Episode 35: Talia Lavin on the Christian Right's View of Marriage/Parenting

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we have an esteemed guest, Talia Laban, the author of Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.

Talia is, for my money, one of the most morally intelligent writers on the far right in America today.

She has a real keen insight for what the stakes of their project are.

And as we're going to see today, she also has done a lot of the legwork looking at the intellectual origins of the far right and the texts that make up their worldview.

Talia, thank you so much for being with us.

I'm delighted.

I'm a longtime Moira fan and I'm also an Adrian fan now that we've chatted.

You're lucky.

I don't like send you weird texts at 3 a.m.

like I do to Moira.

It's always a pleasure.

I'm so happy to be here and to talk about my forthcoming book, Wild Faith, A Christian Rite is Taking Over America, which is coming out October 15th.

And it is terrific.

Spoiler alert.

TLDR by this book.

We're going to be not talking about the whole book here today.

We really, Maura and I got fascinated about a particular part of this book, but the claim of the book is in some way kind of bigger, right?

The basic contention seems to be that we discount the influence of the Christian right at our own peril, that there is this kind of parallel universe that a lot of this stuff happens in, and yet it really influences, you know, public policy and the way many Americans live their lives.

And, you know, parts of the book that both Maura and I, I think, found most moving were your interviews with people who were in that life and where you really kind of get a sense of what millions of Americans, what family looks like to them.

I wanted to to sort of start by asking you: how did you choose the objects through which to study this?

I mean, obviously, you found interview partners, but you also, I mean, as a literature professor, I was very, very pleased with how the book uses books and uses media to really think through the influence of the Christian right on pretty much all important debates.

We're going to talk about transphobia, but we could talk about parenting, we can talk about marriage, we can talk about the sort of cavalcade of self-recycling moral panics we have,

the culture wars, we can talk about, you know, rape culture, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems like the book is sort of saying, because the

overall debate around these topics is so strongly shaped by these books that most of us, you know, shit libs, like never clap eyes on, much less read, like we don't even understand kind of what America, what American culture really has become.

And so how did you work through these objects?

How do you combine your discussions with people who were raised in Christian fundamentalist circles with the kind of books that you could, but would never buy on Amazon?

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, this book kind of took a shape I wasn't expecting.

Initially, it was supposed to be focused around like right-wing terrorism.

And then I wound up watching a documentary that referenced widespread child abuse within like a particular church and sort of had this revelation where I was like, this can't be just this one church and wound up sort of writing a series for my newsletter about child abuse within evangelical context, interviewed a lot of ex-evangelical folks about their childhoods and upbringings.

But yeah, you're right.

I mean, much of the core of the book is these parenting manuals, these marriage manuals, and in other cases, these novels that use prophecies and very

out there interpretations of the book of Revelation as sort of very literal facts.

So it is this examination in part of these cultural artifacts.

And I guess the way I came to them was just by, in part, I asked people, like, what were some texts that were on your parents' shelves?

But also, these books came up in interviews because they were important and they were guidelines.

So you have James Dobson's The Strong-Willed Child, which to be clear, the strong-willed child is a bad thing and we want to break that child's strong will.

Dare to discipline, hugely influential books.

To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debbie Pearl is quite infamous among folks who kind of know stuff about this.

It's basically, it's a child abuse manual and it's been linked to the deaths of several children, like

who were sort of very brutally abused, wound up dying.

And then in their homes, in the homes of their parents, this book was discovered.

So, it's very, it's dark.

And then, the marriage manuals, I was like, what are some of the best-selling sort of Christian marriage manuals?

And I was sort of back reasoning, but also I read, particularly with the parenting stuff, I read about 50 years' worth of sort of big parenting manuals.

So, starting in the 70s, and I think my final texts were published in 2015, 2017.

So, quite recent.

And it is remarkable how much of a consistent through line of sort of God wants you to beat the crap out of your kids.

And you have to do this.

Otherwise, you're condemning them to die

of being sinners.

You know, it's this very intense, internally coherent theological imperative to physically brutalize your children.

To make sure that they're a continuation of yourself and of your own values in some way.

Yeah, I looked up The Power of the Praying Wife, one of the books you mentioned, and one of the books that someone had been gifted several times,

which is another interesting thing that these things clearly sell well because people own multiple copies.

So I'd never heard of The Power of the Praying Wife.

But as of this morning, it ranks at 873 on the Amazon bestseller charts.

And that's from 2014.

I'd never heard of this book.

And those are incredible numbers for a 10-year-old book to put up on Amazon.

And here I was, I was like, oh, what obscure thing Natalia dug up.

And I was like, well, no,

it outranks literally every book on my shelf

on Amazon.

Yeah, right.

It's like Daniel Steele, John Grisham, and this Christian marriage manual that

is fucking horrifying.

It's one of the most disturbing books I've ever read.

Like as a woman, as a human being,

it's awful.

And

it's not that there's some great, you know, paucity or failure on sort of mainstream America's part not to have heard of these books, right?

Like, these are books designed to exist within an insular world, they're passed from hand to hand within this select population.

And this is true of a lot of evangelical culture: that it's sort of internally developed for internal purposes.

And of course, obviously, this is a community that's heavily into proselytizing, so

internal and external, the the boundaries are a little fuzzy, but there's very much this separate and

apart kind of material culture of movies and books and comics that you've never heard of because they're not designed for you.

So, it's not that you're in some mire of ignorance that you haven't heard of the power of praying with.

Sorry, I gotta answer the doorbell.

Okay,

maybe it's JD Vance.

Yeah, I'm told there's an eel farm here

For the eels.

For normal stuff.

That'd be incredible.

I'm going to do normal stuff with these eels.

Yes.

So we've decided that that was J.D.

Vance showing up for the eels that he needs for non-weird things.

Yeah, no.

I did offer him a fine eel skin leather jacket.

Anyway.

So,

yeah, so there's the separate material culture that really exists for evangelicals, by evangelicals.

That's a community of tens of millions of people.

So it has this sort of inbuilt audience, an audience that's proselytizing and getting converts.

But yeah, like you're not dumb for not having heard of Stormy O'Martian before, Omartian.

I think it's Omartian, but my heart wants it to be Omartian.

But her husband is like the musical director for Campus Crusade for Christ.

Oh, yeah.

And she's written, there are a lot of books in the power of a praying series.

So the power of a praying wife is the most popular, I think.

Like, there's study group guides for it, but there's the power of a praying woman, the power of a praying parent, the power of praying for your adult children, the power of a praying grandparent, and so on.

But there's no crossover, a power of a praying chicken noodle soup for who needs my cheese.

The power of a praying teen.

It almost reminds me of Barbie, right?

Like there's any iteration of it that you can imagine.

They're just doing the same thing over and over and over again with slight variations.

But, like, tell us a little bit about what the power of the praying wife prescribes, right?

Like, what kind of vision of marriage does it put forward?

It's so dark, really.

I was reading it, and I have a strong stomach at this point in time for all

sorts of horrors.

And yet,

this really threw me for a loop.

I mean, it was the same actually with a lot of marriage manuals.

I think marriage manuals and child-rearing manuals.

obviously, there's something very horrible about these hate-filled screeds and sermons and the way we sort of publicly see policy manifested and all this stuff.

But then, when you see like people addressing their own folks, right?

Their own constituency, and they're speaking in this sort of, here's what you do, here's how you do it.

It's very measured.

And then what you're reading is like just incredible cruelty.

So, this woman basically hated her husband and really wanted to leave him.

And

she basically sits down and says,

like, I made this decision that I was not going to leave him, that I had to die to myself

and be reborn in

God.

Like, here's a direct quote.

You have to decide if you want your marriage to work.

You have to believe that part of your relationship that has been eaten away by pain, indifference, and selfishness can be restored.

You have to trust that what has swarmed over you, such as abuse, death of a child, infidelity, poverty, loss, catastrophic illness, or accident, can be relieved of its death grip.

You have to know that whatever has crept into your relationship so silently and stealthily, such as making idols of your career, your dreams, your kids, or your selfish desires, can be removed.

You have to trust that God is big enough to accomplish all of this and more.

And she says the solution for this is

literally dying to dying to herself.

So she says,

Dying to yourself is always painful, especially when you are convinced that the other person needs more changing than you, but this kind of pain leads to life.

The other alternative is just as painful, and its ultimate end is the death of a dream, a relationship, a marriage, and a family.

So, again, this is the instructions for when you've experienced abuse and infidelity.

Oh, my God.

It means being willing to die to yourself and say, change me, Lord.

I mean,

this is something you can kind of like detect in a lot of the way conservatives will talk, kind of, for like a general audience.

You can almost deduce the subtext being like, do you just want women to not have any desires or thoughts or drives beyond marriage and motherhood?

And then,

in this sort of behind the curtain, in-group-oriented text, that's exactly, in fact, what they're saying.

You know, it like it is as cartoonish as you might imagine.

I mean, maybe not even cartoonish.

Like, this is essentially prescribing marriage as a kind of martyrdom.

And this is a theologically coherent view.

In other words, it's saying that the most sacred thing you can do as a woman is to

ask God

to kill you,

kill your desires, in order for you to remain in submission to a man.

And this is your sanctified role.

So I would say it's not even cartoonish.

It's

metaphysical almost.

It's cartoonish in the way that like an icon of a saint is cartoonish, right?

Like it is an image, but this is a sacred image.

I mean, and just to quote a little bit more stormy, Stormy I.E., not to be confused with Stormy Daniels, who's very cool.

This is her after her, of course, her husband has this

like intro to the book where he's like, you know, we've had 40 years of marriage and like it's been a blessing for me the whole time, but it's been terrible for her.

And it's sort of, you know, just a joke.

And then you read the actual like.

innards of the book and you're like, oh God, that's not a joke.

Because she says, after a number of years, little change, and this is him being cruel to her.

She says he used words like weapons and left me crippled or paralyzed.

And he's very irritable and angry.

She says, After a number of years with little change, I cried out to the Lord one day in despair, saying, God, I can't live this way anymore.

I know what you've said about divorce, but I can't live in the same house with him.

Help me, Lord.

And then she says,

As I sat there, God also impressed upon my heart that if I would deliberately lay down my life before his throne, die to the desire to leave and give my needs to him, he would teach me how to lay down my life in prayer for Michael.

He would show me how to really intercede for him as a son of God.

And in the process, he would revive my marriage and pour his blessings out on both of us.

I mean, it's so dark.

Yeah.

And that switcheroo of like, right, devotion to God and devotion to your husband, like is, is, seems to be like, it's kind of the secret principle of this book, right?

The table of contents, which I briefly looked at, is right so it's called the power of the praying wife so you'd think that like the wife would make an appearance in some of the chapter titles oh no chapter one his wife two his work then it goes his finances his sexuality his affection his temptations his mind his fears his purpose his choices his health it's it's all centered on him right like it's really extreme here in the sense that like it's really sort of self-abnegation and because of the way the chapters are written it's capital H so you're always like wait uh who am I submitting to is it uh Is it God?

And then you're like, oh no, temptation, that seems unlikely.

So it's probably Michael.

But that switcheroo seems really constitutive of how this book works.

I also think it's quite deliberate.

Yeah.

You know, this is a theological view in which the theological role for a woman is to submit to her husband absolutely.

And this is a form of worship of God.

Right.

This is how you fulfill your divinely ordained destiny, just as Eve was sort of commanded to do.

And you see that in the subheadings in the chapters.

They're like, shut up and pray,

like letting go of expectations.

It's like,

but like, I need prayer too.

And it's like, don't expect that.

Don't.

Pray to be set free and healed of any memories of sexual abuse and trauma you've had.

And then your sex problems will go away.

It strikes me as really consistent that the person in need of changing is always the woman with the grievance, right?

And also that what she needs to resolve her grievance is never any kind of moral restitution or material alteration in the circumstances of her life.

It's always like an attitude adjustment, you know?

It's always about her bad desires or her bad perceptions and not about anybody else's bad behavior or unfair circumstances.

I mean, it's very extreme in this iteration.

You know, the word selfish appears over and over and over again, but it's always about the woman.

And even when a man's selfishness is acknowledged, there's nothing much more stark or dramatic than die to yourself.

Like die to your own needs, put yourself in God's hands, become essentially a living martyr in order to prevent sort of the death of this concept of the family, to prevent like the death of a marriage.

Like

surgically excise your own desires.

It's a crazy ideology, but how does it work out in practice, right?

Because something that I really appreciate about your book is how much time you spent with people who come from these kinds of families and are being raised and trying to live in the muck of this ideological prescription.

What does that do to them?

How do they actually live day to day?

I mean, obviously the people that were like down to speak to me when I was like, hey, were you abused as a child under the aegis of like James Dobson or similar authors?

Let's talk about it.

Like that's people who've left that faith.

Many of them like did live that faith for a long time.

And I mean, it's just really grim.

Like you're really sad a lot of the time.

And, you know, you can't really surgically excise all of your desires through like the transcendent power of prayer, I think.

oh you mean this doesn't work i'm shocked you heard it here first

like maybe like if you're really have some spiritual gifts or something but like praying will not resolve like a husband who is abusing or cheating on you

and in practice people take out their aggression in other ways it can be expressed politically And we all know this story.

I mean, the original epigraph of the book was going to be from that Yeats poem,

September 1st, 1939, where he says, I and the public know what all school children learn.

Those to whom evil are done do evil in return.

This idea of sort of this cycle of violence perpetuating itself.

But I firmly believe that a lot of the cruelty we see in the public sphere, and particularly these theocratic policies embraced, endorsed, and pushed by the Christian right really come from family environments that are sort of steeped in this essential cruelty.

Whether it's the self-abnegation prescribed to women so that abusive marriages can go on and on and on, whether it is this doctrine of beating your kids from before they can walk in many instances, what we see are these sort of authoritarian microcosms that then really enable an authoritarian politic

it both accustoms people to violence,

it accustoms people to notions of sort of absolute spiritual warfare in which one's own desires and one's own self are to be subsumed under these theological goals.

And it also chiefly and above all things values obedience.

Again, back to the idea of the strong will and selfish desire being really bad things.

So this is not an individualistic culture.

It's the opposite.

Saying, like, your nature is inherently sinful.

The things you want are wrong.

Don't trust your own desire.

Don't trust your own self.

And so that leads to a pretty authoritarian politic.

Something I kept thinking about as I went through your book was

how there is

this kind of conventional liberal attitude that the family and marriage are private, right?

That they are not political arrangements and sort of don't merit political inquiry or critique.

And what I really felt coming out of Wild Faith is that the right does not see it that way, right?

The right very much understands marriage as a site of

enacting of one's own political ideals, right?

And you mention the family as sort of like a miniature model of the authoritarian state.

And it strikes me that there's not really like,

there is not the photo negative critique of how families and marriages and parenting works really being developed on the left.

There is just sort of this live and let live attitude that assumes that looking at private life is itself almost too invasive and wrong.

Or nugatory, not important, right?

Like, who cares?

That shouldn't matter.

Yeah, trivial.

I mean, you're not wrong.

That being said, I'm not sure I want the left to be, like, developing an authoritarian family politic of its own.

Do I want a more full-throated embrace of feminism and like women's equality on the political left?

Absolutely.

But I'm not sure I am like, there should be a prescribed family structure that's like politically salient on the left.

But like, I think a lot of the problem, and something that in essence the book is trying in its own small way to address, is that a lot of mainstream liberals,

like they're constantly measuring other people's wheat with their own bushel, as it were.

You know, this idea that like my sort of rationalist, skeptic view of society is sort of the default view.

Everyone else's is probably insincere.

And I'm like, no, these beliefs are very, very sincere,

very deeply held, very zealous.

They're just like alien to you.

And so the book sort of is like, well, you should understand where these people are coming from.

And it's weirder than you think and more sincere than you think that these are like earnest theological beliefs, that accusations of hypocrisy are really besides the point because what we're talking about is A, internally theologically consistent and B, expressive of a will to absolute power.

And if you tell someone who is like expressing a will to like absolutely dominate American culture that they're a hypocrite.

It's like, who are you?

First of all, like you don't have the same faith as me.

I don't validate your worldview.

I mean, in order to credibly levy like an accusation of hypocrisy, you have to be someone whom your interlocutor values finds your perspective worthwhile.

And like that is simply not the case, particularly on the Christian right.

So yeah, I mean, there's a huge disconnect here.

Yes.

Right.

You're trying to have a debate with someone who does not regard you as a plausible participant in that debate.

The terms exclude you from the get-go, basically.

Yeah.

And particularly if you're arguing for women's rights as a woman, this is a culture that's like, you need to be being obedient

to someone.

Like the fact that you are here advocating for your own rights is a sin.

Again, like this is a culture that is just absolutely indifferent to female death, whether spiritual or physical.

And that's how you wind up with theocratic laws that mandate women dying of sepsis in parking lots.

It starts with this idea that like the role of the woman is to submit to God

and to man.

Not to,

it's a real cheerful book.

You're going to pick it up and you're going to love it, smile down the street.

God, I sound so dark, but like you can't imagine what it was like reading these manuals every day, like talking to all these abuse survivors.

I was so angry.

And then I'm like, I got to translate this into prose that's sort of urgent but readable.

Yeah.

Well, it really succeeds.

But let me ask you about the smile.

Because I think you do a really good job showing that how much of this is based on very selective reading of scripture.

But what feels to me particularly American is you're not supposed to be submitting.

You're supposed to be submitting with a smile.

That's sort of where I feel like the 1950s sort of sneak in.

Because like, it's not surly submission either.

It's smiley, beaming, you know, like pathologically cheerful submission, isn't it?

Can we talk about sort of the specific affects of this?

Because I feel like that's what makes a lot of what you describe so scary.

That, like, it's not that people are like, well, this is our lot in life and it sucks, but like, this is how it is.

It's like, and I learned to embrace it and to take joy in it, right?

And like, the books are all like, you know, you're describing them as super dark.

If you look at the covers, they're all poppy and fun.

Like, they, you know, you might reach for it if you...

didn't know the English language and could read what's actually on the cover.

Can you talk about the specific sort of American affect that this is all presented in?

Yeah, I mean, the power of a praying wife has like a flower on the cover and it's pink, and like similarly, incredibly

incredibly dark manuals to me,

admittedly, from the bias of like women are human beings.

This crazy notion, yeah, this wild notion.

So, like, another famous example, which you can buy on such websites as Biblical Femininity Boot Camp, is created to be his help meet by Debbie Pearl.

Debbie Pearl being a menace to society and also also like popular but sort of extreme evangelicalism.

It's it's currently number 107 in Christian marriage on Amazon.

But yeah, it's got this like happy woman in a shawl holding some sort of basket on the cover.

Like she's but she's delighted.

Yeah.

All of it looks like Bridget Jones's submission diary.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, kind of.

But yeah, I mean, it's, it's really like full of these sort of pictures of flowers, but it's also inside.

It's like women who are not married are not fulfilling their God-given, like they're not women.

Like they're not fulfilling their God-given purpose in this world and they're disappointed old failures.

And you must smile all the time.

A joyous smile is your greatest weapon.

You know, our first and foremost calling as wives and mothers is to please our husbands.

You know, out you pop with an inviting smile and a welcoming body.

Oh my God.

Oof.

Everyone is drawn to a smile.

Like nails on a chalkboard.

Yeah, it's pretty gross.

Men are highly attracted to smiles.

That includes your husband.

And then it's like, and this applies if he's cheating on you and abusing you as well.

Like,

I mean, Pearl is really radical on the subject.

She's really, she puts abuse in like quotation marks half the time.

And she explicitly tells women to stay.

She says, Physically abused women are not exempt from the principles I have advanced, but their broken emotional state renders them incapable of understanding the difference between service and servitude and between humility and self-degradation.

Well, I'm sorry, Debbie, that doesn't seem very obvious to me.

It's like be meek, but don't be too meek, but be definitely be meek.

Yeah.

And it kind of feels like you did something wrong if his contempt for you somehow like becomes abuse.

Like that's kind of on you because like you mistook servitude for what was it?

Yeah, you mistook service for servitude.

I mean, Jesus Christ.

It's sorry.

It's really, it's like diet advice, you know, you just can't fucking win, but it's like in this incredibly dark theological, like incredibly like absolutist theological viewpoint where it's like, this is what you were created for.

This is what God wants of you.

And what it, what he wants is to run this like impossible gauntlet of self-abnegation and obedience.

Well, it strikes me that the demand is not merely for, as Adrian was alluding to, the actions of subservience.

It's for the elimination of any other kind of selfhood or capacity for differing thought, right?

It is a kind of manual of self-abuse.

But like not in the sexy way.

That is meant to enable and further men's abuse.

Not self-abuse in the fun way.

Yes, it is a manual of like how to pre-destroy yourself.

And there are many such cases, many such manuals.

And they all have like these pink covers and these inviting, you know, like you could pick them up off a shelf and just think you're reading like a how to make my marriage work.

And then it's like, ah, die to yourself inside.

But, you know, yeah, it is American.

And I think this doesn't negate the fact that it's like a serious and internally consistent theological system because every religion in every era is influenced by where it is.

Right.

Of course.

And like other elements of cultural context.

But yes, this obsession with happiness and looking happy.

And I talked to a lot of kids who, you know, former kids who were beaten for not looking happy enough, which is like, so,

you know, yeah, like I, I had to smile and sing a cheerful hymn.

And if I wasn't singing cheerfully enough, I would be beaten.

And it's like, okay.

This might be a good moment to turn from marriage to parenting, right?

Because something I was really kind of surprised by, although I guess in retrospect I should not have been, was the centrality of physical violence to the Christian prescriptions for parenting.

Could you tell us a little bit about these parenting manuals that you went through?

Yeah, I mean, so if we're talking about like a part of the broader political project, we really see this rise in sort of biblical parenting books whose premier advocate is James Dobson, a focus on the family, which particularly in the 70s was just unbelievably influential.

We're talking about like radio programs going out to tens of millions of households.

And first of all, like much of the rise of the Christian right is essentially an attempt to refute the 60s, from racial integration to feminism, gay rights, all of that.

They're like, let's cancel that.

And we see that now coming to fruition in many ways.

Like they have succeeded at that project at last.

But part of it is that these revolutions and changes were often led by youth.

They were led by students and young people.

And so as part of the reactionary backlash to this, we see a rise in biblical parenting.

This idea of like, well, if kids were more obedient,

1950s parenting was too permissive, apparently.

During a time where lobotomy was considered a parenting tool, it was too permissive.

Yeah, yeah.

Just, oh, like those crazy parents in the 50s totally letting their kids run wild.

But it's this overcorrection.

It's the idea of like we've strayed from what the Bible tells us about how we should discipline our kids.

And let's bring back the rod and that will get rid of this pesky problem of rebellious youth.

So that's sort of the overall political context.

And then you have this massive parenting industrial complex that comes up and is very much a part of the evangelical right from then until today.

Starting, you know, again, Dobson's book, Dare to Discipline, it sold huge amounts of copies and was super influential.

And

there's even a podcast called We Hate James Dobson of just like people who are like,

fuck this, fuck this guy, fuck what he did to all these people.

The broader point that I think you're not making because you don't have to is that like basically fundamentalism, right?

Like it doesn't come organically out of some kind of traditional Christianity.

This is backlash politics and it's worth saying it is a response to feminism.

It's a response to the 60s.

It is part of a backlash to racial integration.

People didn't write and read manuals like this, quite like this in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

This really is a creation of a new strand in conservative Christianity.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And it seems like part of the prescription is once again to eliminate the capacity for critical thought or independent thought among those children, right?

And central to that seems to be the frequent and often quite devastating application of physical discipline, physical violence.

Yeah, I mean, in Dare to Discipline, which has sold 3.5 million copies, incidentally.

He describes in the first, in the introduction, beating the shit out of a dog.

for sleeping on a fuzzy toilet seat with a bell.

History's greatest monster.

Yeah.

And also, how his life was fundamentally and salubriously changed by his mother beating him with a girdle, which is psychosexual on so many levels.

Like, yeah.

I mean,

so what's interesting to me is like they're very hyper-fixated on Proverbs, which is, I think, at best a pretty minor book of the Bible, but it happens to be the one with like the parenting advice.

And it's like, you must discipline your child with the rod or he shall surely die.

The rod of correction, blah, blah, blah.

A child who is not like corrected is a shame to his mother, this kind of stuff.

And so Proverbs comes up again and again and again.

The sort of central verse is like, train up a child in the way he should go.

And when he is old, he shall not depart from it.

So it's always expressed as training up your child.

If you see anyone say, this is how I train up my child, like run away from them and take their kid and hold them.

This is my reactive feeling after studying this shit for a while.

But yeah, it really emphasizes physical abuse.

And I do think there's no way of hitting your kid that's not abuse.

So I'm pretty radical in the don't hit your kids camp.

Like, I get it if like your kid is running into the street and you like grab their wrist or something to like keep them from running into traffic.

But like any sort of systematized spanking,

like it's wrong and you shouldn't do it.

This is my is my take.

This is a firmly anti-spanking podcast, I think.

Yeah, we're not in favor of hitting any children for any reason.

But according to Dobson and his acolytes, this is not just acceptable, but in fact, ordained by God, right?

And something that really moved me in your book is you quote one parent in one of these gods talking about how much time they just spend in the bathroom beating their children.

Because the other thing about this discipline is not only is it divinely divinely ordained and justifiable and in fact mandatory, but that it also has to be done in private.

Could you talk a little bit about like the privacy?

Because it almost suggests a sense of shame, but that doesn't seem to be exactly what's going on there.

I mean, a lot of times you'll see like the sort of, well, you should do it in private, just because like the Gentiles won't understand, basically.

Like the sort of like normal people who aren't true believers on the just and righteous path of God will see you hitting your kid and be weird about it.

And so you should do it in the bathroom or whatever.

But yes, I remember that.

It seems like much of our day is taken up in the bathroom beating our kids.

And it's like, that seems like a you problem.

Yeah.

And this might also bring us to homeschooling, which also has a similar sort of logic of insulating your own.

parenting, which in this logic is, you know, divinely inspired and morally correct, from any kind of public scrutiny, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

It's It's real cult logic for sure.

It's like, not only do we have to do this, we have to make sure nobody else sees that we're doing this, not because they might intervene in the terrible things we're doing, but because they might stop us from living the way of God.

I mean, gosh, yeah, just one last piece on the physical violence.

I mean, it is remarkably pervasive.

It's remarkably consistent across different authors, different genders, different decades.

The things that are inconsistent is like, when does it start?

And for some people, it's like six months.

What?

yeah like blanket training is when you like put a baby that can't crawl yet or or is just starting to crawl on a blanket and then if they like leave the blanket or try to reach out to an object you hit them it's like a whole thing um the duggar family did this to their kids 19 kids and counting what that's what the pearls prescribe and to train up a child Dobson is a little more uh moderate he suggests starting at 15 months but again these are like kids are still in diapers and you're hitting them.

And often the spanking is very ritualized where it's like you have these like multi-step processes where it's like you make the child fetch their own paddle and then you go to their room and then you beat them.

And then you have this like sort of ceremony where they like say they won't sin again and then you hold them and you forgive them.

And I'm like, okay, this is a recipe to cross-solder like a whole bunch of unfortunate wires.

Yeah.

There is like a side note in the book where I say like, is this sexual abuse as well?

Especially because these books are hyper-fixated on kids' butts.

Like it's this miraculous organ that like God provided that's perfect for discipline.

So weird and upsetting.

Yeah, no kidding.

I realize I'm really not doing a good job selling my own book.

Well, no, it's so fascinating.

I read this stuff so you didn't have to.

And I talked to a lot of survivors and I really try to foreground their voices.

But yeah, like, it's like this obsession with kids' butts and these, you know, embrace your child after you've hurt them and like make sure that also, like, if they cry too much, like constant center of kids' emotions.

One parent who had raised her kids according to like a particularly vicious philosophy was like, my obedient, quiet, non-demonstrative, non-tantruming children were meant to be my way of sort of evangelizing and proselytizing.

In other words, the hope would be other parents would come up to me and say, wow, how do your kids behave so well?

And you say, oh, because of God and Christ and we're Christian.

So there is a performative element to this spectacle of sort of legions of obedient and silent children, but it's like.

That obedience was very hard won.

And you can trace a lot of it back to some older parenting parenting texts.

Like one of the older parenting texts that gets constantly cited is Susannah Wesley, who's the founder of the mother of the founders of Methodism.

And this is a very old text, right?

This is an 18th-century text.

Yes.

And she wrote this letter on child-rearing, and she talks about the odious noise of the that most odious noise of the crying of children, and how all her kids were corrected with the rod and taught to cry softly

and this very rigorous expression of physical discipline and Dobson quotes her approvingly so do the pearls like the the Wesley letter comes up again and again and again and then when I think about Susanna Wesley I'm like this lady was continually pregnant for 20 years

and survived 11 of her children like

I think she had like seven kids die in infancy so when she talks about the odious noise of crying of children and like teaching kids to cry softly and like this sort of overall sociopathic seeming disconnect or like profound lack of love towards children.

I'm like, could this be because you were never not pregnant for 20 years and also watched a lot of your kids die?

Yeah.

And is there a reason that we have to cite this with like glowing approbation in like 2014?

Yeah.

I mean, maybe we're rushing back towards that very grim cycle of continual and potentially fatal childbirth, But like, this is a very different social context,

one that I, for one, am not eager to recreate.

Yeah.

I mean, it's also really interesting to think about the fact that like, you know, we started with marriage guides where suffering was normalized and basically made meaningful.

And then in the parent guides, we basically get that, right?

That what you transmit to your children is a sense of really meekness before suffering.

And that's indeed what schooling is.

And I love the way you put it, That basically it just staples a whole bunch of things together, silence, privacy, fear of outsiders, pain, intimacy, forgiveness, et cetera, et cetera.

And like, it's not shocking to me that that's exactly the kind of environment where then

abuse actually, sexual abuse, thrives, right?

Because it puts things all these things together that make it harder to sort of articulate that, hey, something seems wrong in the situation, then maybe we should revisit it, which I feel like most parenting guides I've ever read do, right?

They're like, oh, you should talk to people about this.

Is this normal for a kid to do that?

What can you do?

What do other parents do?

And like, if there is, you create these kind of domes of silence around it, well, something very easily can and will go wrong.

Yeah.

I mean, I would also say that guides that teach wives to endure almost infinite cruelty.

And then also put on them the primary responsibility to rear children in this violent way.

I mean, what you're talking about is like absorb abuse and then regurgitate abuse, right?

Alice Miller is the author of the book For Your Own Good, where she explicitly makes this connection between authoritarian parenting and Fonde Siècle Germany and then the rise of the Nazis.

You know, when we're talking about models of the authoritarian family, she makes this comparison of sort of like

the husband is the dictator.

The wife becomes the secret policeman.

The child is the subject, right?

So it's all these like degrees of power and powerlessness.

Yeah.

So the woman is the checkist, the NKVD officer.

She's the stasi of this environment because she's structurally sort of otherwise disempowered and also like absorbs a lot of violence.

Yeah.

You can take or leave that theory.

I find it persuasive or at least an interesting model of thinking about this sort of stuff.

Yeah.

You also see it a lot in like how vociferously the Christian right speaks out against any form of sex education for kids, age-appropriate sex education, you know, up to even including like even like teens and eighth graders shouldn't like be taught anything.

And when you don't have the words to describe a situation, it is much harder to object.

Right.

Like, of course, the primary beneficiaries of kids not being taught age-appropriate lessons about sex and what it should be and boundaries and all all of these things are abusers, right?

Yeah.

And I don't think that's some wild coincidence.

It's also just interesting to me, and very American, also, that, like, you know, like the classic dichotomy in our movies where it's like, we'll show like the most brutal massacres ever.

And then, like, if there's a butt, like, it gets like an NC-17.

Like, any amount of violence is acceptable, but like, any amount of sex has to be like enshrined in warnings.

And, and

you're talking about kids who are like marinated, bathed in violence from literally literally before they can speak or walk.

And yet, like, any acknowledgement of their physical bodies

is sort of forbidden.

And that is very American to me.

Yeah.

But yeah, about homeschooling, it's just basically all of this taken one step further, isolate kids from mandatory reporters, teachers, and they are much less likely to report abuse.

No one's there to be like, what are those bruises?

And very explicitly, the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association, which is explicitly Christian right, run by Christian right lawyers, established, I believe, in the 80s.

And first, they very successfully dismantled the like patchwork of laws requiring kids to attend school.

And sort of really, you saw the sea change in homeschooling where it was like basically a couple of hippies who like weren't particularly mad at authority and like worked with school districts.

It was a very, very tiny percentage percentage of the population.

And then in the 80s, you have this like enormous explosion of Christians homeschooling in the Reagan 80s.

First, coming out of like the fact that schools had been desegregated, which is part of the origin of like the Christian right in general.

Like the Christian right as a political movement in general, I should say.

But second of all, all of these ideas about permissiveness, all these ideas about indoctrination that you still see about public schooling.

And the majority of people who homeschool in the U.S.

are doing so for religious reasons.

And so the primary lobbying organization for homeschooling in the U.S.

is this Christian right organization.

And basically you had this network of laws that came about like when mandatory schooling and public schooling were like first established.

So like, you know, in the various states.

So that's, you know, 50 different stories, but like essentially you're looking at end of the 19th century.

So this organization was like, hey, these beautiful Christians who will definitely call your office are mad about these like antiquated 19th century laws and they want to like raise their kids according to Jesus.

And so fast forward a couple of decades and what you have now, it's like not that kids are falling through the cracks.

It's that kids can vanish into abysses.

There are just like a tiny proportion of states that require any sort of accountability.

And the vast majority of states in the U.S., all you have to do is like tell your school district, I'm homeschooling my kid.

There's like no external accountability.

You don't like you, you just have to say like once a year, oh yeah, I'm teaching my kid and I'm gonna teach my kid these five or six areas.

And there's no testing and there's no mandatory visits or inspections or anything like that.

I mean, it's nuts.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the same people who make every school library a battleground and want to know exactly what their kids are taught and what they read seem to be absolutely outraged at any suggestion that the community might want to know what they're teaching their kids and whether they're teaching their kids and whether those kids are thriving, in fact.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, the HSLDA has this state-by-state map of like which is like no notice, low regulation, meaning you don't even have to tell your school district if you pull them out.

And that's, you know, Idaho and Texas and Oklahoma and Alaska and Indiana, right?

And then there's low regulation, moderate regulation, and then high regulation, which entails such a thing as in Pennsylvania, like you have to immunize your kids.

Like

you have to fill out an affidavit and whatever.

And this is considered high regulation.

In no state, do you have to be

like accredited as a teacher to teach your kids at home?

Well, to be fair, you have at this point read, you know, the collective works of James Dobson.

So like, isn't that about as good as accreditation?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you have all of these curricula that are like the dinosaurs were not real and the Confederacy was a depressingly lost cause.

But it's like, yeah, like outside of Massachusetts, where like there are external assessments,

really, it's this incredibly just permissive landscape.

And it's not that I'm like.

in favor of regulation for regulation's sake.

I think there are very good reasons why if a kid is taken out of the school system, there should be some policies assuring that they're like being educated and not being like beaten or starved or like isolated or caged.

And like all of these things have happened to homeschooled kids because it becomes exponentially easier to isolate your kid and abuse your kid and neglect your kid if like they don't have to go to school.

This is something I really value about your book and that I think might be a good point for us to end on is that, Talia, you're like uniquely alert to the suffering that this causes, right?

Like, we talked at the top of the episode about how, as you know, sort of normies, for lack of a better term, we don't understand the extent and pervasiveness and odiousness of this ideology.

But I think it also means that we don't really understand the extent of the suffering that it's imposing, in particular on children.

And your book really makes that clear and and centers their voices in a way I haven't seen done elsewhere.

You take them seriously as moral agents and as victims of a really often extremely cruel culture.

And so I'm really grateful for that and for your book.

And I'm grateful also for your time and your insights.

I think you've given us a lot to chew on.

So thank you to Talia Lavin.

The book is Wild Faith.

You can pre-order it now.

You can get it wherever books are sold.

And I'm so grateful that you got to be a part of this.

Yeah.

I mean, delightful to talk to you guys.

I'm sorry that my stories are so depressing.

I will say I think the book is like kind of a crisp read.

It isn't lugubrious.

The story it's telling is a holy war.

And as I say at the top of the book, to win a war, one kind of war, like you kill the men, right?

You capture the men.

But to really succeed in conquering a place, you capture the women and children.

And so this book is largely largely a focus of how that holy war, how that spiritual war is fundamentally an attack on women and children in the U.S.

Kids are people.

Don't hit your kids.

That's my message.

Talia out.

What a mic drop.

If there's one lesson I can bring to you, it's don't beat your kids for Jesus or any other reason.

Yeah.

So lovely to talk to you guys.

Really gotten in bed with the right, died to ourselves at like a time doing it.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for General Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.