The Stolen Generation, Forced Adoptions, and Religious Trauma: A Thread We Need to Talk About

This week, Australia observes National Reconciliation Week — and just a few days ago, on May 26, we marked Sorry Day.

Sorry Day is a time to acknowledge the ongoing pain of the Stolen Generation: the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, driven by government authority and, as we will explore, deeply rooted in Christian ideology.

Reconciliation Week invites all Australians to reflect, to listen, and to reckon honestly with our history — not just the parts that are widely known, but the parts that have been quietly buried. This year, I want to use that invitation to draw a line that is rarely drawn in public conversation: the line connecting the Stolen Generation to the forced adoptions of white babies, and both of those to the religious trauma that high-control Christian groups are still inflicting on families today.

Because reconciliation cannot be complete if we only acknowledge part of the story.

A Thread No One Is Talking About

Very rarely do you hear anyone speak about the Stolen Generation's links to Christianity — and how that same ideology extended well beyond our Indigenous population and is still happening today.

My name is Renée. I'm a mental health practitioner with lived experience of coercive control and cultic abuse. But what I'm about to share comes not only from my professional background, but from personal experience — and from the stories of people I have known and loved throughout my life.

First: An Important Acknowledgement

Before going any further, I want to be clear. The taking of children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, placing them in institutions, and the devastating intergenerational trauma that caused — this is horrific. Nothing I say here is intended to diminish that reality or the urgent need for justice and healing. The wounds of the Stolen Generation are deep, ongoing, and demand our continued attention and action.

What I want to do is add a layer to this conversation that is almost never included — because understanding the full picture matters, both for reconciliation and for recognising how spiritual abuse and religious control continue to cause harm today.

It Wasn't Only Indigenous Children

White women who were unmarried — and in particular young women, teenagers — who became pregnant were also forcefully denied the right to parent their children.

Women were coerced into signing adoption papers moments after giving birth. They were told their babies were stillborn when they were not. Many were never permitted to hold or even see their child. This often followed months of being hidden away in institutions where births were kept private to protect family reputations. The men who fathered those children? They faced no shame, no consequence, no judgment. That burden was placed entirely on the women.

I know about these things not through textbooks, but because this impacted my own family and the families of friends I grew up with — people who never spoke about it at the time. But silence is not the same as healing.

I know personally of women and men who were severely traumatised by these events. What stands out most is that many survivors describe difficulty forming emotional attachments to the children they had later in life. That wound echoed through my generation. So many of us were raised by parents who were emotionally absent. There were several reasons for that — but the forced adoptions that happened in the background is one factor that is almost never spoken about.

Thanks to the work of dedicated advocates, the Australian government eventually issued a formal apology to these women. But it was quiet, low-key, and most Australians have no idea this chapter of our history even exists.

The Christian Foundation of Both

Whether it was children being taken from Indigenous families or young women being stripped of their babies, both were justified by the same ideology: Christian purity culture.

The doctrine is straightforward and brutal. Purity culture teaches that certain people — by virtue of their race, their circumstances, or their perceived moral failure — are unfit. Unfit to parent. Unfit to belong. Unfit to remain in community. And when someone is deemed unfit, the removal of their child, their family, or their place in society is not framed as cruelty. It is framed as righteousness. It is framed as love.

This is where religious trauma is born — in the gap between what is called love and what love actually is.

The Same Religious Trauma Is Still Operating Today

This is not ancient history. That same ideology is alive today, operating through the excommunication and shunning practices still used in fundamentalist and high-control religious groups around the world.

The mechanics have changed. The language has been updated. But the logic is identical: compliance is rewarded with belonging, and deviation is punished with the severing of relationships. Families are split apart. Adult children are turned against parents. Lifelong friendships are ended overnight — not through genuine conflict or disagreement, but through instruction from a leader or doctrine.

This is a defining feature of cultic abuse and coercive control within religious settings: the use of relationship severance as a weapon of punishment and control. It produces the same trauma responses as other forms of coercive control — hypervigilance, grief, identity disruption, difficulty trusting others, and profound religious trauma that can take years to name and recover from.

My Personal Experience

I can tell you from my own experience exactly how this feels.

I have sat across from a cult leader — a man who wrapped his authority in the language of Christ — and been told that my adult child was no longer mine. Not because of anything I had done to my child. Not because of any failure of love or care or relationship between us. But because I had stepped outside the bounds of his control.

Let me be clear about what that moment was. It was not spiritual guidance. It was not pastoral care. It was not an act of love, however it was dressed. It was a power grab — the deliberate weaponisation of a parent's most primal attachment, used as leverage to enforce compliance.

It was the same logic that told a teenager her stillborn baby was alive somewhere, being raised by strangers. The same logic that told an Aboriginal mother her child would be better off without her. Different centuries, different settings, different language — but the same belief at the core: that those in power have the right to decide who belongs to whom.

The Trauma Is Real

The trauma of being told your child is no longer yours is not metaphorical. It lives in the body. It disrupts sleep, concentration, and the capacity to trust. It creates a grief that has no funeral, no ritual, and no socially recognised form of mourning — because the world does not always understand that a living loss can be as devastating as death.

Survivors of forced adoption have been telling us this for decades. Survivors of religious shunning and spiritual abuse are telling us the same thing now. The mechanism is the same: a person in authority — whether a government institution, a church, or a cult leader — decides that love must be conditional, and weaponises the most important relationships in your life to enforce that condition.

This is not love. It has never been love. It is control.

What Connects All of This

What links the Stolen Generation, forced adoptions, and the coercive control practised in high-control religious groups today is not coincidence. It is a continuous thread of ideology — one that has always used the language of purity, godliness, and love to justify the exercise of power over the most intimate areas of human life: our children, our families, our sense of belonging.

Naming this is not anti-Christian. Many people of genuine faith find this history as appalling as anyone does. What we are naming is a specific and recurring abuse of religious authority — one that has caused, and continues to cause, profound and lasting harm.

Healing Is Possible

If you have experienced religious trauma, spiritual abuse, coercive control within a faith community, family separation through shunning or excommunication, or the grief of forced adoption — you are not alone, and what happened to you was not love.

Recovery is possible. Naming what happened is the first step.

Reconciliation — in our nation and in our own lives — begins when we are willing to call it what it is.

If this post resonated with you, please share it. These conversations are how we break the silence.