[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, you're welcome back to the Bridge Boys podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, I'm sitting down with Marissa Franks, Bert, and Kelsey Cramer, McGinnis.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the authors of the forthcoming book, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, which hits shelves on October, fourteenth, two thousand and twenty five.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can actually pick up a copy by clicking a link in the shown us to this episode and putting in a pre-order right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every purchase made that link actually helps support this show as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So be sure to go ahead and check that out.
[SPEAKER_00]: and pre-order your copy right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this raises some really good conversation around some of the toxic teaching that parents have had regarding how to raise children in evangelical circles.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also covers things like the rights of children, the effects of corporal punishment when it's carried out within a home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just a really fantastic book that really analyzes these topics.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was so much that came into this conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's no exaggeration to say we could have talked for literally like three or four hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially with all the things that have happened since the advanced reader copies have gone out for the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've had the passing of John MacArthur.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've had the passing just the day before did the interview of James Thompson.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so seeing now for the conversation, we tried to capture the current moment quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tried to talk about
[SPEAKER_00]: the outpouring of feelings that people have about the passing of James Thompson, the rage that people who are harmed by his teaching are just expressing right now on social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's just a lot of other things I look at the one of the runner-ups from a past season of the Bachelor of Medicine, Pruit, now has a Christian podcast with her husband, Grant Trout.
[SPEAKER_00]: where they just, again, were featuring a lot of websites and magazines for gleefully talking about how hilarious it'll be when they get to enact corporate punishment on their daughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: We reacted to clips from the past of Jack Hiles, who's mentioned in the book as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: This episode, I think, is going to bring up a lot of
[SPEAKER_00]: tough conversations, but I think necessary ones for people who are looking for healing, for people who are looking to parent better, or for experts trying to get a better grasp on the harm that's done within these systems.
[SPEAKER_00]: So definitely listen to the entire conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you're going to enjoy every single second of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something in this for everybody, but I'm going to stop talking for now and get us directly into our conversation with Marissa Franksburg and Kelsey Cramer McGinnis, enjoy the episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today I have two guests with me, Marissa and Kelsey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for joining me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for having us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, already in sync, I love it.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are more in sync than you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I bought a couch last week and I posted a picture on the internet and Marissa texted me was like, Kelsey, we have the same couch.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what happens when you write a book together.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is how in sync we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me ask that first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you feel like the book has put you guys in sync or do you think the book is a product of two people having a lot of conversations and going this should be a book?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the book brought us the idea for the book brought us together.
[SPEAKER_03]: We didn't know each other before.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I mean, in a lot of ways, it really was this idea that I think we'd both been thinking about in in different ways for a while and then just happened to meet on the internet.
[SPEAKER_03]: The internet is a terrible place in many ways, but in this way, it was wonderful.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, it was such a bright spot.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think, you know, we worked together for two years now, brainstorming, researching, sharing ideas, drafting, revising.
[SPEAKER_05]: So then I think you kind of, we come together with one voice in a lot of ways, but yeah, it was wonderful to work together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's good to hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would make for really awkward interview if that wasn't the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, we hate each other now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two years as a miserable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I were here to talk about obviously your book, Myth of Good Christian Parenting, which is a title that everybody's like, let me add that to my cart right now because it evokes a lot of feelings about a lot of different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But something happened yesterday, I have to bring up and I'd be a horrible host when I didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Since you guys, this book is not out yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is an advanced copy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And since this book has been out as an advanced copy, John MacArthur and James stops and have both passed away.
[SPEAKER_00]: One, does that have you guys scrambling to do any last minute things to the book?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it too late for that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then also like what's your take on the reaction to those things?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's a lot of feelings being shared right now that I think tie in so much with the topic of the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Marissa, if you want to kind of start with your take and then Kelsey, you can kind of give yours as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow, it is a little bit surreal to hop on social media and see the things we've been kind of in the weeds with for two years be trending and and just boom, boom, boom, like the people, the events, some of the connections.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think we knew as we've been sharing throughout this whole process on social media we we knew there would be resonance like we we heard that in the interviews and surveys we conducted we we heard the ways this was touching with some tender places pain points for people things people were thinking through and and deconstructing but when those both of those deaths happened I mean I think the
[SPEAKER_05]: Collective conversation really highlights a number of things we explore in our book as well as I've been being a lot this week.
[SPEAKER_05]: particularly with the news about jobs and his my my feet is his full of both people kind of loading him and his ministry and people celebrating his death and expressing the pain that they feel he'd directly or indirectly caused and generally speaking there's a generational gap there I mean not holy but you do see that and that is a significant thing we came up against again and again this
[SPEAKER_05]: this sense of disconnection, the sense of a strange meant, this differing experience between generations and the way they received these ideas, the way they talk about them now.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it feels very timely when we started working, we thought, this is a long overdue conversation.
[SPEAKER_05]: We kind of couldn't believe that this topic hadn't been broke yet in book form.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think that really speaks to that.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is a really timely conversation where a lot of
[SPEAKER_05]: families whose stories touch evangelicalism are experiencing this and processing this.
[SPEAKER_05]: What would you say, Kelsey?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the two deaths of John McArthur and James Dobson are a little bit jarring, both of them make appearances in, in our book, both of them have written about parenting, about concerns about the state of the American family for years.
[SPEAKER_03]: John MacArthur had a book come out.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think two years ago, maybe one year ago, a very alarmist book about the state of the American family and children.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it has been interesting to see the reaction, not surprising, the reaction.
[SPEAKER_03]: Depending on which side of the internet you're on, you get very different sides.
[SPEAKER_03]: I write for Christianity today.
[SPEAKER_03]: which means I get a really interesting look at the process of the, you know, the people who write obituaries for us have to have to walk that line really carefully.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is, man, it's a hard job.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, CT is sort of a old guard evangelical publication.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that, you know, I'm not the person writing those obituaries, but it's interesting to see how people try to negotiate and walk that line between.
[SPEAKER_03]: acknowledging the harm that both of these men have caused and the people who they've enabled over the years, the bad advice they've given.
[SPEAKER_03]: At the same time, I find myself a little bit grieved by the eagerness to kind of point out singular villains because one thing we really try to do in our book is not just zoom in on James Dobson or zoom in on one person.
[SPEAKER_03]: When we talk about Christian parenting teaching, Dobson is probably the name that looms largest, but really, especially when we're talking about millennial and gen Z, parents, they are not buying his books.
[SPEAKER_03]: His ideas are being recycled, but he's not this singular villain that now that he's gone, there's going to be this changing of the guard of ideas.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, absolutely, like, I, I like, you know, seeing people who have experienced harm feel like they can speak out about it and find others who can affirm that pain.
[SPEAKER_03]: At the same time, I, I want us to be watching because I think there's some parallels between this political moment and the political moment that James Dobson was responding to in the nineteen seventies that could very easily enable someone like that again.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know Kelsey Brample good point and it's something that I had a conversation with somebody when MacArthur passed and I was on podcast and they were asking about it and you know I'm a very
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what the word is for it, but I'm not the dance on the grave person, just in general.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just not my personality, but I think some of it is not just because I'm a really good person better than everybody, because I think there's all the reactions are appropriate to the thing that they've experienced.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be clear with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, I think more of it, honestly, as I sat with why I felt that way about MacArthur, is for the reason you just said, which is like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, everyone's got the ding-dong, the witch's data approach to this, but the belief system is still there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's already taken many different forms.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my biggest fear, I don't know if you two have seen this, obviously it's too soon with the option to see how it's going to play out, but like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Historically, when a figure passes away, it lionizes them in a way that they never were before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like, I'm sure grace to you sold a lot of MacArthur books in the week that he passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so like for me, it's almost like they might be more powerful now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It might be more insidious now.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not that one figure to point to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that do am I off base there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you feel that as well?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like how do you think that manifests itself typically?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, one thing that does worry me is that we are seeing a resurgence in interest in more authoritarian parenting methods right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're seeing people speak more publicly about corporal punishment and the need for discipline.
[SPEAKER_03]: And my fear is that the kind of celebration over dobsons death is going to polarize people even more.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the folks who are already primed to look, say, hey, actually
[SPEAKER_03]: This gentle parenting of the past ten years is creating so many problems.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe this job, maybe this jobs and guy had something good to offer.
[SPEAKER_03]: And people turn around and go, you know, look for deer to discipline or the strong world child or those kinds of books.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the appetite is there.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's something we've been watching and been saying, I think we're about to see a resurgence of this for about a year now.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that that so far has been the case.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think so too.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, you see FAF O parenting.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, headlines, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Kind of tongue-in-cheek like we just need to get tough and stop coddling and things like and the pendulum kind of chronically swings back and forth with with parenting trends, but
[SPEAKER_05]: in Christian parenting circles.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think it's worth noting that I don't know if it ever really swung toward potential parenting.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, obedience and corporal punishment are key ingredients across resources.
[SPEAKER_05]: And like you noted, these do circulate because many of these people built what we call Christian parenting empires.
[SPEAKER_05]: So it ties into broader collective and community beliefs, particularly because many of them built their brand with family life teaching.
[SPEAKER_05]: We do mark dobson as the beginning of this development of an explicitly Christian parenting market.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he really paved the way for that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you know Doug Wilson, Gary, as you can kind of tick a bunch of different names or people do this.
[SPEAKER_05]: They produce a lot of parenting or family life resources.
[SPEAKER_05]: It draws in a lot of families.
[SPEAKER_05]: They kind of create international ministries based on that.
[SPEAKER_05]: So absolutely the ideas live on and are recycled in a number of ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that my wife actually, she's always like my uncredited research assistant, because she's like, fine, she's like, you're talking about this and mentioned this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she sent me a clip.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you guys have seen you, you had to have.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Maddie Pruit, who was in the connect to the Bachelor, so you've already seen the clip, I was gonna pull it up and share screen it if you haven't.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we could talk about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just insert it in the episode.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like if Hosanna obeys us, we're not like, come here, girl.
[SPEAKER_04]: Come here.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right, pull him down.
[SPEAKER_04]: Get the, you know, mama, getter, which will be hilarious when we start spanking.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, well.
[SPEAKER_04]: Which we will on the record because the Bible so silly says that it says, it's as Bali is bound up in a child, but discipline drives it far away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it also specifically talks about discipline with the rod.
[SPEAKER_04]: It says it will not kill them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people could say, well, you can discipline them with timeouts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hold on.
[SPEAKER_01]: It says with the rod.
[SPEAKER_04]: She's going to get a little bit.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not going to be.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's going to be in a very loving way of saying, hi sweetheart, do you know why you're being disciplined?
[SPEAKER_01]: Mommy does not want to discipline you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mommy does not enjoy having to spank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: There are consequences to disobedience.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what you're saying is there are consequences to our sin.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are consequences to disobedience.
[SPEAKER_00]: She showed me that clip in what's interesting for my background growing up in a fundamentalist about this realm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to remind myself that that's shocking, like that's not just how parents talk, you know, and but the amount of people who are shocked, the amount of publications that picked it up shows that this isn't a generally culturally acceptable way of thinking, but it is for a large swath of evangelicals, the norm.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess in your perspective, writing a book on topics like this, addressing people talking the way that they were in that clip.
[SPEAKER_00]: was your goal to shake primarily evangelicals who do believe this out of it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or was your goal more primarily to point out to the majority of culture like, hey, some of your neighbors think this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And hey, some of your teachers in the town that Christian counselor down the road is actually affirming this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, who is the ideal demographic there that you were approaching?
[SPEAKER_05]: We wanted to keep it accessible and broad.
[SPEAKER_05]: So our primary
[SPEAKER_05]: audience of readers that we're hoping to reach are people who this touches up against their experience.
[SPEAKER_05]: So either parents reflecting back or adult children reflecting back, we knew there would be a number of current active parents in evangelical communities are coming out of evangelical communities.
[SPEAKER_05]: thinking coming to that realization, maybe what was normal for me, maybe there's a different way forward, maybe I don't, I don't want to replicate that, but we also wanted it to be of interest to maybe pastors, therapists, spiritual directors, other professionals who
[SPEAKER_05]: who may not be as familiar with the specifics of evangelical frameworks.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because if you go to a therapist who has no idea about this background or the way this is wrapped up with religious trauma, religious belief, it's a really important context.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think for people outside the community who are maybe trying to understand something about people they're either working with or the subculture in general,
[SPEAKER_05]: that your right isn't intuitive and really is that oops divergent from where mainstream parenting trends went starting around the seventies and eighties.
[SPEAKER_05]: It kind of went in a different direction.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, so you have maybe all
[SPEAKER_00]: You want everybody in the country by your book.
[SPEAKER_00]: That seems like a good good wide net.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I am curious like so when you see someone like a Maddie Prood and a grant sitting on a podcast and this kind of cheerful like
[SPEAKER_00]: It, it almost feels like for lack of a better colloquial like kind of boomercoated like the stuff that I would hear older pastors say within churches growing up that always scared you as a kid because you're like, oh god, this is gonna wrap everyone up like when you hear younger
[SPEAKER_00]: influencers with cool hair and nice clothes talking about it and a six sneaker collection man it like like why do you think that generation is getting sucked into that vortex like what do you think the draw is because like for the most part it seems it seems like the generations who experienced it.
[SPEAKER_00]: either really want to follow that same path or run as far as possible from it, but there's an infatuation with like Gen Z to like this old school lifestyle.
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to masculinity, femininity, tradwife, parenting, what do you think the draw in appeal of that is?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it just ignorance or what?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's that coming from?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think some of it is that just chronic pendulum swinging that generations tend to do is they look at the one before them and say look at all the things they did wrong you know look at their kids look how annoying the iPad kids are right like I think there's this like weird kind of discourse building that people do when they look up at the generation above them
[SPEAKER_03]: There's been a lot of theorizing about why Gen Z is drawn to broadly the cultural things and media that they are.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's hard to say, I do think that within evangelical communities, Gen Z evangelicals have been sold some of the same ideas that millennials and Gen X were about being counter-cultural, as just being a value in and of its own.
[SPEAKER_03]: And being countercultural means doing what the world is telling you not to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if the world is saying, you know, you don't need to thank your children.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can connect with your children instead.
[SPEAKER_03]: And someone in your community is saying, no, that's permissive that's giving sin a path.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a really win some message for young people who are growing up in evangelicalism with some fundamentalist flavors that are really drawn to this idea of being countercultural.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that that's a piece of this that is under explored is just this idea that like the way everybody else around you is going to tell you to raise your kids is wrong.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't trust yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: And here is a formula for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's not new either.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's like an old message that dobs and would have agreed with, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Don't trust yourself.
[SPEAKER_03]: You as a parent are going to be, you're going to tend to be so permissive.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're going to tend to let your children walk all over you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Don't do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Be the countercultural, be daring, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Dare to be the parent that disciplines your child.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think there are a lot of things in that message that still resonate with evangelicals who are told that they have this kind of countercultural combative mission in the world that we live in.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and I would add to that, there's a really compelling piece of claims to biblical authority.
[SPEAKER_05]: So if someone's devout and they respect the Bible in some fashion is authoritative, or that's the environment they're coming from,
[SPEAKER_05]: And that gets wielded a lot.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you will find in a number of these resources, the authors will open up in some way saying, you know, this isn't my opinion, this is just the plain truth of the word of God.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it goes relatively unquestioned.
[SPEAKER_05]: We do challenge that in our book because just because someone claims something is biblical, doesn't necessarily make it so, but that's a very powerful thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: in Christian communities.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think for I actually stitched a number of responses to Maddie and Grant when that came out because it is concerning to see the same old things crop up with a shinier package.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think we can maybe have two takeaways probably more from that one.
[SPEAKER_05]: Is it might give us some
[SPEAKER_05]: empathy for earlier generations of parents in that it's easy to stand at a distance and be like, how could they fall for it?
[SPEAKER_05]: How could someone read Dobson's book and find it compelling?
[SPEAKER_05]: Rather than say, yes, these ideas will always be attractive, particularly to new parents and new converts.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think new parents are often overwhelmed and looking
[SPEAKER_05]: for that reassurance, especially if they're in communities that say, look for an authority figure to tell you how to do this in the godly way.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then I think new converts are vulnerable to this because they want to do things the Christian way or do not do things the way they were raised.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think it can give us that and it can also help us maybe see that
[SPEAKER_05]: Often the people writing these books or speaking so confidently are parents of very young children.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's not that there's nothing worthwhile that you can say when you, when you just have a young children, but there is a level of assuredness about theoretical parenting advice that people platform themselves to share that comes in those early years, whether it's
[SPEAKER_05]: How am I going to parent?
[SPEAKER_05]: I will never let my child watch screens or I will never let them.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, it can be things like that or whether spanking is the way.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think with people like Maddie and Grant, Grant, I would hope that they begin to be construct.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, we hear from a number of people who becoming a parent was the catalyst that led them to reconsider.
[SPEAKER_05]: And maybe before they would have held those same beliefs very staunchly, but as they began to see the child in front of them,
[SPEAKER_05]: and reflect back on their own experience, they were hungry to find a different way forward, and that kind of was the gateway out of that thinking for them.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I hold out hope for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've said three things, and I wrote down all of them, because there are all things that we could follow as branches.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to try to somehow navigate into all of these, but the one thing that I want to hit off the rip is there is a
[SPEAKER_00]: You are both people of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a theological component to the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am really interested.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fundamentalism is so easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of like, it is so easy to say the Bible says this boom.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't matter if you're interpretation it like it is that's what it says.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read it and that's what I think it means and that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like in that same thing when I have conversation with Beth Allison Bart where like she has a really interesting compelling argument for why this passage is extremely radically feminist in the context in which it was written.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then there's also some things that really aren't and they are very regressive.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm curious when it came to approaching
[SPEAKER_00]: Corporal punishment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like there's like there's like two slopes to the argument where okay, does the Bible expressly call for corporate punishment of kids?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you guys argue in many ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, like the way the rod is even described is incorrect.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there are very clear passages in say like Deuteronomy where like capital punishment for a progressively rebellious child is called into play.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like I guess what's your approach to what you're grabbing onto as like biblical or like the Christian perspective versus like okay that is a relic of its time in its historical context and it doesn't represent like
[SPEAKER_00]: Big G, God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess I'm curious what the approach was to those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Mercy, you can answer that first.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is such a great question because if you dip into any Christian parenting.
[SPEAKER_05]: community or online forum, you will find this back and forth over a corporate punishment, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: You will find staunch defenders.
[SPEAKER_05]: You will find people getting down into the minutia of what the rod could mean.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that I think really reflects the commitments people have to develop people have they want to honor scripture.
[SPEAKER_05]: They want to
[SPEAKER_05]: find a godly way to do things.
[SPEAKER_05]: It really speaks to those longings, which is why we like the language of myth a lot, because it refers to the way these books appeal to various longings.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, I mean, I can write a whole book, making the Christian case against corporate punishment.
[SPEAKER_05]: But I think my general response is to invite Christians to consider that Jesus is always our hermeneutic.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the Christian faith, we believe that when God decided to reveal to humanity what He was like in human form, He became incarnate.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the life and ministry in teaching of Jesus is going to be the guide to see what are things in alignment with that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And second to that, to say, what explicit, do we get any explicit teaching as Christian parents?
[SPEAKER_05]: Because I think a big piece of where the corporal punishment conversation goes off the rails is because of the influence of what's called the neuthetic movement, the biblical counseling movement that says, the Bible is this instruction manual for life.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so you can find everything you need there, kind of almost like a user guide.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's a little bit at odds with the fact that most of the Bible comes to us in narrative form.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's telling us this story of the people of God over millennia.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so as Christians, if we are saying
[SPEAKER_05]: Are there any direct instructions that we should be attentive to?
[SPEAKER_05]: There are two direct instructions given to parents in scripture.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's father's parents do not provoke your children to anger or bitter them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And in Ephesians six, it is followed up, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think having those two things as the e-guide for Christian parents enables you to then look at these other passages to say, okay, we know that not imbittering or provoking is key.
[SPEAKER_05]: We know that the one another inverses apply to our smallest and newest neighbors.
[SPEAKER_05]: We see the life and teaching of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_05]: These are helpful for people who want to have a
[SPEAKER_05]: Some kind of biblical conversation, these are really helpful and expansive.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's a tremendous amount of freedom for the Christian parent within there.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the Bible's not a parenting manual in that sense.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it's curious to me that in all the resources we read,
[SPEAKER_05]: We've rarely heard the name of Jesus mentioned in a meaningful way.
[SPEAKER_05]: We rarely saw his life in ministry discussed.
[SPEAKER_05]: We saw again and again this handful of Proverbs, the Rod Proverbs, and Hebrews twelve.
[SPEAKER_05]: Again and again and again discussed.
[SPEAKER_05]: And as we argue and I think is true in
[SPEAKER_05]: irresponsible, ex-judical and her medical ways, like in ways that don't hold up.
[SPEAKER_05]: But they become things people claim to and I think it's the biggest road black for Christians to give up corporate punishment.
[SPEAKER_05]: They really have been misled to believe that these rituals of spanking, toddlers and preschoolers are somehow biblical.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I will talk about it all day long because I think
[SPEAKER_05]: It's something that Christian parents need to hear from other Christians to say, you can be free of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: We can be done with that.
[SPEAKER_05]: None of this is theoretical anymore.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have a number of adults describing the incredible long-term harm an impact it had.
[SPEAKER_05]: But we have good research in the past fifty years, showing the harm.
[SPEAKER_05]: We have robust exagetical arguments to say, look, this doesn't track.
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's a difficult topic to talk about and engage sometimes, but really important, because I think families need to be freed up from it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there was a quote somewhere I was trying to find out as you were trying to answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a quote from a evangelical leader that was basically talking about discipline and helping shape your children to be more like Jesus, almost implying that corporal punishment and ritualistic spanking, as you guys quoted Jack Hiles saying,
[SPEAKER_00]: was what made Jesus Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like it's like that was not the chemistry experiment that led to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it seems like an odd way to like invent a new formula to try to get the same result.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Kelsey, I'm curious what your take is on this as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like when people are cherry picking or looking at, you know, two verses to paint an entire, like the fact that the Bible says so little on this topic,
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet there are empires of parenting material says that there's a lot being inserted that's not from the source.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like when when your piece on the source is bigger than the source, you're adding something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm curious what your what your take on that is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, I would say two things.
[SPEAKER_03]: One, I mean, first of all, preface this with saying, I'm not a biblical scholar of theologian here.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is sort of my, my take with those caveats.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I, I will say in the interviewing that we did for this, you can see the inconsistency and in the ways that people apply and interpret and try to make sense of why they must spend their children.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you'll hear people say things like, well, it's the best way because it's how God deals with us.
[SPEAKER_03]: One and
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like, there's like trying to draw some strange parallels as if to say, like, and that when you dig under that for more than five seconds, it falls apart almost immediately.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll have parents who say, well, it's not about it's not about punishing my child for that sin, got Jesus already died for that sin.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's about
[SPEAKER_03]: fixing the behavior right like taking a real behaviorist approach, which has it's all kinds of all kinds of issues like behaviorism is a very utilitarian approach to treating people and doing relationship that I do not think is in line with the example of Christ at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the other thing I would say is that
[SPEAKER_03]: I often encourage people to try to take more of an ethics-based approach to this question.
[SPEAKER_03]: One that doesn't treat the Bible like it's going to give you that answer because these scriptures are either vague about this or not clearly meant to be this timeless piece of wisdom handed to all people for all time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's just treat this like an ethical question.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it ethical to hit children?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think a lot of evangelicals are uncomfortable with that because that feels like letting a man-made system of rules supersede the Bible.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think in this case it is very instructive because imagine you are caring for an elderly relative and they don't understand you or they're struggling their cognitive ability is starting to decline.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you hit that person to make them stop doing something or to try to teach them to stop?
[SPEAKER_03]: everyone would say no.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like everyone, I can't imagine one person that we spoke to saying that it's okay for husbands to beat their wives.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are ethical ways of dealing with questions of inflicting pain on another human being.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when the answer, yes, is
[SPEAKER_03]: informed entirely by utilitarian framework.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we can start to say, well, that's not how Jesus fuels with people.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there are parts in the book where we talk about that, about taking an ethical view and taking a step back from trying to twist yourself into knots over reading these verses the right way to justify this practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's, um, when you're teaching that formula of like, if you do x, y and z, your kid will become this, you're essentially making the kid a product.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like, if you want your product to perform correctly, do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, and one of my favorite, uh,
[SPEAKER_00]: quote from the book, I don't know which of you wrote it, so sorry for what you know, but on page forty night it says evangelicals are often the first and modest acclaim that children are blessing, yet this messaging place is children at the bottom of a set hierarchy defined by obedience submission and relationship to a parent.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that framing children are afterthoughts in the garden and accessories, arrows to fulfill a father's aims, all of shoots around them of their table, non-player background characters who exist to rise up and bless their parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's one of the, like, to me, this sums up the rest of the book in terms of, you know, are you having children because you want the beauty of being a part of another human being's life?
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you let it have a whole section whether or not kids are human?
[SPEAKER_00]: But, or do you want them because they make you look like the ideal Christian version?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I just chatted with Amy Douglas.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is fresh on my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you look at someone like that where it's like,
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a deep close relationship with all nineteen children in your quiver whole family?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you look like an idealized version of the family that has lots of arrows in your quiver?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like that to me is such a disturbing element of this is like why do you have the child in the first place?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think most people have a great answer for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a question, but more of a concern, I'll just voice out loud.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, well, and it's so it really sums up
[SPEAKER_05]: the kind of betrayal, like when we say these teachings betrayed entire families, it really robbed so many families of connection that could have been theirs.
[SPEAKER_05]: And certainly, yes, some abusive people were drawn to these teachings.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think a number of people
[SPEAKER_05]: got insured in them and believed they had to do this or this is the godly way or it worked when children were young or they were thinking it's all wrapped up in different belief systems so broader ideas about hierarchies and fundamentalism but down the road it really
[SPEAKER_05]: not only inflicted harm, but left family's bereft of tools for connection of the joy of those moments that could have been theirs because it was about, yes, securing certain ends or it was utilitarian or it was about behavior.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's really a heartbreaking kind of realization to uncover as we talked to so many people because
[SPEAKER_05]: There are so many are still picking up the pieces from this in a number of ways.
[SPEAKER_05]: And often in shame and isolation, because some of, especially if they're still in Christian communities, because this idea of lack of family closeness is also a sign of your failure.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it's just, it's a very painful topic for a number of people.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think
[SPEAKER_05]: it for the church collectively, for Christians collectively, it's important for us to acknowledge the ways our communities enable this, our teaching enabled this and in some ways, directly caused this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's setting aside intentionally abusive people who found a framework to be abusive in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, there's a lot of people who work, I'd say, accidentally abusive or taught to be abusive with some of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And earlier, one of you mentioned, you know, having kids as a catalyst for a lot of deconstruction, people that realize the system's harmful.
[SPEAKER_00]: but also having kids has been a catalyst historically for many to find religion or put their kids into it because they want the structure and the law and order and it's it's unfortunate because I think there is you don't know what you don't know you just know what you don't want to happen and when someone comes and offers the answer like it seems very appealing I am curious to hear from you Kelsey on this point
[SPEAKER_00]: We've talked about like the countercultural like fundamental sir historically reactionary to the culture's going this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to go this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you scale this back to like the nineteen fifties or the nineteen sixties, you know, you see in the culture at large, this like corporate punishment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think the culture birthed the modern Christian parenting movement?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you think the Christian parenting movement and how entrenched Christianity was in the culture, kind of birthed that into the culture at large?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like chicken or the egg, like where did this come from if we trace it back far enough?
[SPEAKER_00]: Pre-dopsin, pre-McArthur, like, you know, how do you explain the the nineteen fifties sitcom that is espousing weird Christian parenting views?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think it's worth saying that spanking and corporate punishment have been the norm for most of Western history.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, when James Dobson writes in the nineteen seventy that culture has gone wrong and no one is disciplining their kids, what he has in mind is something very specific, which is probably the best selling parenting book to that point, which was Dr. Spock's book, Benjamin Spock, so I think it's called Baby and Child Care.
[SPEAKER_03]: And his, his adage was trust yourself, you know more than you think you do.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he was this voice of trying to help anxious mothers feel like they had some form of maternal instinct.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you read interviews with Benjamin Spock, he talks a lot about in his practice dealing with moms who just felt like they had no idea what to do.
[SPEAKER_03]: They felt like they had no sense of natural maternal instinct.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're totally at loss for what to do with these children.
[SPEAKER_03]: When they're home all day with children, this is the fifties and sixties.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the post-war boom.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is so much success in certain segments of the white American family.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have kind of affluence.
[SPEAKER_03]: You also have then in the sixties, the rise of feminism, and then the feminine mystique, and this kind of female disillusionment with what am I doing here?
[SPEAKER_03]: And James Dawbson is very much reacting to the sixties.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's reacting, looking backwards and saying, okay, we've had this affluence, we've had this emergence of this kind of touchy-feely parenting advice and these affluent white parents who are suddenly not adequately disciplining their children.
[SPEAKER_03]: And those are the people responsible for the anti-Vietnam war protest.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are the people responsible for bra burning.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are the people responsible for woodstock.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so all the things in history, all the ways this problem's in history, problems in history, problems in would stock and anti-drama.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I mean, they're to discipline he wrote that book in six months.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was very much a book for this exact moment for this exact group of parents who are showing up to my seminars.
[SPEAKER_03]: anxious and really responding well to this message that I have of we need more discipline because leading up to the publication of dare to discipline he's he's been on the speaking circuit kind of trying out different messages he wants to be on the speaking circuit he wants to become kind of a public thinker
[SPEAKER_03]: and he finds that this message you should discipline your kids is really landing with the audiences and he says, ah, okay, there's an appetite for this and that book absolutely met the moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: It also happened to coincide with conservative resurgence politically and it was kind of a what's that saying high high tide raises all ships or something.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was kind of one of those moments where I think that resurgence
[SPEAKER_03]: led to the, the, um, a sense of a couple different figures.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, kind of similarly to what we're seeing now in some ways.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, so yeah, that's how I would answer that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an interesting cultural moment, but Dobson really recognized the, how things were shifting around him and was able to capitalize on that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was quite savvy that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm seeing that right now with young men like the surge we're seeing of Gen Z men getting involved in church at a higher rate than previous generations and then Gen Z women right now who are leaving for some unknown reason in mass volumes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm seeing that happen and there's a weird symbiosis between
[SPEAKER_00]: The most extreme far-right figures and the church, where it's like, I recently typed out a tweet from like Andrew Tate, who's like a very crazy example of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then a fundamentalist pastor, I grew up listening to, and they set exactly the same thing, give or take one or two lines.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it was the same methodology, same purity culture language, but just being, you know, one's being shot out into the manuscript to
[SPEAKER_00]: the men facing the quote unquote male loneliness epidemic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you've got the other side that's speaking to this like intense purity culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they're sharing the same thing and they're strong together and the high tide is definitely raising all ships in that case.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am really curious.
[SPEAKER_00]: You mentioned Spock's book and you quote Jack Hiles, which I always love to see and I have big eye get thrown in these books.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you seen Jack Hiles talk about Spock's book?
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you seen that clip?
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I haven't.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know the clip.
[SPEAKER_02]: It just made me, for example, that Mr. Spock, some book made, maybe good.
[SPEAKER_02]: I used Mr. Spock's book in the rearing of our kids.
[SPEAKER_02]: I did.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mixed a good panel.
[SPEAKER_02]: I used it to spank the kids with.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it just made me, that we okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, we don't know that's okay, but we, that was his statement.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's always a humor.
[SPEAKER_05]: You always see when Christian pastors or leaders or adults who are talking about this together, and I think it's really revealing the way that, collectively, we deal with the discomfort of this, or maybe delight in the power it gives to joke about hitting children.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember we had a guest speaker that would come through and he would say, I'm not saying it's okay, but my dad would throw me through walls in this or tie him out as how long you're unconscious, like you'd hear those kinds of phrases.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's interesting looking back and going, well, they're definitely coping with what they experienced growing up, but are not breaking that cycle and are continuing it onward.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's so much generational trauma.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think is the point?
[SPEAKER_00]: of that crossroads were like, there's some that are raised in this and you're seeing it with the dops and death.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like people were raised in it and go, this is why I am who I am today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was raised in this system and this gave me the tools to be a functioning adult in a society gone mad.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you have the other people that are going, you know, thank God, he's dead and this was horrible and this was horrific and I experienced this and it's the reason that I am anxious and I do feel this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think there's that that experience where two bill can go through the same horrific system?
[SPEAKER_00]: and some credit it for them being like, I turned out okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then other people recognize the harm it did and are breaking the cycle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why doesn't everyone have the same response to it?
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, a number of things we always will offer the disclaimer, you know, the ways individual families experience this is gonna vary as much as an individual family, or even within the same family, siblings could have had a different experience.
[SPEAKER_05]: So certainly temperament, family culture play into this,
[SPEAKER_05]: the ways families implement things, they may be mitigated it, they may be exacerbated it.
[SPEAKER_05]: However, I think it's worth noting, we'll see as more time comes out.
[SPEAKER_05]: I actually haven't seen a lot of people
[SPEAKER_05]: who were children in dobs and homes saying could credit without your doubt.
[SPEAKER_05]: I hear some people reflecting with fondness on hearing them on the radio or adventures in Odyssey, which for me kind of clues me into like, okay, so maybe people had dipped into this in some way, or maybe a parent read one book and kind of was was able to pick and choose from that.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think for the people who went all in,
[SPEAKER_05]: It seems roundly helpful in more in the sense that
[SPEAKER_05]: they may be thrived in spite of this teaching rather than because of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the people I hear kind of logging jobs in are doing it either for his broad views or from the perspective of a parent, which I think is curious.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think that's revealing, not that there's nothing of good in these resources.
[SPEAKER_05]: We try to be careful to say, you know, some parents found helpful things in a number of these resources.
[SPEAKER_05]: with a few exceptions.
[SPEAKER_05]: There are a few that we're willing to say this should just have been straight in the trash.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think that's worth noting, particularly because you can read the resources themselves and some of them are recipes for a strangement, an authentic connection, anxiety.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, all the kinds of things we're talking about, let alone
[SPEAKER_05]: these things happening behind closed doors and the toxic combination of expectations for instant obedience and corporate punishment mean your only tool you are going to have escalation.
[SPEAKER_05]: One other thought that I think is interesting.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was talking with the host of Christianity on the spectrum podcast recently and he has done kind of wide survey sample of neurodivergent autistic Christians and he was making the observation
[SPEAKER_05]: that given the genetic component of neurodivergence, of kind of raising the question, were some people, the people who were all in on these things, did they perhaps have this desire for very black and white rigid thinking and application that kind of kept them from walking away from it, or kept them from being the kind of parent.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it was like, I flipped through Dobson's book and did some things, did other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's different things, yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think there are other things to explore of what drew certain people to these in a way that they were all in or above and beyond even what dobson would have recommended.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because one, and I want to hear your response on this Kelsey, but one other thing I wanted to mention on the spanking question was we do see something really different happening with the rise of dobson than the kind of
[SPEAKER_05]: beating of children into compliance that maybe would have happened before this, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Many cultures, not all that many cultures would would have beat children in that we see these kind of step-by-step rituals for calm, detached, spanking as being presented as good and godly.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's something very different than I think maybe you see before you see it even in early American cartoons where an angry
[SPEAKER_05]: adult grabs a child and puts them over their knees.
[SPEAKER_05]: So with with jobs and interviews this idea that there's a specifically godly way to do this that demarcates it from hitting your child because you're angry at them and he presented that to parents and all the Christian parenting experts after him replicated that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And said, here are this specific rules that will magically transform this into what you see in other cultures or in other places into a Christian and godly kind of catacesis.
[SPEAKER_05]: And perhaps there was some
[SPEAKER_05]: intent there to curb the child abuse of previous generations.
[SPEAKER_05]: Maybe, but I think what ended up happening was kind of baptizing what we call literature spanking and in many cases that that turned into abuse.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do want to get your take Kelsey, but I want to point out, I literally just turned to your page talking about calm spankings.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd be very excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're all in sync now, and I need to order out later.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to let you know if it's the same as yours.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all firing on all cylinders here.
[SPEAKER_00]: For all the same.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kelsey, what's your take on?
[SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the couch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, yeah, I can send you a link later for the couch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Affiliate link coming through.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do think there is something to this generational divide.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think older people, there is a generation of older readers who when they read James Dobson, they were so probably abused as children that when they read Dobson, they read something that I wish my parents had read that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even just hearing James Dobson say, you should be an involved father.
[SPEAKER_03]: You should not thank your children in anger.
[SPEAKER_03]: for some people, not for everyone, for some people that was like a radical paradigm shift.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I do think it is fair to say for some readers that felt radically different and very graceful, even though it was not.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I want to acknowledge that a little bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, I think we're seeing now that there's this, I think the people who probably were convinced by that held on to it really, really tightly, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it was a feeling for them at the time, you know?
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think I don't want to, well, yeah, I don't want to give a pass to that anyway.
[SPEAKER_03]: But John Fee, who's an evangelical writer, wrote a piece of the Atlantic, kind of defending James Dobson.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not that long ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't remember when that couple years ago.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he got some heat for that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's one thing he said.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, I think my father was an okay father because he read James Dobson.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I recommend this book a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called Practicing What The Dr. Preached.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's by Susan Ridgley.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's one of the very few academic studies of the impact of James Dawbson's work that we have.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an ethnographic study.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is scholarly, but her project is laying out the different ways that families practiced and implemented these things.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you get a really good sense of the ecumenical reach of this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I think
[SPEAKER_03]: Catholic readers who were not steeped in like evangelical subculture had a different relationship with James Dobson, then like fundamentalists who might have even not considered Dobson to be quite religious enough.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, some of his books are actually not that religious.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would have been outside our fold for a lot of stuff for like you would have been a little too outside the map, just realm to you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you quote him, but you wouldn't say, you know, you just say, oh, well, no one person says this.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, like, that was like colleges.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a college.
[SPEAKER_03]: And and dare to discipline is not like a biblical parenting book really until like the last pages.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's some religious stuff back there, but it's a much more conservative book than it is Christian.
[SPEAKER_03]: But anyway, I really like that Susan rigidly book because it helps explain what I would actually say is kind of my experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I grew up in a very evangelical, Normie evangelical household where there were multiple dobs and books on the shelves.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think some of it sounds so dismissive to say that there's an element of look of the draw here, what kind of parents you had, what kind of family you were in.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are a bunch of mitigating circumstances, the temperaments and wisdom of my parents.
[SPEAKER_03]: I still have great relationship with my parents or two of my closest friends, my dedication at the beginning of the book is to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't want to say it's entirely luck of the draw, but I do think there is so much variety in how people receive and practice these things.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is why we can't give it a pass.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because all of that happened, all of it is real.
[SPEAKER_03]: And just because my experience did not involve abuse, does not mean that someone could not pick that book up an absolutely get there.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's clear as day when I read it now.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I definitely resonate with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the example I always give is like the preachers that I heard growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first time I ever left that world and listened to Mark Driscoll.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first time I ever recommended Mark Driscoll was someone I said, he's just so kind and compassionate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like now now I wouldn't say that, you know, and so I think it's I think we do need to be careful and not to justify someone just because by contrast they're not as abusive or their teaching is not as rough, you know, just like, oh, my ex
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, hit me more than my current one does.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're better.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like, yeah, this is all not good, though.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're still similar issues happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is very much in some ways of Rochak for the parent to go, what kind of parent are they?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, you know, my parents and, you know, some of my friends parents
[SPEAKER_00]: satin of the same sermons read the same books.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had friends that got severe corporate punishment, you know, from that same teaching.
[SPEAKER_00]: I received some, not near as much, and, you know, again, I got the knot as bad version of that with parents who tried to be really compassionate.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know we're, we're budding up against the end of our time here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to ask questions, though, because we referenced it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You talk about in the book, there's no way to gauge the harm of the parent who is spanking, hitting out of anger versus the very calm collected parent, which whenever I read biographies of people talking about their experiences or I reflect on experiences like
[SPEAKER_00]: To me, the calm collected seems so much scarier and creepy.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the surveys that you did with people on the interview with people, did you talk about the dichotomy of those two things?
[SPEAKER_00]: And did you get any kind of maybe you didn't have enough to form a thesis in the book about it?
[SPEAKER_00]: But did you notice a difference of people who were spanked by like,
[SPEAKER_00]: The calm collected parent saying, we need to get this sin out of you versus the how dare you, you know, obviously abuse of parent, you know, where it's like, yeah, that's like the stereotype that we expect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Any other of you can answer that one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have a specific direction for that one.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, in our questions, we did try and leave them very open-ended to kind of see how people would share about their experience.
[SPEAKER_05]: A few people did say they wished their would have been a motion that almost that would have felt like that would have been easier to navigate than the calm detachment.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think when people were describing their experiences,
[SPEAKER_05]: What you saw is whatever the goal for even contentagement was.
[SPEAKER_05]: it didn't necessarily happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: And in the same way that all these resources kind of present this idea that if you spank right early, you'll be done with spanking, that also didn't seem to happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was almost like, no, this became the primary tool.
[SPEAKER_05]: So sometimes, yeah, yeah, and so sometimes the parent would maybe become and kind of do the
[SPEAKER_05]: the many layered thing of like I'm going to go in the other room and pray and come back and then I'm calm and then sometimes they would just lose it and sometimes it would be all day spanking session and you get I think the ecumenical reach of these means I think for people who are all in sometimes they're picking up this resource because things aren't working right they're drawn to the strongwill child because
[SPEAKER_05]: they feel like they have a child that they can't control.
[SPEAKER_05]: So there's kind of a meeting of parents in a moment of overwhelm in a number of ways.
[SPEAKER_05]: So then they're picking up this resource that basically is going to tell them to escalate to get compliance.
[SPEAKER_05]: And maybe if that doesn't work, they're going to reach for another one.
[SPEAKER_05]: And they're going to come across Doug Wilson, who says, you need reins of terror and all day speaking sessions or voting bokeham who says something similar.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think it just reinforces it.
[SPEAKER_05]: plus the theology that often comes in that parents are told, look, you stand in God's stead.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're an agent of his authority.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you don't get your children to obey instantly now, they might not obey God down the road.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think
[SPEAKER_05]: There's very little holding parents in check.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like maybe some are like, I'm being calm and doing this right.
[SPEAKER_05]: But if you've already crossed those lines, like it's a kind of nightmare scenario that can go in a number of different directions.
[SPEAKER_05]: And because there's a belief that God wants this, God endorses this, children need to be catacized into this.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think when you put all that in the package and you compare that to maybe a non-religious home where a parent is angry and raging and maybe relying on corporate punishment, there's something that can be left behind in a different way in that home that I think can't be when it's all
[SPEAKER_05]: missed up with the liturgies and this view of God.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I don't know it's hard to say both are awful.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like how do you say which is better?
[SPEAKER_05]: I do think some of the core messaging of like
[SPEAKER_05]: God sees you this way too and sinner the sin and this sort of thing that those are core messaging that go beyond the physical punishment into the realm of emotional psychological spiritual mistreatment that.
[SPEAKER_05]: has really long-lasting impact.
[SPEAKER_05]: Certainly, when we heard the way people talked about their view of God as adults, being racer with that.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I don't know, it's kind of meandering answer.
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know if there's a way to know, but both are just so tragic.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything was just said.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the one thing I will add is that the message always was, there's more danger in being permissive than there isn't being too harsh.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that gave a lot of parents a little bit of permission, even.
[SPEAKER_00]: to worry about not being harsh enough, especially with the eternal stakes you both mentioned in the book.
[SPEAKER_05]: And one another thing I wanted to mention is one thing we did notice is if you talk to parents and children and children, adult children would would note this for us.
[SPEAKER_05]: Often their parents would be like, you were only spanked to handful of times.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like this is the parental response and the adult child would have like this role, memories of, you know, many more than a handful of times and detailed things that the parent almost
[SPEAKER_05]: either couldn't admit to or couldn't retain.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I think that maybe speaks to, we talk a lot about how to, how do these practices understandably impact adult children, but they also trained parents to in certain ways to dissociate if they were practicing calm spanking, they were kind of training themselves to shut down and do this and to ignore pain and kind of mechanically do this.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think there's, there's some of that in the conversation too of like,
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, you're relying on memory and so many individual, individual factors and, oh, yeah, it trained whole families up into this way of relating.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I have like ten thousand more questions we could talk about and there is there's so many layers to this and and so many things that I'd love to touch deep Ron and I'm sure we could have a future conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: If this wasn't too painful, I would love to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really really appreciate the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: really appreciate both of you giving such great powerful answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And thank you so much for for someone who is listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a link to grab a copy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's blurred out.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a link to grab a copy of the myth of good Christian parenting, whether you want to list to read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever that looks like for you, be sure to grab a copy and Marissa and Kelsey, thank you for all your research, all your time and your expertise on this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you so much.