#but I read Debi Pearl at like 13

[justhereforfandomandfriends]

I think I would be a lot less fucked up if I had read less as a child

#genuinely #I was a voracious reader and my one rebellion as a child was reading books that I wasn’t supposed to #and because my parents are kind and good people and their kindness sheltered me from some of the harm of 90s evangelical fundamentalism #but I read Debi Pearl at like 13 #and decided I would NEVER get married because submitting to men seemed like a BAD idea #but was too ashamed to tell my mom I’d read it #turns out she thought the book was pretty shitty #and ‘Michael Pearl doesn’t seem like a very nice man or a good husband’ #which is my mom’s kind way of spotting an absolute abusive peace of shit man #it’s interesting to learn about the harm the Pearls caused on a larger scale #bc they genuinely genuinely ducked my brain up #I wouldn’t be as radical as I am if their vision for the world hadn’t terrified and traumatized me #ex evangelical #ex fundie #cw religious trauma #cw religious themes #religious trauma

[likealittleheartbeat]

The Political Roots of Child Subjugation [among American Evangelicals]

In 1970, an obscure child psychologist named James Dobson published a book that would come to spearhead a movement toward biblical parenting. He positioned it as a necessary curative for the permissive, sinful culture that swept through America in the sixties. The book proclaimed its “countercultural” status in the title: Dare to Discipline. Dobson’s vision was undergirded by repulsion at widespread social chaos, and at its core was his solution: the enforced submission of children to absolute authority.

The emergence of evangelicals as an active right-wing political force on the American scene came into full force over the subsequent decade, largely as a backlash to the civil-rights movement and school integration. In tandem, and in ways that are complexly intertwined with an overweening political agenda, a new vision of the domestic sphere arose in popular books, ministries and churches. Raising the specter of student-led activism—the antiwar, civil rights and feminist movements—a new generation of evangelical leaders portrayed strict discipline in the home as a solution to social disorder.

“In the last half-century, Conservative evangelicals were coalescing as this partisan political movement and coalescing around a particular cultural orientation, and childrearing is right at the center of that,” Kristin Kobes du Mez, historian and author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told me. “Out-of-control children were unravelling the social fabric of the country. So it was absolutely critical for parents to get their kids in line. It started in the home: you discipline your kids, and then your kids will grow up to be functioning members of this social order, which was always understood in a hierarchical sense. In the 1970s, disciplining children became thick with meaning in evangelical spaces, as part of this political mobilization but also more fundamentally as part of this oppositional cultural identity.”

By the 1990s, propelled by the success of Dare to Discipline and its sequels (The Strong-Willed Child, Temper Your Child’s Tantrums), Dobson’s ministry, Focus on the Family, was a media empire. Its radio programs, educational materials, and newsletters became, as du Mez puts it, “a fixture in the homes of tens of millions of Americans.”

Legions of imitators followed, some more sadistic and others more faith-centric than Dobson’s unnervingly folksy persona. They continue to shape evangelical parenting culture by impressing the perils of “sparing the rod.” Dobson popularized a vision of parenting as a battle whose goal was the complete subjection of the child’s will, with pain a central tool in an ongoing spiritual war. His successors include Michael and Debi Pearl, whose work through No Greater Joy Ministries includes the infamous To Train Up A Child (1.2 million copies sold), a work that I can best describe as a child-abuse manual. There are also gurus like the pastor Tedd Tripp, whose Shepherding A Child’s Heart erases completely the line between physical abuse and parental love. Tens of millions of children have been raised with these principles, and this pain. At least three killings have been linked to the parenting doctrines of the Pearls: between 2006 and 2010, Sean Paddock, 4, Lydia Schatz, 7, and Hana Williams, 13, all died brutal deaths at the hands of parents who owned copies of To Train Up A Child.

Dobson’s The Strong-Willed Child (1978, reissued 2005) divides children broadly into “strong-willed” and “compliant”; it is primarily a guidebook in how to transform the former into the latter, creating pliant and submissive children through judicious blows.

“I remember reading my mom's letters or diary about how she wasn't sure what to do about my ‘strong will’ and she just couldn't break it,” says Joy, 37. “Looking back, I have no idea what I did that was so strong-willed. I remember her telling me a story about her telling me not to touch a plant when I was crawling and that I grinned a big ‘knowing’ grin and went and touched it anyway. I would tense myself up to endure hours of spankings. I felt that showing pain would mean they won.”

Authoritarian parenting in a religious context, asserts author Janet Heimlich in Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment, serves to perpetuate a worldview that devalues individualism for the sake of the collective and the church. (A version of this ethos can be found in a commonly-used acronym in evangelical education: children are taught to value JOY—Jesus, Others, Yourself, in that order). By dictating the ways parents raise their children, urging them to adopt corporal punishment and other authoritarian methods, parents are forced to relinquish autonomy. “Despite talk about the importance of family cohesion, family bonds in authoritarian cultures—especially the parent-child bond—threaten those collectivist cultures’ overall goals,” Heimlich writes. In this sense, harsh discipline serves both the breakdown of individualism and the perpetuation of the church itself.

From Ministry of Violence, Talia Lavin

#tw abuse #tw religious trauma #this article was really eye opening for me and my own experiences #and my connection to the feelings and experiences addressed in atla #I think they use the words collectivism and individualism pretty differently than one would use in cultural understandings #but this and the rest of the article really speak to the ways different kinds of corporal punishments #became baked into the family structure of a lot of american Christian’s in the second half of the twentieth century