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The following excerpt comes from The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. (Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.) The book explores the growing movement of people leaving evangelical Christianity, problems within evangelical communities, and connections between white evangelicals and rightwing politics.

This excerpt comes from chapter 13, “Suffer the Children.”

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Once children are born in an evangelical family, they are to be guided with a firm hand.

Evangelical leaders teach young parents that it’s God’s will to guide kids’ minds, hearts, and souls in the way of Christ. To do that, the thinking goes, the Bible teaches that they must physically discipline their children as a means of training them for life and for eternity, preparing them to submit not just to the will of their parents but to the will of God. In the evangelical view of the Bible, the admonition in Proverbs that “whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them” must be taken literally.

Dobson’s Dare to Discipline is among the earliest and best-known examples of what became a genre of Christian parenting manuals offering an evangelical alternative to secular experts like

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose 1946 bestseller The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care became the parenting Bible for many families for decades. Dobson, and others who  would follow him, promised a vision of parenting rooted in Scripture, the guide for all aspects of life for evangelical Christians.

In retrospect, what these books were promoting was a culture of systematic and spiritualized child abuse. Along with other conservative Christian writers such as Michael and Debi Pearl, who came to prominence in the 1990s, many advocated spanking children as young as fifteen months old as an essential method of teaching appropriate behavior. In Dare to Discipline, while advising that discipline should be “administered in a calm and judicious manner” and cautioning against punishing children “too frequently or too severely,” Dobson nonetheless stresses that “the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” Later, he says that if a child cries for longer than five minutes, the parent should “require him to stop the protest crying usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.”

Others, like the Pearls, took it further. On her blog in 2013, the late writer Rachel Held Evans, whose work inspired countless evangelical young adults to rethink their faith, wrote about the tactics advised in the Pearls’ guide to “biblical discipline,” To Train Up a Child. As Held Evans notes, the couple advocated spanking children with plastic tubes, and doing whatever was necessary to punish defiant children, even if it meant holding them down and sitting on them.  As the New York Times had reported in 2011, the Pearls’ methods came under heightened scrutiny after three children whose parents had been influenced by their teachings died of apparent abuse. The Pearls have insisted that they oppose disciplining children in anger or causing physical harm.

In “Ministry of Violence,” a three-part series published on Substack in 2021, writer Talia Lavin delves into the history—and longer-term impact—of teachings on discipline promoted by a host of conservative Christian writers and speakers, including Dobson and the Pearls. The response to a social media callout asking people from evangelical backgrounds to share their experiences as children on the literal receiving end of these teachings “was immediate, and wide-ranging, and intense,” Lavin writes. Lavin heard from scores of people ranging from their twenties to their sixties, expressing “so much candid anguish I marveled the words didn’t etch holes in my screen.”

They told Lavin about being spanked with wooden spoons and belts and hands, sometimes dozens of times, sometimes unclothed, sometimes leaving them bruised or even bleeding—all in the name of raising “godly” children.

Dobson had rightfully cautioned against the dangers of lashing out in anger and disciplining too harshly. But even for those whose parents never lost control or left them bloody, the carefully prescribed, intensely religious nature of the discipline could fuel feelings of confusion and shame.

Spanking, according to Dobson, was a unique tool to facilitate bonding and communication between parent and child: “The child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, loving arms. . . . You can tell him how much you love him, and how important he is to you. . . . This kind of communication is not made possible by other disciplinary measures” such as a time-out.

Most evangelical parents I’ve known would condemn child abuse per se as a betrayal of their God-given responsibility to care for their children. But spanking was viewed as something distinct—God-ordained, and therefore, by definition, not abuse. Abuse, I was told, often involved a parent losing control and becoming violent, rather than calmly and intentionally carrying out God’s instructions.

For the child, though, the experience of being hit by a parent, the person responsible for your very survival, was often a “violative and bewildering moment,” Lavin writes. “Memories of the infraction fade, but a sense of betrayal lingers, as well as the sense that love and pain flow from the same font.”

Hillary McBride, a Canadian trauma therapist who often works with patients from evangelical backgrounds, wrote in a thread on Twitter in October 2022 about repeatedly coming face-to-face with the impact of Dobson’s teachings: “On a full day last week, every single adult patient I saw happened to mention the prolific and enduring trauma they experienced because of how their parents disciplined them as children, as instructed by James Dobson. If you were a child parented under this absolute farce of psychological theory, I want you to know that your strong will, your clear bodily knowing, your powerful emotions, and your capacity to resist what you were being taught, was a resource and deserved to be protected.”

In an interview, McBride told me her patients often struggle with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, chronic overwork, and other coping mechanisms. She said she recently opened a ketamine clinic to better serve those and other patients. McBride said she’s hopeful; she believes “there’s no brain that can’t change.”

Emily Joy Allison, a writer living in Nashville, told me she experienced what she describes as “ritual physical abuse” for more than a decade, in part because of the influence that evangelical teachings about discipline had on her parents. For Allison, the author of #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing, the methodical nature of the discipline produced its own trauma.

“My parents never once flew off the handle and hit me. Never once was it anything like, ‘Oh, I got angry and smacked you,’ or something. I could forgive that, because that’s fucked up, but it’s human at the very least,” she said. “I felt like the way that they handled it was inhuman. They would only do it while they were calm. It was with a sanded-down two-by-four with Bible verses written on it—like literally hitting me with the Bible.”

For some, particularly women, that intertwining of love and pain—inflicted on an intimate area of the body—produced confusing, shameful feelings. Allison described the ritualized nature of the abuse as having a “psychosexual” undercurrent.

In Lavin’s series on evangelical discipline, a forty-year-old woman named Heather described the confusing, intrusive erotic feelings she experienced from being spanked by her parents:

“There’s something about being beaten in such a religious, ritualistic, intimate way that feels almost sexual, even if it’s not intended as such. Child me picked up on that too, and started having sensual feelings about it. And felt extremely guilty for that, and wanted it to stop, but those thoughts intruded in my head. So much that I asked God to kill me. He didn’t.”

There’s no way to know how common this experience is, but I do know that it is real—with lifelong implications.

Sarah McCammon is a National Political Correspondent for NPR and cohost of “The NPR Politics Podcast.” She is the author of The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 43 of the Revealer podcast: “Ex-Evangelicals and U.S. Politics.”