books

Children deserve love, empathy, security, the enjoyment of childhood, and the freedom to develop their own identity. A parent’s task is not to shame, terrify, and mold their child into submission and silence.

In The Child’s Song: The Religious Abuse of Children (1995), Dr. Donald Capps, once Princeton Theological Seminary’s Professor of Pastoral Theology, explores 4th Century St. Augustine of Hippo’s abuse as a child, the psychological signs of abuse in the content and style of the New Testament book of Hebrews, the recurring Biblical theme of a child (Isaac, Jesus) obediently dying for the honor (piety or propitiation) of the father, and the intimation of an endangered child in the Gospels’ biography of Jesus. Click this box for a review of chapters 2-6, which offer Dr. Capp’s most profound insights.

In the heartbreaking appeal for the repressively silenced and pacified child that is For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Dr. Alice Miller summarizes two centuries of cruel child-rearing guidance (”Poisonous Pedagogy”) and the “war of annihilation against the self” that childhood abuse produced in three individuals, including -- most prominently -- Adolf Hitler. Click this box for more on Dr. Miller’s book.

“To take the child’s side unequivocally against the child’s tormentors is to regain one’s soul, and to witness in behalf of the child in others is to participate in the reclamation of their souls as well.” Dr. Donald Capps, Professor of Pastoral Theology, Princeton University

In Parenting for a Peaceful World (2010 Kindle edition), Australian psychoanalyst and psychologist Robin Grille summarizes a chilling history of two millenia of socially accepted and religiously justified child abuse in the West, its pathological impact on a child’s personality and emotional development and on society at large, and society’s painfully gradual evolution from authoritarian toward more empathetic parenting. “Much of the history of childhood in the west is a hellish tale of widespread neglect and abuse, and the further back into history we look, the more brutally we see children treated, with abusive practices institutionalized or embedded in cultural and religious rites.” (p4)

In Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment (2011), journalist Janet Heimlich explores the harm inflicted by authoritarian religious cultures. “Christians have followed a centuries-old path,” Heimlich writes, “of viewing children in a loathsome light--a path paved with ideas about sinfulness.” Heimlich documents how conservative evangelicals have sustained this skeptical, “almost fearful,” view of children, evangelicals’ avid defense of corporal punishment, and their oppressive obsession with child obedience and sinfulness. A quarter of the book explores the phenomena of religious emotional and psychological abuse and intellectual suppression through religious spurning (shaming) and terror. The last half of the book addresses sexual abuse and religiously-motivated medical neglect.

In Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (1998), Stanford anthropologist Dr. Carol Delaney offers a feminist critique of the Genesis 22 narrative of Abraham’s faithfully obedient near-sacrifice of his son and the idealization of that narrative in each of the three major monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). “Why,” Dr. Delaney asks, “must loyalty to God be proven at the expense of one’s child rather than expressed through one’s love and care for one’s family and fellows?” (p118). Noting the absence of Sarah’s knowledge or consent in the narrative, Dr. Delaney argues that its idealization played a significant role in undergirding patriarchy and society’s assumption of the father’s ultimate authority in the family.

Chapter 2 recounts St. Augustine’s lament over the severe beatings he suffered at school -- which he compared to the worst torture devices known to mankind -- his unanswered prayers for deliverance, his parents’ laughter at those prayers, and his logically tortured theological justification of that abuse. Dr. Capps also connects that abuse to the 20+ references in St. Augustine’s Confessions to the “scourgings” or “floggings” of God and to St. Augustine’s emphasis on the “stern Jehovah of the Old Testament.” Dr. Capps also explores signs of St. Augustine’s emotional neglect of his own son Adeodatus, born out of wedlock to become the innocent victim of St. Augustine’s “deep, overwhelming shame,” who yet revered his father and longed for his approval. Chapter 3 explores the dissociative endorsements of physical abuse in biographies of Billy Graham, David Wilkerson, Aimee McPherson, and James Dobson, and observes similar dissociative effects provoked by traumatic religious ideas of shame and punishment. Chapter 4 explores signs of childhood abuse and justification that permeate both the substance and the compressed, disjointed style of the Book of Hebrews. Hebrews depicts Jesus’s death as a “sacrifice,” praises Jesus’s “obedience unto death,” and honors Abraham’s faith in offering to sacrifice his son Isaac. Hebrews also pivots repeatedly between reminding the audience that they are in perilous danger of provoking God’s anger and wrath and briefer words of reassurance to the audience. Hebrews 12:5-11 equates God’s discipline with love and compares God’s discipline with parental discipline. “The sign of God’s love is not in his mercy, as Jesus taught, but in his chastisements.” Hebrews 12:10, which contrasts parental discipline as being done “for pleasure,” signals the author’s possible abuse as a child. Dr. Capps summarizes the book as follows: From passage to passage, and page to page, the profound insecurity of the author of Hebrews is apparent to the reader, at least to the reader who is not under the thrall of the abusive structure itself. Even the author’s claim that Christ’s sacrifice puts an end to the need to propitiate God offers no real comfort or relief, because for those who persist in sinful behavior, not only is Christ’s sacrifice of no avail, but the punishment will be even more severe than if Christ had made no sacrifice at all. That there is no final resolution is communicated both in the content and in the style of the letter. There is a pervasive sense of endagerment throughout, and the source and cause of such endangerment is God, the very one on whom one’s hope for ultimate rest and peace depends. (p75). Chapter 5 is entitled “Abraham and Isaac: The Sacrificial Impulse.” It critiques the Bible for perpetuating a theory of child sacrifice and Christian writers for their continuing idealization of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Chapter 6, provocatively entitled “The Child Jesus as Endangered Self,” cautiously suggests an interpretation of Jesus’s allusions to God as his personal father as a reaction to the stigma of being born out of wedlock: The desire to be another man’s son: I think this is a far more powerful and potent emotion for a child than the desire for a father whose presence is more palpable and protective, or the sense of gratitude one feels for his father’s steady dependability. And I think this is precisely what the child Jesus would feel and experience with special keenness, as he had unusually powerful and urgent grounds for wishing he was not the son of the man who impregnated his mother. This strong wish to be another man’s son is the deep inspiration for his view of God as a personal father, a father who effectively replaces human fathers in his understanding of himself as someone’s son. He would know himself as the son of Abba, and thus, as no longer illegitimate or adopted. He was the true son of Abba and thus of no other. (p114).