On Spiritual Manipulation

Not an Antichrist Essay (Yet)

The most dangerous forms of manipulation don’t look like manipulation at all. They wear the language of virtue—humility, sacrifice, obedience. But instead of shaping the soul, they slowly unravel it. This is spiritual manipulation. And it strikes deeper than any other because it doesn’t just hijack your thoughts or feelings—it hijacks your sense of what is right.

What Spiritual Manipulation Is

Spiritual manipulation is the dangerous use of spiritual categories—things like guilt, shame, humility, obedience, or the redemptive value of suffering—to subvert the action of the Spirit. It clouds the conscience. It distorts desire. And ultimately, it deadens the soul in the service of a false good.

It’s different from ordinary psychological manipulation. Playing hard to get, for instance—masking your own desire to increase someone else’s—is a fairly harmless form of psychological maneuvering. It takes place on the worldly plane. You get the girl or the boy, or you don’t. Life moves on.

But telling someone they’re going to hell if they don’t do what you want—that’s an example of spiritual manipulation. That’s not just a tactic; it’s terror. And it introduces existential stakes that can’t be verified or falsified until the person is dead.

Spiritual manipulation defies Popperian falsifiability. You can’t test it. You can’t reason your way out of it. That’s what makes it demonic: it locks you inside a circular logic that can’t be escaped by reason or force of will alone.

It takes fundamental Jewish and Christian categories—like the defense of victims, turning the other cheek, obedience to superiors—and turns them against people.

Corruptio optimi pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst.

The Challenge

The greatest threat to human life and dignity of the 21st century is spiritual manipulation. As literacy and experiential contact with a genuine spiritual life declines and A.I. ascends—and as it begins to mimic the spiritual, most people will be unable to discern the difference… precisely because many have never tasted the real.

The demonic, indeed the Antichrist himself, is none other than the best imitator—the true deceiver, who can appear under the guise of good. The master spiritual manipulator.

So perceiving the difference between the genuine good and the appearance of good will be a key skill to develop, and it’s certainly not one being taught in the vast majority of schools.

At its root, much of the problem comes down to the discernment of desire, as I’ve written about extensively—especially in the earliest days of this substack. The human soul is moved by desire. All manipulation begins by perverting desire: it seizes what a person longs for and turns that longing against them.

The thriller villain always knows this: if you want to inflict maximum pain on the hero, you don’t just punch him—you threaten the thing he loves most. His wife. His son. His dream.

In the spiritual life, what’s most deeply desired is often heaven, or holiness. So when someone suggests, subtly or not, that your standing before God depends on your obedience to them, or your silence, or your willingness to suffer without protest—it’s not just control. It’s blasphemy.

The Interior Cost

It rarely comes in the form of direct threats. It’s usually something more sophisticated. In many organizations in America—even in many religious communities and seminary environments—if you raise an objection, if you say that something is wrong, you’ll find that the problem is never what you’re objecting to. The problem is always you.

You lack obedience. Or humility. Or trust. If you’re disturbed by irreverent or manipulative leadership, the problem is your pride.

You learn not to trust your conscience, because you’ve been told that your conscience is malformed. But you’ve also been told that you can’t trust yourself to know whether your conscience is malformed.

This isn’t correction. It’s gaslighting in the name of virtue.

When spiritual manipulation takes root, a person becomes alienated not just from others, but from themselves—from their own interiority. It’s not just a loss of autonomy, but a loss of agency. You’re no longer acting in freedom but out of fear. You’re no longer discerning what is right, but guessing what will avoid punishment.

The soul becomes paralyzed, caught in a double bind: disobeying the manipulator feels like disobeying God. But obeying the manipulator feels like betraying yourself.

That’s the mark of diabolical logic. And I don’t use that word lightly.

The Path Out

So what’s the antidote?

It begins with naming it. Evil loves vagueness. Manipulators thrive in spiritual fog. Naming the dynamic clearly—without bitterness, without rage, but with precision—is a first act of reclaiming one’s agency. So is seeking community.

One of the most effective tactics of spiritual manipulation is isolation. A person cut off from others becomes easier to dominate. But communion—with others, with God—restores the soul’s gravity.

The deeper antidote, though, is harder to accept. Because when spiritual manipulation wounds someone, their deepest temptation is to walk away from everything for good.

I truly believe that is what is driving Gen-Z’s isolation today. They sense that they’ve been spiritually manipulated and wounded, even if they can’t entirely name it, and that causes them to retreat.

But the answer is not withdrawal. The answer is rediscovery.

The great tragedy of spiritual manipulation is not just that it wounds—it’s that it makes the real thing seem unreachable. But the existence of the counterfeit is proof that the real exists. The pain of being manipulated testifies to a deeper spiritual instinct that something is off, which means that something in you is still alive. That spark is the beginning of healing.

You reach for what is real, even if your grip is weak—trusting that it can bear your weight. And you let it lead you out.

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Thank you, as always, for reading.

Two notes:
1. Have you witnessed forms of spiritual manipulation? I read every note.
2. There are still two open spots in The Foundations of Agency workshop, beginning in late September. Learn more here.

—Luke