giving forces that cannot be mastered (Becker 1973). In these moments, religion is not merely misused—it is transformed. The holy is seized and repurposed to justify domination, whether through war, coercive moral authority, or the regulation of bodies and identities (Ruether 1983; Johnson 1992). Even among atheist or agnostic men, the assertion of an a priori masculine authority over reason and meaning often remains intact (Bourdieu 2001).

Humankind has used religion to instigate and bless war, regulate bodies, sanctify hierarchy, and excuse exploitation. Religious violence—particularly sexual and ecological violence—emerges from a primordial misrelation to contingency, in which the divine is seized as authorization rather than encountered as presence (Tillich 1957) and when power seizes the sacred, the holy withdraws, and what remains is silence -not absence, but resistance- the silence is scared, both present and existential, a deafening silence.  Sacred silence functions as both a theological refusal and a reparative ethical resource. The withdrawal of the holy into silence is not absence but resistance to appropriation—“the day that God is absent” (Pennington 1980, 31)—and moral injury represents the psychological residue of this betrayal across survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators.

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Gift Without Ownership

Across traditions, creation is rendered as breath, word, soil, or womb—forms that signify givenness* rather than manufactured; life precedes consent, and existence is bestowed rather than achieved (*available to all, neither made nor earned). Interfaith wisdom consistently gestures toward humility before mystery, compassion over domination, and responsibility to one another rather than mastery over one another (Nasr 1996). When faith functions as encounter rather than possession—as a relational meeting marked by reverence—it resists being conscripted into violence (Buber 1970).

In mythic consciousness, this givenness establishes an ethical orientation: the human as steward rather than owner presuming to have dominion. Myths originate from experiences and are conceptualized by human beings in an attempt to make meaning from experience, composing narratives that aspire to point to and explain the ineffable mystery of existing, presuming to express fundamental truths about existence, being human, the world, and the sacred—truths which can neither be concretized nor codified, for being in relationship with the sacred is dynamic and always current in the present.

Myths provide a frame to help orient people in the present in anticipation of an unknown future (similar to how explorers would undertake voyages into the unknown, taking a direction without a destination); myths function as an existential, psycho-spiritual body scan—an orienting point for checking in with ourselves—never static, always dynamic. Throughout human history the prophets characteristically have disrupted the static, guiding people to embrace and encounter the dynamic living ineffable.

Anthropological and psychoanalytic readings of early religious development suggest that people’s uncertainty—lack of control over creation, life, and existence—provoked and still provokes anxiety. Confronting dynamic reality is coming to terms with and admitting the limits of one’s agency and autonomy, and dependence upon that which one did not create and cannot control (Becker 1973). 

For certain humans—historically aligned with male social power—this lack of control becomes intolerable. The first transgression, therefore, is not belief or disbelief but appropriation: altering the sacred of myth and mystery, from dynamic relational presence into a device—something static, manufactured and controllable. The Sacred, or anthropomorphized Holy is named, petrified into an emblem of permission and authority; whosoever controls the emblem presumes license to exercise dominance and control over others.  From a relational–psychodynamic and sociocultural perspective, the Sacred becomes anthropomorphized and fixed as an emblem of authority, enabling those who control it to justify dominance through gendered socialization and culturally sanctioned power narratives. These narratives shape collective cognition and neurobiology, reinforcing rigid, control-oriented belief systems that become encoded in self-perpetuating neural and behavioral loops. Emotional attachment to such beliefs fuses them with identity and meaning, helping explain why violence against trans people and gay men is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, suggesting a perceived threat to male identity.

In mythic and theological symbolic systems, the womb and the earth function as homologous sites of generativity: receptive, life-producing realities that precede human manipulation. Feminist and ecological theologies argue that domination over women’s bodies and domination over land emerge from a shared emblematic economy that aligns divine authority with control over material life (Daly 1978; Merchant 1980; Ruether 1992).

Sacralization as Ownership

A recurring strategy employed by those seeking political dominance is the sacralization of power. When contingent regimes, identities, or sovereignties render themselves sacred—claiming divine authority to justify harm and shield themselves from ethical accountability—the sacred withdraws. Across religious traditions, the divine does not appear in spectacle or force, but in what power cannot control (1 Kings 19:11–13; Qur’an 42:11; Kena Upanishad 1.3–4; Majjhima Nikāya 72).  Historically masculine power, organized around control of bodies, land, and reproduction, finds in captured divinity its most effective justification; the Holy is conscripted to sanctify entitlement by ranking, naming, codifying, gendering: sexual access, territorial expansion, disciplinary force; religion ceases to mediate the divine and instead replaces it. Violence is no longer experienced as a breach of the sacred but is reframed as obedience and coercion to masquerade as moral order. What would otherwise be classified as violation is misappropriated as duty, purity, or divine will (Trump’s cabinet, ICE, CECOT etc.).

Within this emblematic economy, God is rendered as a static sovereign authorizing control over life by framing bodies and ecosystems as governable objects, rather than as relational agents embedded in mutual and reciprocal obligation (Irigaray 1993). This emblematic logic underwrites environmental exploitation. Land is reframed as inert resource rather than living matrix; ownership supplants kinship, and extraction replaces reciprocity; in effect colonialism (Merchant 1980; Berry 1988).

Sexual violence, incest, and reproductive coercion should be recognized as attempts to appropriate and control the power of creation itself. Psychologically and mythically, such acts enact a form of counter-creation: life is forced rather than received, and meaning is imposed rather than co-emergent (Klein 1946; Benjamin 1988). The aggressor assumes a God-like posture—coercive rather than generative—asserting mastery over life by supplanting the agency of those who actually generate it through embodied processes of gestation and birth.

Violence against bodies and violence against ecosystems are thus not parallel phenomena but expressions of a single theological and psychological error: the conflation of stewardship with sovereignty and dominion with domination. 

Divine Absence: Refuge and Recovery

When God is no longer encountered as being present or able to restrain those who seek political dominance through the sacralization of power and imbue themselves with the authority to commit violations against the rights of all who oppose them; they transgress against individual human rights, sovereign boundaries and earth itself, a sacralized masculine violence that asserts divine approval perverting the image of the ineffable: rather than providing a vision of salvation the sacred becomes the portent of the profane, resulting in a collapse of faith. To believe. becomes psychologically and ethically untenable, because to “have faith” would be to conspire to effect one’s own erasure. (This phenomena in current times may be caused by excessive wealth which has become meaningless and the sycophants are numbed by their own material excesses so that only by indulging in as distorted deified persona of themselves can they get the endorphin rushes to satisfy their perverse and unholy beings.  Serial killers, mercenaries, and tyrants all share in their unbridled capacity to torture and cause suffering and death. They are drunk with their self-delusions of power, and their secular and non-secular coconspirators perpetrate violent atrocities-unlawful imprisonments, beheadings, drownings, burnings, stoning- corrupting the words of the Prophets to legitimize their perversion of faith.[i])

In this sense, unbelief is not secularization but discernment. What appears as loss of faith is, at a deeper level, the resolve to reclaim union with the scared beyond the reach of domination—where presence precedes authority, and holiness is known not by command; silence becomes the holy sanctuary of the divine precisely because it cannot be appropriated by those seeking power and domination; the soul recognizes that any Divinity seeking power and domination is in fact not God, but an idol—one that must be abandoned for moral survival.

When the sacred is hijacked to bless violence, it withdraws, it moves elsewhere—into breath that steadies rage, conscience that refuses unjust orders, grief that names the cost of oppression, and restraint that breaks cycles of harm. This withdrawal is not passivity. It is resistance.   The perversion of power looks for divine approval and finds only a deafening silence. That silence marks a boundary such unholy power cannot cross. It protects the divine from misuse and the soul from further injury. The loss of faith is a withdrawal, a protective moral imperative refusing to allow the deepest structures of meaning to be conscripted into harm. What withdraws is not the individual from the sacred, but the sacred from the violent image that presumes to replace it; individuals seek refuge in the divine absence, and recovery in a deafening silence. Where coercion appears, the Holy has already been replaced; violence evidences not the excess of religion but the sign of its failure.

Moral Injury

Soldiers who were deceived into fighting unjust wars or betrayed in relation to their deeply held moral expectations within an economy that has sacralized power, suffer moral injury, an enduring psychological, relational, and spiritual injury suffered when individuals participate in violations, or witness violations, or prevent violations from occurring: an injury so deep that some believe they have transgressed against existence itself and believe they should annihilate themselves (Shay 1994; Litz et al. 2009). 

Within both mystical traditions and trauma-informed clinical practice, silence emerges as a reparative modality—not silence as suppression, but as attentive presence. For those who bear the trace of moral injury, who have suffered violence, those who have witnessed violence without being able to prevent it, and those who were beguiled into believing in the reasonability of violence, silence appears as the refuge wherein healing and recovery can occur without victimology.  Silence restores access to the internal locus of moral orientation, allowing for grief without annihilation, accountability without collapse, and power without discharge. 

Mercenaries are those who perpetrate violence/warfare against humanity for a price, absolving themselves of conscience and morality in exchange for currency; oftentimes recruited from former military personnel, oftentimes those who are not dissuaded from committing war crimes and are psychologically immune to moral conscience, those who like the Judenrat of old, sidled up next to evil to drink the Kool-Aid and get paid. Epstein, Rubio, Hegseth, Noem, Bondi, Patel,  Kennedy, Duffy et al. and complicit elected officials cashing in on the chaos, disruption and suffering.

Conclusion: The Location of the Sacred After the Sacralization of Power

What I am suggesting is that the sacred has not disappeared from human history, but has historically, consistently withdrawn from sites of domination. The divine is no longer credibly encountered in institutions that authorize harm, nor in doctrines that presume to explain and excuse exploitation. Instead, the holy persists in relational restraint, ecological reverence, embodied consent, and moral attentiveness; silence becomes the disciplined movement away from a corrupted God-image toward the heart of the actual divine. Mythically understood, silence is not the absence of God, but the place where the divine waits—until human beings remember that life is given, not owned, and that power without stewardship is desecration. Violence that claims legitimacy ultimately reveals its mythic emptiness when it demands sacred sanction (Benjamin 1978).

As Martin Buber suggests, where God is appropriated as ideological certainty, God becomes an It; where I–Thou relation is absent, so too is absent the living, dynamic divine (Buber 1970); Irigaray 1993). Ultimately the Divine transcends human reason, and intellect; it seeks no homage through violence against creation or creatures, but rather an I–Thou relation through mutuality and reciprocity of regard for existence. The true divine, does not act upon creation but with creation as an embodiment of divine expression: it cannot be embodied it that which would seek to destroy it, violence creates the house divided.

The divine does not crown rulers; it interrupts them (Jacques Ellul 1986).

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[Jesus and Muhammad Reviled the Abduction of the Holy. Both figures emerged within worlds where the sacred had already been harnessed to power—imperial, tribal, legal, and patriarchal—and both respond by reorienting the divine away from domination and back toward moral presence; a radical insistence that no human mediates God.

They were co-opted after their deaths, when their destabilizing presence became intolerable to emerging systems that require order, expansion, and control. In both instances, the radical insistence that no human mediates God hardens into clerical authority: thus, the divine is abducted in the founder’s name.

What survives of the original prophetic revelation is primarily not in institutions, but in recurring reform movements, mystics, conscience-driven dissenters, and those who return to silence, mercy, and restraint as the true signs of the divine.

Jesus and Muhammad exposed the inevitability of religious violence whenever the Divine is seized instead of encountered. Wherever God is used to dominate and their names invoked to justify violence, their prophetic witness has already been betrayed.

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