Spiritual Terrorism is the all-encompassing, systematic mobilization of white Christian Supremacist logic and morality that attacks individuals and communities by targeting a specific identity marker that is posited as evil and a dangerous threat that must be restrained or eradicated. Markers of identity include but are not limited to: race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. These conditions create a hostile environment for targeted individuals because they are subjected to continuous threats of physical and psychological harm through widespread condemnation, vilification, and violation of their basic human rights.
When Rev. Alba Onofrio first coined the term in 2017, and later further defined it during the writing process of our book Spiritual Violence and Religious Phenomena that Defile the Faith, we knew that many people would see the term “terrorism” as an exaggeration. We also had conversations about how the term has been co-opted and racialized to target people of color and present them as threats to society. After discussing it with thinking partners in the US and the Global South, we decided to move forward with this framing. Although the term was strong and even difficult to process at first, we all agreed it was a necessary shift in narrative, one that intentionally names the systems of power from which the terror originates and identifies those who benefit from it.
Five years later, we are witnessing the attack on democracy in real time where those in positions of moral authority and institutional power are promoting dehumanizing narratives and enforcing them through public policy on the bodies of the most vulnerable. This terrorism is enabled by the everyday normalization of violence; media, institutions, and ordinary people accept and repeat rhetoric and practices that target marginalized communities. Cultural narratives dehumanize certain groups of people to a level that makes violence against us/them celebrated, justified, or simply ignored. Government policies establish conditions of terror that cause direct emotional and psychological harm, and even result in death. Perpetrators often feel excused in their aggression because of the false moral claim that they represent the “good guys,” while those marked by targeted identities are cast as “the enemy.” All of this is baptized by a supremacist, corrupted interpretation of Christianity.
Spiritual Terrorism is a form of Spiritual Violence that goes beyond individual and interpersonal levels, scaling to societal and institutional spheres. It enforces fear and shame systematically, while intentionally tormenting targeted individuals and communities from multiple centers of power at once. Its message to those on the receiving end is loud and clear: “There is nowhere to hide. You are not safe. Whether you are in the streets, at church, in school, in libraries, in your own home, or even in the bathroom, you cannot escape. You are always only a breath away from harm: isolation, bullying, denial of rights, separation from family, incarceration, forced disappearance, annihilation. Worse still: there is nothing you can do to change it. This is not about what you do but about who you are.”
Although the message is usually repackaged in secular or neutral-sounding terms to conceal its Christian origins (what was once condemned as “sinful” is reframed as “unlawful,” “immoral,” or “unnatural”), the theological roots of this logic of exclusion are clear: evil is an intrinsic part of you that must be eliminated.
In recent years we’ve shared our approach to “Spiritual Violence” with many groups around the world. Spiritual Violence is an umbrella term that encompasses different types of harm, which we categorized into various, specific expressions such as Religious Abuse and Spiritual Terrorism. Without exception, Spiritual Terrorism is the concept that makes the strongest impression on Queer and Trans folks, People of Color, Immigrants, and communities with intersecting marginalized identities. We are not presenting anything new; we are simply putting into words what they have felt in their bodies since birth. These communities know what it feels like to live in a constant state of alert in spaces others consider safe. Their lived experience teaches them not to fully trust the people and institutions supposed to protect them (faith leaders, politicians, police officers, and others) because those actors have too often inflicted or enabled harm. This vigilance is not paranoia but a necessary response to repeated, intergenerational trauma that has wounded them and their loved ones and shapes how they move through the world.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a stark, contemporary example of how Spiritual Terrorism is operationalized. We have seen footage of armed groups organizing to surveil and expose their neighbors, handing them over to the State. We have seen children screaming for their parents as families are ripped apart. Immigration lawyers around the country are asking for urgent support because due process has collapsed and, in some cases, clients have vanished. Massive detention centers, including outsourced offshore prisons such as CECOT, have been constructed and promoted as policy achievements. People are traded across borders as if they were commodities, and the whole apparatus is presented as lawful, peaceful, or even righteous. This is not normal.
Years from now, people will talk about it for what it was: Spiritual Terrorism. They will lower their gaze, put their hand on their heart, and ask themselves how we let it happen. They may speak of it as an inevitable tragedy. But we know this is not the case. What is happening to immigrant communities in the United States is a moral choice, not an inevitability, and we will name it, resist it, and dismantle it.
Naming this violence matters because it exposes the moral and political choices that enable it. To challenge it, we must demand accountability, defend due process, stand with those who survive these harms, and unmask the narratives and institutions that make such terror seem in any way acceptable. Although systems of power have co-opted the language of Christianity to moralize harmful political maneuvers, validate violent actions, encourage exclusion, and legitimize the unequal distribution of natural resources and access to safety and basic necessities, we proclaim that migration has been a part of God’s design for Creation since the beginning.
On this stolen land, we remember that the movements of people are as old as time, shaped by shifting resources, changing seasons, and the call to survive. The God of Scripture has always held immigrants close to the heart of the Divine—and even incarnated as a baby who had to flee state-sponsored terrorism: Jesus was an immigrant child—and calls us to prioritize care for the vulnerable above our own comfort and ease. As Scripture reminds us: ‘I was a stranger and you invited me in’ (Matthew 25).
