Breaking a Child's Will The Evangelical family's twisted obsession with corporal punishment. [View all]

[demmiblue]

In some hands, a wooden spoon is an innocuous object, a kitchen tool for stirring and scooping. In others, it is an instrument of pain that lingers in the memory far longer than any taste could linger on the tongue. If you strike a child enough times and with enough force with a wooden spoon, it will shatter.

In October 2021, I posted a tweet asking people who had had abusive Evangelical childhoods to reach out to me for a research project that would form part of my new book, Wild Faith. Within 72 hours, 150 people reached out to me, sharing their stories on email and DM. The respondents’ ages ranged from 22 to 65; many were my age, in their early 30s. They were grateful that someone wanted to talk about what had happened to them.

I wound up designing a 12-question survey: What was your experience of corporal punishment like? What parenting books or doctrines do you recall your parents using? Do you feel childhood corporal punishment has affected you as an adult? The responses were intense and contained so much candid anguish it felt as though they would etch holes in my computer screen. I have included many in this story, with the names of my respondents changed to protect their identities.

Within many Evangelical homes, violent abuse of children is cast as a direct act of service to God, and eschewing it a grave, even mortal sin that puts children in peril of losing their eternal souls. In tens of millions of American homes, there presides a structure in which the father dominates over his wife and children with unquestioned brutality, and the wife’s limited sphere of authority over the children is used to inflict further violence.

https://www.thecut.com/article/the-evangelical-obsession-with-corporal-punishment.html