Most people who walk into a church aren’t scheming. They’re searching. They come carrying doubt, fear, grief, questions they can’t answer alone. They want comfort. Guidance. Community. A sense that their pain matters to someone, somewhere.
They want to be prayed over.
But too often, what they get is something else entirely.
They get leaders who see vulnerability as an opportunity. Institutions that treat devotion like a resource to be harvested. Pastors who know exactly how to make someone cry at the altar but never lift a finger to address the real wounds outside the sanctuary.
Instead of being embraced, people get worked. Their insecurities about the afterlife, their longing for belonging, their financial generosity — all of it gets folded neatly into systems designed to keep the machine running. Churches build empires on the backs of earnest people who just wanted a place to be seen and cared for.
It’s not everyone, but it’s enough. Enough to make the “house of God” feel more like a business with a captive market than a refuge. Enough to make you wonder whether the spiritual language is just window dressing for psychological manipulation.
The tragedy isn’t that people believe. The tragedy is how easily their belief is exploited. How little discernment their leaders show. How quick the sermons are to demand loyalty and how slow the actions are to demonstrate integrity.
People want to be prayed over — to be met in their humanity and lifted with compassion. But too many religious institutions treat them like prey: trackable, predictable, ripe for control.
And the worst part? When the mask slips and people see what’s really happening, the institution blames them for losing faith. As if betrayal is the fault of the betrayed.
They wanted prayer. They got a sales pitch.
