Child Abuse as Church Doctrine

Normalization of Cruelty Begins Early

Modern American Christianity is an authoritarian project of psychological control engineered to maximize power. Dangerous to both body and soul, it is built and sustained through dominance, coercion, and enforced ignorance.

The violence it demands begins at home, as parents are indoctrinated to use coercive control in place of compassionate care. 

Watch the Christian parenting influencers below joke about spanking their children. 

“God wants me to give you a spanking right now…I remember clearly one time wielding the little paddle, thinking I’m glorifying God! You need five more. (laughter).

But it’s my duty. It’s my calling. I’m responsible to do this. It’s out of obedience to God and it’s going to bear fruit.”

 

Fundamentalist Christianity uses the fear of hell to turn loving parents into authoritarians. And for parents already wired that way, it provides them justification for abuse.

Authoritarianism is not always a stable personality trait. In fact, some people may live much of their lives without expressing authoritarian attitudes until fear from a perceived threat activates it. The fear doesn’t even have to be real. It just has to feel real – like the fear of hell. Thus, well intentioned and loving parents terrified of hell are convinced that harming their children now will prevent the greater harm of hell later. This is how abuse is normalized and sanctioned.

Terrifying a child with physical violence or threats of eternal damnation embeds compliance so deeply into the developing mind that it often mutates into a self-policing identity, one that overrides and eventually replaces the authentic self.

This state of disassociation, sanctified as “dying to self,” is revered as spiritual ideal instead of the profound psychological wound it is.

This wound often leads to treatment resistant depression, shame, and feelings of worthlessness.

Evangelical environments, with their blend of physical punishment, psychological terror and emotional manipulation, frequently produce complex trauma that is beyond the scope of standard therapy.³

Its not your fault.

The result is fragmentation: the whole self splintered into inaccessible parts. Inner strength, emotional intelligence, and self-trust are never allowed to form. In their place: submission, repression, denial, and projection. Being so violently stripped of the internal resources necessary for full psychological maturity leaves an entire population intensely insecure and prime targets for manipulation and exploitation⁴.

Reclaiming ourselves means returning to the site of rupture. It means unpacking our formative experiences, not just intellectually, but somatically and emotionally. Healing begins when we stop apologizing for who we are and start reclaiming our permission to be our authentic self.⁵

Your wholeness is not lost, only buried.

Post-traumatic growth is real⁶. Through neuroplasticity, new relational experiences, and learning to experience a felt sense of love and safety, you can begin to reclaim the parts of you that you lost.

No matter your background, you don’t have to stay stuck forever.

You deserve the chance to be who you REALLY are and to live the life you’ve always wanted.

Footnotes

During threat, fear or terror "Parents naturally perceived by the child as a source of nurturing simultaneously become a source of threat. This paradoxical experience (the parent is at the same time the source of, and the solution to, the child’s fear) is capable of disorganizing the child’s mental processes and represents a type of traumatic experiences constituting an inescapable threatening experience in the face of which the child is powerless (Schore, 2009; Liotti, 2017)." This causes disordered attachment.

1. Breaking the child’s will was the Christian parent’s most important duty. Every day on the radio, James Dobson encouraged Christian parents to “Dare to Discipline.” A lot of parents took him up on it. ↩︎
2. Farina, Benedetto et al. “The Role of Attachment Trauma and Disintegrative Pathogenic Processes in the Traumatic-Dissociative Dimension.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 10 933. 26 Apr. 2019, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00933 ↩︎
3. The complexity of developmental trauma that occurs when a child is raised by violence and psychological terror of Evangelical Christianity requires specific training and strategies be paired with more conventional therapies. Bryant R. A. (2010). The complexity of complex PTSD. Am. J. Psychiatry https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.10040606 
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4. Example: Why were the Boomers so easily hijacked by Fox News? They were simultaneously raised in incredible economic prosperity and incredible emotional neglect. One does not make up for the other. ↩︎
5. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2014.2
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6. Confino, D., Einav, M. & Margalit, M. Post-traumatic Growth: The Roles of the Sense of Entitlement, Gratitude and hope. Int J Appl Posit Psychol 8, 453–465 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-023-00102-9
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