Breaking Kids God’s Way

When my girlfriend read through the draft of my book, she had a comment about how I mention Growing Kids God’s Way only in passing.

And I realized that I had never explained it, not to her, not to anyone really, anything about Growing Kids God’s Way. It’s not something I’ve seen mentioned on the blogs I read — not that no one is talking about it’s just not something I see with any frequency. Many of the critiques online for GKGW are actually critiques of On Becoming Babywise, a far more well-known book for its controversy related to faithilure to thrive.

Growing Kids God’s Way by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo was a parenting class/book that was popular in the ’90s and it promises, as is obvious by the title, that if you implement their methods, you’ll be implementing godly methods of raising your children. And as I sat down to write it, all the various aspects of it came flooding back. First-time obedience. Cheerful obedience. My mothers voice explaining to us, delayed obedience is disobedience. You come when you are called, you respond instantly to your parents voice, and in everything they ask you to do, you show that you are glad to do it. If you absolutely cannot do something, your only recourse is to look your parent in the eye and politely state, “May I make an appeal?”

This was the prize of the Christian parent, the example that you set for the world. Well-behaved children were proof of your faith itself. The world would compare your family to their own unspanked, disruptive, screaming, arguing children, and be moved by your testimony of God’s holiness in how you raise your children. Or so it goes. Children were trophies you paraded out on Sunday mornings; everyone knew who the good Christians were, the ones who had children never talked back, never were cranky, never once showed anything but instantly obedience and a polite, cheerful demeanor.

I haven’t talked about this, mostly because it always felt like background noise. As I got older, my mother stopped specifically mentioning GKGW, and it felt like it vanished, like it had never been much of a big deal to begin with.

All this time I’ve been writing, what nagged in the back of my mind was the how. How did my mother turn me into a person who felt like I had no sense of identity a part from her? How did I become a person that didn’t rebel, didn’t form a sense of identity, didn’t become anything that I didn’t think would meet with her approval? I couldn’t seem to find the beginning of what happened to make me so compliant.

And then I started writing about Growing Kids God’s Way, and all of a sudden the answer was right in front of me: as a young child, my mother started training me to be the kind of person that was nothing a part from obedience. That my moral goodness was tied to how happy of a front I presented. Disobedience was sin and obedience — to parents, and to God — was the highest moral imperative.

The reason I haven’t posted this past month is because just a cursory look at all of these things slammed my brain into the ground hard. It opened up old wounds I didn’t know I had, and left me in a kind of depressive, anxiety haze that required me to put everything down for a bit. I’m slowly pulling myself out, a process inhibited by the fact that I still keep making myself sit down with this book, sift through it all, and remember.

My mother used to brag to other parents that I had smartly gleaned the consequences for disobedience from watching my brothers punishments, and knew to avoid it. She’d brag that I was the one child she knew she had raised right. Only occasionally she’d tell me she worried that one day I would have the standard teenage rebellion, far later and with a vengeance.

But instead, I have to fight not to obey. When obedience is the only thing rewarded, when the only praise you ever received is praise for obeying, how are you to know what your own desires are? Your motivations are tied to obedience. When other people are pleased with you, you are pleased with yourself. When others think you are good, you know you have done right. So how do you manage to have a sense of self apart from that obedience? Recently, I told my girlfriend that I should practice declarative sentences, that the only way I would ever be able to feel like I had any real power is if I could say I want or I need without qualification. And then I told her what I wanted for dinner, and proceeded to burst into tears. Something as small as dinner felt like claws raking their way through my brain; I had violated the deep underlying core of my training.

It is possible to make people obedient. It is possible to train children into cheerful, willing obedience, to make it seem as though their own personal self strives and desires for nothing else; as though they weren’t dog-trained into it, but rather that they are responding out of their own want to obey. It just requires breaking someone down, scooping out any sense of self and personhood they might have, and replacing all of it with obedience. And if you change the word “obedience” in that sentence to “Jesus,” I’m not sure the Christian faith I grew up in would find anything wrong or horrifying about it at all. And that is why it was so easy to do.

“Teach him [your child] to obey according to the character of true obedience-immediately, completely, without challenge, and without complaint.” (Growing Kids God’s Way, page 169 of the 2002 edition).

The Radical Notion that Love is Kind

When I was a Christian, we focused on two goals within relationships. The first — to ensure that nobody had sex before marriage. The second — to make sure that those marriages never ended in divorce.

I’d been told all my life that the reason our generation was filled with divorce is that we’d been sold a bill of goods by the media, fed stories that love was romance and feeling. Divorces happened solely because people believed that love was a feeling and they could end those marriages when those feelings left. All marital problems were fixable, if people understood that love wasn’t an emotion, and that marriages didn’t exist to make you feel good.

Because that is, in the end, how it was framed. How do you ensure that no one ever sees divorce as good? You make sure that there are no parameters in which a marriage can be viewed as wrong, unhealthy, or beyond fixing. To do that means that you cannot view love as anything other than the action of being married — regardless of the state of that marriage.

So love was not feeling, but a choice; so much a choice it was possible to love someone irrespective of your actual feelings for them. Do you hate your spouse? Pretend you love them, and eventually you will. The message was, if you push aside whatever you are feeling, stick it out day in and day out, God will honor your obedience. You weren’t even promised that it would give you a good relationship — just that by obeying God’s requirement to never divorce, your suffering will be justified out of your obedience to God.

Because the problem of divorce is feelings, that meant the messages about relational problems were that people had expectations. After all, we are sinful people, and as such we think we deserve things, we think we are supposed to have boundaries, independence, relationships we get something out of. Squash those expectations. Kill any want to get something out of a relationship, and instead focus on the action of love. Become utterly selfless, devoid of any desire, because you don’t exist as a separate person anymore. You ARE your marriage. And once the romance fades, all you’ll be left with is too petty, selfish people you have to work to love.

That, fundamentally was the message. Not just that love was hard work, but that the hard work was to love.

Love was something you earned, something you’d only get after you put in the years of work of breaking yourself down. After you give up your expectations, your desire for happiness, your sense of your individuality and personal interest. After you’ve given up on the dream of romance, on the your own goals and plans, on every last thing you could ever possibly hope for. After you give up on the idea that your spouse should be good for you in any way, that love should feel good, that happiness should be a part of a relationship. Only then, only after ten or fifteen years (at least) of a hard, grueling, crying, screaming marriage, will you be (possibly) rewarded with real love.

I knew that kind of love. In fact, that was the only kind of love I knew. I knew it, when my mother demanded I make the choice to love my father, I knew it when my family demanded my heart, my body, my obedience and identity from me. Of course that was love. Of course.

So I spent my life as a relationship prepper, of sorts. I didn’t want marriage, and I didn’t want a relationship either, but if God was going to make me have one, that I needed to be ready for the pain, for the suppression of my wants and needs, for a loss of autonomy and personhood, for the hard, cold, draining nature of marriage.

And I was praised for my maturity in dismissing the romance of love, in accepting the knowledge that relationships were hard, and awful, and if you didn’t work yourself to the bone everyday, would come undone.

At no point did anyone tell me that love should be kind.

Nobody taught me that love is someone who sees you as a full person, who strives to help you in your goals, who wants only good things for you.

Nobody taught me that love wouldn’t feel like sacrifice, that helping the person you love feels easy and right, because why would it be a chore to help those you love?

Why didn’t any bother to explain what good love looked like? Why didn’t we get sermons on the kindness of love, the goodness of love, the happiness of love?

I know why. Because if you expect good love, you might think you can leave bad love. Because if you tell people that they should strive for good relationships, bad ones might not last. Because conservative Christianity cares more about the longevity of a marriage than the health of the relationship, and if that’s the case, there’s no point in filling anyone’s heads with any other expectation than a “you made your bed now lie in it” kind of love.

I don’t know how to process being in a good relationship. I am waiting for the shift. Trying to find the cosmic punchline. I worry there’s something I’m missing, that no one can just love me, and I them, that there must be some approaching danger.

The worst work of being in a relationship is in fighting back against all the messages I was taught about the soul crushing work of relationships. Conservative Christianity created the very pain and work it warned us of.

It’s not to say that there is no work to relationships, that all relationships are or should be nothing but sunny rainbows. But it’s like exercise tips that throw out no pain, no gain, leaving people to believe that injuries are a healthy part of working out. The work of relationships is a work about finding the best way people can love each other. It’s about cultivating happiness, an idea that would seem downright scandalous to my former Christian self.

It took leaving Christianity, it took getting into my terrible, sinful, gay relationship, for me to learn what love is.

Love is reassuring each other that at no point do we own one another. Love is in the way we build each other up. Love is in the way we talk to each other — with kindness, with respect, with a desire to help one another have what we want in this relationship without bulldozing over the other person’s autonomy. Love is knowing we can’t meet every last one of each other’s needs, and knowing we wouldn’t force one another to do it anyway. Love is knowing that if this relationship doesn’t last forever, it will be because we want each other’s happiness too much to let each other be in a relationship that’s not working.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is understanding. Love is gentle and safe. I know I’m mostly paraphrasing scripture here, that’s the strangeness of Christian culture. I, a non-binary gay ex-Christian have a relationship based on Biblical definitions of love, at the defiance of my Christian upbringing.

The other day I draped myself over my girlfriend and said, “You’re so nice to me.”
She replied, “I am as nice as anyone who loves you should be. And don’t ever expect anything less.”

“Nobody’s Buying this Rape Business”: Frank Peretti and the Pentecostal Portrayal of Rape Accusations

picture via amazon

Recently, I’ve decided to re-read through the Christian books that played a significant role in our family’s dynamics and faith. It’s much easier to write my survivor book when I have more than just the hearsay of my family and church, but the solid proof that these messages do actually exist beyond them.

I’m finishing up my re-read of This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. While this book was formative for its depiction of spiritual warfare, and helped fuel my family’s beliefs that demons were all around us, I actually re-read it for another purpose as well: false rape accusations are a central part of the plot.

Except that I hadn’t remembered just how central this is. The plot of This Present Darkness is literally that demons use false rape accusations and create false rape memories to destroy the lives of good Christian men. When there’s actually an attempted rape, well, that’s because there is, quite literally, the demon of Rape.

The main climax of the story is: Hank Busche, the Real True Christian pastor is accused of rape and thrown in prison. Marshall Hogan, Seeker of Truth and Soon to be Christian, is accused by his daughter Sandy of raping her (and since that one would be a little harder to depict as a plot of Satan, Peretti throws in a line about the angels seeing the demon digging into Sandy’s skull as she makes these accusations). Hogan too, is thrown in prison. The book explicitly references Paul in prison as a parallel to them.

Throughout the entire book Hank Busche has been convincing his congregation that there are demonic forces at work in the town. Satan wants the town, and the Saints are just not going to let him have it.

So the saints (as Frank Peretti refers to them) rallies around the prison. They fill the street with praises to Jesus, they know this is an attack from Satan to condemn their on-fire, sanctified, innocent pastor. They know beyond any shadow of any doubt that this is a plot set up by the evil people of this city, and the devil himself. They’re not gonna “buy this rape business” as one character states, because it is blatantly apparent he’s been framed.

Unfortunately, it’s easy for this book to tell this story. After all, in the case of Busche, you, the reader, are present for the events that lead up to his accusation. You, the reader, also know beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he is innocent. You’ve been following this character’s moves the entire time.

But the other characters haven’t. They don’t actually know, in any concrete, physical way that their pastor is innocent. All they have by way of proof is that they believe their pastor has too much solid proof of being a true believer to commit such an act. All they have is their pastor convincing them that there is demonic forces at work in this town, trying to destroy believers. So when they rally in front of the prison to pray and condemn the people who have arrested their pastor, they do so only with their spiritual knowledge that he is innocent.

And this is something I know too well. This is one of the more terrifying aspects of Pentecostal Christianity, and by extension, other forms of fundamentalism as well. If you are “in the Spirit” you know when other Christians are too. If you are, you can tell that someone is a true believer like you. And if that person’s prayers are answered, if they have words from the Lord, if their faith has “fruit” then how could it be anything but demonic deception if they are accused of a crime? After all, you as a Christian have discernment, and your discernment cannot be deceived because that deception might call into question your entire faith. So whomever you determine is guilty or innocent, that is spiritual discernment, knowledge from on high, greater than anything this world could do or say, and cannot be questioned.

But the scary thing about this book is that if the character Hank had raped someone, nothing about his behavior would have to change. In fact, it absolutely benefits a pastor to believe that there are demonic forces at work, because then no matter what he does, any accusation leveled at him can be dismissed with, “ah, but she’s under the control of Satan!”

When I got to the line, “they’re not buying this rape business” I couldn’t help but react with a bitter, “we know.” We know that as long as a man is a Man of God, as long as he has a sincere faith and the right beliefs, as long as he appears to have the favor of God, with answered prayers and “fruit” that no one will believe anyone but him. We understand because it happens again and again and again. “Rape business.” What a dismissive, caviler way of treating it. Like it doesn’t mean anything, because it doesn’t of course, he’s innocent.

My Christian community took this book to heart, treated it like scripture. I won’t say with absolute certainty that this book caused this mentality, but much in the same way these books helped  fuel the Pentecostal belief of “the demon of (rape, lust, murder, etc.) are all around us!” this absolutely has contributed to the ways in which Christian abusers and rapists have language to discount their victims. Peretti treats this like it’s the M.O. of Satan to convince “spiritually weak” girls they were sexually abused, to possess “wanton” women so they make these false accusations. As though this is just like Satan to act like the easiest way to undercut his biggest threat (which is always a solid believer in Christ) is by way of a rape accusation.

So all a rapist has to do then is remind the church that this is just what Satan does — look at this attack leveled against him because Satan wants to destroy the work God is doing. And look at the victim, she seems unstable enough, right? Maybe hurt, emotional, scared, confused? Clearly vulnerable enough that the devil could have gotten to her, right? In Frank Peretti’s world, in the Christian world I grew up in, the answer is yes.

So I do partially blame Frank Peretti. For making me feel like I needed to keep everything that happened to me inside because the fact that I’d been abused must be a sign that instead I was crazy and made everything up. Because I believed I’d been sexually abused was proof it hadn’t happened. As much as Frank Peretti’s books contributed to my childhood of pain and terror over demons, they also were a part of why I felt I needed to shove everything that happened to me down, forget about it, lock it up tight inside my mind for fear that it’s existence proved something horrible about me and my faith.

Because it if had happened, people would have known right? My mother, who received “words from the Lord” would have. The church would have. Through their spiritual discernment, through their unshakable faith, they would have to know because they are True Believers. Because the church’s faith in their own spiritual knowledge of Truth always seems to count for more than the word of a girl.

Repentance and the Cycle of Abuse

From the site whenlovehurts.ca

I don’t normally talk about “the cycle of abuse” because, though it is a useful tool, I don’t like to reduce abuse down to a single method or phrase. The experience of abuse is far more complicated than can fit on a small poster. But I want to talk for a bit about the “honeymoon” stage, and the ways in which conservative Christianity reinforces it with its emphasis on forgiveness, reconciliation, and the concept of forgiving “seventy times seven.”

My father was very good at repentance. He was very good at that aspect of being an abuser – the flowers, the begging for forgiveness, the promises to do and be better. And things would get better, for while.

And our pastors ate it up. They continued to try to help him, they continued to encourage my mother to stick by his side. There were trials of separation, sure, but they always ended with him coming back. Even the final separation was always with a caveat that God would “restore” their marriage.

There is no actual, functional difference between “forgive seventy times seven” and the repentance cycle of abuse. They both mean the same thing – because a person who continues to do the exact same thing and then apologize isn’t just slipping up or doing something on accident. After 10, 20, 30 times, the “I’m sorry”s don’t mean anything.

Now, you could argue that repentance means something different – that genuine repentance is a “real” repentance, and the cycle of abuse is different. But the problem with that is abusers know how to genuinely repentant. In fact, for many, they do sincerely mean their apologies, and their promises to be better.

And when someone genuinely means “I’m sorry,” genuinely wants to try and change, within conservative Christianity, that means you’re obligated to work it out. I can offer an example: my mother told me I was obligated to forgive and work things out with my rapist brother, because he wanted to. He was willing to move past my anger at his actions, and that should be enough right? And if I didn’t, according to my mother, I would be the one acting contrary to my Christian faith.

And that is often how abusers exploit repentance. They have the cycle of abuse on their side because all they need to do is say, “But I’m sorry, and I’m willing to work this out,” and if the victim refuses, they become the one in the wrong, the one sinning for refuses to forgive and reconcile.

Conservative Christianity has, for so long, put such an emphasis on the “rightness” of unbroken relationships, on the holiness of the image of family that it turns into this belief that all a relationship needs is two people making the choice to stay together – and whoever breaks that is the one in the wrong.

It’s the perfect environment for abusers to live and thrive. Whatever they do, whoever they hurt, is obligated to them upon their apology. They can work it out, again and again and again, with the social approval of those around them, because they just want so desperately to make things better, and how could anyone be so awful as to refuse them?

So how does a church not enable the cycle of abuse? By deciding that repentance is more important than reconciliation. By deciding that an abuse victim doesn’t actually have to keep putting up with the abuse just because their abuser apologized. By recognizing that a family can be more “broken” with an abuser in their midst than anything a divorce might do.

There is nothing righteous, holy, or good about supporting the cycle of abuse. I would even argue that it’s not particularly honoring God, and especially not loving of others, to put a family’s togetherness over and above their actual safety.

Abusers should repent, with no expectation from those they harmed. They should repent with the safety of those they’ve harmed put first and foremost. And churches should do all they can to come beside the abused, to do what they can to keep those abused safe from their abusers. Because right now, conservative Christianity’s “family values” is whitewashed tombs Jesus talked about in Matthew 23:27 – an external beauty, maybe, the perfect family photograph with pure-white smiles. But everyone else can see its decay and uncleanliness. Everyone knows its death.