This article explores the issue of corporal punishment within Evangelical households, drawing on firsthand accounts from individuals who experienced abuse during their childhood. The author highlights the deeply ingrained belief that violence is a legitimate form of discipline sanctioned by God, often leading to lasting trauma and psychological harm.
In some hands, a wooden spoon is an innocuous object, a kitchen tool for stirring and scooping. In others, it is an instrument of pain that lingers in the memory far longer than any taste could linger on the tongue. If you strike a child enough times and with enough force with a wooden spoon, it will shatter.
While Evangelicals might protest that the intended effect of corporal punishment is virtuous instruction, in the moral universe of Evangelical parenting, the ideal child is not necessarily smart, ambitious, or even kind or loving. Above all, he or she is obedient. “My mom wasn’t averse to carrying around a wooden spoon to hit us with,” Rebecca, 46, told me. “She broke that wooden spoon on me more than once.” For 32-year-old Sarah, a wooden-spoon beating was routinely used until she showed sufficient “repentance.” To this day, she says, “Being struck causes me to feel sick to my stomach, even if it’s something as small as being brushed by a paper airplane.”
The regularity and implacability of physical punishment are two features that abuse survivors remember keenly. “I was young, probably around age 4, and I remember this experience very clearly yet remember almost nothing else from that age,” Mary, age 30, wrote to me. “We had been out in public. I’m pretty sure that the initial infraction was I started crying when my dad went to zip up my coat. … By the time we got home the punishment being dealt was 100 hits without any pants or underwear.
“I remember reading my mom’s letters or diary about how she wasn’t sure what to do about my ‘strong will’ and she just couldn’t break it,” said Bathsheba, 37. “Looking back, I have no idea what I did that was so strong willed. I remember her telling me a story about her telling me not to touch a plant when I was crawling and that I grinned a big ‘knowing’ grin and went and touched it anyway. I would tense myself up to endure hours of spankings. I felt that showing pain would mean they won.
Legions of imitators followed, some more fixated on pain and others more faith-centric than Dobson’s neighborly, folksy persona. They continue to shape Evangelical parenting culture by emphasizing the perils of “sparing the rod.” His immediate successors include Michael and Debi Pearl, whose work through No Greater Joy Ministries includes the infamous, a book that, to me at least, is best described as a child-abuse manual.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Evangelicals make up 14 percent of the American population. Half of that is 24 million people. There’s a laundry list of abuses that are permitted daily under the aegis of parental rights: physical and sexual abuse; the deprivation of education under the guise of homeschooling; and the denial of any outlet, in school or otherwise, to talk about what’s happening at home.ParentalRights.
“I have a constant fear of failure and a lot of anxiety around succeeding. It damaged my ability to be creative and to be willing to stand up for myself or set boundaries,” Jeremy, 37, told me. “I have felt as though I had no real goals of my own without someone telling me what to do. I still struggle mightily with taking initiative and fear of punishment.”
For other respondents, the connections were more vivid, even from an early age. Dinah, 30, recalled that being forced to strip created guilt and confusion — an extreme form of immodesty. “I had separately ‘figured out’ masturbation as a toddler and would often use it to self-soothe before and after getting spanked,” she wrote to me.
When she was very young, Hannah remembered, her parents often sent her to the copse of weeping willows beside her home. There she was instructed to pick her own switch — a short length of willow that would be used to beat her. When she grew older, plastic hangers and dowel rods from Home Depot were the tools of choice, but in her youngest years, she was made to participate in the ritual of her own punishment.
Joanna, 38, was beaten on a weekly basis with wooden spoons and spatulas until she was 12. She was told that it was the only measure that could correct her innate sinfulness. “I stayed with one guy who would throw me around when I ‘acted wrong,’” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t articulate what wasn’t right about it. I was so used to being punished for my wrongness that he just sort of fit the pattern. I only left after he raped me.
Corporal Punishment Evangelicalism Child Abuse Trauma Religious Doctrine
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