Reigns of Terror in the US Department of War
Christian parenting, politics, and the cultivation of cruelty
“When obedience would get a little raggedy around the house,” Idahoan Pastor Doug Wilson writes in his 2018 book Why Children Matter, “We would line up the kids and tell them that there was too much squabbling or fussing or whatever. We would tell the kids we were sorry for letting that happen, and let them know we were going to have a short reign of terror. That meant no warnings, and spankings for all offenses.”1
Wilson, who is making headlines again today for his ideas about Christian theocracy, refers to this concept throughout his parenting resources, reminding parents that they can and should expect instant cheerful compliance in all things. He offers them corporal punishment as the primary tool for achieving compliance, a baptizing of violence that he endeavors to minimize with a joking tone. Wilson is not alone in this advice. Many popular Christian parenting experts suggest something similar, emphasizing the paramount importance of parental authority and presenting a framework of parenting by “winning.”
Wilson’s “reign of terror” came to mind when I listened to Pete Hegseth give his address to military leaders last week. Hegseth pointed out the things he saw as weaknesses in the current structures, instead underscoring violence, external compliance, and “FAFO” energy as markers of strength and winning-ness. Interwoven throughout were other troubling changes like his desire to do away with career-ending consequences for “earnest mistakes” of insiders and rolling back what he described as red-tape standing in the way of necessary force.
Hegseth attends a CREC church (the denomination originally founded by Wilson), has spoken favorably of Wilson’s ideas, and appears to embrace Wilson’s version of Christian Nationalism, tag-line “All of Christ for All of Life.” Recently, the Department of War released a military promo clip with visuals of training and combat set to Hegseth reciting the Lord’s prayer.
Some Christians strongly object to such antics, seeing them as an offensive taking of the Lord’s name in vain. Other Christians are energized by Hegseth’s and Wilson’s vision of Christian supremacy, one that has no room for what Hegseth described in his speech as a “naive and dangerous” pacifism. Hegseth instead argues for a peace for insiders, for “fellow citizens,” claiming that “the only people who actually deserve peace are those willing to wage war to defend it.”
When political leaders publicly resort to war-mongering and commend ends-justifies-the-means applications of force—all done in God’s name—we see the inevitable fruit in our daily headlines. And one need only to visit the comments sections to discover Christians applauding cruelty and the dehumanization of others.
“The first batch of criminal aliens has arrived at Alligator Alcatraz. Into my veins,” YouTuber Benny Johnson, whose profile includes “God, Family, America,” posted to 2.2 million followers in July of 2025. The accompanying photo of a van arriving at the Florida immigration detention facility received 110K likes and hearts and dozens of similar comments—“I hear the gators like Mexican food!” “How can I sponsor an alligator?” Influencer Sharon McMahon called out this dehumanizing rhetoric in a viral post that spotlighted how commenters’ profiles claimed things like “Daughter of the King” and other Christian identifiers.
Is this an isolated incident? No. Speaking out against the “sin of empathy” has become an evangelical tagline. Recently, Ross Douthat asked Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey, author of the best-selling book Toxic Empathy, whether there was anything Donald Trump could do in his immigration policy that she would consider evil. Stuckey danced around the question, pitting biblical truth against empathy, before concluding that she is “most sympathetic when it comes to the taking in of Christian refugees . . . [her] highest priority is the protection of the preservation of Christians.”
This kind of cherry-picked compassion and the accompanying justification of cruelty and violence are all in direct opposition to the teaching of Jesus Christ, who instructed his followers to do good even to people they perceive to be enemies. How did we get to the place where Christians are instead known for their detachment and cruelty?
Training Families Up into Authoritarianism
While researching for The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families Kelsey and I reviewed scores of Christian parenting resources, and surveyed and interviewed parents and adult children. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” so the Bible verse goes. “And when he is old he will not depart from it.” But what if the ways evangelical families were “trained up” had hierarchical authority, coercive discipline, and violence baked in?
One of the central myths of “good Christian parenting” is that there is a God-ordained hierarchy by which to order society, beginning with the nuclear family. James Dobson—psychologist, political activist, and founder of the global organization Focus on the Family—was one of the first to discover how lucrative an explicitly Christian parenting market could be. Countless Christian parenting experts (most often self-platformed) followed in his footsteps, building ministry empires around tantalizing myths: if Christians get parenting “right,” they can protect their children, build generational legacies, and even correct the course of the nation.
What is the key Christian parents need to get parenting right? The timeless truth of God’s Word, or rather the advice many experts packaged as such and eagerly doled out in books, curricula, conference seminars, and streaming courses. A central myth that occurred across resources and spanned decades is the preeminent importance of protecting and preserving parental authority from perceived threats.
Renowned parenting expert Tedd Tripp tells parents, “You have the authority to act on behalf of God . . . you act with the conviction that [God] has charged you to act on his behalf.”2 Other resources warned that societal trends, secular influences, and everything from video games to the sexual revolution were out to usurp the authority they had over their children. And so Christian parents must work hard to secure instant, cheerful compliance from children not just to end a tantrum or help the day run smoothly, but as a way of teaching their children to obey God—or those who speak for him—without question.
Ends-Justifies-the-Means Discipline
There is no place for empathy in a system that values authority and obedience above all. Concerns about ethics or impact are brushed aside when people believe that parents must also obey without question or critical thinking:
When parents administer the rod [evangelical code for corporal punishment] they are not merely punishing their children. They are obeying the responsibility that God has given them. The rod is somewhat of a mystery in how it works but we can be confident that while we are obeying God and working on the buttocks, God is honoring our obedience and working on the heart.3
Books that have sold millions of copies lay out disciplinary practices like “blanket training,” where parents tempt crawling infants with attractive toys and “switch” them back in place, rules for godly spanking sessions, and other forms of behavioristic conditioning.
Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo claim to have reached over ten million households globally with their Growing Kids God’s Way curricula and its secular counterpart On Becoming Babywise. The Ezzos tell parents to ignore a baby’s “training cries” beginning in the second week postpartum in order to get their newborns to sleep through the night by 8 weeks. Establishing “parent-directed” cry-it-out methods from infancy on up is part of God’s order for the home.4
Despite criticism from pediatricians, psychologists, pastors, and theologians, the Ezzos defend their teaching by quoting Christ’s words on the cross: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Ezzo elsewhere expounds on this point, saying that the “Father’s nonintervention in the suffering of His Son is the ultimate example that speaks against the fraudulent notion that love always requires immediate intervention.”
This quote powerfully captures the gaslighty ideas, bolstered by theological word salads, that suggest that parents who ignore a child’s suffering or pain are doing something good, actually. Many evangelical resources tell parents to mistrust their God-given protective instincts and discount their emotional responses, which are often villainized as effeminacy—a failing of mothers and the rotten fruit of feminism. Feelings are liabilities when it comes to discipline and obedience.
It’s common for resources to dehumanize children, describing developmental needs in terms of manipulative intent or sin. Pastor Doug Wilson says that inconsolable babies must “not get their way…[or] summon you whenever [they] want,” and tells parents to leave infants in a crib to “be miserable at the other end of the house” where they can “count it all joy,” a phrase crudely plucked from Scripture. Again and again in resource after resource, parents are told to spank children as a way to punish misbehavior and regain lapsed control. Most of the liturgies for “godly” spanking include forced reconnection, usually hugging or praying with a parent or some other demonstration of “sweetness.”
Influencer Ginger Hubbard offers an example from her own life. After her 3 year old told a lie, Ginger sent her to her room for the afternoon, and the little girl fell asleep. Ginger later woke her to spank her, explaining that her daughter was “absolutely relieved and thankful to get a spanking,” because “her heart was clean.” 5This isn’t a one-off. Many Christian parenting experts talk about the way children are “begging for” punishment or “looking for spankings, because [they] want to be clean,” ideas that pair dangerously with exhortations for parents to diagnose the sin in their child’s heart.
In these frameworks, discipline won’t ever just be about the moment of conflict or even of punishment. It also includes cleansing the child from bad behavior or “sin” and making sure a parent “wins.” This creates situations ripe for abuse and normalizes an adversarial view of the parent/child relationship and of wider interpersonal relationships. People who envision themselves as agents of God-ordained authority or mouthpieces for God’s Word have no problem meting out painful punishment to those they feel are out of line. In fact, they have been told it is godly and good to do so.
Training Parents Up
Many parents pick up a parenting book because they are overwhelmed or have a specific question, never suspecting parenting advice comes with stowaway theological and political frameworks. Parents rarely consider the fact that they themselves are being inadvertently shaped and guided. But regularly applying many of these popular evangelical parenting methods trains parents up into cultivated detachment, where a crying baby, a tantruming toddler, a frustrated child, or a differentiating teen are all threats to be met with unyielding dominance.
In such a worldview, the powerful ignore the cries of the vulnerable and call it love. People formed by these practices are uniquely ill-equipped to consider the personhood, needs, and suffering of others and instead consistently practice disconnecting from their own empathetic response and emotions. It doesn’t matter if a child is sick, hungry, fearful, or crying, the parent must dispassionately pass judgment on a child’s internal motivations and administer “the rod” alongside catechesis that this is what God is like.
Down the road, the parent may look in the face of a distressed adult child—one who has chosen a different path, voted for a different candidate, or exited the church—and determine that estrangement is the appropriate consequence for daring to buck the hierarchy and reclaim one’s personhood. They may in turn look into the face of other distressed people—with different backgrounds, religions, or moral frameworks—and see only the disobedient other, worthy of the suffering and punishment they deserve or enemies who, as Hegseth says, should FAFO (fuck around and find out).
Breaking the Cycle
It’s not unusual for Christian parenting experts to describe their own violent childhoods. Doug Wilson recounts the moment his father, who taught him family rules with “his fist in front of my face,”6 spanked him “up the stairs in anger”7 before heading out to teach Bible study. Tedd Tripp’s brother addresses the trauma of their abusive family of origin. James Dobson recalls how he learned at 4 years old that distance from his mother “was necessary to avoid being hit with whatever she could get in her hands.”8 Many of the pastors preaching “spanking” from the pulpit do so with laughter and jokes that minimize their own experiences of violence at the hands of their parents.
It seems to be a difficult thing for Christians trained by such practices to dethrone cruel authority figures and name what these god-like leaders did (or do) as wrong and evil. In fact, people raised in these environments may find they are drawn to abusive leaders or intimate partners, that cruelty feels “right,” that they must act “sweet” in the face of gross injustice, or that it is acceptable to remain in Christian communities that use tortured theologies to justify and enable abuse.
If you have been steeling yourself to ignore your baby’s cries from the second week postpartum, if you have been spanking the personhood out of your child since their toddler years, if you have been punishing any dissent from your teenagers, you have trained yourself out of any capacity to listen to the objections and pain of others.
The fruit of this teaching is parents and children alike who suppress their own emotions and try harder to obey. No one is permitted to have complex needs, cries or pain. They have been trained up to see God as angry, distant, and unmoved by human need, more interested in punishing the errant and securing submission and right belief than anything else. It follows, then, that they are unmoved by the needs of others, especially ones whom authorities say behave badly or believe the “wrong” things.
It’s a heart-breaking and maddening irony, because such myths are out of alignment with the Incarnation, the idea that God himself entered into human suffering—drew near and lived and laughed and grew weary and wept with people, drew near to heal and set people free, drew near because he loved people. Christians who freely receive this love are in turn instructed to, as the Body of Christ, minister that same love and redemptive activity into a world torn asunder by suffering.
Hegseth’s war-mongering has no compatibility with this vision of Christianity, and his speech glorifies violence and power in ways that primarily benefit insiders and those at the top of the hierarchy. This is how Hegseth can in one breath promise FAFO punishment for perceived enemies, and with another erase consequences for powerful authority figures who make “earnest mistakes,” a revealing distinction given the numerous people who have described Hegseth’s alleged misconduct and abuse.
This is also how religious communities like Wilson’s can tell women and children to submit without question to their male authorities, thus enabling abusive situations, while rejecting the authority of government mandates.
The fruit of this teaching is not peace-keeping or peace-making, however confidently one declares it. In fact, it seems that lording it over other people, reigns of terror, and spanking children into compliance bears the fruit of estrangement, inauthentic connection, and injury. Authoritarian parenting is a short-sighted enterprise and one that leaves families picking up the pieces long past the moments when adults are big enough to secure their own personal peace through “reigns of terror” over small children. Perhaps there is a lesson there for Christians who want to govern by such means if they have the ears to hear it.
Jesus Christ was clear that his way has always been about love and service, not dominance or hierarchies. The choice for Christians has never been empathy or truth, because, for Christians, the truth is that God is love, and his love includes compassion, kindness, and mercy—and not just for other Christians. God’s love is for everybody: for ourselves, for our neighbors, for our enemies, and perhaps especially for whoever we imagine least deserves it.
*****
The Myth of Good Christian Parenting is out October 14th! Get a sneak peek at the introduction and first chapter and preorder now:
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Also! Last week to get the pre-order bonus: downloadable bundle that makes the Christian case against “spanking.”
Why Children Matter, by: Doug Wilson, 110. Many of the direct instruction and indirect messaging in these resources groom children for abuse and enable it to continue. It is not a coincidence that communities like Wilson’s, built around family life teaching, are rife with allegations of abuse.
Shepherding A Child’s Heart, by: Tedd Tripp, 28.
Don’t Make Me Count to Three, by: Ginger Hubbard, 109.
The original title of the best-selling Babywise was Preparation for Parenting: Bringing God’s Order to Your Baby’s Day And Restful Sleep To Your Baby’s Night.
Hubbard, 32.
Wilson, 38.
Wilson, 110-111.
Dare to Discipline, by: James Dobson, 30.
I love how in the opening paragraph the people who pay dearly for the Wilson’s parenting “mistake” are not the parents but the children 🤦🏻♂️
So articulate, well thought out and spot on. Thank you!