Evangelical parenting practices shape norms about authority, obedience and punishment, and, because I am seeing Christians defend the state sanctioned violence on display in Minnesota, I want to today consider how witnessing corporal punishment impacted the siblings in evangelical families.
I’ve written before about how Christian parenting manuals, particularly the older ones that continue to circulate under original titles or repackaged influencer versions, tell parents there is a “right” way to spank. This is presented with magical thinking vocabulary—e.g. hitting children with a physical tool like a switch, glue stick, or wooden spoon becomes “chastisement”—in an effort to somehow transform hitting a child into what is perceived as a God-endorsed, loving action. If a parent is following the “right way” to spank, so the thinking goes, they can’t be abusing their child. They mean well and want to parent in a godly way, so their child’s cries—or flinching or trying to protect themselves or bruises or abrasions—must be proof of penitence and just deserts, not a reflection of parental violence.
This shows up when adult children have conversations with their parents about “spanking,” too. Parents often say something like: “I can count on one hand the times you were spanked,” while adult children recount crystal clear and far more prevalent memories. I don’t know exactly what to make of this, but I’ve heard a version of it enough now to think it reveals patterns. Perhaps it says something about the long term dissociation and detachment required for a parent to choose to spank, or maybe it testifies to how visceral it is for a child to be on the receiving end of that from a caregiver.1
Whatever the case, every time a parent follows these liturgies of spanking, they practice a way of being with their children that is primarily concerned about obedience and compliance, something that reinforces (for everyone) ideas about authority and the necessity of violence that aren’t limited to child-rearing.2
If you have been telling yourself that your baby crying in the night is trying to manipulate you, that your toddler’s meltdown is a challenge to your parental authority, that your child’s whining is sinful disobedience, that your tween’s attitude is “rebellion like the sin of witchcraft,” you have trained yourself to see your authority as unchallengeable and your child as the disobedient other. The person in front of you disappears amidst commitments to the process (“biblical” one-size-fits-all parenting advice) and the principles.
For instance, the high value placed on “first-time obedience” eliminates any consideration of whether the approaches needed to secure that cheerful compliance are ethical. It doesn’t allow for a parent to factor in a child’s unique personality, temperament, and developmental capacity, let alone the circumstances of the moment. Children, for their part, quickly learn that “obeying” is the ultimate good and that contradicting parental authority will not be tolerated or profitable. They learn to placate and praise parental authority.
The prioritization of obedience, secured primarily through corporal punishment is a precursor for the kind of authoritarian politics that say noncompliant people deserve to be shot, that tell protestors they should “learn a lesson” from state-sanctioned violence, that perceive empathy as a failure and even a sin. Empathy is irrelevant if the goal of the Christian life is to obey cheerfully, right away, all the way, and without question. Empathy is irrelevant when the principles of authority and discipline are at stake.
It’s a ruthless and exacting standard that leads people like Ginger Hubbard and Bruce Ray to recommend spanking tired, hungry, sick, and disabled children, because there is no excuse for disobedience. These authoritarian beliefs practiced within the family blend with a distorted understanding of Romans 13 to prioritize the political principle of “law and order” over a critical examination of the ethics of various behaviors or a consideration of unique scenarios. They forestall discernment and foment a knee-jerk response to defend and praise authority figures. As seen in the above tweets, in a moment of tragic loss of life, the conclusion is to blame protestors for their “disobedience” rather than question the use of lethal force at all, to trust the authority figures over those challenging them, to see the detention of citizens and asylum seekers as acceptable collateral damage for the promised law-and-order end.
Perhaps this way of being in the world seems acceptable to power-holders in American evangelical Christianity—pastors, leaders, celebrities, authors, musicians—and yes, parents—because they envision themselves in the role of the God-like authority figures rather than that of a child, in the role of a master rather than that of the enslaved. Maybe it’s a version of “you were only spanked a handful of times,” because when you are not on the receiving end of unethical, unjust treatment, it doesn’t stick in your memory. Or maybe a part of them does remember well those lessons learned over a parent’s knee. Justifying corrupt leaders can feel “right” and safe to people who from earliest days have been conditioned to believe that defying “God-ordained” authority is incredibly dangerous.
And what if you’re the sibling seeing or hearing a brother or sister over the years getting punished? How does that impact you and the way you perceive the world?
As with all of popular Christian parenting practices, how they are implemented in individual families is going to vary a great deal. But if we look at the primary sources we can see that, if practiced according to the “right” way, a sibling will regularly witness someone they believe to be a God-ordained authority figure taking an errant sibling away somewhere to punish them. Their mom or dad has punished them in this way, so they will have a cognitive and somatic awareness of what happens, and it likely will trigger their own fight or flight response to witness it done to someone else.
As I surveyed adults reflecting back on their experiences, I heard variations on this. Some recalled overhearing the hitting sounds and the crying and sometimes the prayer from the other side of a closed door. Some were in the room when it happened. A few recalled joint spanking sessions, with siblings being lined up in a row and parents doling out spankings one right after another. Others had parents who did not follow the “right way” rules and simply unleashed on their children. Children were spanked in the car in grocery store parking lots or in public bathrooms or other scenarios where siblings would watch it happen with their own eyes. Everyone saw the humiliation, the dominance, and the forced reconciliation and many recalled the sensation of increased attachment and connection after a spanking diffused parental anger.
When siblings repeatedly witness an authority figure hurting a child and justifying it, it forms a view of the world where it is not only normal to witness violence, but it is expected.
So, too, do children learn early on that they are powerless to keep others from getting hurt, that intervening makes things worse. Some people were still haunted by a brother’s or sister’s cries, and several told me how certain siblings seemed to always be on the receiving end of more discipline. A few named ways they became participants, either as older siblings tasked with spanking in their parent’s stead or through confusing role-plays that gave them a sense of power they otherwise didn’t have. Some described spanking “games” amongst siblings or some kind of resulting abuse.
They also learned that they might be next, even as they, too, had to “be sweet” or placate an adult who could cause them pain. Perhaps they came to think their sibling deserved the punishment, are were relieved it wasn’t them getting spanked, or felt glad to be the “good” child in that moment. Children in evangelical families learn to thank their parents for spanking them, to the point where adults regularly defend spanking with phrases like “I’m glad my parents spanked me,” “I was spanked and I deserved it,” and “I was spanked and I turned out fine.”
It makes sense that these messages would be formative, training children’s nervous systems and emotional responses in various ways, reinforcing what feels “right” to a person and what doesn’t, underscoring the importance of complying with authority, and bolstering a narrative that blames anyone who doesn’t as deserving retributive punishment. These experiences shape what kind of leaders, pastors, employers, and other authority figures will feel “right” to a child as an adult. They contribute to a person’s capacity for advocacy and empathy later in life and undergird the kinds of things they will—or won’t—tolerate in their communities. High control family life teaching usually maps with high control church culture and high control politics.
Communities that have normalized this kind of attitude toward the most vulnerable and powerless in society—children—may have difficulty seeing the problem with treating other “misbehaving” people in this way. If you have been spanked into compliance and taught to thank your parent for it, questioning and challenging “God-given” authority may feel especially dangerous. Your job is to cheerfully comply and to praise authority figures, no matter what they do. Defending unaccountable leaders may also feel normal, something that recurs in evangelical church family systems where abusive spiritual leaders face no meaningful consequences for their actions.
I don’t know what it will take to change the minds of American evangelicals who are defending state-sanctioned violence. I have a lot of theories about why Christians are so reluctant to give up the corporal punishment of small children, and I wonder if some of these same reasons map to the unwillingness to give up authoritarian politics. The thing is, we are all God’s children, and many of us now are the siblings in the room witnessing the violent dehumanization of brothers and sisters in real time, whether in person or from dozens of angles shared on social media.
There was one other common thing I heard from siblings in evangelical homes, and it had to do with their childhood understanding of the cross and atonement. For many evangelicals, “accepting Jesus into your heart” as a child involves a cognitive understanding of penal substitutionary atonement. This might be taught through something like the colors of the “wordless book:” black is sin that separates you from God, red is Jesus’ blood that bought your salvation, white is you being cleansed from sin, green is your growth as a Christian, and gold is the streets of heaven.
Typically what’s emphasized is that children are born in sin and that their sin, which is deserving of punishment and death, separates them from a holy God. Jesus, the line of thinking goes, came to earth primarily to die in our place, to take God’s intended punishment for humanity’s sin, and to secure heaven for those who believe. “Jesus loves you so much,” children are often directly told, “He took your place and the punishment you deserved.” Sometimes the language of “spanking” is used to try and teach children this concept, as they are told stories that depict someone else volunteering to take another’s punishment.
It is not surprising, then, that many adults recount moments when they wrestled within themselves about whether they should offer to take a sibling’s punishment on their behalf. Some remembered feeling like they should offer to do this but couldn’t and felt guilty or selfish. But I heard from many people who did make that offer as children. They took “greater love has no man than this, that he would lay down his life for his friend” to heart and mustered up the courage to confront a mother or father in the moment of discipline and volunteer to take a brother or sister’s place.
People said this went one of two ways. The most common thing I heard is that the parent became incensed. The challenge presented by a non-offending child placing their body between unlimited parental authority and the intended object was absolutely unacceptable. Despite the fact that the parent had likely been the one to impart this view of the cross and atonement, despite the lip-service given to a vision of self-martyrdom, a child employing this action in the face of unchecked parental power and violence triggered the parent. Either both siblings ended up getting punished or spanked, or it was a harsher spanking for the original offender.
A rarer anecdote was that this offering broke through the parent’s detachment and stopped the spanking altogether. A few people recounted their parents crying or apologizing, and one said it was the last time her father ever spanked them.
Because evangelical parenting teaching came wrapped up with distorted catechesis, many adults carry religious trauma as a result. But even amidst this incomplete or distorted theological understanding, these terrified, brave children were following Jesus in a way that cost them everything, especially in insular families where parents held complete control. For me, this powerfully shows how the foolishness of the cross disrupts the violence of human beings dominating one another, that horizontal wreckage of the powers of sin. Because when Jesus came in conflict with empire and dominion, He laid His life down, and it incensed the rulers and authorities. They could not tolerate it.
I don’t know how many people in the US government, in Hegseth’s FAFO war office, in the unaccountable Department of Homeland Security, in ICE uniforms perceive themselves as instruments of God-like authority. Some certainly appear to think of themselves that way. But all of them seem to be okay with ends-justify-the-means approaches, and I am troubled, if unsurprised, to see many American evangelicals quick to defend egregious and unethical practices in the service of ideological principles and political us vs. them identity markers.
Whatever you think about the end goal of immigration policy, it is anti-Christ to sign off on ends-justify-the-means methods. Attaching Christian words and Bible verses to practices that are about killing or injuring others, controlling people through force and violence, and lying to avoid accountability do not make these things acceptable, any more than painting a Bible verse on a wooden paddle makes hitting a child a Christian thing to do.
Confronting this may feel unmooring for many Christians, especially for those who were formed by households and churches and communities that tangled Christian ideas up with worldly practices of dominion and empire, with lording it over one another as a way to organize society. For Bible-believing Christians, the way out of this requires deconstruction, a revisiting of what people were taught and by whom, which also includes considering who was missing from that conversation.
Christians, we do not have to silently witness the suffering of other members of our human family, reassuring ourselves that they must have done something to deserve it. We do not need to hunt up Bible verses or talking points to defend authorities who are in the wrong. We do not need to cover for the errors of our parents or other leaders, insisting that we all “turned out fine.” If you who were once small victims of enforced compliance and coercion are now defending it when employed on others, or reenacting it in your own home, you didn’t “turn out fine.”
It isn’t God you are imitating when you dominate others with violence, justify cruelty, or excuse away bloodshed. I have to believe that there’s a way to compassionately and truthfully acknowledge the Christian family dysfunction that has made so many victims into victimizers and to learn new ways of relating in the world. The good news is and always has been that admitting error and turning away from it doesn’t lead to an angry deity waiting to punish but to the invitation of a God who desires wholeness for us and all He has made.
Oddly enough, the stories adults recounted of their childhood attempts to secure penal substitutionary atonement for a sibling give us a glimpse into what’s known as the Christus Victor view of the cross. Here, the authorities and powers of sin and death are disarmed, exhausted, and revealed for what they are through the unlikely foolishness of humility, meekness, and love.
When the devil tempts Jesus with all kingdoms of the world, when James and John want to call down fiery judgment on their enemies, when Peter pulls out the sword to prevent Jesus’s arrest—Jesus refuses all of it. Jesus never opts in to this kind of top-down coercive worldly power. “It shall not be this way with you,” He tells His disciples. They are to be known not for their dominance but for the love they have for one another—a shocking choice in the face of a world torn asunder by sin, captive to the powers that break wholeness and shalom with a thousand reverberations through individual lives, families, societies, systems, and, yes, nations plagued by the idolization of Violence and Domination.
The lectionary has us in 1 Corinthians these days, and I find comfort in the pairing of passages for the fourth Sunday of Epiphany—Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1 about the foolishness of the cross, of God choosing the weak and despised to shame the wise, right alongside Jesus’s words in the Beatitudes and Micah’s exhortation in 6:8 to displace religiosity with justice, mercy, and humility and David’s reminder to cultivate quiet faithfulness rather than fretting over wicked men.
It’s all throughout the biblical narrative—this glimpse of the cross of Christ, the embodiment of the power of God and the wisdom of God—foolishness and a stumbling block to so many—but an invitation to a different way of doing things if we will allow it.
It’s the way of the last, the little, and the least—God incarnate coming as an infant, the Messiah coming from Nazareth, the litany of the blessing for the desperate and invisible: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted and insulted. It’s the Kingdom of a mustard seed, of a woman kneading yeast, of children leading, of fishermen and women and penitent tax collectors. It’s turning the other cheek, loving your enemies, and letting go of worry. It’s the God of creation, the King of the universe caring so much for human beings that He reminds us: whatever you do for the least of these—all of the least of these not just the Christians as has been erroneously taught to justify cruelty—for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the imprisoned, you do for Me.
Jesus was constantly teaching His disciples what His kingdom was like, because it was so atypical, so not-the-way-of-the-powers-of-empire, that they had trouble understanding it. And so do we still.
“You’ve observed how godless rulers throw their weight around, how quickly a little power goes to their heads. It’s not going to be that way with you. Whoever wants to be great must become a servant. Whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave. That is what the Son of Man has done: He came to serve, not be served—and then to give away his life in exchange for the many who are held hostage.” (Matthew 20:24-28, MSG)
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Related posts:
Estrangement in Evangelical Families
Op-Ed: How Doug Wilson’s child-rearing tips baptize parents into Christian nationalism
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I’ve tried to story-tell this concept via an imagined scenario of a spanking done “the right way,” as recommended by Tedd Tripp, because I think it powerfully shows-not-tells that these ideas impact everyone in the family.
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Wow, I think another layer of the onion just fell off. My older brother severely abused me physically and emotionally my entire childhood. I don't ever remember a time when he didn't hit me. My parents spanked us, but they weren't extreme, they were casual Dobson readers, and we weren't constantly spanked. While I'll never know for sure, reading this, I am wondering if spanking played a role in showing him that violence was ok? I wonder if you explored sibling abuse in your research? I am not talking about sibling rivalry, I mean abuse. I'm sure it hasn't been studied because there just isn't a lot of sibling abuse research available generally, but I would love to know if there is a correlation. Thank you.