The Discipline of Conservative Christian Children

Percy:

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The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers recently appeared in the Washington Post. Primarily it's about some conservative Christians returning their children to the public schools, but here's the part that caught my attention where it recounts the thoughts of an adult thinking back to his experiences with discipline as a child:

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The memory of waiting as a small child outside his parents’ bedroom for his mother to summon him in; the fear that his transgressions might be enough to incur what he called “killer bee” spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin; his efforts to obey the order to remain immobile as he was hit — all these sensations and emotions seeped into his bones, creating a deep conviction that those who fail to obey authority pay an awful price.

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There's more detail in the article, but that quote should provide enough of a flavor of conservative Christian children's experience with discipline.

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The thing that gets me about peanut gallery thinking is that you equate conservatism with authoritarianism, lack of respect for their children, and "Christian". Granted, I have known some Christians who advocate child discipline to such an extreme degree, but it is also my experience that simply being a conservative Christian does not usually equate to such behavior. You guys grasp at straws in order to vilify the whole idea of

Christian

Conservative

Authoritarian

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Granted my carnal rants dont help the case.

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Percy writes:

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...parents shouldn't be allowed to do it to children. A community that encourages such abuse to me calls into the question the very legitimacy of that community's existence. Children deserve love and attention, not beatings.

So you advocate the state having community authority to determind the parameters by which children *should* be raised. Got it.

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nwr writes:

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My first impression of the WaPo article, was that it helped explain the insanity that we are seeing in America these days. It seems that too many Americans have been kept within the evangelical bubble, so are not fully aware of the reality that we share.

So how many is too many? One family? Again, you wish that conservatives would go away and that the progressive liberal "church" (no god needed) becomes the global humanist authority. Got it. Of course this article has given all of you the link in your mind that you wanted...namely conservative=Christian=Authoritarian.

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dwise1:

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(Calvary Church is bible-literalist, which I learned all to well in my association with them c. 1970). That is why they were so grateful to find our UU church which taught love instead of beatings.
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Second person reporting based on personal witness of a first person reporting. And I have no doubt that there are many more such stories out there.

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My question would first off be "how literal"? The Aurora Calvary Chapel church that I occasionally attend is legalistic only in matters of Faith (Yes, Jesus is alive and is the *only* way to God) and as far as I have observed, there are no problems within the youth of such a group, apart from the secular control group. What many Christians fear is that the kind loving secular progressivism and openness will itself create many abused victims. Just not Christian ones. I will agree, however, that Christians need to more fully understand what they are told to fight and why.

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If progressives have no belief that there is a God, they only see a giant cult of brainwashed sheeple.(Buzsaws favorite word! ) And I am not trying to sweep problems under the rug.

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As far as Dr.Henry Cloud and Dr.John Townsend I was never impressed with them either.

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I am mos def not a literalist in the Ken Ham mold.
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No one said anything like this. But all of us are aware that religious arguments for the corporal punishment of children is strongest among conservative Christians, so it is no surprise that this is also where the worst abuses are found. No one said conservative Christianity equates to child abuse. The reports of child abuse are not straws and are very real. And the very conservative FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) brings the abuse into the realm of the sexual. Why are you making things up? I said that children deserve love and attention, not beatings. Isn't that something you can get on board with? Why can't Christians just say they're against child abuse no matter who commits it? Why instead make excuses for corporal punishment, saying that without it things would get worse. They're making the "spare the rod and spoil the child" argument.What child abuse breeds is broken adults, including child abusers. All of us probably know at least one person who we think of as broken because of the abuse they endured as children. I'm thinking of a couple people right now, and the outcomes for their families have not been pretty. Belief in God among liberals - Religion in America: U.S. Religious Data, Demographics and Statistics | Pew Research Center has a graph that says well over half of liberals believe in God. Only around 4% of the country identifies as atheist. It's wildly inaccurate to suggest that not believing in God is a dominant characteristic of progressives. If you have solid support for what you believe, let's hear it.--Percy

You need to re-read Chapter 4 of The Authoritarians.

Page 33:

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Conventionalism.
By conventionalism, the third defining element of the rightwing authoritarian, I don’t just mean do you put your socks on before your shoes, and
I don’t just mean following the norms and customs that you like. I mean believing that
everybody should have to follow the norms and customs that your authorities have
decreed. Authoritarians get a lot of their ideas about how people ought to act from their religion, and as we’ll see in chapter 4 they tend to belong to fundamentalist religions that make it crystal clear what they consider correct and what they consider wrong. For example these churches strongly advocate a traditional family structure of father-as-head, mother as subservient to her husband and caretaker of the husband’s begotten, and kids as subservient, period. The authoritarian followers who fill a lot of the pews in these churches strongly agree. And they want everybody’s family to be like that. (A word of advice, guys: check with your wives first.)

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Chapter 4 (Chapter Four Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism) starts on page 106. Basically, authoritarianism and fundamentalism were made for each other. Not sure how branding, trademarks, and franchising work in the religion biz, but I seem to recall that the Costa Mesa church, which is what I was familiar with, was the first and then it spread from there. I seem to recall that they had to hold to certain standards/teachings/practices to be allowed to use the name, but I don't know how much legal power they'd have to enforce it.At Costa Mesa, they were uncompromising about literalism and biblical inerrancy. They were obsessed with the Rapture and the End Times (they were always finding signs of the End and picked the public figures who were either the Beast or AntiChrist -- ironically, now they do worship the Beast, Trump AKA "The Orange Calf"), demonology, etc. They were also obsessed with Dispensationalism. They were burned-out hippies who got "hooked on Jesus" (a common phrase among them; the bumper sticker depicted a hook on a line that had snagged an ΙΧΘΥΣ fish), so they were already inclined towards weird mysticism.They were less into young-earth creation (which had not yet spawned the "creation science" deception), but that was right around the time that the "monkey laws" were being struck down and the anti-evolution movement was getting restarted, but it would be another few years before they'd realize that they had to lie about their religious purpose, whereupon they created their "creation science" deliberate deception (AKA the Game of "Hide the Bible") and spread it through their "debate" snake-oil shows. As it was, the only creationist I saw was a few vague claims of there being evidence of a young earth plus two specific claims: 1) the living freshwater mollusks that were radiocarbon dated to be thousands of years old (they were getting their carbon from dissolved limestone) and 2) the "NASA computer that found Joshua's Lost Day". The first one sounded suspicious, but it took me a couple decades to track down the Science article that they were misrepresenting. The second one was completely bogus on the face of it, especially how it ascribed powers to computers that simply do not exist -- at the time (late-60's to 1970) few people had any contact with computers plus TV and movies misrepresented what they could do, so most people probably thought that they were magic (including those screenwriters). FWIW, even after home computers and PCs/Macs had become common in households so people should have known better by then, a Sunday newspaper magazine still carried that story circa 1990.At first the Jesus Freaks of Calvary Costa Mesa were aggressive proselytizers. To the present day, many normals who had suffered their efforts still hate them and their ilk. But the congregation evolved (not in the biological sense) over time becoming less virulent as those ex-hippies started getting a life (getting job, marrying, raising families, etc) which took most of their energy and attention -- though campus proselytizers, still without a life, remain virulent. Now that their children and grandchildren are being raised in the faith and end up fleeing it (about 80% leaving as fast as they can), they have to again resort to proselytizing to keep their numbers up. They have also gotten heavily into that abominaton, Christian Nationalism (formerly known as Christian Reconstructionism and Dominion Theology).I had left Christianity half a decade before, triggered by reading the Bible and realizing that I couldn't believe any of what I was reading. Then when I learned what the fundamentalists were teaching, I really couldn't believe that. Then "creation science" starting another decade after that revealed their faith to be based on outright lies, thus pounding the final nails in that coffin -- followed for effect by the crass dishonesty of creationists.Ironically, when I was reading the Bible I rejected what I was reading because I was naïvely assuming biblical literalism, only to later see an entire church based on that bankrupt idea.

I guess you didn't get very far in that critical thinking lesson.

Unlike many, i'm not searching for truth. Ive found it and am not about to throw it away. I do not look at belief as some falsifiable experiment.

Irrelevant to my comment. I will take that as a confirmation that you did not finish. I am nit searching for truth. Just reacting to factual information and data. When new data arrives I adjust my mindset.

Classic statement that sums up a world view.
I am not searching for truth. Just reacting to factual information and data. When new data arrives I adjust my mindset.Who gives you new data? Data cannot, after all, present itself to us.AI will change a lot of our human psyche. And many will allow it to change them.|

I don't answer troll.posts.

The state, it is us.Parental rights are not absolute. The law already defines some parameters, but far too few.Please, sir, may I seek to exorcise demons from my defiant toddler with a press of fervently praying bodies? Better dead than infernal, yes?And may I deny my daughters a life-saving vaccine against cervical cancer because they'll otherwise be sluts? Better metastasized than satisfied, I say. You take care of your kids, I'll take care of mineMy oldest son is lippy despite repeated thrashing with a razor strop. May I upgrade to a heavy rod? Maybe a police baton?My daughter seems to enjoy her physicality a bit too much. My religious heritage recommends female circumcision (called mutilation by nonbelievers) ... which is my parental right.Kids are not property.They are human beings. The law limits some but not enough child abuse, the most execrable exceptions applying to the religious parent. Apparently, holding beliefs about your kids' souls permits every outrage against their bodies.The State!Kiss my ass.

The fear is that their (conservative indoctrinated) children will end up de converting and becoming humanist/atheists. The believers do not think that this outcome is good for the future of the planet. They stick with what they believe Gods plan is.They wont go quietly into that good night.Of course none of you believe that humans are imperfect enough to fail.
You dont believe anything about a God (personal through Jesus) exists.And in my mind, the eventual future will be crazzy regardless.

And that would be considered a bad thing ... why?Just kidding ... kind of. Actually, leaving the fate of humanity in the hands of too many "conservative indoctrinated" children would be a bad thing.But, yes, we do have different perspectives. One of my COs was an evangelical which reflected on his political views, but professionalism prevented him from imposing his personal views on others as it should be in the military. One day he was telling a fellow officer about his recent business trip to Boston and got to talking about there being six National Public Radio (NPR) stations just in that one area. Since NPR was my only source of national and international news during my five winters of "internal exile" in North Dakota (which made me a fan of that network, recently replaced by Sirius XM), I was thinking "Cool!", that's a good and really neat thing. But then I realized that he was actually complaining about it. Hmm.BTW, he also would hold Bible study on Sunday mornings for any of our sailors who wanted to participate (purely voluntary and not in the archetypical military way). Since regs allow sailors time for divine services, I supported that both as one of the unit's chiefs but also personally, though I did not participate myself. And just what is God's Plan for the future of the planet? According to Christian Doctrine, His Plan is for it to decay and fall apart and be destroyed, all necessary for the Second Coming.Refer to the Christianity Today (CT) article about the Christian Reconstructionist movement (now known as "Christian Nationalism"), "Democracy as Heresy" (20 Feb 1987, pp 17-23). They are/were postmillennialists who believed that the Second Coming would occur after they had established the Thousand Years, whereas premillennialists believe that the Second Coming would usher in that Millennium -- it's actually a bit more involved than that; see this section.That article makes a reference to a metaphor by Dwight L. Moody, though does not include that part that I guess I had gotten elsewhere. The attitude of premillennialists in the face of God's Plan for the world to go to Hell in a poke has been described as "why bother to polish the brass of a sinking ship?", meaning that any attempt to make the world better was utterly futile. The CT article describes postmillennialist Reconstructionists thus (page 19 under Postmillennialism):

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If D.L. Moody thought the world was a sinking ship from which souls should be rescued, the Reconstructionists want to commandeer the ship, repair it, and sail it toward their own destination.

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Thus the Reconstructionists sought to replace secular law (and the US Constitution) with an Old Testament theocracy. In contrast, the brass-polishing metaphor was used to describe why fundamentalists used to have no interest in getting involved in politics: since the world is going to Hell anyway, any effort to stop that would be futile. But with the appearance on the national scene of the Radical Religious Right steered by Jerry Falwell et alia accompanying the rise of Reagan, the pre-mill fundamentalists adopted the post-mils' political agenda of establishing Biblical rule over society, a kind of Christian Sharia Law. The main difference was that whereas the Reconstructionist approach was a multi-generational long game leading the population to want to choose that theocracy (which is why they were very active in home-schooling) even if it took a thousand years (remember, time was on their side), the pre-mils were working under a much shorter schedule (remember, the Second Coming can happen any moment now) so they chose to seize the reins of power themselves by whatever means necessary (after all, their ends justify any means ... but isn't that "secular humanism"?) by passing laws that impose their religion on everyone else. Two different millennialisms, two very different approaches.It should be pointed out that the current Christian Nationalism is descended from the premillennial Radical Religious Right, not by the postmillennial Reconstructionists, in much the same manner that YECs have adopted Intelligent Design (which does not deal in young-earthism) into their own young-earth theology. They believe that God's Plan is for the world to go to Hell in a reusable shopping bag, which is most definitely not good for the future of the planet.

Too late, too late ... As Christian nationalism rises in the U.S., the churches are emptying: as zealous haters take the pulpit, the kids hit the streets.Youth detests nothing so much as hypocrisy, and Christianity in the U.S. has nothing else left -- grandma's lighted picture of a serene Jesus at the sermon on the mount has morphed into the muscular Christ Avenger with Trump's face toting an AK-47. "They" don't give a fig for the planet. This world is a stage for either converting or destroying unbelievers and raising their righteous selves to heaven.
​ No, there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth as they drag the world down into the hell they hope to make for us all.Religion and superstition have waged a reactionary war against reason since the Enlightenment. "They" are losing, bit by bit -- that's why they worship guns and preach hatred. Most people, especially young people, don't buy what they're selling, so they turn to coercion of both their own children and society at large.And that's why the church of Christ has sold its soul to the party of oligarchs and racists for political clout, private jets for their preachers, and the right to torment their children.
​ Hogwash. Perhaps you're trying to say that humanists believe that human effort can make a better human world, while you believe we are irretrievably fallen and doomed without divine intervention. Good luck selling that to idealistic youth. Bingo.You could have stopped at anything.
​ Crazzy is as crazzy does.American Christians have abandoned the democratic liberties that preserved and nourished their churches. The wall between Church and State was intended to protect both. Charged by Christ to love and forgive, "they" prefer to hijack democracy in order to more potently hate and smite -- like God would, if He knew what was going on down here.Hey, look at all those kids filing out the back door. I wonder why.

Brings to mind the Puritans who fled religious persecution in Europe so they could be free to practice their own particular brand of religious persecution in the New World.--Percy

Perhaps its better if I define American Christians rather than you. First off, the term "American Christians" is hardly monolithic. Sometimes I think that you athesist critics define American Christians through televangelism and right wing politics alone. You have never been to dozens of churches nor met many different varieties of Christians as have I.
As for God, He most definitely knows whats going on, what must go on to fulfill the divine plan and what His role is in it. A lot of what "must" go on is up to us--all of us. Again,though "haters" exist in some pulpits, it is far from a majority. I have met many caring and knowledgeable pastors and laymen alike. You are generalizing and stereotyping "American Christians." And what makes you think that the kids will find wisdom on the streets? Indoctrination in this culture is not limited to the churches.
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But that is what you show us. Should we not believe you?