Obey or else
How a psychologist's parenting advice helped America speed into fascism
I’ve been listening to Focus On Your Own Family a lot these days; it’s been giving me a lot to think about, especially about what it means to be a good person. There’s a tendency, especially in the western world and right wing politics, to conflate goodness with Christianity; it’s just something we get taught early on. It’s not just faith or a belief system, it’s cultural capital in countries with a majority Christian population; a lot of people, white conservative Americans in particular, wear their faith on their sleeves to signal that they are somehow more trustworthy than others.
There’s something particularly triggering about the current political movement in America if you’ve grown up within white fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, or at least adjacent enough to it to be exposed to some of the more authoritarian aspects, such as the parenting “advice” (more like decrees) of Dr. James Dobson, who sold easy answers to people, many of whom who may not have had the best childhoods themselves. Dobson and the other writers of the religious authoritarian parenting movement, such as the Pearls and the Ezzos, made a fortune by preying on parents’ insecurities and natural concern for their children, convincing them that if they didn’t do what they said, they would be responsible for their children turning out wrong and burning in hell.
I wonder how many people who weren’t raised within this milieu are aware of just how much religious authoritarian parenting is about control and limiting possibilities, to stunt the child’s normal development of things like imagination and curiosity and narrow down who they could be into their proper place in the hierarchy, which is rigid and divinely ordained, with white able-bodied Christian men at the top.
There is an emphasis on keeping a distorted view of the world outside the group, and a tendency to ascribe sinister motivations on those who don’t practice the specific faith. People without religion are said to have nothing holding them back from their worst impulses, or most generously, pitied as “deceived”. The child is supposed to be insulated from other worldviews.
The language of demons and evil is common. Fear and shame are used as weapons. Privacy and creating boundaries are not allowed, and any attempt at exercising agency or autonomy is considered willfulness and rebellion. Intuition is not to be trusted. Girls are instructed to remain “pure” until marriage, and the responsibility for that is placed solely on their own shoulders, all while being denied information that they could use to protect themselves.
A lot of people raised in this environment end up in a frozen child-like state, growing up with little idea of who they are other than what would give them the most praise or the least shame. They are conditioned to crave validation and trained to wait for permission that may never come, especially if their God-ordained role in the world is to submit and be dependent on others’ goodwill.
There’s a certain level of insularity within this environment; people demonstrate they belong by conforming, using their vernacular, often even altering the timbre of their voice (“fundie baby voice” is a thing). They make themselves small to fit into the mold created by others’ expectations. One thing that stuck with me from another exvangelical podcast I listened to was the hosts telling a story about relocating to a new city and getting excited that they would be meeting new people with different perspectives, only to discover that everyone was pretty much a clone of what they knew back in their other town.
The overwhelming message is “You are who we say you are; you want what we say you should want.”
People raised in this world are taught to ignore their own intuition or emotions, and conflate the idea of “goodness” with obedience and compliance; people who are disobedient are “bad”. There is no room to explore or experiment, no space for messiness, and they often come into adulthood not knowing what they really feel or want, just what they’re expected to say. They learn that the performance is more important than authenticity. I honestly think the people raised in this system are set up to fail so they would continually feel inadequate, always looking to authority figures to tell them what to do.
When you’re disconnected from your own humanity, it makes it easy to dehumanize others. It’s very easy to discount others’ suffering when you believe that people deserve eternal conscious torture for their sin nature. I see a lot of this in the current push against empathy, and to be honest, I believe that the end goal of this ideology is to commit atrocities (or at least stand idly by as they happen), just as long as it’s for “the Glory of God”.
It really shows in how many white fundamentalist evangelicals view current events. The genocide of Gaza continues unabated, but there are a lot of people who either minimize it, or even justify it because of who the victims are and how much Israel and Netanyahu serve their interests. Meanwhile, millions of people salivate at the prospect of a war between Iran and Israel because they believe it’s going to bring the second coming of Jesus, and the current U.S. government, probably the most conspicuously religious one in the nation’s history, is kidnapping people off the street and torturing them in concentration camps in the Everglades.
It’s not that there isn’t any truth, wisdom, or beauty in the collected writings of the Christian Bible (whatever canon is being used), but they’ve more often than not been used in the service of empire ever since the Roman empire decided they could turn Jesus into their mascot. Once this happened, it mostly became about retaining and increasing its own power; that criticism isn’t specific to Christianity, that’s just the nature of institutions. Besides, it’s always been far too easy for bad men to gain power by invoking divine authority.
The doctrines of Biblical inerrancy and literalism are fairly recent inventions, and rapture theology, which is one of the most selfish and sadistic belief systems, is only 200 years old. The various authors of the Bible, as well as the people who curated and translated everything, did not gain a temporary burst of omniscience when they worked on it. We also know a lot more now than we knew then. One part of this is discovering how much less we actually know than we thought we did, and being able to identify what gaps exist, or have existed, in our knowledge.
White fundamentalist evangelicalism can dress it up in jeans and fancy multimedia presentations, but their worldview remains black-and-white at its core. Random Bible verses are taken out of context to be used as thought-terminating cliches. Hypocrisy doesn’t matter; power does.
When I realize what Dobson and the other leaders of this movement have done to so many parents and children over the last 50 years, I become sick. Dobson in particular has been one of the most pernicious influences on modern society because of how insidious he was; fully conscious of how to manipulate people psychologically, and able to build an empire and an enormous amount of influence without becoming notorious for his awfulness like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson were, or getting himself into trouble with sexual escapades.
The damage he did to countless people is immense, but he also deliberately made America a meaner, more hateful place. All he needed to do was somehow convince people this was actually “love”.
If you want some more background on Dobson, this is a good explanation of his role in Christian Nationalism:
Some more writing about the authoritarianism behind these parenting methods: Sorry, James Dobson, We Can’t Spank Our Kids to Heaven.
I also highly recommend
as a more in-depth exploration of the harms of this parenting methods.If you’re reading this right now, I would like to hear from you; it could be a comment on something in the newsletter, or just an update on how things are going in your own lives. Please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly at bjdwsm@gmail.com; as well, if you’ve received this via e-mail, you can hit reply and your response will be delivered to me.
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this man is one of the reasons I don’t trust myself or my feelings. not even 12 years of therapy and deconstruction have gotten rid of the deep brainwashing. today my shriveled gay heart is doing a little dance.
I remember my sister and I thought the priests at the alter(!) and the nuns at Sunday school at our catholic church in the rural midwest U.S. were so creepy and sinister there must be something horrible lurking in this thing called church. Fortunately for us, our parents left the catholic church when I was ten or so. They became devoutly not-religious. Even though I did not grow up in a religious environment, I am acutely aware of religious abuse and religious trauma as so many people I meet live with this. Maybe I meet more religiously abused folks because I work in social services but I have a sneaking suspicion I don’t see a disproportionate representation. I believe religion-based parenting advice and the attendant punishment (so many things in religions are very punishing!) is so widespread people don’t even notice. Or they do and don’t think it’s a bad thing because after all children (like women) need to be controlled or society would fail.