Estrangement in Evangelical Families
Many families are navigating painful “low-contact” or “no-contact” dynamics among increasing political and worldview divides. 1 out of 3 adults in the general American population reports estrangement from a parent or a sibling, and I suspect that we might find higher percentages among the 60% of Americans who identify as Christians.
In Christian circles, there’s a whole ecosystem of resources that offer precise parenting methodology presented as God’s Way. So an overwhelmed new parent might pick up a best-selling Christian parenting books or listen to influencers talk about the importance of obedience or the primacy of parental authority. Families might be drawn to church communities that reinforce these ideas, promising generational legacies or encouraging parents to raise “arrows,” drawing on biblical imagery to suggest children are a means to winning the culture war.
These families have often been told their political beliefs or parenting choices have eternal stakes, that they either align with “God’s way” or not, and in these black-and-white systems prescribed down to the detail, there is little room for mistakes.
Some of the most popular Christian parenting empires appeal to deep-seated parental longings: how to keep your children safe and to guarantee a good and godly life for them. This often pairs with dire warnings that children are at risk (social panic around various issues of each decade feature prominently in parenting books), that parents are at risk (sometimes portrayed as victims of their children), and that society as a whole is at risk (unless Christian parents dare to discipline their toddlers and preschoolers, our nation is doomed).
Christian parenting myths appeal to understandable desires and offer an illusion of security in one of the most out-of-control endeavors of adult life.
They also play into some of a parent’s deepest fears: Will my child be all right? What about with God? Will they be all right with God?
The resulting messaging is a pressure-cooker for everyone that combines understandable parental worries with powerful parental longings and offers easy-to-apply solutions—the perfect recipe for myth-building. The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families explores some of the dangers of beliefs like these—particularly when paired with ideas about one-size-fits-all compliance enforced through corporal punishment, but here I want to consider the long-term implications.
Promises like these—often bolstered by misreadings of Bible verses—have betrayed Christian families.
Many evangelical parents put a lot of faith in these claims that certain practices would result in certain outcomes. And because Christian parents believed these promises were “biblical,” based on timeless word-of-God truth, they trusted that if they were just intentional enough, just Christian enough about their by-the-book approach, they could expect to control outcomes.
While understandable, this short-sighted approach is unsustainable.
These methodologies may “work” for a time, when children are young and parents are in charge. Parents may even congratulate themselves (and others) on well-behaved, externally compliant children. But, for so many families, this didn’t hold. As children grew and entered the God-given developmental stages of individuation and differentiation—separating from their family of origin—parents who had only ever known insta-obedience were uniquely ill-equipped to navigate their child’s differing opinions. Sometimes it even came as a disorienting surprise: who even is this person? They are nothing like the son or daughter I raised!
For Christian parents, this fracturing of familial relationships can come with a sense of cosmic failure—and if there is a resulting estrangement or disconnection, it can feel to parents like they have failed at one of life’s “highest callings.” They failed to control their child’s trajectory, failed to transform society, and even failed God himself. Or, an equally disorienting conclusion: perhaps God has failed them.
After all, if parents “train up children in the way they should go,” weren’t they guaranteed that their children “will not depart from it”?
It is all the more lonely, then, when—years down the road—parents find empty seats at the big holiday table or go to check the mailbox and see return-to-sender envelopes or log on to see pictures of grandchildren, only to find they’ve been blocked.
Children, for their part, may find themselves coping with grief and anger, particularly if their parents are unable to listen to their concerns or hear that family practices—whatever parental intentions—caused harm. The pressure on children in Christian families can be immense if it comes from an expectation for instant, cheerful compliance that requires masking feelings, shape-shifting personalities, and normalizing inauthentic connection. Underneath all of this pulses the quiet drumbeat that pleasing parents means pleasing God.
Compliant children may later discover their body keeps the score, as the cost of family cohesiveness is subsidized with things like chronic illness, depression, or addictive patterns.
And for non-compliant children? Well, they probably learned very early on that exercising their God-given autonomy came with pain and disconnection.
Because whatever lip-service evangelicals give to children being blessings, their commitments to expectations for “first-time obedience” and authority structures belie the way obedience and performance are prioritized above all. This kind of parenting leaves little room for the quirks, charms, and challenges of individual children and the unique temperaments of parents—a message of conformity at odds with historic Christian teaching that celebrates the diversity of human capacity to bear the imago dei, the image of God.
Adult children navigating these complicated dynamics face a painful fallout as they attempt to differentiate from their families of origin and exercise autonomy. In families that practiced “first time obedience” in all things, an adult child making a choice a parent doesn’t approve of, or not following the path the parent desires, is perceived as “disobedient” or outside the “circle of blessing” or “umbrella of protection,” or any number of images that were offered to keep people in line.
Corporal punishment may no longer be an option, but these children may experience other forms of punitive coercion. “Honor thy father and thy mother” echoes with a loud, shaming voice as adult children attempt to set boundaries. And parents who feel “cut off” may find themselves confused or retaliatory.
Many people share their stories with me, tender accounts of estrangement and pain, filled with grief, anger, and betrayal: middle-aged adults who still long to hear an “I’m sorry” from parents, a recognition of what they experienced, or to be granted the dignity of separate personhood; aging parents who still are paralyzed by their need to assert that they did it “right.” Some remain stuck, because the tenets of Christian parenting set an implacable obey-or-be-punished metric for everyone that leaves no room for imperfection or the kind of humility that can admit error.
While these frameworks focused on training up children, they also unconsciously trained parents up to see children as extensions of themselves and their God-endorsed dreams. Such systems, with expectations for lifelong compliance, cast an adult child’s differentiation as especially unwelcome, a dangerous back-sliding or an attack on the parent. These parents were given tools to exact compliance, not to see the child in front of them, not to listen to their experience, and not to find a way to mutual respect and relate to each other.
The systems that formed these frameworks mirror the same dynamics, and in both there is little space for people to have a complex experience. It’s an especially sobering thought given the way a new crop of Christian leaders is recycling these same ideas about authority, obedience, and control, evaluating social concerns and dialing in on the family as the means for political or cultural influence.
The thing is, we know where that path leads, and the bitter fruit that kind of parenting produces. We can find a new path forward, but it begins with a willingness to listen to injured people, including the countless families who still find themselves navigating the fallout.
***
Read what people are saying about The Myth of Good Christian Parenting!
Join me and Kelsey for conversations about the book.
Order your own copy now!
The retaliation is the worst thing.
Scapegoating and a smear campaign, all because I had the audacity to make life choices (even as a still-practicing Christian) that my parents hated because it wasn’t reflecting how they would do things.
My parents were also embarrassed by my inability to keep up the public performance and perfect family image, due to me being a late-diagnosed introverted autistic with co-occurring disabilities and similarly neurodivergent kids.
But of course in their eyes I’m the problem and always will be. That’s why cutting contact with them felt like setting myself free, even though they then ruined my reputation and relationships with extended family through a distorted and confabulated narrative, after their attempts to bully me back into submission fell flat.
Parents like mine can never see their adult children as equal, independent adults, whose life decisions have validity in reflecting their own God-given individuality as image bearers.
And women raised in church settings especially are trained for compliance, submission and self-abandonment, which gives us no scope to push back against mistreatment without it being framed by others as either sinful rebellion or a mental health crisis.
Your phrase ‘whatever parental intentions’ is significant. What invariably follows, after the litany of spiritual, emotional and/or physical abuses a child had to suffer through, is the well-worn ‘…but I’m sure the parents were just doing what they thought best.’
That is patently false, and it’s a tired excuse at this point. I far too easily convinced myself—despite abundant evidence to the contrary—of the same when I was exercising ‘godly discipline’ with my children. More is the pity.