On Hitting Small(er) People

Article Table of Contents

• the message of spanking and punishments
• A quick map of what we are covering
  • Because evangelicals talk about jesus
  • a way that a big bad became a big good
  • If murder can be made good, why cannot adults hitting kids also be made good?
• the theme of entitlement/obligation and supremacy
• The Origins of Pro-slavery Christanity
• The thing that changed
• Alternatives to Needing Violence
• Evangelicalism Is Similar In Enough Ways To Colonialism
• The Origins of Pro-slavery Christianity part 2
• How Spanking Works In Evangelicalism
• The concepts of punishment & discipline is abusive
  • The softest way I can say it
  • Discipline is punishment is retribution is revenge
  • How the emotional concept of discipline escalates to physical violence
  • Discipline and Supremacy
• Common objections
• What gets unlocked if punishment and coercion are dropped
• Oops, I’ve “spanked” (abused) a child of mine in the past
• On “Sin”
• Additional Reading/Resources
• Footnotes

this has been hard for me to write, has been sitting in one draft form or another for months. Finally getting it off the ‘drafts’ list, but only reluctantly. This is far too long for even me to try to read in a single sitting, especially on my phone, so it might be too long for you to try to read on a phone, or at once, too.

I sometimes imagine that if I phrase something gently enough or the right qualifiers, I’ll somehow ‘farm’ goodwill from the imagined reader. It feels adjacent to a willingness to manipulate, though, and I don’t like that, either. I don’t wanna be manipulative. I think some of you have done bad things to others. To the degree you wish it were not that way, we can be friends! Otherwise, eh.

Some readers have perhaps never existed inside of the USA, others never outside of it. Some have had a lot of exposure to religeous influences in the USA. I speak with first-hand knowledge of being ‘raised evangelical’, and this particular blob of writing addresses themes common within that group of people. Specifically, the concept of “spanking”.

I had gotten close to publishing a shorter first draft of this, then a book that I’d long ago requested via interlibrary loan finally arrived. It has the provocative title Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. It’s very good, and caused this whole blog post to spiral into something even longer. ¹

First, book-keeping:

If you have ever hit your children and then told them they deserved it, and are today, right now, willing to defend that, i feel contempt for you and it’s hard for me to contain that, so I’m not gonna try.

If you hit kids, but then said:

I hit you because I wanted to, I was angry over something, and I hurt and scared you to regain a sense of control for myself. Bummer. I bet that was terrible for you. Was it? I’d like to do differently, I wish I hadn’t done that, and I’m doing {thing 1} and {thing 2} to make it less likely that I’ll every do that again. Just to reiterate and confirm, it’s not okay for me to hit you, shouldn’t have happened, shouldn’t ever happen again. It did, and it might, it is reasonable to me for you to be angry at me now and get angry at me if it happens again.

this post isn’t to you or about you. It’s about the people that say:

I hit you, child, and it’s because you deserved it, you called my violence down upon you, and my hitting you is evidence that I love you, and as long as you do not make a mistake again in the future, I won’t be forced to hit you again.

I feel contempt for the latter sentiment. I can work just fine with the former.

I’ll get the hard parts out on the table up front. Free-associating through some of the interconnected issues:

1. Within evangelicalism, the concept of “parents spanking children” is held up as one of the core tenants of participation with evangelicalism. Indeed, if a parent does NOT beat their child, or threaten their child with physical and sexual assault, some others in the group will shame that parent.
2. “spanking”, as I define it, is adults, usually parents, assaulting their own children for instances of the child displaying a will. If a child says “no” to a parent, that often-enough is considered grounds for assault.
3. The spanking itself is at best simple physical assault. On top of that physical assault is further emotional violence/verbal abuse. If the spanking is done on the gluteal region/butt, it is sexual assault. Additionally, because the ‘spanking’ blames the victim for the harm, all uses of ‘spanking’ have emotional and verbal abuse embedded within it.
4. ‘spanking’ is the sexualized assault of a child. ²
5. I do not even pretend to evaluate as safe the kinds of people that think adults spanking “their” kids is fine. I view this attitude as deeply problematic. To those people, my main hope is that your kids survive you, as a caretaker, as best they can, with as little damage to their sense of self as can be had in an environment such as that.

But wait there’s more: Not only is physically assaulting a child abuse, but acting like ‘punishment’ is a valid thing that an adult can appropriately do to a child is also abuse.

this is all hard for me, as it puts me on the wrong side of a lot of people. My immediate family all is full of physically abusive people. The family I was married into, ditto. Same with the extended family I was born into. And plenty of people around me in various social relationships.

All these people believe that adults hitting kids and blaming the kids for it is laudable and evidence of good-enough parenting. The emotional distance between us grows all the more. I wish it didn’t; i no longer try to pretend to feel warmly towards people who condone adults assaulting and sexually assaulting children.

So, I’m going to take a few turns at shitting on explaining themes of evangelicalism, because we all deserve it.

The mountain of victims deserve it. I am also taking issue with something that isn’t strictly evagelicalism - it’s more describable as americanism, or american-ness, or “The West”, and to show participation in these systems, among other things, one most tout/affirm the concept of ‘obedience’, and that if someone doesn’t ‘obey’, they ‘should be punished’. ³

This language is all minimizing what really happens

the message of spanking and punishments #

What’s a concise re-expression of punishment/spanking energy?

If you do something I don’t like, I or someone acting on my behalf will hurt you, torture you, coerce you into doing whatever it is I wanted you to do. And I’ll say it’s an expression of love, and i’ll hurt you even more unless you act like you believe me.

So, fuck that energy.

Critically, there are alternatives to punishment.

your only hope of existing non-abusively with the kid(s) in your life is if you and they know that you do not see “punishment” as part of your problem solving toolkit.

I have lots more on alternatives to punishment below.

I continue to be unsure how to channel my own anger over this. I am livid at Miriam and Donald Thompson, the people who contributed to my physical and emotional existance, for many reasons, and I have no intent of or desire to change that, especially while they are alive and actively claiming the rightness of adults assaulting children. The first thing my power-obsessed father bullied out of me was the right to protest his unfair treatment, the right to say ‘no’ to him. The last time he physically yanked me around (as an adult) I almost hit him, before stopping myself, and I realized how truly helpless my little child frame felt before his 6 foot 1 inch military officer bullying self. I’m not helpless before him anymore, and critically, I never have to speak to him, so physical conflict is less likely, but if he treated me today in a fraction of the way he treated me as a child, I would absolutely, without hestation or guilt, hit him, repeatedly, until he stopped aggressing against me.

They both physically, sexually, emotionally abused and neglected me, and had abundent opportunities to do better, or differently, at any moment in their lives, including within the last few months. The book Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse was published the year before I was born. I could try to extend graciousness for them not knowing better, perhaps, if that claim was plausible or used non-defensively, but they both said to me “we were doing to you what other people told us to do”. Meh. My father is also deeply misogynistic, patriarchal, but claims God told him to be that way thus it’s the way of the universe.

Not only could they have refrained from beating me as, like, a three year old, but they displayed poor decision making and head-in-the-sand isolation, when I brought these issues up as an adult. they alternated between ignoring me, or saying I was the problem, or “nothing they could say wouldn’t make me more angry” and then settled on them blocking me in whatsapp. ⁴

I’ll possibly still email them a link to this blog post. I told them both, basically, “You deserve whatever peace you think a child abuser deserves.” and “I’m honoring both of you by using the experiences you’ve both provided to me, then and now, to warn others of these exact things.”

It seems worth mentioning that the level of emotional dissociation required to beat someone else into submission is profound, and correlates with an overall inability to ever form an emotional connection. In 2024, I saw Miriam for the first time in several years, and kept being stunned by 1) the level of emotional disconnect and 2) how familiar it felt, as something I’d experienced consistently my entire life.

I never-not-once had a good-enough relationship with my parents.⁵

I am resentful of them, because there were times I wanted a hug, kindness, healthy maternal or paternal energies, and they attacked me instead. Over and over and over. But part of the harm is that as a kid, I knew what sort of attitudes were supposed to exist between healthy parents and kids, so I kept trying to pretend we had a real relationship. Once I became an adult, it eventually became obvious no relationship had ever existed, and I would never be friends with people like them. If I had my druthers, they’d never meet my kid.

They both seemed extremely offended, when, individually, I contacted them to say:

Please confirm to me that you will never hit Eden, nor make jokes about, or threats of, hitting children in her presence.

I ran into an astonishing level of evasion around this.

To make a point about the association between discipline and punishment and rules, and how punishment is really just physical assault, I said:

if I find that you have hit eden, after having heard this unambiguous statement assessing the wrongness of that act, shall I arrange a meeting between us, where I will ‘give’ you a spanking, for your “disobedience”?

For the note, this is why violence begets more violence. I despise violence, force, coercion, and yet, when dealing with someone who interacts with the world nearly exclusively through coercion and violence, one finds coercion and violence emrging from the woodwork around them. I recognize that I could perhaps act more ‘healed’ towards them and treat them as simply the confused, wayward, supremacist, aged, violence-using colonizing european-americans that they are, rather than holding onto a specific vindictiveness towards them. Alas.

I don’t think they’ll ever try to hit Eden, and if they did, the psychological damage to her would be much less than it was for me, to be hit (repeatedly, by them), so i’m not overly concerned. So much of the real harm of ‘spanking’ is that it’s one’s caretaker who is saying ‘i love you’ and hitting and humiliating you is evidence of that love.

My mom hit me many times, always saying “this is because you disobeyed me, and thus God, and the wages of sin is death, so be thankful i’m only causing you a little death, instead of a big death, to teach you to be obedient.”.

Eden knows:

Anyone who loves someone else wouldn’t want to coerce and overwhelm them. They wouldn’t hit them, and if an adult ever hits a child, that adult certainly does not love that child, probably never did, and are likely incapable of experiencing love.

So, she knows I view my father/her grandfather as dangerous, that he hits kids, and has sexually assaulted children in the past, and then lies to kids about why he does it.

She knows it’s insanely hurtful to be willingly tortured by someone else, so if for whatever reason one of my parents or anyone else decided to assault her (‘spank’ her), she would hopefully experience it as “simple” assault, and not as a perverted expression of love. She also is extremely quick to say and move and clock when she doesn’t like something, and this instinct will accomplish a lot of providing for her own safety.

The repeated, hopeless, helplessness of adults hitting kids at home over and over for any certain expression does a lot of damage, too. Eden gets to know what it’s like to exist in an environment where ‘punishment’ is a strange concept that some emotionally immature people use to coerce the people in their life they construe themselves as deserving to coerce.

All the way up until I was at least 31 or 32, I would have said I thought my parents loved me, even though I also knew hitting children was wildly inappropriate. I ‘gave them a pass’, because I wanted to believe I had a family, and it was more useful to pretend that things were good than to fully appreciate how disruptive it is to trust and intimacy to inject physical and emotional assaults, mixed with an overwhelming power dynamic. They freely withdrew warmth and affection to extinguish unwanted or unfamiliar behaviors, and would use emotional warmth/acceptance as a reward when they saw things they liked.

A quick map of what we are covering #

it’s easy for me to end up on tangents, but also I want to explain things well-enough. I suspect this particular post will end up turning into several posts.

Here’s what I want to make sure I touch on:

• reframing ‘christ suffering for sins’ to ‘self-justifying intellectual dressings for the nobility of feudal europe, which is when it was invented’. (Anselm of Canterbury “invented” the modern motive/meme of ‘substitutionary/satisfaction atonement’, which is the pivot around which all of evangelicalism turns)
• I no longer view the concept of ‘sin’ as having any validity. No more so than ‘spanking’.
• demonstrate a coherent reframe of “suffering”, transforming it from “something maybe good” to “something certainly bad and simply to be avoided”
• demonstrate that the motif of “suffering is good” is how parents dissociate from the painful experiences they are causing, directly, to their children.
• a reframe of “Jesus significance was in His death” (what evangelicals say is the central tenant of evangelicalism) to “if he mattered at all, it was because of what he did and said, OBVIOUSLY. (Yes, I am accusing Christians of having absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ)

I write in the spirit of write things now (rather than, for instance, never).

Because evangelicals talk about jesus #

Evangelicals sometimes talk about Jesus, or seem to like to do so. I too, in very certain situations, like to talk about Jesus, if and only if the other person already finds that person interesting before even showing up to the conversation. If that’s you…

a way that a big bad became a big good #

there was perhaps a time that jesus’ teachings were tightly bound to the literal concept ‘do not murder’. This particular injunction, simple enough for a child to plainly understand, is still bandied about. However, any churchy institution you or I have interacted now declares the issue “complicated”.

Churchy institutions say:

Jesus still says to not murder, and he failed to specify was that sometimes killing someone is not murder, thus not bad. play close attention while I explain…

Christianity became the state religieon of rome in 300 AD. An emperor named ‘Constantine’ did it, and that’s an easy date to pick for when the state decided to improve it’s fitness by adding the ‘religeousness, christianity’ mod.

600 or 700 years later, the fitness of the state was being constrained by ‘not enough army’. The state/church looked at the problem, and the available solutions. The church liked the support of the state so “church authorities” helped raise armies for their nobles.

Raising armies was tricky when the peasents say they can opt out for religious reasons.

The church authorities decided they would/could “pre-forgive” the peasants who were being dragged into armies and taken off to fight a war. Now there’s no barrier on killing for the ones that wanted to kill, and no barrier for not joining the army, for the ones that didn’t want to fight.

The peasants once could avoid the draft by saying “jesus says to not kill, and war is obviously killing, so i don’t have to participate in the states wars because I am also obligated to the church”.

That was, as I said, inconvenient to those trying to raise an army, so the church did them a solid and said “hey, cannon fodder, i just said magic words that i’ve decided makes it cool for you to kill on someone elses behalf, have fun in the army, bye!!!!” To “make it permissible”, they said they would not issue fines or punishments for murder anymore, and might even incentivize murder with first dibs on loot and plunder for the most murderous and such.

If murder can be made good, why cannot adults hitting kids also be made good? #

It’s that easy to go from “murder is bad” to “if it is desired by the right person (an authority, the pope or the king or the president), it isn’t murder, or if it is murder, it isn’t bad, or even if it is murder, and it is bad, it’s not as bad as not committing murder”.

Hitting is bad, we all agree, but to permit someone to utter or hold the term spanking, one accepts (sort of) the statement: “It isn’t hitting, if the right person pre-determined that you should be hit. It magically becomes ‘discipline’, ‘punishment’, a ‘spanking’, and therefore, obviously an acceptable or laudable thing.

So, this isn’t a diatribe just on the concept of “spanking”, or “adults hitting children and then convincing the child it is an act of love”.

I also contend that to assume the validity of the idea of spanking is already a disaster, because this perversion already drags behind it further perversions, usually floating around the idea called ‘discipline’ or ‘punishment’. To accept the validity of discipline or punishment, one is casting their lot in with child abusers and (literally) Nazis. It couldn’t be me.

I hold rage in me, and feel indignant, that I am going to say some of what I’m about to say. I’ve spoken on this topic with a number of people, including those who abused me when I was a child. They said “well, nothing else was working, so we had to abuse you”. I wanted to scream in their face that perhaps their obvious needful desire to assault a child ought to have been evidence enough that something was obviously already going very wrong.

The framing becomes clear as soon as you reverse some of the players:

well, if my aged parents do not instantly obey me, how will I extract future obedience from them if I do not physically, emotionally, and sexually assault them to break their will?

my wife did not give me instant and unflinching obedience, so I hit her hard a few times, until she’s I can tell by the change in tone of her crying that she no longer is resisting me, then I tell her I love her. I wouldn’t have to hit her if she didn’t make me.

Obviously we’d say “you are a domestic abusers and intimates should be kept far away from you. You’re not safe to have around vulnerable populations.”

never not once have I felt inclined to hit a child, especially my own child, and I’d like to help you find an easier way of being than your current pro-abuse stance.

There is obviously a lot to be said about how one can foster a loving and trusting relationship with a small/young person that isn’t based in violence and terrorism, but when my brain is in the mode of “writing against child abuse” I do not find it easy or pleasent to drop into a mode of answering the question of “well, if I am not going to abuse a child, how else should I engage with them?”. Another blog post will perhaps talk about that. For now, go read https://takingchildrenseriously.com/ for a primer.

the theme of entitlement/obligation and supremacy #

In the year of 2024, I’ve talked with people who have built into their sense of self the “rightness” of adults hitting children, while at the same time rejecting the possible rightness of children hitting adults.

I want to tie in to this piece themes of supremacy. I use ‘supremacy’, ‘entitlement/obligation’, ‘abuse’, and ‘emotional immaturity + exploitable power dynamic’ throughout. I believe a certain form of supremacy is in operation for adults who hit children.

If anyone “makes” it permissable to exploit a power dynamic to cause pain to someone else, it stinks for them and the person they are hurting. It’s also a bummer to these sorts of people sprinkled about society, because if it’s okay a little bit, to them, it needs to be okay in big ways, to them, and they’ll undoubtedly be complicit with some other harms, if the situation were to go just right.

Settler colonialism is obviously built on the idea that it’s okay to do a litte murder and violence somewhere, as long as the “benefits” are “worth more” than the costs.

The root attitude, one that is clearly visible over and over and over again when interacting with these people/systems, is one of entitlement and obligation.⁶

The man whou contributed to the pregnancy that led to the birth of the person we now know as “Josh” (me), his name is Donald, he is obsessed with the concept of authority.

He perceives it to benefit him today, and its a primary organizing principle for the world around him. He is military, a doctor, has an ‘advanced degree’ from the educational institution most affiliated with the southern baptists/slaveholder christianity. He’s obsessed with authority, believes it’s real, and thinks he has TONS of it. ⁷

The Origins of Pro-slavery Christanity #

Christians didn’t start purely with beating their own children. They got plenty of practice beating slaves, in fact needing to beat the slaves, to prevent the slaves from walking off or walking away or resisting the beatings.

Here’s a quote from The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black and White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia

When black men and women of their own initiative joined evangelical churches in numbers that far surpassed white evangelicals’ expectations, white evangelicals realized the irrelevance of the Old Testament model of slavery and searched for new ways to understand a master-slave relationship in which both parties belonged to the community of faithful.

I just gave the above quote without context. it comes from a book titled _. Read other quotes from it here.

It explains how slaveholders were effortful and strenuous in their re-workings of ‘theology’ to support their overt domination of the people who were slaves. As soon as the power dynamic shifted (unfavorably, to the slaveholders) they were quick with a response, to minimize the change, the loss. Evangelicals today continue that noble tradition.

Some slavers claimed that an authority external to the slaver demanded this treatment of those they enslaved.

[a god] ordered the world for slavery, I’m simply doing what he wants me to.

Ah, the Nuremberg defense.

When I found the title of this book, the first time, I instantly purchased it for my kindle and began reading it. Generally, when talking about it with christian people, I get met with a fascinating look of passive non-engagement. Like, they’ll willingly order their entire lives around this thing (christianity), they will claim it’s the most pro-freedom way of being imaginable, they’ll allocate dozens and hundreds of hours of time to the regime, and then claim they don’t have time to read a book about it.

I think it’s actually because they clearly see the book, even from the title, in the exact same way I did, and know that it is far too dangerous to read. To read it and appreciate it would end their way of life.

When I read this book, I remember saying “I don’t know if I’ll ever attend another church again”. At that point in time, holding to the premis of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, I was using the “voice” option, excitedly sharing what I was learning with others around me. I’d send this book to church people, I talked about it with a pastor, I told my friends, and I remember gaining such insight from their responses.

Some of my friends heard it, appreciated it, and have largely left the church. this book wasn’t the only reason, but the concepts inside of it did for them what it did for me.

I struggle to give my full reasoning for why this book is so powerful.

I might be code switching repeatedly throughout this writing. I’ll exlain it through the lense of ‘frame control’. Frame control is a rhetorical tactic by which someone in the conversation keeps forcing the conversation to be had through a certain frame.

I refuse to talk to you unless you use the language of {x}

is a form of frame control. I link this piece regularly: Frame Control. It’s an excellent piece written by an interesting person, I think it’s worth the read.

As part of something of an experiment/attempt to improve the state of things even as I expected it to not work, I became “pushy” with my parents, about decisions they made raising me that previously we never discussed. (Like their decisions to hit me until I gave them what they wanted, and to use other forms of emotional coercion, terrorism)

To the degree we never discussed things they proudly did to me, they kept a sense of comfort about themselves (perhaps) when thinking/interacting with me. I didn’t ever discuss what I wasn’t supposed to, because I was terrified of my father during and after I lived in his house, because he would terrorize me into compliance with whatever he wanted.

I’d learned to get safety by making him feel good about himself, and ignored the parts of how he treated me that was dehumanizing, and mostly didn’t have a relationship with him, though he liked to claim everything was good. (We have hardly spoken since I was 16 years old, I’m now 35). A few years ago, at the beginning of this little pro-slavery christianity journey I was on, when he started realizing fractures were growing, he said “I have not changed in the last few years, I have no idea why you’re pulling away.”

This ignored that I was telling him, and that the environment was littered with clues about why things had shifted. His need for plausible ignorance wasn’t a good look. But, since I wasn’t using one of “his” frames, he could claim to not understand it.

Miriam does this too. If you speak to her from outside one of her perferred frames, you will not be heard. She is not distrubed by not understanding, she’ll just let everything slide off until it lines up with her patriarchal, slave-holding christianity view of the world. It’s maddening

As I was appreciating that miriam and donald’s right to comfort didn’t equal my need to self-abandon, and because they are occasionally seeing/interacting with Eden, and because I wanted the relationship to be clarified. They claimed to love me, I claim they hated me, lets just bring it back up and see what shakes out. This post is part of that story, and it contains excerpts of conversations (spoken, text) I’ve had with them, that explains a way that some people today cling to ideas that cause incredible harm and suffering.

The thing that changed #

A lot got clearer in my mind once I had a kid, especially once she became the age at which I know my parents had already begun hitting me.

It hurts enough to witness constantly the oppression and coercion and dehumanization that is pointed towards children today. At her day care, I’ve heard adults barking orders at groups of children, being mean, being aggressive, being dissociated from the kids. I always say something like:

oof, can you hear the way that adult is speaking? that tone? That’s not appropriate. I hope you never experience someone speaking to you like that. That’s mean, and demanding. If anyone does speak to you like that, they are being mean and cruel, and if you cannot avoid a person like this, I hope you can at least find a way to be safe from them.

Alternatives to Needing Violence #

The alternative to using violence on your children is not trying to do all the same stuff without violence.

It’s to stop persuing things that justify or demand being overpowering. No appropriate goal can ever call into existance violence around itself, so if you’re willing to use violence, it’s your fault.

Here’s a list of things that will cause me to hit my kid (and any kid):

Here’s what causes others to hit kids:

• an attitude of entitlement
• expectations of obedience
• a willingness to overpower, overwhelm, coerce

Here’s what I do instead of hitting kids:

• bring mutuality and co-creation to the table

Mutuality and co-creation respect differences in power, and are incompatible with overwhelming energies.

These particular words come from The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond.

I witness verbal abuse from parents towards children constantly. To stop being abusive to someone, one needs more than a goal of ‘not being abusive’ or ‘not being controlling’ but one needs a clue at the alternative way of being. Patricia Evans in the above book talks about abusive people living in ‘power over others’ reality, while non-abusers live in a ‘power with others’ reality.

Kids, and people overall attune to the difference in energies between mutuality, co-creation, and the energies of a willingness to overwhelm, to coerce, and to extract compliance in the least painful way for the authority figure.

An extra quick shortcut to parenting without violence would be to read The Most Dangerous Superstition, and extract from it a reframe, perhaps, of your relationship with authority. I.E. read the book, update a mental model to view a belief in authority as a dangerous superstition, and proceed in your life without ever again relying on the concept of authority.

It’s not technically a parenting book, but one of the domains I see most soaked in language of entitlements and expected obligations is parenting.

Children are a deeply, oppressed class.

In part because this ironclad belief in the authority of parents’ permission/expectation to treat their children as farmable property, not so different than cattle. Cattle never had rights.

a meaningful line from Killers of the Flower Moon, during a “legal trial” about some very murderous people, was: “No one is questioning if this american killed these indians. It’s simply that the americans don’t think any murder happened. No people were killed. Animals were killed.”

The level of dissociation from the humanity in another that can be directed towards any non-self ethnic group can also be directed towards ‘outgroup’ members of the same ethnic group as that person. The part of the soul that needs to be alive to stop one of those would stop both, if it existed, and because it doesn’t, all parts of the self that would rely upon it doen’t have structure.

That root issue of ‘violence feeling right’ is entitlement.

The few times I’ve spoken to the people who gave birth to me about the violence they meted out to me, and listened to them justify their own violence against me, I can hear their words dripping with entitlement. I was labelled ‘rebellious’ since well before high school, and my parents cannot imagine that I perhaps disliked being controlled and disrespected, continuously.

Evangelicalism Is Similar In Enough Ways To Colonialism #

Evangelicals point the techniques of settler colonialism at the personalities of their own children.

When someone is entitled, they think others are obligated to give them whatever they’re entitled to.

American society is drenched with entitlement and obligation, someone acting like there is a right to coerce, and a duty to obey.

I am, broadly, addressing evangelicals.

Obviously there are people who beat their children who are not evangelicals, but there’s something particularly insideous about the beatings that evangelical parents dispense, because along with the beatings is also heavy psychological mistreatment and coercion. it’s also what I experienced, thus what I am speaking to.

Most concisely, the modern sense of entitlement and obligation, emobied by the treatment of parents towards “their” children, is firmly rooted in the sense of entitlement and obligation that european americans exhibited towards people kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, and who’s ancestors were kidnapped from Africa.

The Origins of Pro-slavery Christianity part 2 #

This book ended my ability to exist within evangelical circles: The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black And White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia

I now view existing within or parallel to evangelicalism in silence as being complicit with the kinds of supremacists that created the pro-slavery christianity described in the above book.

Here are a few highlighted sections from the above book

If the command to love one’s neighbor made Lumpkin realize in 1915 that segregation was wrong, why did so few white southerners realize that race-based slavery was wrong? By all accounts, white southerners in the nineteenth century were among the most devoted Christians in the Western world, but their faith seems only to have strengthened their determination to hold another people in bondage. This book represents my attempt to understand this staggering moral failure-to understand why the parable of the Good Samaritan fell on deaf ears for so many generations.

[…]

As long as the vast majority of slaves had “lived and died strangers to Christianity” in colonial days, keeping the occasional convert enslaved had not caused white evangelicals many scruples. When tens of thousands of people of African descent were clamoring for admission to evangelical churches following the Revolution, however, and were starting their own churches when whites were too slow or unwilling to facilitate the admission of blacks to white congregations, it became impossible for whites to maintain the illusion that religious commitment provided a meaningful distinction between them and their slaves.

[…]

He justified slavery as one of many hierarchical relationships approved by God in a 1757 sermon, The Duty of Masters to Their Servants. In what would become the most important plank of the proslavery argument, he taught that “the appointments of Providence, and the order of the world, not only admit, but require, that there should be civil distinctions among mankind; that some should rule, and some be subject; that some should be Masters, and some Servants. ⁸

This was brought into hilarious and tragic relief for me recently. I was in my early 30s before ever considering that I’d been raised by emotionally abusive people. I believed the spoken narrative, that it was ‘love’, and I’d accepted that there was no relationship between me and my parents. When my dad left the house when I was 16 to conduct colonialism in the middle east on behalf of American empire, we hardly ever spoke again.

It never struck me as odd that I had no relationship with my mother. Never once in my life did it cross my mind that I could obtain nurturance or emotional comfort from her, or a sense of attunement. It wasn’t until I started watching other adults having nice relationships with their parents that I realized something had been wrong in my own childhood.

I still couldn’t place it. I noticed having a confidence that my parents hated me, but they enjoyed having me around IF I was playing the role of ‘successful, subservient son’. If I stop playing that role, or raised any sort of issue, I’d get treated with either withdrawal and shunning, or open opposition coupled with intimidation and manipulation.

For some context setting, my parents read and embodied the ideologies of a man (of course) named James Dobson, who was a eugenicist, and taught that parents, if they suitably controlled the behaviors and thoughts of their children, could ‘raise’ them to be good members of a civil society, defined as “participating in european american settler colonialism with a certain ideological bent.”

Settler colonialists use ethnic cleansing as a primary tool for accomplishing their goals, because it works well ,obviously.

So, the kinds of people that would support population confinement and displacement and genocide, on the concept of ‘race’, make for interesting parents. I resonated with what the athor of The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir shared about his childhood experiences.

Settler colonialists use violence and coercion to get what they want. Violence is expensive and risky, so sometimes other, ‘gentler’ forms of coercion can be made effective, if the person is willing, interested in using violence. Economic coercion, for instance, might seem gentler than knocking someone’s house over with a bulldozer, but it’s all on the same spectrum.

The bulldozer shows up only if the other methods are deemed to have failed. Abusers say they usually don’t have to assault their children, but it is still all full of violence because they and their kids know that if certain compliance isn’t had, the violence emerges. I think this is a good way to ‘give’ someone ADHD, by the way. Let them stew in an environment where violence lies behind many doors, and they have influence over if the person sometimes uses that violence agains them, or not.

This is the core, fundamental dangerous attitude of all people who concede the correctness of the concept of ‘spanking’. It’s an extension of the concepts of ‘punishment’ and ‘discipline’.

How Spanking Works In Evangelicalism #

I have many notes (typed, written) floating around on why spanking is abuse. I could quote James Dobson’s books if I wanted to, but I don’t need to. Here’s how spanking works in evangelical circles, in my own words:

If your kid does something that you decide justifies you beating them, you’re not supposed to just reach out and hit them in the moment. You are supposed to ritualize it a bit. Take them somewhere else. Show them you’re calm, and doing the hitting from a place of reason and love. Shame them for a bit, then make them disrobe, or walk over to you and bend over. (Do they do this willingly, or do you force it on them? Oh, the nuances of child abuse!)

Then as you hit them, you’re not supposed to use your hand, that might cause them to flinch away from your hand in public, which would be awkward. Maybe use a spoon or a thin stick. It might not leave as many marks as something that would lacerate or bruise. Anyway, hit them until you feel better, or until you feel anything at all, and then (here’s the kicker) tell them you love them, and that god loves them and that next time if they obey you/god better, you might not beat them. Tell them that you’re hitting them because they made you hit them and that you’re hitting them for their own benefit.

I recently read a few stories the woman who considers herself my mother wrote (about me) that revolved around ‘spanking’ three year old me for the ‘sin’ of not doing exactly what she commanded me to do in a timely manner.

As her written notes go, on my third birthday, I didn’t put a train set away to her liking. So she beat me, and blamed god/me for the beating. The next time I put the train set away, I did it, through tears, in the exact way she wanted, and said “the lord gave josh obedience”, through tears. I wonder if this has anything to do with why I dislike to celebrate my own birthday, even 30+ years later.

The issue for her wasn’t that I didn’t put the train set away. the issue was I didn’t comply with her demand. She viewed her ‘authority’ over me as an extension of her fantasy of how God controls her, or how God controls a husband who controls her. Regardless, that whole chain of control is diminished if she doesn’t get the same level of control over the kids in her charge.

So, because the bible says ‘the wages of sin is death’, christians think ‘as long as I don’t kill someone, I can hurt them all I ~want~ deem necessary to ensure compliance’, and if I beat them more they’ll be more Christlike, and Sky Daddy will give them more nice things like he gives me, so I’ll threaten them all the more.

The concepts of punishment & discipline is abusive #

deep breath

This section deserves its own article, I’ll get it there.

When I talk with evangelicals today, they can tell quickly how I feel about adults assaulting children. sometimes one might backpedal and say:

yeah, that form of violence is bad, I would not endorse adults assaulting children either. Of course, adults need to discipline children sometimes.

And I note a need to quickly register my strong disagreement. Now I can send anyone a link to this page, to the above anchor heading, if I want to say:

I think a willingness to concede “punishment” as a valid thing is definitionally an endorsement for supremacy or some other abusive ideology and I dont think you wanna be a supremacist or abuse others. Can we talk about it?

The softest way I can say it #

Maybe a softer way is:

I clock something in your wording that correlates with the kinds of things people with power have said to justify the violence or neglect they point towards people with less relative power. I have found myself becoming a better advocate for the people I love when I’ve reframed and reworded some concepts. Could I tell you the story?

Maybe.

Discipline is punishment is retribution is revenge #

So lets talk about “discipline” and “punishment”. These are propagandist terms for something better called “retributive vengeance” or “retributive violence”, ‘retributive justice’, etc. Wikipedia has an entry for ‘retribution’ it’s simply ‘punishment’. It’s very little different from revenge. Again, a simple reframe of ‘spanking’ is ‘adults revenge-hitting kids’, and it is much clearer.

Retributive justice is a legal concept whereby the criminal offender receives punishment proportional or similar to the crime. As opposed to revenge, retribution—and thus retributive justice—is not personal, is directed only at wrongdoing, has inherent limits, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others, and employs procedural standards.

Retributive justice, wikipedia

So, retribution is slightly different from revenge, and we know revenge is kinda crappy. If parents were “hitting their children regularly out of a sense of revenge”, that seems suss.

Here’s the wikipedia definition of Punishment:

Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon an individual or group, meted out by an authority—in contexts ranging from child discipline to criminal law—as a deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable.

Ick ick ick. Remember, to this person who doesn’t believe authority exists, all these words just round to open defenses of abusive ideologies.

It’s all obviously devestating to have this sort of contemptuous, exploitative energy unfold in the context of a family relationship. I was constantly being punished and disciplined by my dad who picked at my every move. (Remember, doctor/military officer/pastor type person). He was nothing if not coercive and evaluative, and he felt entitled to punish me, so he did.

I survived by running an emotional insurgency against him, and parts of myself, and it makes me angry to have had all these experiences.

How the emotional concept of discipline escalates to physical violence #

It goes like this:

If I tell my child to do something, or to not do something, and they do not do it, or do it, unless I cause them pain and suffering, they will think it is acceptable to continue to disregard the injunction.

This “I have permission to cause them pain and suffering” hinges on the superstition of authority-as-a-thing, we might as well disabuse the system of both misapprehensions.

It takes a belief in authority + a belief in the concept of ‘punishment’, or ‘hurting others because you want to’, to justify making threatening statements:

If you don’t [put somthing away, do the dishes, take a shower], I will psychologically hurt you and I am willing to hit you if the psychological pressure isn’t enough.

Now, even if all the other person does is nothing, they are now in a position where you would be blaming them for the physical act of hitting them. This obviously hurts, sows great mistrust, rightfully.

So ‘discipline’ and ‘punishment’ means an adult arbitrarily increases the suffering and pain in a childs life, to try to ensure compliance later on.

Discipline and Supremacy #

Discipline and punishment are inherently supremacist. Usually when someone says “discipline”, they mean “punishment”, and “punishment” is shorthand for ‘retributive violence’. The theory (as it works in patriarchal/authoritative/supremacist families) is simple:

1. if a “bad” thing happens, someone or something is offended, completely independent of the simple effects of that thing.

If I ask you to take out the trash, and you say no, the ‘bad thing’ is that the trash is still in the trash can.

If I tell you to “stop walking ahead” and you keep walking ahead, an evil act is done, the honor of the noble (me) is offended, and retributive violence must be meted out. To evangelicals, it’s never actually about the wrong act, it’s that a presumed authority figure (a parent, sky daddy) is displeased because the subservient person has treated the authority as an equal, and like any good noble from the middle ages, it is time to hurt someone.

The real concern is that the honor of the patriarch has been offended, because the property/possession of the patriarch has presumed a state of equality with the patriarch. To fix the offended honor of the patriarch, a further harm needs to be obtained - pain must be extracted from the willful individual, to enforce the concept of supremacy: “There is a hierarchy here, and you damned well better understand where you sit.”’⁹

‘retributive justice’ (revengeful violence) is propaganda justifying all sorts of the worst parts of human behavior. It underpins war, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, child abuse.

Yes, I am condemning the violent regime of social control some call ‘the criminal justice system of the greater united states’.

For all the money wasted spent by supremacists on that system, everyone could be housed and fed and given safety and security without coercion. Even the people who find themselves working the system as the oppressor. Yes, I propose housing, food, dignity, even to the people currently complicit in perpetuating the evils of that system. even deputized slave patrollers/police deserve shelter and food, because they are sentient.

Common objections #

But Josh, if I don’t keep my children afraid of me with threats of violence, how will I force them to…

🤫

I won’t dedignify myself by considering you to be an advocate for your own children if you presume your chief role in their life is to bully and abuse them. I hope your children, for their own good, realize that they might not be under your control their entire life and they might someday be able to save themselves from you.

But Josh, it would be dangerous for my child to run into the road and get killed by a car, how will I prevent them from doing so without assaulting them?

Great question. Do you feel a sense of curiosity about how this thing could be accomplished without violence, and without threatening anyone with anything? I’ll take it seriously, because roads occupy some special place in my heart, and evangelicals use the threat of vehicular homicide to justify all sorts of control of their kids.

First, kids deserve far more access to safe roads than they’ve ever had in the USA.

In America, traffic violence is accepted by many levels of society, and children experience it from their first moments of life. Everything about the existance of a child is wrapped up in layers and layers of american car-centric supremacy.

Car seats, being stuck in car seats, at least in america. Lots of constraints around roads are experienced by children in the 96% of the world beyond the boarders of the USA, but the USA has a particularly special level of vehicular oppression. Constantly hearing cars. Seeing the cars with horrible sightlines and visibility, knowing the drivers of the vehicle cannot see the kid. Seeing light glinting and reflecting off cars, the movement of them attracting the eye. The smell of them. So much of the world being ‘parking aprons’ and parking spaces and parking lots and roads or walking between a parking space and the door of a building. walking in front of or behind a parking space. Being able to see almost nothing from inside a car seat. Motion sickness, even if the driver is good, but especially if the driver is jerky with the steering wheel or rushed/panicked on the gas and brake.

Being threatened with death every time a car is simply pointed at you, because very little space in America is properly protected by bollards (josh.works).

I’ve formally registered my objections with the concept of jaywalking, I extend this to kids, obviously. Kids, and the duty of play/playing, ought to have been preserved within American culture. Unfortunately the needs of kids and the needs of houseless people overlap too much, so spaces conducive to kids being kids have been eliminiated.

Shade in the summer, sun in the winter, comfort, quiet, water, a bathroom, a spot to lie down for a few minutes or a few hours, grass, trees, a place to sit, running water, a structure to climb on. A pile of rocks, a slide, a piece of art, a tree, a swing, some mulch and dirt.

By telling kids what they deserve, and sharing in the disappointment of the world they’re in with them, completely, makes a solid foundation for working with them to maximize their options in the dangerous world they live in.

I keep my kid safe in the road without ever blaming her for the potential violence she might experience. I tell her

in this country, most people drive very dangerously and would murder you without hesitation, though they would probably feel bad about it.

The greatest source of fear I feel for her is that in this abomination of a country, 40,000 people die every year on roads, and globablly, it’s like 1.2 million people that die, per year. This is wild! The USA went to a 20-year war over the death of 3000 people once. Since that date, around one million people in america have died on american roads from entirely preventable accidents.

It’s not that ‘individual drivers are bad’ it’s that:

building a road network entirely around supremacist ideals hurts the people they intended to hurt and people they did not intend to hurt, and literally all hope of progress is constrained by those people who accidentally or intentionally support those supremacists.

So, most of you that want to talk about roads and punishment with kids are, to me, not ready to have a real discussion about it, but I think the kid’s intuition is correct, and you could/should use your adult skills to help the roads be safer to them.

So, she is intimidated by roads, as I am also intimidated by roads. When riding her bike around, she always stops well short of intersections, waits for me to catch up, lets me pass into the intersection slightly ahead of her, once it’s deemed safe (we often work together on the timing piece) and then she crosses it quickly, finishing the intersection before I do. At least on most american roads - when the streets are quiet and safe, she’ll enjoy using them the same as anyone else does.

Another thought-stopping cliché you might hear offered about punishment or hitting kids relates to the kid reaching for something that will hurt them. All outlets could/should have covers, so there’s no issue with them exploring their favorite past-time, ‘putting things in other things’, right?

My dad, when I pressed him on assaulting me as a child, used the classic evasion “if the stove is hot and can hurt a child, who reaches for the stove, to keep them safe, I would have to punish them for reaching for a stove”.

This is the cry of a person who has no imagination. When there’s things Eden might learn regarding heat, I give her things to put in the frying pan to see how heat works. She’s watched me cook many times, seems to perfectly understand heat. I might help her hold her hand near a pan to test for how hot it is.

I might see if I can touch it for a split second to feel if it’s hot, and let her do the same. I scaffold her skills so she can learn to accomplish whatever it is she wants, with the skills and awarenesses to do so safely.

It’s ludicrously easy to navigate the world with a child without violence. It boggles my mind how invested parents are in reigning down violence and terror on their kids. I also happen to remember clearly how it felt to be terrorized by my parents, and the many ways I rejected every aspect of their need for control over me, and continue to reject every authority that meets me with an energy of “I believe I am entitled to coerce you, and you’re obligated to obey me”.

I’ve always helped kids defend themselves against this kind of energy, because it’s so familiar to me, and I’ve found in virtually all situations the kids respond reasonably, kindly, and treat me with dignity.

If you want to get along with your kids, read and internalize some messages about the fantasy of authority, then share these with your kids:

• The Most Dangerous Superstition
• The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Obligation To Obey
• The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and How to Respond
• Legal Systems Very Different from Ours

gee, josh, I’m not interested or willing to read books that might help me not abuse my child, or help me stand as an advocate for other children who are being abused by adults.

Ah. I see that you do not want to read these books.

I’m not a fan of this kind of thinking. I propose that you embrace the resistance, and then read the book(s) anyway, or at least recognize that your resistance might be rooted in something. It is possible that as you free your children from the shackles of your condemnation and control, you will do a little of the same for yourself. It might be worth it.

If you are your own child’s first abuser, and habituate them to think it is love, you are crippling them, destroying their ability to navigate the world and themselves safely, because abusive people and institutions abound, hungry for more bodies to consume.

Which kid do you think will be safer around other kids and adults?

1. The child who is occasionally humiliated and assaulted by a parent hitting them, who then tells them it is an act of love
2. The child who is told, with complete seriousness: “It is never acceptable for an adult to hit you, ever, and if anyone tries to do this to you, I hope you can evade, escape, or resist, and if you are able to communicate it to me, I’ll expend substantial resources to protect you from that person.”

And an adult who no longer hits the kid, but still controls and coerces them with emotional and verbal assaults, is only slightly better, maybe, than one who hits children. An adult who coerces and threatens a child is fundamentally unsafe. An adult who coerces and threatens another adult is fundamentally unsafe.

To the kids of parents who assaulted them:

How distressing it is to be terrorized by someone who then also convinces you that they loved you. It really causes the brain to break, and the psyche to attack itself (in some ways) and to dissociate from reality (in some ways) and to project/displace shame and anger towards oneself or others.

It’s virtually guaranteed you have something like “Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”. Please do not waste your time reading The Body Keeps the Score, instead read Pete Walker’s books Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving and The Tao of Fully Feeling.

What gets unlocked if punishment and coercion are dropped #

Parents who believe children exist to serve their ego and obey them issue admonitions to children nearly continuously. The entire tone of the relationship is dominated by the parental willingness to inflict violence. The parent is unable to “see” the child.

So, one thing that gets unlocked:

silence. Sometimes there is profound and extensive silence. If something is needed or noteworthy, parent or child will mention it. Otherwise, harmony, everyone is involved in their own thing.

interesting conversation. We have interesting conversations, regularly enough. Very reciprocal, back-and-forth.

curiosity. I express curiosity towards her, as a default, and especially when there is upset or pain. there’s never rejection of an emotion or sentiment. For instance, coercion cannot abide “no” or “don’t do that”. So, coercion cannot abide the anger that arises after that initial boundary violation. Since we have no coercion, there’s no need to suppress any emotions, it’s easy to greet all feelings warmly, and because there is no coercion, there’s a high baseline of peace and easy, confident expectation of problem-solving anything that arises.

one of the reasons I will never beat eden is I don’t view our relationship as one where I am entitled to control her behavior.

I seek her wellness, and thriving, easily, and view myself as someone who can help her accomplish and do whatever she wants to accomplish and do, because I have different skills and capacities than she does, but at no point am I entitled to simply control her simply because.

There’s genocide happening in the world, there are dangerous streets and loud engines and a coercive school system’s demands to comply, and there are limitations on schedules and people’s availability and it certainly seems like money is not infinite. All of these things are worth railing against.

When she says “I want {x}” I usually respond, truthfully, with something like “I think you have great taste. That sounds like it could be excellent.” and if it’s something we can do, we do it. Otherwise, it goes into a ‘that sounds nice and maybe we can do that/you can have that some day’ bucket.

Why punish kids for having good taste and liking to configure the world to their liking?

I will never see intentionally terrorizing her as a ‘useful tool’ to coercively extract compliance from her.

Would you believe that we have an extremely peaceful way of being, and interact with mutuality, consideration?

I am considerate towards her, and she is considerate to me. There’s obvious regard for each other in ways that people like my parents would never be able to appreciate, and I don’t think they would be able to even see it, really, even if they witnessed it, because they so willingly polute the intimate space of a relationship with coercion and violence.

no problem solving is achievable if one of the parties knows the other one will hurt them if they become suitably displeased.

Oops, I’ve “spanked” (abused) a child of mine in the past #

If you’re reading these words, and you’ve “spanked” or “punished” your kid(s), a little or a lot, what to do?

OK, so, starting point is… my goal isn’t necessarily to be gentle with your ego. A fair approach is to first attend to the experience of the victims. Lets first concede the power of language. it’s not ‘spanking’ it’s ‘hitting and then creating intellectual or moral justification’.

The impulse to hit is tightly linked to attitudes of entitlement and obligation. We’ll talk about that more, I mention it now because I believe the most efficient avenue of repair with yourself and your kid(s) would be tot find and appreciate the fullness of attitudes of entitlement.

One hits someone else when one feels deeply entitled to that person submitting to them. Talk about that with your kid(s), perhaps. Solicit their experience of your overwhelming coerciveness.

It’s worth appreciating that settler colonialism has lots of entitlements to it, as does european american supremacy culture, and it’s all sorta connected.

the repair from the myth of the “correctness of spanking” is closely linked to walking out of a supremacy culture.

The alternative to entitlement/obligation is cocreation and mutuality.

Here’s some ideas on things that might contribute to a different and non-dominatior model of interactions with ones kids:

• you will now not utter ‘spanking’ seriously again. Use ‘adults hitting children and then self-justifying’.
• if you are willing to read some books, read The Verbally Abusive Relationship but from the lense of a child experiencing verbal abuse from their parent. (virtually all physical abuse is preceeded by verbal abuse & neglect)
• read the taking children seriously website and tell any kid(s) around you that you’re reading it.

I am interested in not being complicit with people who abuse children or anyone else.

So:

Hi, [child], there were times in the past that I thought it was okay to use my size and role in your life to hurt you and scare you and control you, either with my hands or extensions of my hands, and my words and tone and emotions. I’d decided that it was appropriate for me to overpower you in in these ways, to force you to experience me as overwhelming, terrifying, hurtful.

That alone is pretty bad, but then I also further assaulted your sense of self, by trying to convince me/you that all the rage and hurt you felt about all this was wrong, because I told myself that that this mistreatment of you was loving, and that you’d brought it on yourself, rather than me creating every bit of this harmful and painful dynamic.

It is, in fact, terrible to intentionally hurt someone, for any reason, even in response to a ‘perceived wrong’. especially so when there is a power dynamic being exploited.

As a starting point, I am practicing the concept of taking children seriously, and am trying to bring mutuality and co-creation into my way of being. I cannot fully insulate us all from demands outside of us, which means we sometimes have to do things we don’t want to do, or I am sometimes unavailable to spend time with you, or we cannot have and do the things we want to have and do. however, I will no longer be making valid threats to extract compliance from you.

It might take me time to learn the new habits. Feel free to clock me when it seems like I’m heading in the direction of making a threat. I hope it doesn’t happen, and obviously these are all simply words. I recognize I destroyed precious things by inflicting pain on you.

Things might be strange around here as we adjust to this new state of affairs, I’m pleased for newness. There will undoubtedly be less/no more spanking, hitting, punishing, attacking. Clock me on it all.

On “Sin” #

Usually evangelical parents won’t say “i beat my child whenever I feel like it” they’ll say “when {child} sins, I must discipline them”.

So strange, to believe in sin, now.

There’s bad things that people do, to themselves, each other, or to non-people (concentrated agricultureal feeding operations jump to mind), and those things need to be addressed, but the concept of sin isn’t needed to fix those harms.

my kid sometimes goes to a daycare at a church/school facility. She hears the normal set of evangelical thought-stopping phrases. I was raised on these, it’s really interesting to encounter them through her brain.

She’s quite reasonable in many ways.

She picked up the phrase “God keeps us safe”. We digested that a bit, eventually ended up with

in so many ways you keep yourself safe. And people around you can help keep you safe. But in many situations, you are making big contributions to your own safety. Walking safely, catching yourself skillfully when you fall or trip, riding your bike or running skillfully. Being aware, planning ahead, especially with roads. all skillfulness and awareness is a form of safety.

It’s not “thank god for keeping Eden safe” it’s “thank Eden for keeping Eden safe”. She’s attentive with her movements, her bike, roads. She is, literally, very responsible for her own safety. I obviously stay nearby when she’s with me, I work with effort to maintain her safety too, and appreciate her own skillful management of her own domains.

another time she said “jesus fixed my sins” or something like that.

I didn’t respond much. How interesting. I think she said it before she was 3 years old.

I remember my response, clearly. I said “how interesting it is, that there some people who think sin is a real thing.”

And that keeps being my general response. “How interesting it is, that some people think sin is a real thing. I wonder what else they think is real.”

The very first concept she brought with her, related to the concept of God:

God is so big

I could hear the kids songs in her language that her church camp makes her sing. There’s a kids song all about “god is so big, so this and so that”.

I said “hm, indeed. There’s so many big things out there. [looks around] That tree, and that mountain. That cloud. so much is so big.” We talked more about it, both a big god and bigness in general.

A few days later, at her school parking lot, when a HUGE suburban pulled in next to us, Eden said, in the same way she said ‘god is so big’, ‘that car is so big’. I laughed.

I just talk about ‘the evangelical’s god’ or ‘some peoples god’ or ‘the god of certain americans’ when I’m with her. It’s pretty graceful and ele

If you’re coming at me about someone elses sin, I’m just clocking you as a perpetrator or victim (or both) of settler colonialism and the intellectual self-justifications they spun around themselves. The concept of “sin” goes hand in hand with what Pete Walker might call “Toxic Shame”.

When someone says ‘sin’, I now hear ‘i am probably trying to get you to shame yourself into a regime of social control I’m about to tell you about…’ and I get so bored, so I leave.

Additional Reading/Resources #

All of these count as parenting books, loosely. I find most parenting-specific books to be meh, and I find lots of parenting help stuff in non-parenting books.

• taking children seriously
• legal systems very different than ours, that link is the book, this link is the book online, shared on the author’s website. ¹⁰
• The Politics of Jesus (josh.works) If you want to keep the person of Jesus central in your life, and you want to move away from european american supremacy, the ideas in this book are a good place to start. If, along the way, you end up also dropping the person of Jesus from your life as a central organizing principle, this book is still a good place to start. Here’s something else I wrote about this book: Was Jesus’ ethic normative? (josh.works)
• The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity (goodreads.com) This book points to the origins of ‘paternalism’, which is the underlying intellectual support for the sense of ‘duty’ some adults feel around hitting children, and the obligation they think their kids have to receive their physical abuse without protest. It started as the ‘duty’ masters had towards their slaves to be ‘good masters’, and the obligation they felt their slaves had towards them to be ‘good slaves’. here’s some of my highlights from the book (goodreads.com)
• They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (goodreads) This book is relevant to the concept of ‘discipline’, because it’s full of accounts of white female slaveowners ‘disciplining’ the slaves around them, or showing shocking degrees of entitlement to the very personhood of someone else. That these people wouldn’t beat and abuse their own children defies reason. here’s some highlights of mine (goodreads)
• The Secret Of Our Success, Joseph Henrich (still goodreads). An amazing book. Here’s a really nice book review (slatestarcodex.com). Not technically a ‘parenting book’, but tons of useful mental models for the transmission of skills, ‘skills/knowledge toolkits’ and more.
• On Leaving Evangelicalism and Opposing it (josh.works)
• Quotes from ‘Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse’ (josh.works)

Footnotes #