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On Easter, Passover and Jewish life

April 8, 2012 in Easter | Tags: children, Easter, marriage, women | 4 comments

In my Easter extravaganza food post, I mentioned that Easter and Passover are observed during the same time period.

To demonstrate, here is a comparison of dates for Passover (approximately one week) and Easter:

2012: April 6-14 / April 8

2013: March 25-April 2 / March 31

2014: April 14-22 / April 20

2015: April 3-11 / April 5

Passover notes

How little we know about Easter

April 1, 2012 in Catholic, Easter, Protestant, surveys | Tags: Catholic, children, Christianity, Easter, Jesus, Protestant, survey | 2 comments

As we begin Holy Week, many people calling themselves Christian do not know about Easter.

Although it seems hard to believe, our fellow ‘believers’ cannot explain what happens on the most important feast of the Church year.

A few years ago, I worked with a supposedly Eastern Orthodox woman in England who said, ‘My son came home from nursery school where they had a lesson about Easter. The women told the children that Christ died on the Cross.’

I asked, ‘And what else?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What happened after He died on the Cross? Did they explain?’

‘I’m not following you,’ she said.

‘Did the women tell the children about Easter?’

‘I’m not sure. All Easter means to me is that we passed around coloured eggs in church. Kind of a sharing thing. I don’t know why. It was very stinky and messy. Stupid, really.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘so I guess your son does not know that Christ rose from the dead and without that there is no salvation.’

‘No, I don’t think they went into that.’

From the look on her face, I had the distinct impression that I was telling her something new — that Christ rose from the dead.

However, she is not alone — read more here from my 2010 post which examines a Barna survey about our general ignorance about Easter.

Yes, Christians were surveyed. Be prepared for a shock.

Our treatment of children determines our future

March 21, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: children, history, Lloyd de Mause, women | Leave a comment

This post is for adults only.

Those of a sensitive disposition are also forewarned as some readers may find the content disturbing.

The past few days I have been looking at Lloyd de Mause’s research into children and women.

De Mause (pronounced ‘de-Moss’) is an American social thinker who specialises in psychohistory — uncovering the whys and wherefores of our behaviour over millenia.

In yesterday’s post, we saw that he recommends that the future of women be improved in order for them to become better mothers and, by extension, facilitate societal advancement. However, in this is a complex of issues — personal, familial, cultural and historical.

In his 1998 lecture, ‘The History of Child Abuse’, he described ‘six childrearing modes’ and said (emphases mine):

My “psychogenic theory of history” posits that a society’s childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits, but–because all other traits must be passed down from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood–instead makes childrearing the very basis for the transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of history. The main source of childhood evolution is, I believe, the process I call psychogenesis, by which parents–mainly the mother for most of history–revisit a second time around the stages of childhood and undo to some extent the traumas they themselves endured. It is in this sense that history is like a psychotherapy of the generations, undoing trauma and giving historical personality a chance at a new start with every baby born. Only humans have brain networks that allow this miracle to take place. All cultural changes in the past 100,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens are epigenetic, not genetic. Regardless of changes in the environment, it is only when changes in childhood occur that epigenetic changes in the brain can occur and societies can begin to progress and move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive. That more individuated and loving individuals are ultimately more adaptive is understandable–because they are less under the pressures of infantile traumas and are therefore more rational in reaching their goals. But that this childhood evolution–and therefore all social evolution–is terribly uneven is also understandable, given the varying conditions under which parents all over the world have to conduct their childrearing tasks.

Yesterday, we read some of de Mause’s detail debunking that incest is a universal taboo. Nearly every society has a long history — some continuing today — of incest. Child sacrifice also took place and continues in certain societies.

The first of de Mause’s childrearing modes is the infanticidal mode, which comprises the atrocities in the preceding paragraph. As for infanticide from ancient times to the Enlightenment, de Mause said:

I have estimated that perhaps half of all children born in antiquity were killed by their caretakers, declining to about a third in medieval times and dropping to under one percent only by the eighteenth century. Since these skewed sex ratios do not vary by economic class–the rich do away with their children at about the same rates as the poor–the evidence suggests that the parents were coping with the emotional anxieties of childrearing more than economic conditions.

Reading that you might say, ‘But what about the Church?’ De Mause would respond that in this second — abandoning — mode:

Although Christianity attempted to reduce the outright killing of newborns, thus moving beyond the infanticidal mode, it continued the abandonment of children–whether by child sale or by sending to wet nurse or monastery or nunnery or foster family or to other homes as servants–which is why I labeled this second stage the abandoning mode. The refusal of parents to raise their own legitimate children was so powerful that through the nineteenth century over half of the children born in Florence, for instance, were dumped into foundling homes at birth, to be picked up by their families–if they lived that long (the majority died)–when they were around five years old, thus avoiding having homes where crying babies disturbed the peace. The same abandonment was common in France, where, in 1900, over 90 percent of the babies born in Paris were carted out to the countryside to wetnurses at birth. As one author put it, “mother love” was a late historical achievement, not an instinctual trait.

Although infanticide decreased through the centuries in the Christian West, adults’ other sins against children carried on, principally physical and sexual abuse. Recall that de Mause said people consider children ‘poison containers’:

The erotic beating of children continued in Christian times, because of the anxieties of living with a child who is so full of your projections. Children were experienced as always about to turn into “changelings,” those who, as St. Augustine puts it, “suffer from a demon”–which usually meant just that they cry too much, since the Malleus Maleficarum says that one can recognize changelings because they “always howl most piteously,” and since Luther says they “are more obnoxious than ten children with their cr–ping, eating, and screaming.”

Today, it is still common for a parent to say to a child, ‘Be quiet or I will give you something to cry about!’

So, it’s the child’s noise, the unpredictability and, let’s face it, the seemingly spontaneous soiling that has upset adults through the ages.

For centuries, babies were wrapped in swaddling clothes. Even Jesus was. This was not to keep the infant warm but to prevent him from moving around too much. However, some societies kept their young wrapped that way for a few years as a means of keeping the child under control.

By the 13th century, the third mode of childrearing — the ambivalent mode — appeared. The modes overlapped somewhat, as it takes time for widespread change to come into effect:

the giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses, was ended, the first disapproval of pedophilia appeared, the first childrearing tracts were published and some advanced parents began to practice what I have termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing, where the child was not born completely evil, but was seen as being still full of enough dangerous projections so that the parent, whose task it was to mold it, must beat it into shape like clay. Church moralists for the first time began to warn against sexual molestation of children by parents, nurses and neighbors … The length of time of swaddling was eventually reduced from a year or more to only a few months. Pediatrics and educational philosophy were born. Parents of means began suggesting that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be wetnursed in some peasant village–and thereby condemning over half of them to early death–the mother might herself nurse her infant. The baby, said some mothers who began to try nursing their own babies, even responds to this care by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her breast and face and cooing. And if the father, as often happened, complained that his wife’s breast belonged to him not the baby, these bold new mothers suggested that the father should be allowed to hold the baby too.

The ambivalent mode enabled the Renaissance: exploration, invention and more sophisticated forms of art, writing and music. Parents were less inclined towards the child as poison container and instead began internalising and examining their own personal experiences. It was during this time that Shakespeare gave us the melancholic Hamlet. This internalising also produced a conscious experience of guilt.

The next mode — the intrusive mode — had begun by the 17th century and was most advanced in England, America and France. Parents removed swaddling clothes after several weeks, they increasingly viewed molestation as sinful and, as such, made it incumbent upon their children not to masturbate. (Prior to the intrusive mode, parents had also given children frequent enemas to cleanse whatever ‘bad contents’ accumulated inside their ‘poison containers’.) Although they still beat their children in a fruitless battle of the ‘wills’ — which, by the way, no parent won — some mothers began locking their children in dark closets or keeping them shut away in drawers for days at a time. It would seem that, even subconsciously, parents tried to beat, starve or kill off (through lack of light) the demons they saw in their youngsters.

Rousseau confirmed that in France babies in their earliest days were often beaten to keep them quiet. Another mother wrote of her first battle with her four-month-old infant, “I whipped him til he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.” One can sense in this description of baby battering the struggle with the mother’s own powerful parent, with the baby seen as so obstinate that it “won the battle” even after being beaten. In fact, this “double image” of the child as both a powerful adult and a wicked child accounts for the merging of beater and beaten in our myriad historical accounts of child abuse.

De Mause observed that the sequestering of the child in a dark closet marks the beginning of psychological abuse, although psychology did not exist as such at the time.

Along with this came a variety of emotional devices parents used designed to effect better behaviour. The intrusive mode gave rise to nighttime parental threats of murder or kidnapping by ghosts, werewolves, demons, witches, black canines under the bed, chimney sweeps, Blue Beard, Napoleon Bonaparte, bogeymen and black men. (I recollect one of my aunts giving me the chimney sweep line, although I didn’t even know what a chimney sweep was until some years later when I saw Oliver! Some of my cousins — another family — got the ‘black man’ story.)

Some adults dressed up in terrifying disguises to frighten children into submission.

And there was another means to obedience, which I remember one of the older nuns telling us at school:

Religion was a further source of terrorizing. God was said to “hold you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire” and children’s books depicted Hell as follows: “The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out…It stamps its little feet on the floor…”

During the day, parents and teachers took children to witness hangings. This was seen to be good for moral and behavioural development.

The Victorian Era (19th century) heralded the socialising mode which carried on through the 20th century. De Mause observed the breathtaking progress that Western countries made during that time. Think of the industrial revolution which became widespread, improved crop production, increased sanitation, the railroads, electricity, public education, the telephone, the automobile, radio, air travel and television. And let’s not forget photography, cinema, plastics, home appliances, the transistor, space exploration, the personal computer and the Internet! Child labour was outlawed or severely restricted in the West. Psychology developed as a discipline and personal development became much more prominent for everyone, adult and child alike.

During the socialising mode, the mother’s role became that of a daytime teacher — not in a homeschooling sense but in a moral, behavioural and practical sense. She taught you how to say your prayers, tell time, tie a shoe, write your name, read a book and bake a batch of cookies. The father continued to sustain the family financially and protect them from harm but was also more personally involved with his children as the decades passed. Generationally speaking, my father — born just after the Great War — was very different from today’s fathers.

Which brings us to de Mause’s last — and current — mode, the helping mode. De Mause hopes that this will be the start of a pacifistic humanity. I’m less sure. It is certainly the era of helicopter parents and the heaping of praise on children who might not fully deserve it. As I see it, we are becoming more behaviourally class divided than ever before. Middle- and upper-class children resemble one another more in the way they conduct themselves. Working class and underclass children are fusing together — perhaps because of economic circumstances — seemingly quicker than before. Uniting all the groups, however, is a love of mediocrity, it seems. Perhaps I am just showing my age. However, I do wonder whether progress has stalled for now as teenage pregnancies, single parenthood, substandard education and unemployment increase.

In closing, I wanted to call your attention to something that de Mause says about predicting war, which made me think of trends forecaster Gerald Celente, who foresees a major war coming soon. De Mause said:

Psychohistorians have regularly found that images on the magazine covers and in political cartoons in the months prior to wars reveal fears of the nation becoming “too soft” and vulnerable, with images of dangerous women threatening to engulf and hurt people. These regressed group-fantasies eventually produce so much anxiety that a sacrifice of innocent victims is deemed necessary, and another nation who also needs a sacrifice is located. So regular are these group-fantasies in the media that I was able to forecast, for instance, the recent Persian Gulf War months before Iraq invaded Kuwait by locating in the American media an upsurge in imagery of devouring mommies and guilty children needing punishment.

That periodic sacrifices are in fact lawful is suggested by the regularity with which they occur, nearly every state producing a major war on the average of about every 25 years throughout the past two millennia. In between wars, periodic economic sacrifices serve to relieve our guilt for too much prosperity and to cleanse us of our dangerous economic and social progress. Depth psychology has shown that in individuals progress toward individuation and success often produces regression, including both fears of leaving mommy and wishes for maternal re-engulfment, along with fears of losing one’s self. In nations, the same thing occurs after periods of rapid change and prosperity, and is defended against by the sacrificial ritual called war.

End of series

Carnality: Children historically seen as ‘poison containers’

March 20, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: Canada, children, England, Germany, Greece, history, India, Lloyd de Mause, United States, women | 2 comments

This post is for adults only.

Those of a sensitive disposition are also forewarned as some readers may find the content disturbing.

As the content is so distressing, I would advise people to refrain from eating whilst reading it.

Lloyd de Mause (pronounced ‘de-Moss’) is an American social thinker who specialises in psychohistory — uncovering the whys and wherefores of our behaviour over millenia. The next few posts feature his research into child abuse and the treatment of women in societies around the world from antiquity to the present day.

You might find his research either edifying or objectionable. However, it will provide food for thought, especially to readers who have ever wondered why so many children are treated as being lower than animals. These excerpts from deMause’s The Origins of War in Child Abuse and his 1997 lecture, ‘The History of Child Abuse’, will shed light on what might be atavistic human traits or learned behaviour.

I do not agree with de Mause’s conclusion that laws against corporal punishment and obligatory visits by ‘child helpers’ will produce a kinder, less violent society. I can think of real life examples for and against.

De Mause also believes that less corporal punishment will give way to fewer wars. I’m not sure about that, either. Fallen man will always look for violence and subjugation of another. Just read the news in peacetime. Some of the suspects had violent upbringings, others did not.

Content and summaries below are from de Mause’s lecture, ‘The History of Child Abuse’. Emphases are mine.

De Mause states that children have been beaten, molested, starved and sacrificed since ancient times in cultures around the world through to the present day. He posits that abusive parents and other adults view children as ‘poison containers’:

receptacles into which adults project disowned parts of their psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without danger to themselves.

An abusive mother often feels insecure and unloved:

As one battering mother put it, “I have never felt loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant he didn’t love me. So I hit him.² Rather than the child being able to use the parent to detoxify its fears and anger, the parent instead injects his or her bad feelings into the child and uses it to cleanse his or herself of depression and anger.

A more complex, socially acceptable example is that of the Bimin-Kuskusmin of New Guinea, where it is taboo for a woman who has recently given birth to sleep with her husband. Consequently, the mother sleeps with the child and transfers her sexual feelings and gestures to them, particularly to sons. As this separation from the husband can last up to four years, a frustrated mother can cause a small boy pain in his genital area:

One three-year-old boy describes how whenever his mother was sad or angry she masturbated him so roughly that it hurt him, and he struggled to get away, complaining of a pain in his penis. “It hurts inside,² he told the ethnologist. “It goes Œkoong, koong, koong’ inside. I think it bleeds in there I don’t like to touch it anymore …”

The boy told the ethnologist that in order to overcome the pain in his privates, he cut himself on the leg, thereby creating a new pain which distracted him from the original one.

De Mause observes:

Boys in many New Guinea groups today, for instance, are so traumatized by the early erotic experiences, neglect and assaults on their bodies that they need to prove their masculinity when they grow up and become fierce warriors and cannibals, with a third of them dying in raids and wars. In fact, I have found that rather than the incest taboo being universal–as anthropologists claim–it is incest itself that has been universal for most children in most cultures in most times. A childhood more or less free from adult sexual use is in fact a very late historical achievement, limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern nations.

He then looks at late 20th century statistics on incest in the United States, Canada, Latin America, England and Germany. I couldn’t help think of the eagerness of education ‘experts’ to push for sex education among younger and younger children in our schools when I read this:

In America … Adjusting statistically for what is known about these additional factors [those from higher risk groups who were not interviewed, e.g. criminals, psychotics, prostitutes], I have concluded that the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys, about half of these directly incestuous.

A recent Canadian study by Gallup of 2,000 adults has produced incidence rates almost exactly the same as those found in the United States. Latin American family sexual activity–particularly widespread pederasty as part of macho sexuality–is considered even more widespread. In England, a recent BBC “ChildWatch” program asked its female listeners–a large though admittedly biased sample–if they remembered sexual molestation, and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone touching their genitals, 62 percent recalling actual intercourse. In Germany, the Institut für Kindheit has recently concluded a survey asking West Berlin schoolchildren about their sexual experiences, and 80 percent reported having been molested.

Of India, he states:

Childhood in India begins, according to observers, with the child being regularly masturbated by the mother, the girl “to make her sleep well,” the boy “to make him manly.” The child sleeps in the family bed, witnesses and most likely takes part in sexual intercourse between the parents …

Child marriage was, of course, a long-standing Indian practice. When laws were passed in 1929 trying to outlaw it, the government was overwhelmed by men insisting that early marriage was an absolute necessity, since little girls were naturally very sexual and must be married early if they are to be restrained from seducing adults …

The Indian subcontinent, in fact, still has many groups, such as the Baiga, where actual incestuous marriage is practiced, between fathers and daughters, between mothers and sons, between siblings and even between grandparents and their grandchildren–thus disproving the oft-repeated anthropological truism that “no known tribe has ever permitted incest” because if it were allowed society would surely cease functioning. In many of these villages, the children move at the age of 5 or 6 from the incestuous activities of the family bed to spend the rest of their childhood in sex dormitories, where they are initiated by older youth and men into intercourse with a succession of other children, none for longer than three days at a time, under threat of gang rape.

China’s social history, he says, shows:

the same institutionalized rape rituals as in India, including the pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of boys to be used sexually as eunuchs, marriage of young girls to a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves. So prevalent was the rape of little girls that Western doctors found that, as in India, few girls entering puberty had intact hymens. Even the universal practice of foot binding was for sexual purposes, with a girl undergoing extremely painful crushing of the bones of her feet for years in order that men could make love to her big toe as a fetish …

Childhood in Japan:

still includes masturbation by mothers “to put them to sleep.” Parents often have intercourse with their children in bed with them, and “co-sleeping,” with parents physically embracing the child, often continues until the child is ten or fifteen. One recent Japanese study found daughters sleeping with their fathers over 20 percent of the time after age 16. Recent sex surveys report memories of sexual abuse even higher than comparable American studies, and “hot lines” of sexual abuse report mother-son incest in almost a third of the calls … Even today, there are rural areas in Japan where fathers marry their daughters when the mother has died or is incapacitated, “in accordance with feudal family traditions.”

In the Middle East:

Historically, all the institutionalized forms of pedophilia which were customary in the Far East are documented extensively for the Near East, including child marriage, child concubinage, temple prostitution of both boys and girls, parent-child marriage (among the Zoroastrians), sibling marriage (quite common among Egyptians), sex slavery, ritualized pederasty and child prostitution. Masturbation in infancy is said to be necessary “to increase the size” of the penis, and older siblings are reported to play with the genitals of babies for hours at a time. Mutual masturbation, fellatio and anal intercourse are also said to be common among children, particularly with the older boys using younger children as sex objects. The nude public baths (hammam) are particularly eroticized in many areas, being especially notorious as a place of homosexual acts, both male and female.

Girls are used incestuously even more often than boys, since females are valued so little. One report found 80 percent of Near Eastern women surveyed recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of 3 and 6 by older brothers, cousins, uncles and teachers. The girls rarely complain, since “if there is any punishment to be meted out, it will always end up by being inflicted on her.” Arab women know that their spouses are pedophiles and prefer having sex with children to having sex with them. Their retribution comes as follows. When the girl is about 6 years old, the women of the house grab her, pull her thighs apart and cut off her clitoris and often also her labia with a razor, thus usually ending her ability to feel sexual pleasure forever.

De Mause views the clitoridectomy as an act of incest. Of genital mutilation of girls and boys, he says:

In all these cases, the child is being used for the sadistic sexual pleasure of the parent. In fact, circumcision ceremonies are often followed by drinking parties that end in intercourse, so sexually arousing is the circumcision—in some areas, the traveling circumcizer is actually accompanied by some prostitutes, who know how sexually excited villages become after the ceremony …

Oh, the carnality of it all. If this does not illustrate man at his hungriest for flesh to abuse, then what does?

Any time that people lust after flesh, whether to beat it or abuse it sexually, they would do well to ask why they feel that need. Sadly, most who engage in this practice are too caught up in flesh to step back for a moment to examine their thoughts and desires.

De Mause explains how the child as ‘poison container’ works in contemporary Greece:

As one peasant community in rural Greece puts it, you must have children around to put your bad feelings into, especially when the “Bad Hour” comes around. An informant describes the process as follows:

One of the ways for the Bad Hour to occur is when you get angry. When you’re angry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a child for instance, will the “bad” leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted.

Newborn infants, in particular, were perfect poison containers because they were so “unpolluted.” The newborn then became so full of the parent’s projections that even if he or she is allowed to live (up to half the children in early societies were murdered at birth), the infant had to be tied up–tightly swaddled in bandages for up to a year or more—to prevent it from “tearing its ears off, scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or touching its genitals,” i.e., to prevent it from acting out the violent and sexual projections of the parents.

It seems to me from personal observation that many adults coo over a tiny infant only to demonise it when it starts developing an inquisitive nature or personality a few years later. The much loved, much indulged baby becomes a ‘little devil’ or, more benignly, an ‘imp’ or a ‘rascal’. Admittedly, most of us tested the waters in our early years, but observe how quickly adult opprobrium sets in and lasts until our adulthood. Then, it often reverts back to indulgence, excuse-making and the need of the parent for the child.

I know a number of middle-aged married American mothers who say of their adult offspring, ‘I hope they don’t move away. I need all my babies around me’, or ‘All my children and their families live within a three-block radius; they are there when I need them’.

So, it seems that once trained to be independent, the parent views the adult child as cleansed anew — reborn, as it were — and becomes a revered ‘poison container’ for the parent’s anxieties and fears in their advancing years.

This, too, is something which seems to have gone on since time began. Perhaps it is a good thing in that a parent finally feels free and able to invest positive emotional energy in the adult child. However, in a pathological situation, it happens when the child has his best years ahead of him personally and professionally. In the worst sense, the parent is still controlling the child’s development, dreams and aspirations. In this case, the parent still relies on carnality and the need for the ‘poison container’.

De Mause points out that anxious adults used children as sacrificial poison containers to ensure commercial and other successes. Child sacrifice was a means of appeasing the gods, a practice that began in pagan times and continues into the present day:

Typical was Carthage, where a large cemetery has been discovered called The Tophet filled with over 20,000 urns deposited there between 400 and 200 B.C. The urns contained bones of children sacrificed by their parents, who often would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a favor–for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port. Some urns contain the bones of stillborn babies along with the bones of two-year-olds, indicating that if the promised child was not born alive, an older child had also to be killed to satisfy the promise. The sacrifice was accompanied by a music, wild dancing and riotous orgy, and was probably accompanied by the ritual rape of virgin girls, as it was with the Incans. Plutarch told how the priests would “cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan [while] the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums…” Sacrifice, rape and genital mutilation of young girls continues to take place today in the Andean mountains, particularly to ward off the guilt coming after successful cocaine deliveries. These ceremonies, from antiquity to today, resemble closely the satanic rituals made familiar recently in the newspapers, using the infliction of rape, sexual mutilation and other horrors in order to visit upon child victims elements of the traumas of the satanists’ own childhood.

Furthermore:

That child sacrifice was carried out mainly by the rich in each of these early societies confirms my theory that it is a guilt-reducing technique. Whenever new ventures were begun, children would be sacrificed. Whenever a new building or bridge was built, a child would be buried within it as a “foundation sacrifice.” Children still play at capturing a child and making it part of the bridge in “London Bridge’s Falling Down.” Children’s bodies were particularly useful in curing disease. Whatever one’s physical ills, a child could be used to “absorb” the poison that was responsible. When, for instance, one wanted to be cured of leprosy, one was supposed to kill a child and wash one’s body in its blood. When one wanted to find out if a house whose previous occupants had died of plague was still infected or not, one rented some children to live in it for several weeks to see if they died–rather like the use of canaries in mines to detect poisonous gas. When one was impotent, depressed or had venereal disease, doctors prescribed having intercourse with a child. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, men who were brought into Old Bailey for having raped young girls were let go because “they believed that they were curing themselves of venereal disease.” Raping virgins was particularly effective for impotence and depression; as one medical book put it, “Breaking a maiden’s seal is one of the best antidotes for one’s ills. Cudgeling her unceasingly, until she swoons away, is a might remedy for man’s depression. It cures all impotence.” And, of course, whenever a parent had a disease, they always had their children handy to absorb the poison. Thus British doctors in the nineteenth century regularly found when visiting men who had venereal disease that their children also had the same disease–on their mouths, anuses or genitals.

De Mause sees the advancement of women as the way out of this situation. He theorises that the better women are able to mother, the better off families — and societies — are. And the way for them to become better mothers is by coming to grips with their past — especially the traumas:

The crucial relationship in this evolution is the mother-daughter relationship. If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas, and history is frozen. For instance, although China was ahead of the West in most ways during the pre-Christian era, it became “frozen” and fell far behind the West in evolutionary social and technological change after it adopted the practice of footbinding girls. Similarly, the clitoridectomy of girls in Moslem societies has inhibited their social development for centuries, since it likewise puts a brake on the ability of the next generation of mothers to make progress in caring for their children.

However, there is more complexity to this than meets the eye, because we have all been conditioned not only by our family influences, but those which are cultural and historical as well. More on this tomorrow.

Meanwhile, let this serve as a message that we should not be regressing to the past, as Christian complementarians and their Muslim counterparts would have us do, but to move forward in God’s grace to make use of all the precious gifts He has given us and our offspring. If there is one thing in this life we really should do ‘for the children’, this is it.

Tomorrow: De Mause’s six childrearing modes

Carnality: Quotes throughout history on the treatment of children and women

March 19, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: children, Christianity, history, John Calvin, John Wesley, Lloyd de Mause, Martin Luther, Tony Blair, women | Leave a comment

This post is for adults only.

It is also not recommended for those of a sensitive nature.

What follows is the beginning of a historical study into the treatment of children and women from ancient times until the 20th century.

Lloyd deMause (pronouced ‘de-Moss’) is an American social thinker who specialises in psychohistory — uncovering the whys and wherefores of our behaviour over millenia.

De Mause leaves no society or civilisation unturned in his book, The Origins of War in Child Abuse. Although it focusses on children, you will also read men’s thoughts on women.

Be prepared for a shock.

I shall go into deMause’s ‘psychohistory’ — as he calls it — in another post. For now, here is a set of historical quotes and citations from the beginning of recorded history on men’s relationship with women and children.

I shall be censoring as appropriate for my audience and excluding the worst descriptions. Emphases are mine. Chapter sources are given at the end.

Ancient Egypt

“The family in Egypt was matriarchal. The most important person in the family was not the father, but the mother. The Egyptian wife was called the ‘Ruler of the House.’” (Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder, 1974, p. 438)

When babies cried a lot because they were starving, they were given beer, wine, liquor or even opium to quiet them; as one Egyptian papyrus tells parents about opium for infants: “It acts at once!”¹¹¹

In many areas of the world, beginning in early Egypt and continuing to modern European nations, the head was painfully molded to reshape it by putting another board on the forehead so as to squash the head into the angle formed by the boards.¹¹⁵ ( E. J. Dingwall, Artificial Cranial Deformation. London: J. Bale & Sons, 1931; Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 62.)

The Ancient Western World

Xenophon reports that the women and children were “separated from the men’s quarters by a bolted door” ³ where the men “dined and entertained male guests,” especially the young boys they used in sexual intercourse in preference to their wives.

Herodotus could admit that “a boy is not seen by his father before he is five years old, but lives with the women.”⁴

Herodotus tells how during wars soldiers “no sooner got possession of a town than they chose out all the best favored boys and made them eunuchs,” this simply repeated the regular castration and then anal raping of little boys in their own societies.¹⁵⁰

Often first-born babies were routinely sacrificed to the avenging goddess. Hippocrates said that Greeks often experienced “convulsions, fears, terrors and delusions” and physicians were expected to treat the possessions and hallucinations of their dissociated personalities.¹⁴

Often women would become so possessed by their Killer Mother alters that, as Euripides describes them during Dionysian rituals, “Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers clawed calves to pieces with bare hands, snatched children from their homes” and killed them.¹⁸

Hilarion to his wife: “If it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl, cast it out.”¹⁹

Poseidippos stated, “Even a rich man always exposes a daughter.”

Children playing in dung heaps, rivers and cess trenches would find hundreds of dead babies, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend” (Euripides).²⁴

Quintilian said, “To put one’s own children to death is at times the noblest of deeds.”³⁰

Martialis: “How pitiful, to be the owner of thirty girls and thirty boys and have only one [male member].”⁴⁶

Petronius depicts men raping a seven-year-old girl, with women happily clapping in a long line around the bed.⁴⁸

“It was not uncommon, since Greek girls married very early, for them to play with their dolls up to the time of their marriage.”⁵⁶ (Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 24.)

Plutarch said boys should be taught about being raped to “put up with it; not as a pleasure, but as a duty.”⁶²

Plutarch and others wrote essays on what was the best kind of person a father should give his son over for raping.

Plutarch wrote: “Genuine love has no connections whatsoever with the women’s quarters.”⁸⁵

Plutarch reports that “if a woman left the house in daylight she had to be chaperoned” to avoid rape.¹⁰³

Homer’s word for “wife” damar, means “broken into submission.”

Ovid wrote in his Art of Love: “Love is a kind of war”

Ovid describes how children were often terrorized by saying they would at night be eaten by witches, strigae.¹²²

Hipponax put it, “There are only two happy days in man’s life with a woman: The day he marries her and the day he buries her.”⁹⁷

Men say they split their relationship with women into three parts: “We keep prostitutes for pleasure, slave concubines for the daily care of our bodies, and wives for the bearing of legitimate children.”¹⁰⁰ (Sue Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, p. 268)

Solon passed a law decreeing that “a man should consort with his wife not less than three times a month—not for pleasure surely, but as cities renew their agreements from time to time.¹⁰²

Women rarely learned to read, since “He who teaches letters to his wife is giving poison to a snake.”¹⁰⁶ (Jack Holland, Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice. Philadelphia: Running Press, 2006, p. 21)

Juvenal’s plays portray the fears of all men in early states, concluding that “A wife is a tyrant…Cruelty is natural to women: they torment their husbands, whip the housekeeper, and enjoy having slaves flogged almost to death…their sexual lusts are disgusting.”¹⁰⁷

Tacitus said, “At birth our children are handed over to some silly little Greek serving girl—but more often they were sent out and not seen for years.”¹⁰⁸

Philo wrote: “It is right that parents should rebuke their children, beat them, disgrace them and imprison them…If they still rebel, the law permits that they even be punished with death.”¹¹⁷

Seneca described the public floggings of children in Sparta, where it was considered patriotic to beat children to death in public squares.

In Athens, over 800 portrayals have survived of Greek heroes stabbing and clubbing Amazons to death.”¹³⁴

If a young woman should simply speak to someone who was not approved by her father, that was enough of a sin for Constantine, the first Christian emperor, to decree a penalty of “death by having molten lead poured down her throat.”¹⁵

Ancient India

[T]he Mahabharata says, “Let the man of thirty years wed a ten-year-old wife, or let the man of twenty-one get one seven years old.”⁵⁷

All kinds of rationalizations were given early marriage, as when Indian mothers married off their daughters at age seven because otherwise “the men of the family” might rape her “if she was left home alone for an hour.”⁵⁹ (Lloyd deMause, “The Universality of Incest,” p. 136, 142-5.)

one Indian proverb has it, “For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousins nor father.”⁶⁰

Early Doctors of the Church

Tertullian told Romans, “Although you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants, it so happens that no laws are evaded with more impunity.”²⁶

Women, said Tertullian, were “irrational, more prone to lust than men, and at every turn waiting to seduce men,” so husbands had to beat them all the time to keep them from sinning.⁵

Everyone agreed girls should be fed less than boys; as Jerome put it, ‘Let her meals always leave her hungry.’”³

John Chrysostom maintained, “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.”⁸

John Chrysostom tells believers to “constantly think on death, speak of it all the time, visit tombs and attend to dying people, because nothing is so edifying as watching impious people die.”¹⁸⁵

Augustine put it, “If the infant is left to do what he wants, there is no crime it will not plunge into.”¹¹

The Aztecs

“The trinity of war, sacrifice and cannibalism made up a combined religious service…the Aztec state existed solely to produce sacrificial victims.”¹⁴⁸ (Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979, p. 195)

Aztec armies would even fight “Flower Wars” where they would split into smaller groups and kill their own fellow soldiers in order to feed the goddess.¹⁵⁴

Christians during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Teaching girls in schools was not allowed, Aelred said (1170), because the teacher might be tempted to show them affection.

Peter Damian said in the 11th century that sex with boys in monasteries usually “rages like a bloodthirsty beast,” yet only the boys and not the priests were punished.¹⁵⁸

When their children returned from the wet-nurse, mothers in the Renaissance followed the prescriptions of friars like Dominici [St Dominic] to avoid “hugging and kissing them” so they won’t be “sensual,” and instead “scare them with a dozen bogies [bogeymen],” to make them more fearful.²⁶

Giraldus Cambrensis relates that the English sold great numbers of their children to the Irish as slaves as late as the 12th century.⁸⁰

[Bernard] of Siena said fathers regularly “pimped” their own sons for money, and mothers colluded in the sexual use of their boys, giving them a separate bedroom on the ground floor so rapists could more easily use him sexually.¹³⁷

[Bernard] of Siena could still complain about fathers who “make pimps” of their own sons, saying boys were so likely to be raped in the streets that “a boy can’t even pass nearby without having a sodomite on his tail” and urging mothers to “send your girls out instead…This is less evil.”¹⁵³

As Henry Suso [Heinrich Seuse] put it: “Suffering quells my anger [and] makes me no part of the world.”¹⁷⁵

Medieval clerics themselves said most Christians suffered from acedia, “a disgust of the heart, an enormous loathing of yourself, your soul is torn to pieces, sad and embittered.”¹⁶⁶ Doctors during the medieval period said that most of their emotionally ill patients were either “melancholic” or “manic.”¹⁶⁷

Even by the 16th century, a priest admitted that “the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them.”⁵⁰

Jean Bodin spoke of “the husband’s power over the wife as the source and origin of every human society.”⁶⁷

The Reformers

Luther may have been one of the first fathers to spend time with and to teach his children, but because his mother had thrashed him “until his blood flowed” he also beat his own children, and his teaching goal was mainly to show them from the Bible how sinful their every act was.⁴⁷

Luther claimed his wife Kate only existed as a housewife and mother, saying, “Take women from their housewifery and they are good for nothing.”⁴⁸

John Calvin decreed: “Those children who violate parental authority are monsters. Therefore the Lord commands all those who are disobedient to their parents to be put to death.”¹⁴

Colonial America

If the parents’ regular beating of their children still did not result in obedience, the child should be “put to death [if they] curse or smite their father or mother,” according for instance to a 1646 Massachusetts law.⁹³

Thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticists

One [mother] is praised by Locke because she was “forced to whip her little daughter at first coming home from Nurse, eight times successively…before she could master her Stubbornness.“⁶⁶

Rousseau, who became famous for saying that mothers should nurse their children, sent all five of his own children to foundling homes. He also declared that “woman is made specially to please man and to be subjugated.”¹⁹

Talleyrand wasn’t that unusual in stating that he “had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother.”²²

Most parents agreed with the French musician and mathematician Vandermonde in 1756 who admitted, “One blushes to think of loving one’s children.”29

As Kant declared, wars are needed because “prolonged peace favors effeminacy.”⁴⁰

[Giacomo] Leopardi said his mother “experienced a deep happiness when she saw the death of one of her infants approaching.”³

Patriarchal fathers considered their children from their earliest years as theirs to beat, as with this British father:

“A gentleman was playing with his child of a year old, who began to cry. He ordered silence; the child did not obey; the father then began to whip it, but this terrified the child and increased its cries. The father thought the child would be ruined unless it was made to yield, and renewed his chastisement with increased severity. On undressing it, a pin was discovered sticking into its back.”³⁶

(Albertine Adrienne Necker, Progressive Education, Commencing with the Infant. Boston: W. D. Ticknor, 1835, p. 180)

Doctors well into the nineteenth century thought having sexual intercourse with three-year-old girls was a good idea because it was “instructive to familiarize them with carnal matters…”⁹¹

The belief that “one could cure venereal disease” by means of sexual intercourse with children”⁹⁶ was of course one of the main underlying motivations for the frequency of paternal abuse, in addition to the need of fathers to prove their masculinity.

Non-conformist Christians

[A]s John Wesley put it, “Never, on any account, give a child anything that it cries for…If you give a child what he cries for, you pay him for crying.”⁹¹

20th century parents

When in 1908 incest was finally made a criminal offense in England, it was considered a minor felony, rarely prosecuted.⁸³

Even when a British study in 1991 found 45 percent of girls and 30 percent of boys admitting to remembering having been sexually abused as children (the actual rates being much higher due to underreporting and repression), British doctors surveyed at that time said they thought the sexual abuse rate was probably “less than one percent.”⁷⁸

Sexual abuse of little children is still routine in the rest of the world, starting with Asian maternal masturbation of little children from India to Japan.⁸⁰

[Prior to the Great War] Germans feared women would “take over men” and “oversexed wives would threaten her husband’s life with her insatiable erotic demands.’⁵² Females were depicted in art and cinema as vampires devouring helpless men.⁵³ “On the eve of the 20th century, the image of the New Woman was widespread…university-educated and sexually independent, she engendered intense hostility and fear as she seemed to challenge male supremacy and turn the world upside down.”⁵⁴

The origin of [John F] Kennedy’s need to prove his masculinity was his early child abuse. His mother had battered him as a child with coat hangers and belts, his father smashed his childrens’ heads against walls, so that his resulting fears of impotence made him fill the White House during evenings with sexual partners to demonstrate how hyper-masculine he was.¹⁰¹

Lyndon Johnson had an alcoholic father who whipped him with a razor strap and an abandoning, overcontrolling, disrespectful mother who sometimes “walked around the house pretending I was dead.”¹¹⁰ His mother was described as “tough, stern, unyielding, obstinate, domineering.”¹¹¹ He kept running away from home because he felt “smothered … oscillating between grandiosity and gloom and always questioning his worth.”¹¹² Like Kennedy, he had to have many sexual affairs to prove his masculinity.¹¹³

John McCain described his parents as beating him so hard that he often passed out as he held his breath during the beatings. He reports they punished him for holding his breath and passing out by filling the bathtub with ice cold water and throwing him in while unconscious, fully clothed.¹²⁹He says “this went on for some time until I was finally ‘cured.’ Whenever I worked myself into a tiny rage, my mother shouted to my father, ‘Get the water!’ Moments later I would find myself thrashing, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, in a tub of icy-cold water.”¹³⁰

The advance in the Soviet Union from abandonment of children in street gangs and “round-the-clock boarding schools” to actual family care of children began to take place in the 1970s,¹²⁸ resulting in a switch in parenting from traditional “hardening” childrearing like that experienced by Joseph Stalin—who was “kicked and tried to be killed”—to that of Gorbachev—who was treated with respect and was remembered as being “very joyful” as a child.¹²⁹

Tony Blair recently admitted on television that he hit his one-year-old baby “to discipline him,” explaining that “I had to hit him, because he could not talk.”³⁷

A recent survey of 652 Palestinian undergraduates asking if they recalled sexual abuse showed 18.6 percent said they had been used sexually by a family member, 36. 2 percent by a relative and 45.6 percent by a stranger.¹⁴⁷ … In many Islamic areas 90 percent of the women surveyed say they have genitally mutilated all of their daughters.¹⁵¹

For further reading:

Chapter 8: Infanticide, Child Rape and War in Early States (quotes and footnotes for Ancient Egypt, Ancient Western World, first Tertullian quote in Early Doctors of the Church and The Aztecs)

Chapter 9: Bipolar Christianity: How Torturing “Sinful” Children Produced Holy Wars (quotes and footnotes for Constantine in Ancient Western World, Early Doctors of the Church, Christians during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, The Reformers, Colonial America, Thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticists for the Locke quote, Non-conformist Christians)

Chapter 10: Patriarchal Families and National Wars (quotes and footnotes for The Reformers’ Luther quotes, Christians during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for the Jean Bodin quote, Thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticists for citations other than Locke’s, 20th Century Parents)

Chapter 11: Global Wars to Restore US Masculinity (quotes for 20th Century Parents — footnote sources are brief, as they are included in de Mause’s books listed at the end)

Tomorrow: More on the global history of the abuse of children and women

Christian child abuse: more works-based carnality

March 14, 2012 in Baptist, Evangelical, Protestant | Tags: Baptist, children, Christianity, church, Evangelical, Protestant, Semi-Pelagianism, toxic churches, United States | 15 comments

Since I was a child I have never understood the (mainly) American penchant for non-mainline Protestants to beat their children to a pulp from infancy.

This is another reason why I do not advocate pietistic and holiness movements and why I started this series exploring the background to these groups. Yes, some are said to be gentler than others, however, even some Amish and Mennonite communities consider extreme corporal punishment to be necessary for the godly raising of children.

A brief background

In the 1970s, whilst America was looking at post-Dr Spock ways of parenting with patience, the new Christian Right advocated the more traditional method of ‘beatings will stop when morale improves’.

During that time, James Dobson, a Nazarene (a Wesleyan-derived holiness church), started Focus on the Family. From what I can remember through his newspaper interviews, he advocated breaking a young child’s will but not his spirit. I believe it was he who said that you must whip your child with an implement, having tried it on yourself first to see if it would hurt — a fallacy if ever there was one. As children grew, the size of the implement would increase in order to inflict more pain.

I wondered what would happen between a parent who had a black-and-white view of the world and a creative or analytical child. What would happen with an adolescent who was turning out to be more intelligent and articulate than the parent? I concluded that, according to Dobson’s model, the child would need to be beaten into submission.

In the fundamentalist worldview, any opposition to the parent — God’s familial representative — is sinful, ‘rebellious’ and counter-productive to a ‘godly’ home life.

If it doesn’t make sense to you, count yourself fortunate.

The same line of thinking extends to Christian homes for troubled girls and boys, some — like Hephzibah House — operated by Baptist organisations. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Other advocates of this type of abuse in God’s name were — and are — associated with Dominionism which began in the 1970s as a fringe movement and has now morphed into various groups and churches which mostly agree on the necessity to have a home worthy of God, perfect obedience and an unquestioning mind. Some leaders are pastors, others are laypeople — especially couples. In the 1990s, Gary and Anne-Marie Ezzo wrote books and course materials on biblically-based parenting. Over the past decade, Michael and Debi Pearl have been popular in ultra-conservative congregations. To provide more of a structured paradigm for the dominionist model as it relates to the home, pseudo-Calvinists involved in Vision Forum have been at the forefront of the homeschooling movement over the past several years. There are also pseudo-cultish leaders who are promoting the dominionist agenda and a formulaic way to make sure one’s home is favoured by the Lord. I’ll go into that much more next week.

For now, however, consider that we are now into our third generation — at least — of conservative Protestants who are supporters of primitive methods seen to bring about increased godliness and Christian domination. The necessary rationale and mindset revolve around the Old Testament, with the Gospels and Jesus Christ taking second place. The doctrines of grace which are essential to Lutheranism and Calvinism have been displaced by the drive for holiness and sanctity.

Balanced = lukewarm

There is a certain mindset which is in place for the extreme fundamentalist. They separate from the rest of us — Catholics and mainline Protestants — because we aren’t on fire enough for the Lord. We take more measured approaches to faith and home life. The extreme denominations see that as being lukewarm and damned.

Here is an illuminating quote featured recently at Commandments of Men in ‘Balance, Extremes and Swinging Pendulums’ (emphases in bold mine):

All three are concepts which turn into crutches for religious addicts – particularly those in the halfway house phase of the journey.

I fear that a lot of people may have misunderstood the point or context of “balance” that Cindy Kunsman brought up in her review of Courageous…

“In real life, these formulaic practices tend to degrade into extremes of legalism which compete with balanced Christian living over time. As Vyckie Garrison notes, because the father-centered ideology redefines balance as sinful mediocrity and compromise to be resisted at all costs under most all circumstances, her family “did NOT want to be balanced.” This is a core symptom of dysfunction found in families affected by addiction, a pattern of behavior that Vision Forum teaches as God’s ordained plan for godly living.”

Under Much Grace develops this further:

… in dysfunctional households, family members learn that extremes are normal, and when they start to live in balance, it feels wrong. They associate their lives and have learned to experience life through extremes of despair and ecstatic joy, so the balance of everyday living doesn’t feel much like living. They have to chase a high, and this makes sense if they’ve spent a lot of time coping with tragedy and events that left them in despair. They learn to hate that place of balance, the zone where balance places most events in life as the dynamically weave around the midline between extremes.

In extreme religious groups which tends to attract people who subconsciously wish to avoid their pain, not knowing that it even exists in many cases, that zone of balance and emotional health gets redefined. Just as dysfunctional adults redefine balance in relationships as deadness and extremes of continual extreme passion and disdain as intimacy (actually the enemies of true intimacy), religious groups tend to redefine balance in religious life as conformity and lack of commitment to God.

They learn to experience the world through a framework that prefers extremes and controversy, or rather through conspiracies and extreme themes of apocalypse and triumph. People mistake balanced Christian living as lack of devotion and lack of intimacy with God. Some use gender motivated “culture wars” to play out their unresolved and displaced emotions. Some use the chase of religious highs or the attainment of perfect piety as another way of displacing their internal struggle.

Please note that last sentence about piety!

And this introduction into the desired imbalance starts as soon as a child is born.

Extreme punishment is ‘cleansing’

The Revd Ronald E Williams, Pastor of Believers Baptist Church in Winona Lake, Indiana, and director of the Hepzibah House for ‘troubled teens’ (mostly girls) says in ‘The Correction and Salvation of Children’ that not beating your offspring into submission will consign them to hellfire. As others do, he uses verses from Proverbs to support his methods.

I’m going to map his perspective on a chronological timeline:

When should a parent start using the rod of correction on a child that the Lord has brought into the family? … A child very quickly demonstrates his fallen, depraved nature and reveals himself to be a selfish little beast in manifold ways. As soon as the child begins to express his own self-will (and this occurs early in life) that child needs to receive correction. My wife and I have a general goal of making sure that each of our children has his will broken by the time he reaches the age of one year. To do this, a child must receive correction when he is a small infant. Every parent recognizes that this self-will begins early as he has witnessed his child stiffen his back and boldly demonstrate his rebellion and self-will even though he has been fed, diapered, and cared for in every other physical way.

On what occasions should a child be corrected? Whenever a child directly disobeys authority or shows disrespect and rebellion toward authority, that child should receive correction. Lesser infractions of course would receive lesser forms of correction with the rod being reserved for the more serious infractions.

It’s a cleansing ritual (this is scripturally impossible, by the way, because we cannot purify another’s soul):

The first part or the procedure of correction is highlighted by “Thou shalt beat him with the rod.” The one who does the beating, in other words, is the one who saves this child in a spiritual sense! Here is a very mysterious promise to a parent in the Scriptures, that consistent, Godly, disciplined correction of the child with the rod of correction will in some mysterious sense be instrumental in that child’s spiritual salvation from sin and death …

The beating spoken of in this passage is done often and consistently so that the child recognizes he will always pay a price that he does not want to pay for rebellion against his authority. Such a child who is Biblically trained and corrected will be far more likely to respond to the spiritual concepts of sin and salvation when he reaches the age of understanding. A vital principle for a parent to grasp in this business of child correction is that our children will leave our house to obey their heavenly Father in exactly the same way as they have obeyed their earthly father.

You can understand now why many on the Christian Right think that God or Jesus will give them a whipping if they sin.

Now, note:

Obviously, by the grace of God, there are exceptions to this general rule. By the mercy of God, the Lord has often reached down and saved a rebellious youngster who has left the home of parents who never corrected him in a Godly fashion. It must be remembered that he was saved by an all-wise, merciful, and loving heavenly Father who regenerated his heart even though his earthly parents were unfaithful in the area of correction.

That is the only biblical passage in the piece. We are saved by God’s grace, not parental or filial beatings!

Yet more on the cleansing ritual aspect:

A child may in fact be bruised by a session of difficult correction. In fact, the Lord has already anticipated this objection and has discussed it briefly in the Scriptures. “The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly” (Proverbs 20:30) …

God makes the point that if a child is bruised during one of these sessions of correction that a parent should not despair but realize that the blueness of that wound cleanses away the evil heart of rebellion and willful stubbornness that reside in that depraved little body. I must hasten to add that no parent should deliberately seek to bruise his child nor should that be the goal of Biblical correction. I simply must agree with the Lord and declare that if a bruise does occur, God knows about it and will use it to cleanse the guilty heart of that erring child.

Also:

To put it another way, the one who does not Biblically beat his child, in a loving and consistent way, in a very real sense predisposes that child for hell and even has a direct part in sending him there! This truth is precisely why the Lord says you “hate your child” if you do not chasten him betimes (Proverbs 13:24).

And:

Although a hand may have to be used in an emergency session of correction, this is not what the Lord had in mind. Your hand cannot do an effective job of correcting since you will inflict about as much pain on your hand as you will on the child’s buttock. Your hand should represent love and affection, not correction. The Lord prefers this inanimate object called the rod.

This will be alarming to those of us not in this mindset:

Many parents in using the rod of correction on their child do so with an obvious lack of vigor and often stop short of the child’s will being completely broken. Manifestation of this error is illustrated in countless homes as a child gets up from his session of correction still spouting rebellious words and giving willful looks at his discouraged parent. The parent has no one to blame but himself for this problem since he did not completely break the will of the child during the session of correction. A child who is still willing to resist the authority of his parent after having received the rod of correction is still in need of more of that same rod.

Both my wife and I have often remarked that it is good that one of our children was not our firstborn. This particular child who came along later in our family was extremely willful and rebellious toward our authority and would often require sessions of correction lasting from one to two hours in length before the will would finally be broken! Had this child been our first, we may well have been tempted to despair of the grace of God.

In the first part of the article, he advocates that even young adults — especially girls — be punished in this way.

As long as you have a child under your authority and your home where you can directly supervise and correct him, there still is hope that you may turn that child from his wicked ways and break his will. You may still teach him to submit to authority in his life …

A good illustration of this hope is found in the case of a mother who called me from a distant state about her troubled teenage daughter … I explained to the mother that we did not have room to receive the girl at the time because our beds were filled. However, I mentioned that I could give her a possible answer for her predicament. I also said, “But I doubt that you will follow through.” The mother, hearing that there might be a solution to her crisis, desperately implored, “Yes, I will take your counsel. What is your solution?” I then proceeded to explain that the mother should get a stick that would not break and get after that daughter until the daughter asked for peace in their relationship …

Three weeks later, I received a phone call from this same mother. I had forgotten who she was and was reminded of her identity only when she reminded me of the lock and chain she had purchased to secure her daughter. I remembered who she was at that point since that was a unique method of restraining the girl. I asked, “Well, what has happened since our last conversation?” The mother replied that she had taken my advice to secure a large stick that would not break, and to quote the mother, “I wore off her behind!” I chuckled at the mother’s response and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the story … The mother then said, “And it has lasted for three weeks! But I think she needs it again this week.”

Note how the mother’s attempt to amend her daughter’s behaviour translated into a carnal desire to repeat the experience. Not unlike Christian Domestic Discipline with its ‘maintenance’ sessions: ‘Honey, I’ve saved your soul for the Lord and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it!’

You can read more about Williams’s Hephzibah House here — not for the faint-hearted or sensitive, by any means.

Reformed Baptist minister Voddie Baucham promotes ‘first-time obedience’, which relies heavily on corporal punishment to break a child’s will. Baucham also believes that a child’s innate shyness is ‘selfishness’ and must be beaten out of him. He insists on being addressed correctly by toddlers after church. Carnal? This man is how many times the size of a small child? Why would he feel threatened by their shyness or social inadequacies?

I’ll go into more of his perspectives next week, however, these parenting methods raise several questions, as Under More Grace shows:

I wholeheartedly agree that letting children (or encouraging children) to engage in rude, disrespectful behavior as a toddler encourages “rank disobedience” later in life. Yet how appropriate is it for an adult to put a small child into a situation wherein the adult expects the child to behave like a rational adult, capable of demonstrating the emotional control of an adult? I think that reasonable tears of fear/hiding one’s face in shy behavior demonstrates an appropriate response under certain circumstances, and the intolerable sticking out one’s tongue are two very separate issues …

Fear is not a sin in a two year old, and fear can sometimes manifest as anger or as shyness. Even adults run to the Rock of our Salvation and hide in the clefts as the adult and valiant warrior Psalmist often did. We trust under the feathers of God and find solace in His shield and buckler when we are afraid, even crying out to our Heavenly Father. Why would this similar behavior be inappropriate for a two year old? …

I am also confused about what Baucham argues here regarding the apparent the virtues of a two year old, wondering how a totally depraved creature who has not yet come to faith in Christ with understanding and credulity can also be filled with the Spirit as evidenced by desirable behavior as a manifestation of willful choice. Does Dr. Baucham believe that good behavior always indicates the manifestation of the indwelling Holy Spirit? Can’t an unbeliever who has been conditioned with behavioral consistency and techniques of “child training” manifest good behavior, or can’t good behavior be feigned apart from the work of the Spirit? Cannot and do not unbelievers, consummate examples of “the good person,” raise respectful, polite and obedient children? How does one differentiate this “deceitful feigning” of good behavior from the miraculous manifestation of the indwelling Holy Spirit, all prior to the child’s mature and willful faith in Christ with understanding of the atonement?

This carnality under the guise of ‘godly discipline’ can be fatal.

Notional pearls of wisdom can lead to prison

Michael and Debi Pearl — an unassuming couple if ever there was one — have (amazingly) made their living in recent years by advocating that parents use a length of plumbing line to beat their children, starting in infancy. It’s cheap and convenient, they say, because you can have them located easily all around the house and on your person.

In November 2011, America’s ABC News reported on three deaths that resulted:

In May, the 11-year-old daughter of Larry and Carri Williams of Sedro-Woolley, Wash., died after they allegedly used Pearl’s methodology, according to a reported The New York Times. The parents were charged with homicide by abuse Sept. 29 and have pled not guilty.

Hana, who with her brother had been adopted from Ethiopia, died from hyperthermia and malnutrition and was found face-down in her back yard, according to the report.

Police said Hana had often been whipped and was forced by her parents to sleep in the barn and to shower outside with a hose. They say that her parents had used a 15-inch plastic tube that is recommended by Pearl to discipline children.

You can read Hana’s horrifying saga here in the Skagit County Sherriff’s Office report.

Christian Domestic Discipline — when life imitates art?

March 8, 2012 in Evangelical, Protestant | Tags: children, Christianity, Evangelical, Protestant, women | 8 comments

This post is for adults only. It’s not meant to be titillating and addresses a serious issue, although casual readers might laugh. For those who are offended, of a sensitive nature or who do not wish to read about Satan’s influence in Christianity, please skip this one.

There is a website by the name Christian Domestic Discipline, which you can search for if interested. Its margins contain New Testament verses from Paul’s epistles.

A close reading will show that the site is most likely a hoax. The syntax and some of the language appear to be British. (Why am I not surprised? In 2010, a spoof blog which carried my site on its blogroll appeared during the Edinburgh Festival. I have no idea if the two were linked as part of a comedy act playing there, but the ‘Baptist pastor’ from a plausibly named but nonexistent town in England was so theologically disjointed that I had to call it out after a few weeks. The author(s) kept it going for a few more months until the ‘pastor’s wife’ wrote the last post saying that her husband was being silly. I haven’t checked to see if it still exists.)

Back to the Christian Domestic Discipline site. Its apparent hoax value and the absurdity of the idea have not prevented a group of Christian women from opening a forum on this topic saying that the husband is the head of the home and must, when necessary, correct and instruct his wife through the use of corporal punishment. They say that this shows the man is a romantic and a true hero. Please read it for yourselves; they specifically request that copying and pasting not be done. The website is private outside of the home page (no, I won’t be registering).

Please be wary of these sites and of this heinous practice. There is no biblical evidence — despite what CDD advocates say — that a wife should be physically chastened or emotionally abused. Remember the sanctity of marriage — Holy Matrimony. Our marriages are supposed to mimic the holy bond between Christ and His bride the Church.

What follows are excerpts from ‘Domestic Discipline’ from The Marriage Bed:

Domestic Discipline, or DD, is a lifestyle which is quietly being adopted by a growing number of Christian couples. We have studied DD for a number of years – read books and web sites, talked to couples who practice (or practiced) it, and “lurked” on several “Christian Domestic Discipline” e-mail lists. We must acknowledge that some who have adopted this life style have found at least temporary benefit from it, but what is taught is at odds with the Word of God, and we believe it to be a distortion of what God intended headship and submission to be.

Let’s start with the basic premises of DD. There are some variations, but these seem to be the main beliefs:

The husband is in authority over his household and has the right/responsibility to discipline his entire household, including the wife …

Discipline is seen as a practical expression of love, a proactive way of helping a wife to grow and mature; motivating her to re-align her priorities so that she will not end up in mediocrity.

Discipline is expressed in loss of privileges, spanking, corner time, and writing appropriate sentences multiple times. DDers may include prayer, godly examples, and encouragement in their list of ways to discipline.

…

Those who practice it, extol DD because:

they believe it to be in obedience to God’s Word.

they see it as a part of God’s plan for protection of women, and the exercise of authority over her.

they see it as a way of motivating a woman to change/grow.

it helps women to not seek control or inappropriate leadership, and teaches submission.

it makes peace in the home, children will not see their parents fighting as the father has ultimate authority.

it specifies limits of physical discipline, so that there will be no physical abuse.

To some of us, especially Europeans, this will seem bizarre. However, before I continue with The Marriage Bed‘s article, let’s segue to a first-hand account from a commenter on a Salon article about the topic. Opinion was divided as to whether the CDD site was real or a hoax, however, bethanyb (page 5 of the comments) wrote in to say:

I use to be one

I can’t exactly say this was consensual. No, in fact, it wasn’t in any way consensual. But, I had a husband of 16 years who believed it was perfectly normal & “right” to discipline me when he believed I was out of line.

I use to be influenced by the desire to please others. I wanted to be “right with God and the leaders in the Church.” I wanted to be a good disciple, which included accepting discipline from authority. After years of feeling scared of what would happen to me if I didn’t do everything the way HE wanted it done, of trying to listen and adhere to the men who were leading our family in righteousness, of saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong moment to or with the wrong people, I found myself in a deep dark tunnel with no light and no escape. I lost my desire to carry on. I had children to love and raise, but no sense of self to do the work. I realized I had lost my identity.

It was a year-long process to get out of my marriage alive, but I did. (He now denies that he ever threatened my life, even though he spent 2.5 years in prison for his behavior.) I had to let my children go for a time period, but they were all restored to me in time. I now have my sense of self identity restored and wonder how in the world I EVER let anyone take me down this path where I had lost myself. But, in writing this response, I realize it was due to my innate desire to please God, to do what is right, and to have a happy marriage and family that I gave all I could give.

The idea that a man/husband should discipline his wife is certainly one to which many good-intentioned women will fall victim, but in so doing, they will, I promise you, lose all sense of self. In the long run, this will destroy their strength and dignity if they don’t put a stop to it and just say no.

The idea of CDD is insidiously clever for insidiously ugly men.

Now back to the views from The Marriage Bed:

Lori:
DDers rest their case very heavily on arguments that explain the authority/submission structure of the home. They stress the need for the husband and wife to take their roles in obedience to God’s Word. So far, so good, but then they make a rather large intellectual leap in giving the husband the responsibility of “motivating” his wife to mature and grow through the use of domestic discipline. There are often strong implications that if you are truly submitted you will see DD as relevant and biblical, while those who reject DD are somehow being rebellious, or are immature in their understanding of submission and authority.

Though I thoroughly agree with the structure of authority and submission in the home, I am concerned with including the physical discipline of adults in the structure of a godly marriage, the minimization of the wife’s adult abilities, and the level of dishonesty in the explanation of DD beliefs.

Adult discipline:

I understand that God sees discipline as a good thing, but this does not mean that He validates every form of discipline. I can find no statement in scripture where God tells, or allows, husbands to physically discipline their wives (odd, because He doesn’t seem to have forgotten to tell parents to discipline their children). I also find no reference to Christ physically disciplining His disciples or followers (the Christ/church and husband/wife analogy). I do see that God uses hard circumstance to build righteousness in us (the “chastisement” of Hebrew 12:5-11), but it seems clear to me that any reference to physical discipline has to do with young children (including v.10 that speaks of fathers disciplining us for a short time (childhood) and, of course, Proverbs 13:24). If physical discipline is only for children the whole DD philosophy falls apart, so this is a significant battleground for the DDers. I think their arguments lack significant scriptural support, including the fact that a lot of the discipline scriptures are either not gender specific, or speak of the discipline of men (Proverbs 10:13b).

Additional problems:

Another serious problem with the DD philosophy is that if women need this kind of discipline, how do teens, singles and widows get what they need? The extension of this philosophy gets frightening pretty quick. Why would God meet this “need” in marriage and leave the rest without the “help” that they need? Or maybe fathers should discipline their girls until they are married, and singles/widows should be disciplined by the elders? Yikes!

Or perhaps we should discipline our children so that as adults they are capable of walking with the Lord, following the lead and direction of the Spirit?

Does it work long term?:

I’ve talked to a few men who got “burned out” on DD after a while. Their wife was “not behaving better” or “seemed to enjoy being spanked.” Some men report their wife seems more like a child to them, or that regularly spanking her “was tearing me up.”

Daily DD:

Some DDers practice what are called “maintenance sessions.” These sessions, usually done daily, consist of the wife listing all the rules she has broken, and the husband meting out what he considers appropriate disciple. Some DDers advocate that every maintenance session end with a spanking, even if no violations are reported by the wife.

The Marriage Bed contributors who have looked at various CDD sites say that there are pornographic pictures on them. So, could this be one of the reasons that Christian men testify on blogs to their porn addictions? One wonders.

The Marriage Bed posits that the name CDD gives a ‘godly’ excuse to couples with particular fetishes, that somehow a man can become a better Christian and a woman a more submissive wife who, as bethanyb said above, is pleasing to God. If so, CDD practitioners show a very confused line of thinking.

However, The Marriage Bed also says:

DD can also look good to a woman who wants to be free from having to make decisions, or taking responsibility in life. All responsibility falls on the husband and the wife is relegated to child status. If she does not live up to her responsibility she gets a spanking, and that’s the end of it. There is little effort or motivation to grow into a mature woman of God.

Many couples have grown tired of the kind of marriage our society advocates, finding it incomplete and empty. On the surface DD may seem to offer a better way of living as man and wife. DD does advocate headship and submission, both of which are biblical concepts, and there are those who say DD has improved their marriage. Upon close examination it’s become obvious to us that DD does not live up to the claims made for it, especially in the long term. Of far greater concern is that we see DD as contrary to what the Bible teaches, and counterproductive to developing the kinds of lives and marriages God has called us to have.

It’s very carnal. It should set off alarm bells.

I would also caution against the use of distorted language for sustained abuse. ‘Discipline’ does not necessarily have to be physical; it implies structure and order. A ‘spanking’ involves a short, brisk slapping on the bottom by hand, yet a ‘spanking’ page on the CDD site apparently gives instructions on how to thrash one’s wife with a belt and leave no marks. You will also find that many Christian books on parenting talk endlessly about ‘spanking’ yet discourage a few slaps given by hand and say you must use belts, switches, dowels, rods and, worst of all, plumbing lines. Those are not implements with which to ‘spank’ — those are implements for whipping and flogging.

Therefore, call it what it is. If you thrash your wife (heaven forbid) or child (ill advised — is your pet better treated?), call it a thrashing. Or a whipping. But it is not a ‘spanking’.

CDD is diabolical. It is a carnal power play. It’s assault and abuse — both of which are illegal.

Pastor Reb Bradley on ‘formulaic parenting’ and ‘relationship’

February 24, 2012 in Evangelical, Protestant, school | Tags: children, Christianity, Evangelical, faith, Protestant, school, women | Leave a comment

If you’ve missed been past two posts — here and here — on Pastor Reb Bradley’s article on homeschooling ‘Solving the Crisis in Homeschooling: Exposing the 7 Major Blindspots of Homeschoolers’, I hope that you will have time to read it in full.

In this concluding part, he discusses ‘formulaic parenting’ and ‘relationship’. This also concerns the way husbands treat wives.

We seem to have a growing trend in conservative — not necessarily orthodox — churches with men objectifying not only children but also women. Some of these men are new to the faith, others are returning from a sojourn away from the Church and others have been lifetime believers steeped in outward holiness. Some laymen’s groups are church book clubs where the latest in family and ‘godly’ advice are dutifully read and digested. The erroneous notion of ‘federal headship’ — relatively recent — is gaining currency among men who, despite their muscular physiques, feel bewildered and displaced in 21st century society. The idea that they command their families like ‘high priests of the home’, the way a fundamentalist Muslim does, has some appeal. At least there is one realm which these men can control in any way they see fit. When ‘Christian’ books and videos reinforce these notions, men can hide behind the word ‘godly’ and say, ‘Honey, I’m only making our home more acceptable to the Lord. Now, just do what I tell you and we won’t have any problems.’

In the final part of his article, Bradley warns us about objectifying family members. Emphases mine below, except in the heading and italicised words.

7. Formulaic parenting breaks down relationship

An over-dependence on authority and control, along with an over-reliance upon sheltering are often part of a “formulaic” approach to parenting. We, as homeschool parents, are committed to achieving results with our children so we look for and rely upon formulas and self-working principles to insure our success. One of the reasons we go to homeschooling conventions and read numerous books is to learn the guaranteed “how to’s” and steps from the successful veterans. Our desire for results with our family compels us to discover all the ingredients in the ultimate “family-life recipe.”

Formulas for success after all, have become the American way – impatience and love of expedience characterize our outlook on life. That is why millions of self-help books are sold every year in bookstores, both secular and Christian. By its very definition, a formula is a reliable process of producing a specified result. In life, we want the ultimate formula for weight loss, the quickest scheme to get rich, and the surefire prescription for finding true love. In the church we want the proven method for church growth, the sure techniques for evangelism, and the most effective system for raising up leaders. And with our children we want the tried and true approach for producing results. The process doesn’t need to be quick or simple, but it must be reliable, and it certainly must be biblical. To our delight, we know the Bible is full of the wisdom and promises of God. We therefore look to it for its self-working principles and promised methods.

Yes, it seems that everyone in the church these days wants to find the biblical formulas for success, but there’s a problem with trusting in formulas – we are directed, no, commanded to trust in God – not in formulas (John 14:1; Ps 37:5; 62:8). There is a monumental difference.

A formulaic perspective says, “If I am faithful to implement this principle or carry out this procedure properly, I am certain to arrive at a specific result. And If I do not do the procedure exactly right I will achieve bad results.” In this state of mind we are trusting not just in the “method,” but in our efforts to carry it out. Trust in formulas is really dependence upon ourselves. In our hearts we know this and that’s why those who feel their efforts have produced great results are tempted to take pride in their adult children – they credit themselves for doing it all right (and condescend to those who haven’t). And that’s why those unhappy with the results of their efforts feel so much like failures – they conclude they must have used the wrong approach.

Anyone who really understands the grace of the gospel knows that we cannot take personal credit for any spiritual accomplishments. We are totally God’s workmanship (Eph 2:10; Phil 2:13; 1:6) and everything good in our lives is a gift from Him (James 1:17). We can do absolutely nothing by ourselves for which we can take credit (Eph 2:8-9; Gal 6:14; Rom 4:2; 1 Cor 1:28-31; 2 Cor 11:30). Yes, when we face God on Judgment Day he will affirm us for what we have done here on Earth (1 Cor 3:6-15; Mat 25:21), but we know He is the power behind our lives (Acts 17:28), so we rightly give all glory to Him (Rom 11:36). So many of us lean toward a formulaic mentality, because our fallen natures are drawn toward self-reliance. We want to feel that by our own efforts (works) we have achieved something that will make us acceptable to God – by nature we are legalistic. (The reason that “human effort” forms the basis for all false religions of the world is, because our fallen natures strive toward “high self-esteem” through self-effort. In contrast, grace gives credit to God for all that is good.)

It is critical to understand that God wants us to trust not in principles, methods, or formulas, no matter how “biblical” they seem. God wants us to trust in HIM! As I emphasized earlier on in this series of articles, our responsibility is to obey – God’s job is to produce results (1 Cor 3:6). Our success in raising children to be lovers of God and others, is not going to be contingent upon achieving perfect sheltering or using the best Bible curriculum. It is going to be based on doing what we must as parents, but trusting God for the outcome. We absolutely mustn’t trust in our ability to intimidate and control, or in the path upon which we lead our family.

If Christians can consistently achieve seemingly spiritual results by human efforts, I ask – where is God in the equation? After studying how God dealt with Israel and how Christ conducted himself on Earth, I contend that God will not reduce Himself to being an ingredient in a formula or method … In the church is it possible that we are trying to gain spiritual results by fleshly means? Yes, biblical principles of discipline, when used by believers or unbelievers, will help develop good behavior in children, but good behavior is only skin-deep. Fruitful parenting is about affecting our children’s hearts, not just their behavior. To influence their hearts, it won’t be by our control – the heart belongs to the individual and must be touched by God.

I have observed that the best and most lasting fruit is born in families in which the gospel is genuinely believed and lived. Parents who daily depend upon God, and not their methods and self-working principles, are most likely to pass on their faith. I am convinced that the most contagious parenting is living a heartfelt faith before your children.

Children as people

There’s a problem with approaching our relationships in a formulaic fashion. Can you guess what it is?

People, as self-willed individuals, cannot be successfully subjected to methods of manipulation. Our children are people – they are not soulless animals to be trained. Neither are they chemicals in a formula, which can be processed for guaranteed results. It is critical that we realize our children are people whose hearts, as they mature, are influenced more by relationship than by external controls. In all our intensity we can sometimes treat them not as fellow humans, but as dehumanized ingredients in a cake we are baking.

If we think we have total control over how our children respond to our training, we will relate to them not so much as people, but more as animals. Dogs are behavior-driven and can be trained to respond to a stimulus exactly the same way, time after time. Children however are people and as they mature they will eventually decide if they will continue to respond as trained. If we do not understand this we will fail to develop the relationship they deserve as our children, and as our younger brothers and sisters in Christ – which, incidentally, will give us greater influence over their adolescent hearts.

My own recipe called for great amounts of parental control, daily doses of Scripture indoctrination, plenty of edifying music, modest apparel, and safe entertainment, all combined in the oversized mixing bowl of sheltering, and cooked in the oven of homeschooling. The timer was set and I knew that when they reached their 18^th birthday, “DING” the timer would go off I would have a perfect angel food kid. I was certain of it. I had yet to learn that fruitful parenting is more about people than process.

At homeschool conventions across the country I have seen in parents a tendency to treat children as non-persons. I cannot count the times I have stood at my booth in the exhibit hall and been approached by a mom or dad, accompanied by one of their older teenage children. The parents ask me about a problem they are having with one of their children, and as they talk, I realize that the child to whom they refer is the one standing there with them. It is as though these parents are oblivious that their young adult has feelings. As I look into the eyes of that embarrassed young person I often see a detached or despairing look that hints they can’t wait to get out of the home. Other parents who approach me may not have a teen present to embarrass, but they will ask me for a method to change their problem-teenager at home. In the last few years I have tried to explain to these parents that fruitful interaction is not about what they do to their young people, but who they are with them. It’s about having a real faith in God, and expressing it in a real relationship with a real person.

Breakdown of relationship

A number of years ago, it finally dawned on Bev and I that as we had focused on parenting ”methods,” our children were eventually relegated to being ingredients in a formula. We related with them as if they were “projects.” The more we focused on formulas and principles to which we would subject our children, the more they became “things.” The more they became things the less we had significant relationship. The less we had relationship the more we lost their hearts. Without their hearts the less we were able to influence them or their values. We regularly spent hours coaching and admonishing them during their teen tears, not realizing that all our brilliant lectures were falling on deaf ears. Without their hearts, the best we could do was make more rules and devise new consequences, which affected the outside, but not the inside.

I want to restate the points of this last paragraph one at a time, so you can see the progression again:

1. The more we focus on formulas and principles, the more children become “things.”

2. The more they become things the less we have significant relationship.

3. The less we have relationship the more we lose their hearts.

4. Without their hearts the less we are able to influence their values.

5. Without their hearts, the best we can do is control the outside (for a while).

Is it clear yet? I know that some of you don’t get it, because right now you are hoping I will lay out a step-by-step plan for winning your children’s hearts. Ouch! The formulaic mentality, unfortunately, is like a filter that we wear over our eyes – it is a way of viewing the Christian life that must be identified and forsaken.

Perhaps it will become clearer if I illustrate the point using the husband-wife relationship.

Let’s say that the situation involves a man and his wife. He goes off for a day to the ACME School for Husbands and returns home to put into practice all that he learns. Upon arising the first morning he pulls out a cue card, looks at his wife lying in bed and awkwardly reads, “Honey… don’t you look ….. beautiful today!” She might be flattered, and does want to believe he is sincere, but she knows that with her mask of face cream she looks awful. Besides, although his words are nice, his need to read his “heart felt” love lines smacks of insincerity, and she doesn’t trust his motives. Her hopes are up, after all, he is trying; but as the day progresses and he does one “good husband” deed after the other, it is obvious that he has merely learned some tricks for manipulating women. He cluelessly insults her cooking for the 17^th time that month, then reaches into a box and pulls out a bouquet of plastic flowers to “fix it”; when his wife confronts him after he starts his daily tirade against his mother-in-law, he suddenly stops and begins reciting a contrived script about how wonderful his mother-in-law actually is; before responding to anything his wife says he first refers to list of tips he carries in his pocket, etc.

Some women would be thrilled that their husband was at least trying, but most would prefer that he not simply act loving, but that he actually love them. She desires her husband not to act like he is listening to her, but to actually care enough to listen. A woman rightly desires a real relationship with her husband, and doesn’t want to feel like she’s another problem in his life to be dealt with. She wants him – not the cliché phrases or manipulative ploys he learned from an ACME instructor. Such a woman will not easily draw close to her husband – she may even be tempted to back away out of self-protection.

But what if a husband came home from the training and instead of trying to woo his wife, he treated her degradingly, seeking to force changes in her, ie: he threatened to take away all access to money if the house were not kept neater; he took away her car keys and cut off the phone to control how she spent her time; if she cried for any reason he would scream at her and accuse her of “classic female manipulation,” etc. My guess is that most women would have great difficulty submitting to such demeaning treatment.

A woman’s struggle with such harsh conduct is understandable, since as the Scriptures teach, a wife is to be sacrificially loved and tenderly cherished (Eph 5:25, 28-29). And she mustn’t be treated roughly (Col 3:19), but regarded with special consideration and respect (1 Pet 3:7). It is a foolish man who disregards God’s shrewd admonishments – any wife with self‑respect will be tempted to keep herself at a safe emotional distance.

In these two scenarios the husband approached his wife with a formulaic mentality. He related to her like she was a project, subjecting her to various techniques and ploys to achieve a certain result. What he really needed to do was love his wife and relate to her genuinely on the basis of that love. In the same way that a wife needs to be esteemed as a woman and fellow adult, our children, particularly our teens, need to be respected. When we relate with them like they are projects they subconsciously see it in our eyes and sense it in our manner. They respond best to genuine interaction – respectful of them, as if they were intelligent beings with thoughts and opinions worth listening to. If we relate with them as if they are projects, rather than persons, they will likely remain emotionally distant from us. Yes, we are still responsible to protect them, exercise authority over them, and groom them toward full adulthood, but they must have opportunities to share their thoughts and know they have been heard. (I will address this with more specifics in a future article.)

It all goes back to my admonition in Section 5 – it is who you are not just what you do. A formulaic mentality is chiefly concerned with doing the right thing to produce the right result. Our children need us not merely to act like Christians, but to be genuine Christians. As I look back in my own life, I see that with my first three children I was too concerned with how they were perceived by others. I saw their behavior as a reflection on me, and I wanted to look good. They, therefore, sensed in me a measure of pretentiousness – not the genuineness of faith that would have drawn them to me or to the Jesus I spoke about. My sincere concern for their character was overshadowed by my concern for my reputation. I have discovered that, like me, multitudes of parents want their children’s hearts, but live a faith that fails to completely attract them.

Influencing the heart

… If we want to influence our children’s hearts and not just their behavior, it will happen because of who we are, not what we do. We cannot simply implement loving actions in our homes – we must truly love (1 Cor 13:3). We cannot merely recite Scripture to our families – we must be those who look to the Word because it points to our wonderful Savior (John 5:39). And we especially cannot treat a spiritual activity such as prayer as a “discipline” or “principle” – it must be the natural response of dearly loved children of God pouring their hearts out to their Father in Heaven.

Turning hearts of children to parents

…

It is possible that the pure gospel of Jesus, which first led us to him, has become clouded for us. We may believe in the grace of the gospel, but we have unconsciously supplemented the finished work of Christ with our own efforts to implement our preferred formula. We may have muddied the gospel with our preoccupation with outward appearances and external controls.

It could also be that we don’t enjoy the fruit of the gospel in our families, because we have never understood the grace of the gospel at all. Either way, I pray that the eyes of our hearts be opened to see Jesus (John 12:21; 20:29). Those who see him, most easily drop those things that hamper them in their pursuit of him (Heb 12:1-3). And those who really see him find they more naturally become like him (1 John 3:2). And it is those who are genuinely like him that have the greatest impact on those around them.

Seeing Jesus

Jesus was the greatest preacher of holiness the world has ever known, yet he attracted to himself common sinners and the dregs of society. Jesus had high standards – he was the epitome of righteousness and purity, but somehow he was incredibly attractive. He exposed sin, but he accepted sinners. He hated evil, but evildoers saw in him a wealth of mercy. Jewish society was intimidated by the standards of the Pharisees, but few were drawn to their religion of avoidance, control, and form. Is it possible that when our children look at us they see more of the Pharisees in us than Jesus? Might it be that the Jesus we represent to our children is not the real Jesus at all?

…

The Savior is near you and calls you to leave behind the life of empty, lifeless religion, and come to the One who embodies God’s mercy. He is righteous – he abhors evil and despises pompous religion. He hates it exceedingly, but he loves us so much, he allowed himself be nailed to a cross, so that the wrath of God would pour down upon him instead of us. He now extends to us his scarred hands, so that we would see them and declare in our hearts, he is a wonderful Savior worth following!

Loving him isn’t about our children – it is about HIM! God intends that the side effect of loving Jesus, and enjoying the grace of the gospel, will be that all people, including our children, will be touched by the Savior in us. I pray in Jesus name that as you read these words you will experience the grace of God in a fresh and new way. Cry out for it! And may it rain down upon you with power from on high! May today be the day that you grasp the love of God and find in Him what you’ve been searching for all along.

AMEN!

I personally know only one large family whom I consider godly, healthy and ‘successful’, for lack of a better word. Both parents held graduate degrees and had met at university. The husband converted to Catholicism from a Protestant denomination. His wife had always been a devout Catholic, despite a tragic episode during her childhood. The couple had a lifelong interest and activity in local and state education, primarily at secondary and university level.

They had five children, each of whom was an individual, and developed their lives in different ways. The whole family has a very lively faith, which is still evident today. The eldest son became a priest, a daughter pursued a fast-paced consulting career, a son forged his way in photography then as a small business manager, another son became a successful businessman and another daughter became a full-time teacher after a long debilitating illness. Four attended state secondary school and one a Catholic girls’ school. All earned at least a Bachelors degree at university; the eldest son has advanced degrees from seminary. In their spare time, some of them played sports, others pursued a more intellectual path, but all trusted in the promise of Christ which, in turn, deepened their love for each other and those whose lives they touched.

Their home was elegant and orderly but always felt calm and peaceful. I don’t know how the parents managed it; each had a busy schedule, often through to late evenings. However, they showed an excellent example to their children by exhibiting a true love of Christ. The children saw that example and wanted to follow it. I can’t explain it, because whilst the couple were in the public eye and well-respected, they were self-effacing and modest people who treated each other as equals. However, they did live their faith and respected their children as people whilst giving them sound guidance and providing them with structure.

A heartfelt Christianity, deep humility and a quiet spirit helped this couple raise five talented, thinking, believing children, now in middle age, two of whom have their own families.

So, it is possible, but it takes a genuine faith in and individual relationship with God through His Son Jesus Christ.

End of series

Pastor Reb Bradley’s advice for homeschooling parents

February 23, 2012 in Evangelical, Protestant, school | Tags: children, Christianity, Evangelical, faith, God, Jesus, school | Leave a comment

Yesterday, I featured excerpts from an article by a pastor, homeschool advocate and father of six — Reb Bradley. Bradley’s article ‘Solving the Crisis in Homeschooling: Exposing the 7 Major Blindspots of Homeschoolers’ makes several excellent observations about the potentially isolating and outwardly pious distinctions of some homeschooling families.

He sees a crisis looming which has the potential for overly-controlled children to turn away from their parents, the Church and God.

Today’s post provides Bradley’s advice. Bradley would want you read his article in its entirety, as he requested on another website, to get the full import of what he is saying. I agree and would recommend it to every Christian adult — parent or not — as they examine their own family relationships.

Emphases below are mine, except for title headings and italicised words.

6. Over-reliance upon sheltering

…

I took nothing for granted and evaluated the effects of everything that had contact with my family. I got rid of the TV antennae when my older children were little and allowed them to watch only approved videos, ie: ones with no boy/girl relationships or occult powers — Popeye and Mary Poppins were therefore out. They would attend birthday parties for children from church, but I would instruct them that if the birthday boy or girl’s mother tried to show a video on my “no-watch” list, they were to go to a back bedroom and entertain themselves until the video was over. We carefully screened the music they heard and watched them cautiously when they were with friends.

My children could not play with most children in the neighborhood and were even kept away from some children in “like-minded” families. They were sheltered from secular publications, let alone any Christian books or magazines that promoted values that didn’t match our own. Youth groups or Scouting were unheard of. Santa Claus, Halloween, and Harvest parties, as well as Superheroes and Barbies, were anathema. I hardly wanted them to go into Wal-Mart or grocery stores lest they be exposed to images of immodestly dressed women …

Protecting from temptations and corrupting influences is part of raising children. Every parent shelters to one degree or another. We all set standards for diet, for relationships, for reading and entertainment. One permits the children to watch network television, but prohibits cable movie stations; another forbids network TV, but allows parent-approved videos; still another tolerates only parent-approved Christian videos; and another permits only books. All parents shelter – they just draw their lines in different places.

Protecting our children is not only a natural response of paternal love, but fulfills the commands of God. The Scriptures are clear that we are to make no provision for our flesh (Rom 13:14) and are to avoid all corrupting influences (2 Cor 6:17-7:1). It warns us that bad company corrupts good morals (1 Cor 15:33) and that those who spend too much time with bad people may learn their ways (Prov 22:24-25) and suffer for it (Prov 13:20). Just as our Father in heaven will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear (1 Cor 10:13), we rightly keep our children out of situations they will lack the moral strength to handle. Young children are weak and we are to protect the weak (1 Thes 5:12) …

Sheltering our families from bad influences is critical for their safety, but it is possible to become imbalanced and rely too heavily upon sheltering. We do this in a couple of ways.

1. We are imbalanced when sheltering from harm is the predominant expression of our parenting. Are we more concerned with protecting our kids from that which is bad or with putting into them that which is good? I want to ask that again: Are we more concerned with protecting our kids from that which is bad or with putting into them that which is good? … We must certainly protect them from harmful influences, but more than that, we must give them that which strengthens them spiritually and morally.

In my case I protected my oldest children from harm more than I invested into them health. I certainly taught my children a great deal about God and Kingdom living – we saturated them with the Word and Kingdom stories. Their lives were full of outreach and ministry, but comparatively, I was most intense about sheltering. I was continually analyzing the effects of every aspect of life, and my children never knew what thing Dad would declare off-limits next. Those parents who aren’t analyzers like me just wait for their favorite teacher to expose for them the next unseen danger to their family. In imbalanced homes parents are most passionate about protecting children from harmful influences, and the children see that passion, then come to view Christianity as mostly about “avoiding bad stuff” …

Please note that the operative word in my assessment is passion. Our children learn what’s important to us not by what we verbally emphasize, but by what they see us passionate about. It is the intensity of our reaction to potential corruption that elevates to our children our priorities. If they see a greater intensity in us for their sheltering than they do for their equipping, we shouldn’t be surprised if they come to view Christianity negatively as a “religion of avoidance.” (In fact, our intensity may actually create a mystique and raise curiosity toward that which is forbidden.) …

Yes, it is right to value and protect our children’s moral innocence, and it is natural for us to react with intensity or anger to anyone or anything that might rob them of that innocence. However, when we treat every minor issue as a threat deserving of our outrage, it is possible we are defining Christianity for our children in a negative way.

After watching multitudes of highly sheltered children grow up and chase after the very things from which their parents sought to keep them, and seeing less-sheltered children grow up and walk strong, I am more selective about which hill I want to die on. I now pick my battles more carefully. I have concluded that fruitful parenting is more about what we put into our children than what we protect them from.

2. Sheltering is a critical part of parenting, but if parents keep it their primary focus, the children will grow up ill equipped to handle the temptations in the world.

When we enter the world as infants we arrive with immune systems still in development. Because we have had no contact with germs or disease while in the womb, our bodies need to come in contact with them, so that we can develop immunities. Babies who are isolated and kept in germfree environments fail to develop sufficient resistance, so succumb more easily to diseases when they grow older and encounter them. Medical inoculations only succeed because God has designed the body with the capacity to develop antibodies against disease. A child isolated from disease may appear to be of the greatest health to his parents, but the health of the human body is only proven by how it withstands an attack. A weak constitution succumbs to every germ and virus – a strong one fights them off. Our spiritual and moral health is developed and proved in the same way.

If we isolate our kids from the world until they are adults they may appear to us to be spiritually minded and strong in character. However, it is how they ultimately engage the world that proves their spiritual resilience. This is because sheltering does not transform the human heart – it merely preserves it, temporarily. Sheltering is nothing more than keeping something flammable away from a fire ...

If we want to prepare them to thrive in the world we must take them into it and teach them how to engage it. As part of that preparation I have several recommendations:

a. Take time to teach them about God and living in His kingdom. I emphasize this particularly for dads who are careful to shelter, but rarely get around to actually instructing their children in the faith. Too many fathers are quick to forbid all TV and youth groups, but never take the time to sit down and acquaint their children with the Word and how it points us to God. Preparing children to face the world requires more than keeping them away from its corruptions – parents must put into them Truth that will draw them to God. It is those children who have found God irresistible who will be faithful to Him.

It is important at this point to emphasize that true Christianity is not merely a system of religious beliefs that can be embraced or forsaken – it is a relationship between individuals and God. Therefore, Christians are not strengthened simply by massive doses of indoctrination. Our faith is strengthened as we discover God in the Word, and as we walk with Him we find Him to be trustworthy. If we want our children to remain faithful to God we must do all we can to lead them to Him, not just to a “system of faith.”

Keep in mind that Bible instruction by itself is not some magic ingredient in a “parenting formula.” Many homeschool prodigals were heavily groomed in the Scriptures. We do best when we faithfully use the Scriptures to reveal to children the Lord himself. Remember Jesus’ words in John 5:39, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me.” It is faith in Christ that carries us – not faith in Christianity.

b. Pass on a pure faith. It has been said that faith is caught and not taught, and I would agree. As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, I have seen young married people who grew up in the public schools, but who walked in purity and close to Christ through their teen years, and are still close to their parents. What their parents gave them was not the gift of extreme sheltering, but the gift of a sincere faith in Christ. Homeschool parents must give the same gift to their children (1 Tim 1:5; 2 Tim 1:5). The problem is that we cannot give what we do not have. If we want to give our children a lasting and sincere faith in Christ, then we must first have it ourselves.

What is the faith in us that our children see? As I have sought to show in the first six points of this series of articles, the purity of our faith is degraded by our missteps in parenting:

1. If the dreams we have for our children are really about us, might not they feel undue pressure to make us a success? In other words, is the faith they see in us a self-centered one?

2. If we have regarded them as a trophy, do they feel our intensity about not making the family look bad in public? In other words, is the simplicity of our faith polluted by our pride?

3. If we have emphasized outward form to our children, might not they equate holiness with external appearances? In other words, has the grace of our relationship with Christ been slowly traded for a phariseeistic concern for externals?

4. If they hear us pronounce judgments of others, might they not learn from us self-righteousness or fear of judgment? In other words, is it possible they see in us a faith that is both shallow and proud?

5. If our homes are controlled chiefly by intimidation and fear, might not our children feel like they are inconsequential, non-persons? In other words, are we losing the very relationship with our teens we need to attract them to our Lord?

6. If we over-elevate sheltering as an ingredient in our parenting formula, is it possible our children might come to believe that Christianity is mostly about avoiding bad stuff? In other words, although our Lord never told people to shelter themselves from anything except self-righteous religious leaders, do we present an inaccurate (and unattractive) picture of him? …

c. Expose them to the world a little at a time, so that they will not be overwhelmed by its attraction when they finally face it. Just as babies raised in germfree environments more easily contract diseases, so also do Christians who have not encountered the world …

The root of lust is self-centeredness, so the more selfless and loving our children are, the less they will be impacted by lust. I therefore encourage parents to concentrate on raising children who selflessly love others. I have found that praying for those who tempt us accomplishes two things – the recipient receives prayer and we see them through the eyes of God. Those who see others from God’s perspective will tend to have compassion on them as lost souls …

d. Take them into the world on the offense, not defense. A major reason many parents choose to homeschool their children is that they are concerned about negative socialization in the classroom setting. They want control over when and how their children are faced with outside influences. When the children are confronted by the world the parents want to be there as guides. I understand this perspective, but such a view is inadequate. I want to be with my children when they encounter the world, but not merely so that they will survive it. Survival has to do with self-preservation, and is concerned with self, not others …

My 12-year-old son has been playing little league baseball every spring for the last 4 years, and I help out as an assistant coach. On occasion, when word of my son’s involvement leaks out, I will be approached by a concerned homeschool parent and questioned about the risks of such contact with unbelievers. They remind me that my son may hear bad words, vulgar jokes, and bad attitudes. Boys may even swear at him. I tell them that that is exactly what I was anticipating.

I want my son to know how to respond when unkind people express themselves (Luke 6:27-28), and I want to be with him when it happens. I want him to know he can survive quite well when others verbally abuse him, but more importantly, I want to witness it so I can coach him through it. I especially want to be there so I can help him see the world through eyes of compassion – not fear. I believe that those homeschoolers, who don’t just survive but thrive in the world, do so because they have a “kingdom” view of it. They see it as the place inhabited by the blind (2 Cor 4:4) who are potential members of God’s kingdom.

e. Cultivate a loving relationship with them, which will allow you to speak into their lives and influence their values. I will deal with this issue at length later in this series of articles, so suffice it to say that it is the key area of need I have discovered among my own and many other homeschool families. It has been my observation that in “control-oriented” homes, relationships between parents and teens are often weakest. For us to have influence over our teen’s hearts, especially when they are engaging the world, our love relationships with them must be strong …

If our children grow up motivated only by fear of consequence, they will eventually get away with what they can whenever we are not around (Eph 6:6). If we have their hearts they will seek to honor us whether we are present or not, and their hearts will remain open to our influence. I refer you to the apostle Paul who modeled this approach to leadership perfectly, “Therefore, although in Christ I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do, 9 yet I appeal to you on the basis of love…” (Phile 1:8-9a). Paul’s pattern with the churches suggests he understood that appeals to love were more powerful than commands and threats. As an apostle, he could have issued personal commands many times, yet in his letters to the churches he plead with them 25 different times to do what was right, while he personally commanded them only twice (2 Th 3:6,12).

Many intense parents mistakenly think they have their children’s hearts, and therefore do not seek to cultivate better relationships. Beverly and I were such parents. We were certain that because we shared so much affection with our children that we had their hearts. However, when we gave them instructions, it was never our children’s love for us that we appealed to, it was their fear of our authority. This meant that our first three children were far more vulnerable to outside influences than they needed to be ...

f. Help them find security in their relationship with you. When my oldest son was almost 16 we let him get his first job washing dishes at a restaurant managed by a Christian friend of ours. As diehard shelterers we wrestled with whether or not our son was ready to enter the world’s workforce. We knew we couldn’t shelter him forever, and so finally concluded that he should be old enough to send into the world two nights a week. What we didn’t realize was that he would be working with drug-using, tattooed, partiers, and our Christian friend was never scheduled to work our son’s shift …

Of course, my wife and I immediately began to evaluate whether we had made a mistake by letting him take the job. After an intense discussion we decided to coach him more carefully and let him keep his job …

I would never have guessed that his values could change so quickly or so severely. What took me over the edge was not just that he suddenly had outrageous values, but that he thought I might go along with him! It immediately became obvious that he was not ready to handle the world. To our relief, he volunteered to quit the job.

One day, several years later, I was looking back and evaluating our approach to sheltering. Something my son said shortly after he started his job kept coming back to me. When I picked him up the second night of work, he got in the car with a big smile on his face and said “They like me!” As I dwelt on that comment, it suddenly came clear to me – my son had finally met someone who liked him for who he was. Few others in his entire life had shown him much acceptance, especially not his mother and I. It is no exaggeration – in our efforts to shape and improve him, all we did was find fault with everything he did. We loved him dearly, but he constantly heard from us that what he did (who he was) wasn’t good enough. He craved our approval, but we couldn’t be pleased. Years later, I realized he had given up trying to please us when he was 14, and from then on he was just patronizing us.

The reason our son wanted to adorn himself like his work associates, was because they accepted him for who he was. He wanted to fit in with those who made him feel significant. He wanted to be like those who gave him a sense of identity. The problem wasn’t one that could be solved by extended sheltering – he could have been sheltered until he was 30 and he still would have been vulnerable. The problem was that we had sent our son into the world insecure in who he was. He went into the world with a hole in his heart that God had wanted to fill through his parents.

I have since observed that what best equips children to handle the pressures of the world is security in who they are. Whether believer or unbeliever, those young people who are least tempted to follow the crowd are those who are secure in themselves and don’t need the approval of others. The Bible calls insecurity the fear of man – it is allowing other’s opinions of us to affect our values and choices. At the very least, if we want to prepare our children to stand tall in the world we need to help them find security in their relationship with us, and more importantly, with God …

I believe that a primary reason we can over-rely on sheltering is because it is the easiest part of parenting to do. It requires no planning, little preparation, or expenditure of energy. It takes minimal immediate brainpower. We simply assess something might be harmful and say to our children, “NO.” It’s an aspect of parenting that is effortless to do, yet seems to promise an extreme impact. I don’t know if I would go so far as to call it lazy parenting, but I will say that investing into our children does take a lot more work and much more time.

Before we leave this topic, we must consider the possibility that we are drawn to an over-dependence on sheltering because it appeals to the Pharisee in us. Maintaining a righteous appearance and avoiding uncleanness characterized the most religious people of Christ’s day, and he didn’t tolerate it (Luke 7:39-47; 15:2; Mark 7:15; Mat 15:17-20). Avoiding anything that seemed to defile made them feel “holy” and it does the same for us. The more we fixate on keeping our families away from corruption the prouder we can become of our higher standards. It may even get to the place that we can’t wait for opportunities to boast or “share” with others the standards we hold, ie: an invitation for our children to watch a movie, attend a Bible club, or accept a questionable gift, etc.). Pride is a dangerous sin because it blinds us to itself – it is the filter through which we see. Spiritual pride is even more dangerous because it involves what we think is righteousness (Luke 18:11-12). May God open our eyes that we might see why we are so prone to imbalance in this area.

Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: 21 “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. 23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. Col 2:20-23

Lest this article be taken wrong, and some readers misinterpret my intentions, I want to emphasize that I am still a strong proponent of sheltering our children. My goal has been to alert parents to the problem of over‑reliance on sheltering. If you have finished this lengthy article, and are under the impression that I no longer believe in it, I would encourage you to go back and reread it.

I do wonder if this over-sheltering and outward piety has some bearing on the growing numbers of militant atheists in the United States. I know of some scoffers who were raised in small, harsh, controlling church and home environments who broke away from it as soon as they left home in their late teens. This is a natural outcome for some in an effort to break free from rules and rigidity associated with today’s extreme fundamentalism.

Although these people are somehow able to marry well and sustain healthy relationships, often they have no children. It is as if they lack enough positive experiences, parental trust and personal confidence to enable them to have a family.

This is a matter which the more conservative — not necessarily orthodox — churches should want to address. Worryingly, the issues of control over children are now progressing to wives, objectifying and diminishing them in a similar way. It’s a sure recipe for disaster. More on that tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Conclusion — Bradley on formulaic parenting and relationship

Pastor Reb Bradley on the homeschooling ‘crisis’

February 22, 2012 in Evangelical, pastor, Protestant, school | Tags: children, Christianity, Evangelical, Protestant, school, sin | 6 comments

The Revd Reb Bradley — pastor, father of six, homeschooling champion and founder of Family Ministries — has an article on his ministry site, ‘Solving the Crisis in Homeschooling: Exposing the 7 Major Blindspots of Homeschoolers’.

My thanks to Abby Kautt — a pastor‘s daughter and homeschooler — who blogged on excerpts of the article which she found on Josh Harris’s website. Bradley asked Harris’s readers to read the article in full.

Although it is a long article, it is a fascinating one, and I would recommend it not only to homeschoolers but to all adult Christians and parents. He has powerful insights, which I’ll also cover in the next two posts. This is one of the best précis of parenthood and homeschooling that you’re likely to read in a long time.

Emphases in the excerpts below are mine, except in headings and italicised words:

When my three married children were young, I was overly-confident in my approach to parenting. I was convinced that my children would grow up godly, and that they would avoid significant struggles with sin because of my parenting. I was absolutely certain that since I was training them ”in the way they should go”, and I was doing most everything I had written in my book, I would be a success as a parent. However, I had yet to discover it wasn’t all about ME and MY success. In fact, I had yet to learn that the parent who thinks it’s all about THEIR success is often contributing to their children’s struggles. (Revelation #1 – proper parenting is about the children not the parent. I’ll explain in point 1.)

As each of my three oldest children reached adulthood I was shocked to discover that they did not conform exactly to the values I had sought to give them. They had retained much of what I had given, but not everything. Instead of being perfect reflections of my training, they each turned out to be individuals who had their own values and opinions. I had wrongly thought them to be exactly like wet clay, me being the potter with total control over what they would become. I was not prepared for their individuality, nor was I ready to see them as fleshly beings. As I watched them each face off with the Lord and have their own struggles with the flesh, like I had when I was their age, my homeschool dreams crashed royally.

…

CONTRIBUTING FACTORS

1. Self-centered dreams

…

When my oldest son was 18 he developed habits of disrespectful communication and I had to ask him to leave my home for a season. (In Israel the most severe discipline for lawbreakers was execution – next to that, it was setting someone outside the camp.) Needless to say, my wife and I were devastated by the discipline we imposed. In the first month he was gone we wept each day for him. We were grieved that he was now unprotected from the junk from which we had worked so hard to shelter him, but more than that, I was heartbroken that my dreams for him and our family would no longer come true. I remember speaking the words to him – “Son, you’ve ruined my dreams.” You see, I had a dream for my family and it involved adult children who lived at home humbly under parental authority, and who would one day leave home to marry, after following my carefully orchestrated courtship process. But now, my son had gone and “messed up” my perfect dream. Nothing is wrong with dreaming of good things for your children, but the truth was, my dream for my son was mostly about me.

In hindsight, what was particularly grievous was that I was more worried about the failure of my dream of “success” than the fact that my son and I had a broken relationship. Although he did come back and was restored to us 4 months later, it still took me years to realize that I had contributed to the damaged relationship. (More on that later.)

One of the reasons parents homeschool is because they want to accomplish something good in their children. Success in homeschooling requires that academic, moral, and spiritual goals be set. It is only natural for parents to have high hopes and dreams for their children. However, when we begin to see our children as a reflection or validation of us, we become the center of our dreams, and the children become our source of significance. When that happens in our home it affects the way we relate with our children, and subtly breaks down relationship.

2. Family as an idol

We dream for results, but preoccupation with results can turn the family into a measurement of success. For those who feel successful, family becomes a badge of honor or trophy to be admired by others or God. When we allow the success of our family to determine our security or sense of wellbeing we are seeking from it something God intends us to receive from Him. I am describing idolatry. If homeschoolers are not careful, family can easily become an idol …

A great problem with idolatry is that idols require sacrifice, and we end up sacrificing relationship with our children for the idol of the family. When we elevate the image of the family, we effectively trade our children’s hearts for our reputation.

Craving a reputation for success puts great pressure on us, and then on our children – we feel quite constrained to succeed with them. If they turn out okay, then we can credit ourselves with success, but if they struggle or fail, then we may live with guilt, embarrassment, and bitterness towards them. Many homeschool parents look at the choices made by their teen and adult children and live under a cloud of failure or resentment ...

It was a rude awakening for me when I saw that even the best parenting could not exempt a person from making the wrong choice when faced with temptation. I do believe that by our influence we can greatly increase the likelihood our children will love and follow Christ, but I see nothing in Scripture that guarantees well-trained children will never succumb to temptation …

3. Emphasis on outward form

Preoccupation with results often leads to emphasis on outward form. When we are preoccupied with achieving results it is natural to admire the results others seem to have achieved with their children. We like the way the pastor’s kids sit reverently in the front pew and take notes of their father’s sermon, so we go home and begin to teach our children to sit reverently and to take notes. What we don’t know is that the pastor’s kids conduct themselves with reverence and attentiveness not because he “cleaned the outside of the cup” and simply drilled them to do so — he lived a genuine love for Jesus that was contagious, and watched as the fruit was born (Matt 23:26). Parents are destined for disappointment when they admire fruit in others and seek to emulate merely that expression of fruit in their own children. Fruit is born from the inside — not applied to the outside …

In the homeschool community I have observed that there can be a great emphasis on outward appearance, whether it is dressing for excellence, modesty, grooming, respectful manners, music style, or an attitude of sober reverence in worship. Some even take their children down a country path of humble fashions, raising food, and making bread. Nothing is wrong with any of these things, but we must be careful – we can model for our children outward changes and easily fall into molding their behavior and/or appearance, while missing their hearts. In some circles emphasis on the outward is epidemic ...

Let us not forget that Jesus came against the Pharisees for their preoccupation with what they felt were legitimate expressions of spirituality. They measured holiness by what was avoided and by what would be seen by others (Mat 6:1-2, 5, 16; 23:5-6, 23-28; John 7:24). The Pharisees were earnest in their religion, but they were preoccupied with outward expressions of holiness rather than hearts of humility and love (Micah 6:8) that would bear genuine fruit. I find it fascinating that in the gospels there is not one mention of Jesus coming against immodesty, even though among his followers were prostitutes and the like. Jesus emphasized cleaning up the inside while the Pharisees were the ones preoccupied with cleaning up the outside. We must ask ourselves: Which are we more like – Jesus or the Pharisees? Even now do we justify ourselves, insisting we emphasize cleaning up both the inside and the outside?

I know that some react strongly to these assertions, so let me emphasize that I do want my wife and daughters to adorn themselves modestly. God did address it once in the New Testament (1Tim 2:9), but we must ask ourselves, is it possible that we have elevated modesty, or other issues of outward form, higher than Jesus did? … Concurrently, let us also be careful of measuring everyone else’s enlightenment by what we have decided is modest, spiritual, or holy.

4. Tendency to judge

… It is a fair assumption that if we make preeminent for our families issues of outward appearance (such as humble fashions, modesty, and grooming) we will likely condescend to those who don’t hold to our standards. If we are proud of our children’s public etiquette and conduct, it will be easy to belittle those who don’t measure up. If we condemn everything but our preferred music style, we may avoid all those who hold to a different standard in music. Standards in these areas are subjectively derived and based largely on personal opinion, yet if we are convinced our opinion is God’s opinion, we may count those who don’t hold to them as being in error or at the very least misguided.

It is easy to miss this area of pride because we may not express our judgments “arrogantly”. We may not say something condemning like, “My goodness, I couldn’t believe it when I heard the Smiths say they were putting their oldest children into school next year! They’re sacrificing their children for convenience. Seems to me they’re either compromising or giving up. I was afraid this would happen when they began attending that new church!” Instead, we may wrap our judgments in compassionate sounding words, “I’m so grieved to hear about the Smiths’ decision. How far they have fallen — it’s so sad. We’ll pray that they see the light again! I hate it when the devil deceives God’s people!” Arrogance wrapped in compassionate tones can be especially deceiving …

It is important to note that when pride is working its work in us, we sincerely believe our personal opinions reflect God’s utmost priorities and standards. We validate ourselves since we know we keep those standards, and by the same standards others are validated or invalidated in our eyes, as well. For example, if we are self-validating, we may decide that since we have chosen to homeschool, anyone who won’t homeschool doesn’t love their children enough to sacrifice for them. If we are self-validating, it means that since we think we understand the true definition of modesty, anyone who doesn’t dress according to our standard is carnal, unenlightened, or has fallen away. A self-validating person is justified in their own eyes and in the eyes of those with whom they fellowship …

I want to suggest that this area of pride and judgment is a difficult one to identify and renounce. By its very nature, pride acts as a filter for our thinking and therefore, our perceptions. We feel self‑justified. So I pray, even at this moment, that God will open our blind eyes and bring freedom to us all. If we are able to leave a judgmental outlook behind we increase the likelihood of our children finding in us the beauty of our Savior, Jesus.

5. Over-dependence on authority and control

When we are preoccupied with outward form our focus tends to become shallow and behavior oriented. We look upon our children as if they are roses that can be trained to grow a certain direction by constant pruning and binding. Subsequently, we rely heavily upon our authority in an attempt to bring our children under our total control. We assume if we give them the Word of God, shelter them from harmful influences, discipline them consistently, and maintain high standards for their outside, that their inside will inevitably be shaped.

I recall that when I first started teaching on parenting many years ago, I actually used the illustration of training roses to describe proper rearing of children. I was mistaken to do so – not because it is an incorrect example of training, but because it is an inadequate one. To successfully train roses requires a goal, a plan, and diligence in labor. Fruitful training of children requires the same. However, the difference is that roses have no mind of their own and only grow as they are allowed. Children are people – self-determining individuals – and they ultimately choose how they will respond to parental influence.

If we think we have total control over how our children respond to our training, we will relate to them not so much as people, but more as soulless animals. Dogs are behavior-driven and can be trained to respond to a stimulus time after time, exactly the same way. Children however, are people and as they mature they will eventually decide if they will continue to respond as trained. If we fail to understand this we will be tempted to intensely control our children up into their adult years. We will hold them tightly in the mold of our choice up until the day we release them from the home, thinking that they will maintain the shape of our mold as they venture into their married lives. Sometimes as parents we give ourselves way too much credit for the power we have in our children’s lives. Such a perspective insures we will develop a dominating style of parenting that will likely damage our relationship with our children and hinder our ability to truly influence their values …

In Proverbs 22:6 we receive encouragement towards diligent training of our children, but we must remember that they are neither animals to be dominated nor mindless plants to be pruned and bound. They are self-determining individuals who are processing their upbringing and will one day have their own time of reckoning with God.

… significant family bonds are created by not by external controls and steps along a path, but are a fruit of love in a home. Our goal should chiefly be the cultivation of Christ’s love – first in our own hearts (Eph 3:17-19) and then in our families.

6. Over-reliance upon sheltering

An over-dependence on control in a family is often accompanied by an over-reliance on sheltering of children. It is not uncommon for homeschool parents to feel that since they filter whatever their children see and hear, they will control the results in their lives. That was me for many years. I remember saying to people, “I am controlling the influences in my children’s lives, so I am going to control the outcome.” I was absolutely certain that my children would be exempted from significant temptation and from developing particular bad habits because I was controlling what touched their lives …

In the last five years I have heard countless reports of highly sheltered homeschool children who grew up and abandoned their parents’ values. Some of these children were never allowed out of their parents’ sight and were not permitted to be in any kind of group setting, even with other “like-minded” kids, yet they still managed to develop an appetite for the world’s pleasures. While I’ve seen sheltered children grow up and turn away from their parents’ standards, conversely, I’ve known some Christian young people who went to public school, watched TV, attended youth groups, and dated, yet they walk in purity, have respectful, loving relationships with their parents, and now enjoy good marriages. Their parents broke the all the “rules of sheltering,” yet these kids grew up close to their families and resilient in their walks with Christ. Super-strict sheltering was obviously not the ultimate answer for them …

When protection from the world becomes the defining characteristic of Christianity, we shouldn’t be surprised if our kids grow up and forsake the lifeless “religion of avoidance” they learned from us. As I stated in the December issue, point c of section 4, that is not a faith most children are drawn to; in fact, it is one that will likely repel them …

If we isolate our kids from the world until they are adults they may appear to us to be spiritually minded and strong in character. However, it is how they ultimately engage the world that proves their spiritual resilience. This is because sheltering does not transform the human heart – it merely preserves it, temporarily. Sheltering is nothing more than keeping something flammable away from a fire.

Tomorrow’s post presents Bradley’s solutions for parents in a homeschooling context.

In the meantime, how many of us read through these excerpts thinking, ‘Yes, those were my parents’ or ‘That’s my style of parenting’?

Bradley brings out all the points which form my objections to holiness movements and pietism. Recall from my pietism posts (available on the Christianity / Apologetics page) about the appeal of appearing more holy to the outside world. What can we do? Isolate ourselves. How can we dress? Not as others. How do we live? By a strict code of rules and regulations — a manmade code of laws wrapped in a few out-of-context references to Scripture to make it credible.

As far as Protestants are concerned, we have lack of fellowship all over the map. The further one goes into pietist and holiness doctrines (e.g. Spener for the Lutherans, Wesley for the Methodists and Holiness offshoots) the greater the importance of outward ‘piety’. Calvinists also fall prey to this mode of thinking; the Puritan Board’s family section often has concerned mothers discussing the evils of Hallowe’en or denouncing children’s sleepovers even with someone from church. However, some Catholics do this, too; even today, a number of them will not fellowship with other Catholics whom they believe are less ‘holy’ in their devotions.

By doing this, are we not succumbing to manmade piety? Are we not belonging to the Church of Everything Forbidden? Where’s the Good News of Jesus Christ? Where is the freedom which He purchased for us with His blood on the Cross?

I read through the comments on Josh Harris’s website. Most supported Bradley’s article, but some readers did go on the defensive. The best comment in response to them was the last one, by Matt J:

Great article and I am slightly amused as I refer back to the section where R[e]b says “Typically, when we belittle others who don’t measure up to our standards, we will also imagine others are judging us. Consequently, we will find ourselves frequently being defensive”.

As I’ve read some of the comments from people who disagree with R[e]b, I see many of them are very defensive even though R[e]b has taken a very humble approach in addressing these sensitive issues. One old evangelist used to say “just fire into a pack of dogs and the one who is hit will howl!” I hear some ‘howling’ going on in these comments as the truth is hitting close to home!

Tomorrow: Bradley’s advice for parents who homeschool

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