Episode 31 - The Myth of Good Christian Parenting with Marissa Franks Burt

What happens when we "train up a child" in the way James Dobson thinks we should? Author Marissa Franks Burt and Anni discuss the tragic fruit of high-control parenting so common in Christian spaces.

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Transcript

Hey, welcome back to season three of Barely Christian, Fully Christian. I'm Anni Ponder, and I'm super grateful to have the gift of your attention and time.

This season, we're diving further into conversations about what it means to love Jesus, to call Christianity to be better than it is and a whole lot more like Jesus, and to embrace the feminine aspects of God. I'm so glad you're here.

If you happen to be tuning in for the first time to Barely Christian, Fully Christian, may I suggest you actually go back and start with episode zero.

There's a lot of information in there that will help lay the foundation for the conversations currently ongoing. Not saying you have to go back and listen to all the episodes in between, but that would be a really great place to start.

Okay, friends, as I've shared, much of my healing has come from unlearning really harmful things as I grew up thinking were true and replacing them with much better ideas. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of parenting.

Being raised in high control religious spaces, I'm constantly finding old harmful beliefs and practices and learning better ones. Know what I'm talking about?

Maybe you were raised in a Dobson household, or perhaps you have verses set to memory about training up a child and sparing not the rod. Well, buckle up, my friends.

My guest today is Marissa Franks Burt, and wow, does she have some receipts about what the so-called Christian parenting empires really have to offer. Also, trigger warning for anyone still feeling the effects of abuse.

Please take excellent care of yourself and listen with discretion. You are loved. So if you were raised in what we like to call a Dobson household, today's conversation is going to be really interesting for you.

I am joined by whom I will call Christian myth parenting expert.

Sure, why not?

Marissa Franks Burt, who co-authored The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, along with Kelsey Kramer McGinnis.

And Marissa is here today to explore with us all of the things that have come about since we started listening to, quote, Christian parenting experts, end quote, like James Dobson and his ilk.

And we're going to have a conversation about this book and also where we are today. So Marissa, thank you so much for making time for this in the middle of a very busy week for you and your family. Just so glad to have you here.

Thank you for inviting me.

It's just good to finally connect in conversation together, you know.

Well, this is what I love about Substack. So that's how I first learned about you. At the same time, some things were happening in the ACNA that also connected us.

And so I've just really loved reading what you put out and everything you put. I'm like, yes, yes, let's continue talking about this. So really what a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you.

Yeah, I love virtual that virtual kindred spirit feeling, you know, when you read something or engage in some way and you're like, oh man, I just want to have a cup of coffee with that person and chat and truly know this a little bit.

That's actually why I did this podcast, just to make new friends.

I love it. I love it.

Yeah. Well, let's dive in because right now, so let it be known that we are in the middle of March and in our state, it's a snowstorm. So there's that.

And there is also another kind of storm happening in our nation, in the world at large right now, 2026, and many of us are very baffled and also completely not at all surprised because we have been living under authoritarianism in one form or

another. And it's not surprising to see it reaching the levels of government and foreign policy where we see it right now. And so, yeah, to dive in. Okay, let's do this.

Let's pretend that we are riding on a train. We sit next to each other and I see this book in your lap because maybe you're signing it for someone or whatever. I don't know if you carry around copies of your own book.

Not typically, but we're imagining.

I don't write scripts typically either, but I love it.

Okay, let's make this happen. So I noticed this book. I learned that you are one of the authors and I'm curious.

What's this about? What would you say to help me understand?

4:33

Parenting Myth Unveiled

Yeah, yeah, I would say my co-author Kelsey and I wrote a book that traces the history and development of popular Christian parenting teaching over the last 50 years or so.

We examine the recurrent themes across this teaching and we consider the impact. How did this play out for people?

And we're primarily interested in white evangelical Christian teaching because that dominated Christian publishing and media empires for the past 50 years and had global influence because it was exported via missionaries, via international Christian

ministry organizations. But we're really looking at the primary sources to say, if we take these people at their word, what were they telling parents to do? And let's think about what would have happened in families who implemented this.

And so we surveyed a number of people, both older parents and adult children reflecting back to hear what their experiences were like, because, of course, this would have varied how individual families implemented things, maybe parents mitigated

things, maybe they exacerbated it, maybe church communities people were in, impacted how people applied this teaching. But we wanted to hear from people. What was it like behind closed doors in your home? How did this work out for you?

And it was a really heartbreaking reckoning, I think, to hear some of those stories. And that's why I really appreciate the language of mythology and betrayal in the title, because a lot of families were trusting these really self-appointed experts.

And it betrayed them in the end, that many of them experienced inauthentic connection, painful estrangements, all manner of abuse, any number of things and carry deep regrets and a lot of anger about it, too.

So I think it's a long overdue conversation within the communities. I think it's also of interest to people outside the communities or, as you said, people in this current moment who are looking around and thinking, what is going on?

Why are there Christians supporting these sort of ideas? Like, what is happening? And you can look at the roots here in how people were formed, how they were trained up in the way they should go.

I see what you did there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So for anyone who is raised in any kind of Christianity, probably you heard the proverb repeated over and over, train of a child and the way he should go.

Thanks, Patriarchy, for excluding girls. And when he is old, he will not depart from it. So there's this like little, if you do this, parents, and we'll tell you how, then your children will fall in line and have godly lives.

And the proof will be in the pudding of your children's amazing adulthood if you follow our steps. And like you said, these promises were given like carte blanche in the 70s, 80s, 90s.

I remember I've read these parenting books and I'll get into that. And we were told as parents and as children in these homes that this was the formula that would produce godly humans.

If we would just do these things, then we would have this outcome.

And of course, many of us can attest, and I'm sure if you were talking to a passenger on a train who had any experience with this, they would want to talk your ear off about, well, let me tell you my experiences with how that was actually so

incredibly damaging. And also, there are folks that I am in conversation with who say things like, well, I was spanked and I turned out great, so it's fine. And I'm like, OK, well, that's that's your experience.

And I have some questions because I know your kids and they're not fine. There's a little judging.

Yeah, it really varies how people experienced it, which kind of goes to show there isn't a one size fits all parenting formula.

It's prosperity gospel is what it is to sort of play on understandable parental hopes and aspirations and fears and say, look, parenting is hard and out of your control.

So here's this recipe of quote unquote biblical parenting or godly parenting or good Christian parenting. And that can be really reassuring for parents, but it requires a lot of faith.

And the question is, was that faith misplaced and what was underlying all these grandiose promises that were made and really built lucrative ministry empires on it because of how overwhelming parenting is and how people are looking for help continues

to this day in Christian influencer circles. And it's understandable why it was so appealing. It leaves families picking up the pieces though, whether it impacted them in small ways or large ways or whether it worked out fine for them.

It still raises the question, can there be any kind of meaningful accountability? The question we're always having within the church for people who profited off of this advice. Or at the very least, we don't need to keep repeating this.

It's not theoretical anymore. We don't have to take it on faith. We can listen to the generations who lived this, and maybe choose an alternate way forward.

We were really pleased with the resonance this book is having with people who've lived it, as you said, who've experienced it in some way and it feels very timely given the broader conversation as well.

I'm happy to talk about any ingredient you want to hear.

Oh, goodness. There is so much. Yeah, what I really appreciated at the end of your book, you said, look, we can look back and view all of this through the lens of posterity now.

And these authors, James Dobson was writing, what was it, Dare to Discipline or one of the others, when he still had toddlers. And when he's beating his dog, little Siggy, with a belt. I think Siggy was his name.

And all of these quote unquote experts who are promising parents, if you do it our way, they didn't have adult children to look back on and say, how did the fruit turn out?

And there weren't longitudinal studies about this that they were drawing from.

It was simply, hey, we're taking a few verses from the scriptures, putting our own interpretation on them, turning them into a formula and then telling parents if you do this and you follow our way and PS, you're buying our merch and coming to our

seminars and helping our empire expand. So that cannot be ignored. Then you will have these outcomes and it simply is turning out now decades later, absolutely false. So Marissa, I'm wondering if you could unpack for us.

If you could put into just a small little package, what was the message that all of these parenting books were really telling parents? What were the specific things that parents were hearing and what were some of the underlying themes there?

11:29

Core Teachings Examined

Yeah.

So yeah, we-

And are currently, by the way, they're still being published, unfortunately.

Still around. We ended up reading together over 100 different resources, reviewing them. And so as we read, we began to note recurrent themes.

And some of the key ones are the primacy of obedience, often presented as first-time obedience or instant unquestioning obedience. Obedience means right away, all the way with a happy heart, all these little catch phrases that were given to parents.

So this idea of the primacy of the obedience, the primacy of parental authority, many parents were told they are agents of God who stand in God's stead, essentially. So that is linked to this first-time obedience.

The idea being you need your children to obey you right away without question, so they can learn to obey God right away without question. So there were often eternal stakes given to these promises, which was very motivating for Christian parents.

Understandably, devout parents wanted to know, if the Bible says something about parenting, they wanted to know what it was, understandably. And also, they're very concerned about their children's spiritual well-being.

So that really is a big piece that sets evangelical parenting advice apart from other parenting advice. There's tons of parenting books, and there always have been in publishing and print media.

But Christian parenting advice really added that extra layer of eternal stakes to say there's a timeless way to do this, there's a biblical way to do it, there's one right way to do it. And that has to do with eternal living.

So those two things, often, corporal punishment is a big piece of this equation. It becomes the primary tool parents are given to get that obedience. So it's coerced obedience.

I would also say that there's spiritual catechesis. So ideas about sin, ideas about atonement show up in this teaching. And then a fair bit of them overlap with other family life resources.

So there's kind of blueprints for family life, like godly motherhood, godly fatherhood, godly biblical womanhood, biblical manhood, boyhood, girlhood.

So these ideas about hierarchies in the home or roles in the home also show up in a number of these resources. Not all, but a number of them kind of are a package deal. And they end up being self-reinforcing, right?

We mark the beginning of this with Dobson's Empire in 1970 with the publication of Dare to Discipline. Many others came after them. They're remarkably ecumenical in that they kind of recycle the same talking points and end up reinforcing each other.

So if you're a parent and you've read some of Dobson's stuff, you pick up some of Ted Tripp's stuff, maybe Ginger Hubbard, maybe Douglas Wilson, you've got a bunch of these resources.

They kind of all are saying similar things about first-time obedience, about authority. So it can then feel like, well, of course this is the way, particularly when it's combined with a skepticism for external secular sources.

Yes. And what's really wrong with the world is those people out there are not following godly precepts and look at the world and it's terrible. So come in here, we'll give you safety and instruction.

And doesn't it feel like all of these authors got together in a room and said, okay, here are the points that we're all going to make in our own voice. Make sure you mentioned that eternal damnation is on the line.

Make sure that you mentioned that atonement, Christ was punished for our sins and so we need to be punished.

And I've got a story that I'm sure you've heard like this before, where parents are trying to find creative ways of driving home the idea that Jesus taking your sins means that you were bad and God wanted to punish you, but Jesus was like, no, please

don't, I'll take it. In fact, I'm going to tell you that story right now. I'm just going to stop my train of thought because this is so exemplary. So the home I grew up in, loving parents, I have so much gratitude and oh, my stars, right?

As I'm sure many of us can relate to. What they were hearing as what they needed to do in order to keep me eternally safe led to this scenario. So I'm four years old, I've done something wrong.

I think actually I colored on my dad's magazine, because backstory, I was an only child, I was really bored a lot of the time. And my dad would take his men's health magazine and go to the bathroom and not come back for hours.

I think he would say he was doing his business, but I think he was just getting some time to himself. I mean, because please, right?

From the parenting lens, we all know, right?

Like, oh, I can understand being like, no, I'm not yet.

Right.

So I, as a four year old, decided that's probably because this magazine is so interesting and it's taking him away from me. So one day I found the magazine, I got some crayons and I scribbled over the cover of it.

I was very mad at this magazine for taking my dad away from me. And then I became very unsettled in my spirit. I knew that I would be in trouble.

So I hid it underneath his trampoline. He had this little jumpy trampoline that he did his exercise on. And of course, it was discovered and there was the, you know, like, Annie, you know, how did this happen?

Who did this, right? Okay. So I've transgressed, you know, the language of sinning is probably brought in right there.

And so here's what happens next. My mom calls me into their bedroom. And I see that my dad is lying face down on the bed and she has a belt in her hand.

And she says, because you sinned, you deserve a spanking, but today mama is going to spank papa. And you're going to see how Jesus took your sin and papa is going to take your spanking today. So I watch this.

I observe my mom spanking my dad with a belt for my transgression. And I know two things right away. I'm four years old and I'm already like, the theologian in me is like, I see some problems with this.

Number one, I'm like, you hurting my dad does nothing to solve the problem of the thing that I colored on. Like it doesn't put it back. It doesn't restore that it just, it just adds pain.

Secondly, if you weren't hurting my dad, if you were hurting me, same problem.

Punishing me and making me physically hurt does not fix the problem, which is I knew in my heart, I'm like trying to speak out with my little tiny four-year-old way that I don't like that my dad uses the bathroom for so long. And I'm trying.

It's a bid for connection really in my own little roundabout way, right? I'm wanting his attention. And so this is how I get it.

And either my dad or me receiving corporal punishment does nothing to address that or solve that or address the relationship rift. It simply adds pain to the equation now. And so when I share that story, people are like, oh, what?

That's weird. I'm like, oh, you have no idea. The weird theology that I was raised with that encouraged parents to come up with creative ways to hurt their children in order to drive home these points.

Right.

So, yes, I'm so sorry for younger you and your parents who were like twisted up believing this. I heard just this week an influencer talking about this. And for her dad, when she was old enough, it was push ups.

And one time he did all the push ups she couldn't do to drive this point home. And it's warped and also theologically off. Because that's not a picture of grace, because the parent is the one requiring this punishment.

The parent could be like, you know what? Let's talk about the magazine. We don't need to have we don't need to have punishment here.

Right.

Right.

Like, yes, you did something wrong. We'll talk about it. But or whatever, if that was a rule, who knows?

And so I think what happens is people take these presuppositions, these, we call them stowaway theological doctrines. When we talk about this, these these unexamined theological ideas that everyone's kind of swimming in.

And then they're like, this is what it means to be a Christian. So we do need to catechize our children. And nobody's allowed to ask questions, right?

The parents not allowed to be like, I don't feel good about beating my husband with a bell in front of my four year old. You know, the parents not allowed to have that pause because they have been told in such extraordinarily like dogmatic terms.

This relatively recent, very specific, rudimentary theory of the tonement, penal substitutionary tonement, is the gospel. So that just elevates everything to impossible stakes. So yes, they feel like they need to do this.

I've heard from a number of adults who still defend spanking, who say those moments of that kind of experience you experienced is when they become a Christian. Because of course, for a four-year-old, this is impactful.

Like whether you're questioning or not, like this is visceral. We know that witnessing domestic violence impacts children, whether a parent's calling it, whatever they're calling it, that is impactful to witness that.

Then to be told, accept Jesus so you don't have eternal punishment. Usually, it's eternal conscious torment with hellfire and damnation is how it's presented in very concrete thinking stages of childhood.

Many of them, this does become a moment then that leads them to the sinner's prayer. Some of these parenting books will present it that way.

They will directly say that shepherding a child's heart continues to be one of the most recommended best-selling resources.

It's all throughout there, almost to a scrupulous, I would say a scrupulous zeal, the way he talks about issues of faith in there.

So I think parents feel like they've been told myths like if you catch a child's heart before age three or five or seven, you can shape their future.

So there's a lot of pressure, particularly in corners of the church that holds a believer's baptism and a personal confession of faith. There's a lot of urgency, like I need to get my child as early as possible to understand this and believe.

And that really puts everyone under this incredible pressure cooker, parents and children alike. And it's not, I think, like you said, we can hold both things to be true, that the parents are responsible for doing this, like, yes.

And also, they can have been victims under this kind of like theology that kept them rolling. They can have been ill-equipped to think critically about it. But it's incredibly destructive.

I'm glad you shared that. I mean, there's so many reasons. It's packed up right now, but I have a picture book, a picture book that's called He Took My Licking For Me.

And it is this story writ large. And so, yeah, there are a number, there's a skit. I have them on my sub stack somewhere.

I may link them for you, but there's a little skit where a family acts this out. It's very much in the collective spiritual imagination that, yes, God is an angry father. Kind of doesn't matter what happened.

As long as somebody gets punished, he's happy. So he's going to punish Jesus. And that's supposed to be good news for everybody.

It's really problematic.

23:10

Theologyʼs Influence

I'm so glad you brought up the theology behind this, because that, of course, is the area of my intense focus right now.

I'm not sure if I told you this. I'm studying theology.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. Yeah. Lifelong dream.

Well, maybe adult lifelong dream. Anyway, and one of the questions that brought me to this program is, okay, what is a better idea for the question of what happened and how did atonement work? Why did Jesus die?

That you're absolutely right. So many people conflate with the gospel, which my teacher would be, my teacher is Bradley Jerzak. He would be very quick to point out the gospel is just the story.

And there are four of them in the canon. And you can find other ones too, where they tell the story of Jesus' birth and life and teachings and death and resurrection. That's the gospel.

The meaning that we make out of it is what we call atonement theory. Like, why did this work? How were we one way?

And now because of Jesus' death and resurrection, we're a different way toward God. That's called atonement theory. And it's always subjective.

And it has to do with how we're interpreting scripture. But the gospel itself is just the story of what Jesus did and what he showed us. And that's really important.

And for those who are interested, what we're really talking about right here is called penal substitution atonement theory, that we can really trace back to the 16th century with John Calvin and then right after that with Jonathan Edwards and the

sinners in the hands of an angry God that says, God is mad at us. Jesus comes and says, no, please don't hurt them. You can hurt me. I'll take their punishment.

And then God's like, okay, fine. Whoever believes in you is off the hook. Weird theology that for the majority of Christianity, no one has thought until John Calvin really brings us forward.

That's relatively recent.

The early church didn't. And what I love and what so many evangelicals miss out on, honestly, is church history. The study of church history allows us to see that some of these things have evolved over time.

Many of the theologians, brilliant theologians, yes, who are trying to work these things out, are still, like all of us, influenced by their cultural context, by their historical moment. And you see this, right? Like Calvin's a lawyer.

He's influenced by legal ideas. You look further back, you see some influence of, like, the feudal system on atonement theory. You go, you know, so there's a number of things that it doesn't mean we throw, we have to throw all this out.

But it does allow us to say, like, I think these these things together are all of us trying to get a little glimpse of like a gem or something.

Whatever the atonement is that we can't fully grasp, simply because of our finite reality and we just don't have the information, right? The Bible is not a theological systematic theology book.

And it's not a user's manual, PS.

It's not a user's manual. So, yes, it's good and important work to try and make sense of it. But these just become different facets of the gem.

Maybe together give us more insight, but maybe not. Like a lot of it is, I don't want to say guesswork because these are brilliant people doing this work, all of us, but some of it really is.

And when you look at it, you're like, yeah, it's just what they're wondering about God. And depending what corner the church are in, you may give greater weight to that.

Than not, you may say, you know, church tradition holds a lot more weight with me, it's authoritative. But I think the average person in the pew, the average evangelical in a non-denominational or Protestant church is simply unaware of that.

And they have been told instead, this five point thing is the gospel or something like those bead bracelets kids make in Sunday school, the wordless book, like like black is for sin, red is for Jesus, but you know, this very simplified version, I

understand why people want to do that. But it ends up being in incomplete at best, inaccurate at worst, and also keeps everybody with a very small theology in the sense that as they grow and develop and mature in the faith, they have nowhere to go

from that often. And so they will exit because they have not been given tools that allow them to wonder and join that great theological conversation that is wondering and is not shying away from questions. And I think it's really too bad.

And we've even come across that as our book has been released because we're careful in the book. We don't make a case about which atonement theory people should all do.

We simply observe that penal substitutionary atonement is one of a number of theories. And we observe that ideas about original sin have developed over time and vary across the different corners of the church. And still, those are two things.

Some people will throw the book out entirely simply because we've named that.

Because you're questioning that. And can you unpack for listeners who might not connect to that term? What is original sin?

What do you mean by that?

Yeah. So typically what people mean, again, you have to ask. And in these parenting books, none of this stuff is defined.

Like no one ever despines sin or atonement. These words are just thrown around. So anyway, typically what people mean in layperson's terms is they mean that humans are born sinful.

They're born with a ruptured relationship with God that needs repair. And this can vary to something like total depravity that says people are not capable of anything good from infancy.

And the corners of the church that do this produce a lot of these parenting resources.

So they call children bundles of sin, vipers and diapers, you know, these dehumanizing terms that see an infant's needs, for instance, as sinful, like a baby crying in the night as evidence of their sin.

So, you know, distorted theology is not theoretical. It has a really negative impact. So, but for many people, they would say, OK, Adam and Eve are in a perfect state of harmony.

And then when they take the apple, they eat the apple, that harmony is broken between God and each other. And we inherit that. That's original sin.

But you are going to get different understandings of it across the church. The Orthodox Church has a little bit different view. The Augustinian influence from St.

Augustine and the Western Church. And this is just something we observe that you can historically document this, that even the early church fathers held different views on this.

Some of them thought of children as in an inedentic state, like Adam and Eve. We don't talk about that in Evangelical Christian Parenting teaching, but some of the early church fathers held to that, that infants were close to that.

In many corners of the church, the idea, particularly where there's infant baptism, the idea is that in baptism, we are washed clean of original sin.

And then sins we individually commit and are culpable or guilty for, that is something that after baptism requires confession. So, there's a distinction, theologically speaking, between original sin, willful culpability and guilt.

And then also the biblical terms for sin. There are three different terms of sin. But we have these catch-all buckets in Evangelicalism of just like sin.

Everybody's a sinner. And it can kind of mean anything a parent doesn't like becomes sin.

So subjective.

Yeah, yeah, it becomes so subjective. So so yeah, much to be said there, but it can be unsettling for people to hear that for the first time, because it does kind of sound like you're questioning the faith.

And for anyone listening who's kind of feeling that internal like, oh, is this some kind of slippery slope these ladies are on?

I just encourage you to get yourself a historical theology textbook or some kind of even like the dummies guide to church history or something like this. It can really help you realize, okay, this doesn't have to mean questioning the faith.

It just it can be getting curious about how these ideas have developed over time and in different denominations, which is reality. It's just a fact.

Right. And I like to say, you know, when we're examining our faith, particularly as adults, but maybe we're training up our teenagers to know how to do this too. But when we're like, what is part of my ethos?

What gets to come in and be my core beliefs and what does not? I like to say it's important not to throw the baby Jesus out with the bathwater. If you want to stay faithful to Jesus and also be outraged by what the church has done, you sure can.

And also you don't have to throw out the bathtub. You can remain in some container, in some form of Christianity, or you can go elsewhere. Like you're free, you're a free agent and off you go.

But there are things that you will need to understand, that you are in the middle of a cultural moment. It hasn't always been this way.

And like you say, Marissa, I was not invited to understand church history as a particular fundamental branch of the Protestant faith. My church was like, oh no, we study from Luther forward. Everything before that was terrible.

And so I was never even exposed to the early fathers and mothers who didn't do a lot of writing, but we can still hear their voices if we dig. Who grappled with all of these concepts in their own cultural context.

And many of them came to the conclusion that like, well, we can't really know, but here's our best guess.

And I think one of the most helpful things someone said to me a few years ago, as I was just beginning to be like, what, have I missed a few things? Someone said to me, it's really important to know that Christianity is not a monolith.

And I had to go and look up the word monolith because I was like, I think it, right? One stone, it's not all the same. It's not homogenous.

There are lots of different ways to be a follower of Christ. And just because you look at something and say, I reject that particular stream of thought, does not mean you're getting rid of your faith.

It simply means maybe you're taking it more personal and taking more responsibility for, what do I really believe is true?

And you're exercising agency that you point out in the book, you and Kelsey do so well, that a lot of this authoritarian parenting removes from the children and also the parents, the ability to critically think and question, is this true?

Is it good to do what I would call the Christian work of discernment with the spirit? Like, hey, what is my spirit experiencing when I'm spanking my child? Do I feel that this is right?

Or do I have the freedom to even just wonder?

Yep. And see how it lands. And I would argue, this idea is, for those who are curious to hear it, is a very biblical concept.

I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians 3, where we have Paul writing to a church that was divided by people following different teachers who were identifying themselves with those teachers and saying, look, teachers are going to build with different

materials. It is up to people to discern, to look at those materials, because only the foundation that's on Jesus Christ will stand. The foundation will hold. Like, you can look at all of these things.

The foundation of Jesus will hold, and that is the essence of what it means to be a Christian, right? Is to be a follower of Jesus who trusts in him.

But all the other stuff people are building with, this is up for examination and we absolutely should look to it. I think it's why not many should be teachers.

We get that caution in James because they are subject to greater judgment, because, and I love how 1 Corinthians 3 takes this, we are God's temple. Like, the people are God's temple.

So when instead Christian teachers shame people for questioning, that is out of alignment with how Paul, the great apostle, was operating in the early church.

And I tend to think when we're looking at all this, because I love studying church history, I think it's fascinating.

Something I love about the work of the Spirit is that there's an incredible diversity across cultures, across cultural beliefs globally and back throughout time. And so things that are going to be essentials have got to hold across that tension.

You know, otherwise, we got preferences, which can be fine. We got preferences about how to organize the church, preferences about how to engage. It's kind of like family culture, things that might feel right to us.

And we can enjoy those and delight in them.

But when we start to say, this has got to be the only way, and we're ignoring the fact that the global church can't engage in this way, or the church throughout time can't engage in this way, we're coming up with something else.

That's not the foundation, because I think that's what's beautiful about Christianity, is the core of it does transcend culture and history. Absolutely.

I find that to be a helpful metric sometimes when I'm asking about things to be like, could this apply around the globe?

Because if not, if our idea of being a biblical mom can't apply to women all around the globe, we're probably talking about something cultural.

This might be American white evangelicalism. You know, and one of the things that I mean, I appreciated so much, I dog-eared and underlined like this book has so many points of wisdom.

You really make a case for, hey, if you are a Christian, your primary job is to know Jesus, to get curious about him, read the Gospels often, know the story, and ask yourself, how does he interface with the world? How does he treat children?

And let that be your guide, not somebody going, I know what you need to do, follow me, pay me for this book and then I'll tell you. And it really occurs to me that Jesus gives instruction for, well, how do you know what's good teaching?

And he says, well, look at the fruit. Just, you know, what does it produce? And that's what you've done in this book is you've said, oh, there are some horrendous things that have come because of this high control, authoritarian, punitive ideology.

And I've got another story for you that you can add to your bucket. I'm sure it's deep and wide by now.

38:14

Pain Equals Love

My first job, so I was a teacher for my first career and my first job out of college, I was working in a juvenile justice center. And I probably learned more there about how to be a teacher than I ever did in my teacher training college, right?

I can imagine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I got a real education there. And my mentor, teacher trainer, Mrs. C, whom I still love and adore.

And if she's listening, hi, Mrs. C, I love you. She told me when I first started working there, she said, you have to understand the ideology that a lot of the kids in here have had to absorb.

And she actually happened to have roots in my same faith community. And so she could really understand this. She said, they have conflated pain with love.

And here's how she came to know that. One day she was teaching the students and they were having a conversation. And one of them asked her, Mrs.

C, how often does your husband beat you? And she was shocked. And she said, never, not once, or he wouldn't be my husband.

Why? And they said, they collectively all said, oh, that's so sad. That means he doesn't love you.

And she said, what do you mean, he doesn't love me, if he doesn't beat me? And they said, well, it's very easy. If you are little and you do something wrong, your dad beats you because he loves you and he's trying to teach you.

And so that beating is how you know he loves you. And then when you're older, if you get into a relationship and your boyfriend needs to keep you in line, then he beats you to do that. And it's just because they love you.

And she said, she had this moment of epiphany, right? Like, oh, no wonder their lives have taken them to a place where now they're in corrections because they fundamentally understand that love and pain are intrinsically linked. And so no wonder.

I mean, it just, it became like such a guiding example in my teaching that when we believe that pain equals love, like the story that we've all heard, you wrote about it here, the farmer breaking the sheep's leg because it kept wandering off.

I heard that in my, you know, elementary years.

Totally made up for those listening. There's zero basis.

Yeah. Oh, my stars. I remember my mom telling me, and with tears in his eyes, he apologized to the lamb for what was about us.

This hurts me more.

It's so messed up.

And so we can see how this ideology, pain and love being conflated leads to so much strife. And I'm sure that many of our listeners will be not surprised to learn, as you and I have, that there's a mention of James Dobson in the Epstein files.

41:13

Dobsonʼs Controversial Advice

So let's see, why is that? First of all, can you talk about, because you've been writing about this a little bit.

Why is James Dobson in the Epstein files? Oh gosh, so much here. Yes, I'll get there.

I want to reaffirm everything you're saying, because some of these resources will say that directly. Doug Wilson says, God requires us to inflict pain on those dear to us.

This idea comes from the Stowaway theology that God's love equals basically kind of penal substitutionary atonement, so that somehow this pain is pleasing to God, and we need to replicate that. And those messages, yes, run very deep.

Whatever a parent is intending, they functionally groom children for abusive relationships, right? Because it says, this is what it means. It also trains their bodies to need that, to be rewired for attachment.

Like, it feels like they can't feel clean unless they're hurt physically. That is how you get restoration. And so it becomes this kind of vicious cycle that really does train children up in this way.

I mean, that principle that lessons learned early in childhood are formative does hold. I just think it's not where people really intend to go. So absolutely.

So Dobson shows up in the Epstein Files because Epstein sent a linked Dobson article, which is an excerpt from one of his books. Oh, I can't remember. It's called Emotions and God or something, is the Dobson book that it came from.

It was really interesting. I did dig deep to find the original book, so it was fascinating. But he sent it to an unnamed recipient.

We don't really know. We can assume it was one of his victims, but it's not clear in the interaction. Jeffrey is kind of counseling this person with this article that is about two women talking about their fractured relationship with their fathers.

He's kind of using it to say, look, you should honor your fathers and forgive, no matter what they've done. Dobson in his article is responding to these two women writing in for help.

They both describe scenarios where their father was either absent or injured them, his painful fraught relationship, someone who's not interested in connecting to them. Dobson advises that they should forgive.

He does qualify and say for your own sake, don't hold on to this, don't be bitter. You should forgive. What I think was most interesting about that article is Dobson reveals his own background in it.

I'm always fascinated to hear these parenting experts talk about their childhood, because they inevitably are describing abusive dynamics. Of course.

I think that really frames a lot of what they're doing, but he talks about how painful it was for him and how he needed to just move on.

He's basically teaching detachment from emotions and stuffing emotions, and moving on is basically what he's advising. We can speculate as to why Epstein found that useful to send along.

It certainly has been used in the church, those messages to keep people in abusive relationships, to guilt them into staying, to Darvo, to deny abuse, what is that?

Reverse victim offender to say, you are the one responsible, the victim is responsible, they need to keep trying, they need to keep being more forgiving and loving.

And all of that is very familiar to anyone who's read Evangelical Family Life Teaching, right?

Like the linked article itself probably would not surprise many people who have read resources from Focus on the Family or other types of family life teaching. In that sense, it was kind of unsurprising, right?

Because this is so baked in to Christian family life teaching. I think it's curious to know whether Jeffrey knew who Dobson was. You know, Google this.

Who knows?

I mean, we can speculate about this, but it definitely says something to the way these ideas about submission, forgiveness and abuse really have been used to harm people and keep people stuck in unhealthy relationships, keep people from maturing in

the sense of taking accountability, learning about true repairs, any number of things, and true relational consequences, any number of things. But yes, abuse in general is a big fruit of this teaching, both for what was inflicted on children behind

closed doors, the way it inevitably escalated because it was the only tool given, and how it set people up. I heard from so many people in adulthood still navigating the painful fruit of this, whether it was they stayed a long time in an abusive

marriage because they had been trained in this way, whether it was they found themselves experiencing sexual dysfunction because they experienced corporal punishment as child sexual abuse, whether it led to practices of self-harm and cutting because

they felt that they needed to feel pain to be forgiven, whether it set them up to be abused by other people, like other people claiming spiritual authority and saying, God wants me to do this, to take you somewhere private and hurt your body. Like I

really am begging, if there are any current parents listening, I am begging them to think through the implications of the rules they've been given for the quote-unquote right way to spank. Because we are telling parents to take children somewhere

private, hurt their bodies, tell them it's okay because God wants them to do it. And then requiring them to hug afterwards and retain relationship. And if we could really put that under a microscope, that is a recipe for abuse.

And spanking more if they don't hug.

If they don't hug, yeah. Or if they cry too much or too little. And we are really, you change the players in that.

And you have a pastor choosing a victim and saying, God, it's okay. God told me this is okay. I hurt your body, but don't worry.

Don't tell anyone. We'll pretend to be reconciled after. Like, I just am begging parents to think about what they are doing and what that is preparing others to step into that role.

It really is grooming, just textbook case.

I have a dear, beloved friend who was sexually assaulted by her youth leader. And then afterward, he made her get on her knees and pray for forgiveness for what she had made him do. And this is the pattern, right?

Train people to accept authority without questioning, because God told me, and I'm over you. Here's another story for you.

This is very personal and political at the moment, because in my area, there is an individual running for office in Washington state, who I once heard tell a group of young people this story.

He said, because he had this sort of Bill Gothard-esque, you know, the umbrellas, right? Christ is over the husband, who's over the wife, who's over the children.

He said, if Jesus came and knocked on my door and my wife answered, Jesus would smile and greet her warmly and then ask to speak to me, because I'm the head of the household. Yeah.

So it's training wives to not even need to speak to Jesus, because my husband will. And it's training children to not need to speak to Jesus, because my mother will, who's speaking to my father, who's speaking to my pastor, who's speaking to God.

And so therefore, it absolves a person from having any personal connection with Christ.

Yes.

And any sort of ability to know, well, what does God really want of me? It makes you think you have to have external authority in order to tell you even what to feel. Even what to feel.

And if you feel something that's like something's wrong here, you're sinning against God. Oh, that is just the recipe for absolute and utter authoritarian control carte blanche.

It is. And often the people further down on the umbrella, the wives and the children, are told even if the person over you hurts you or asks you to do something you don't want to do, kind of count it all joy. Like suffer for the sake of Jesus.

You know, like there's a lot of spiritual abuse happening alongside this that reinforces it and kind of says, well, that's on like, no matter what they're doing, you do the right thing, which is to submit cheerfully. And so it keeps people stuck.

And then of course, if they do exit, if they do push back, if they do call it out, they will be excluded often from the very tight knit community. They will be blamed. They will be cast out.

And so it's really costly to find the, you know, rediscover personal agency and autonomy and will, and just begin to even overcome the hurdles of how wrong that feels, right?

If you've been conditioned, because frankly, it's behavioristic conditioning that's happening in childhood. If you've been conditioned that way, wow, does it feel dangerous to all of a sudden, even as an adult, question your parents?

I mean, if you are blanket trained, never mind. You don't even learn to listen to your body.

And of course, and as I heard from a number of people who then, the God given developmental stage of individuation and differentiation when young adults separate, become their own people, begin to walk in adult life responsible for themselves is

delayed well into their late twenties, even into their thirties. Often it's circumstantially precipitated.

Like it's not until they have children of their own or move to a new area for a job or, you know, find, oh, there's a different church that does this in a different way that they they find the will, they reclaim their will.

And it causes all kinds of trouble because not only have children been trained this way, parents have trained themselves in this way. They have trained themselves to only expect instant compliance.

They have fooled themselves into thinking that that cheerful, joyful compliance their child is putting on was genuine.

So then, and later in adulthood, when their adult child says, no, this is what it was really like for me, or surprise, I'm not a Christian anymore, or I don't vote the same way as you, or any number of things, the parent is uniquely ill-equipped to

know how to do that because they've never, all those opportunities, all those God-given opportunities, when day in and day out, they could have been learning to see the child in front of them, listen, they could have learned skills for connection,

they simply haven't done that. They are left trying to enforce compliance again, and often this comes through relational measures, cutting off relationship, or coercion, or lots of spiritual language to try and coerce compliance, and it leaves so

Absolutely.

Like what it took from them.

And so, yeah, it's almost like you couldn't have designed better recipes for Annihilation Connection if you had sat down to do it, because that is where a number of these patterns leave, particularly if people applied it by the book.

Now, some families mitigated in different ways, or parents were able to have the humility and the courage later on to be like, oh goodness, I was all in that, but I was wrong.

And to hear that and to be able to reckon with the grief and betrayal themselves. But a number of them kind of can't, because it does require a kind of deconstruction to do that. It does.

And they're uniquely ill-equipped to do that also.

Because they never learned in the maturing process how to own something and say, I no longer think this, and I apologize for the pain I caused. And that's a mature thing to be able to do. And they just, they were, what's the word?

Their development, their maturation was arrested by all of this, just submit, just obey, and be cheerful about it. Oh, that story where I think it was on one of your subsects, you had the video of Doug Wilson and forgive me, what's his wife's name?

Nancy. And she's talking about spanking her four-year-old because when she said it's time to go, the four-year-old went, oh, right. And so she spanks her so that she will be cheerful next time.

I say it's time to go. Yeah. Do you expect that that is really working or do you expect that your child is smart enough to go, I'm not going to show my emotion because it will make my body hurt.

And that's the fruit that you pull out in your book that's so important for parents to think about right now. Do you want your kids to feel free to be themselves with you or not?

Because if you use pain as a way of enforcing behavior, I promise you, your children are smart enough to learn, I won't show you all of me because you'll hurt me when I do. And so I will only show you what you want to see.

And then they will probably go one of two ways when they're older. Either they will say, well, this worked out really well, and I'm going to just recycle this on my own children, or I want very little to do with this.

And you write stories and stories about adults saying, I really wish I had a close relationship with my parents, but I can't. It's not safe. I never learned how to love them.

I only learned how to fear them.

Yeah. It's devastating. It's a devastating reckoning.

And the people who double and triple down, the parenting experts, the parents who can't bear to look at this, will then claim user error, right? Like it didn't work for those families because they did it wrong, right?

They weren't faithful enough.

Exactly. Which I think also is just like a gut punch to the people who did, you know, follow the rules that they were given. And it didn't work.

It cannot work out. And it drives me bananas because this is simply, you can write Biblical all you want, but this is simply not the story we get of how God interacts with people. Like he respects human autonomy.

People are allowed to rebel. I feel like when Jesus reaches for the language of fatherhood to describe God, like in the parable of the prodigal son or the prodigal God, however you want to read that, like nobody gets punished in that parable.

Like the younger son has functionally told his father, I wish you were dead, give me my inheritance. He's squandered it. He's betrayed the family.

The elder son is disconnected and slavish in his attitude towards father. Nobody gets punished. They are welcomed in.

And I think for all the way the rod proverbs get trotted out, all the other parts of scripture that describe the way Jesus interacts with people, the way Christians are to interact with one another, are forgotten.

They don't show up in these resources. And it is not a particularly Christian message at all for all the proof-texted Bible verses.

Just because you say it's Christian doesn't mean it actually is. Because what is Christian but to follow Jesus.

But to follow Jesus. And so I think it's important to name that and also to say, but Christian pastors and Christian teachers and Christian communities have marketed this as Christian.

And so we can call out that it's out of alignment without Christian, but we can't do the like, well, not all Christian things because it's Christians who are saying this. And so I do think collectively, we need to own it.

I'm a Christian, you're a Christian. Like to say, no, we reject this. It was wrong for our communities to embrace this.

It's wrong for us to continue to circulate this. We can be done with it. There are so many better ways.

Like if we're looking for a parenting, there's so many better ways that are in alignment with Christian teaching.

And so I just I would love to free people up because I think there could be a lot of fear for current parents, especially as the pendulum politically swings more authoritarian.

I think parenting trends follow that, mirror that, to sort of say there's so much freedom for the Christian parent. There is not a quote unquote biblical way to parent.

You know, follow Jesus, learn what he is like, grow in the fruit of the spirit, like grow in the one another in capacity. See your children as your neighbors. You know, they're not your slave.

They're your neighbor. Love them as your neighbor.

59:03

Rethinking Authority

I love how you wind up your book with a couple of things.

One, you encourage parents because people, I'm sure, ask you all the time, well, what book should I be reading? And you're like, so I'm not going to tell you because I know it's hard.

Because your job as a follower of Jesus is to have a relationship with Jesus and ask, ask the spirit, do your own discernment work. And you give really beautiful guidelines.

I love the appendix back here with like, if your books say this, then here's a green flag. If they say this, here's yellow. If they say this, red flag, don't read that.

And so I think that's really helpful. But then you're reframing the to train up a child using Bruce Waltke's, is that Waltke translation? And he has translated that verse so much differently.

It says dedicate the youth according to his way. Even when he grows old, he will not depart from it. Now, I just learned this reading your book.

I hadn't found this in my theology courses. The phrase should go that we've all read in our English evangelical Bibles, train up a child and the way he should go, isn't even in the original Hebrew text. What?

Wild, right?

Isn't it wild? It's wild. It's scandalous.

I think it's scandalous.

It is scandalous.

And I think why I love Dr. Walke's phrasing there is he really gets at the term dedicate as well.

And he kind of in his commentary, he talks about the idea of like dedication as like can be for a temple or a religious building or something for religious use.

And I think it makes so much sense that devout parents desire their children to walk with the Lord. I think I want that for my child, right? Like that desire makes so much sense.

But there's a very real limit to what our desire can accomplish. I do like that sense of dedicate like yes, I can pray that for my children. I can dedicate.

I can set, you know, hope for that. But they are individuals who will decide for themselves whether to follow Jesus or not. Like all of us, all of us have that moment when we encounter Jesus and determine, do I want to follow him or not?

And I think the wisdom of this proverb is beautiful that respects that reality, respects the agency of the son in question, his way, according to his way, which is up for interpretation. What does that mean? Is that the way he chooses?

Is that the way he will go? I mean, there's a lot of different angles we could come at that. And also speaks to the very real observation that the things we learn and experience in childhood are formative, which is sobering as a parent.

I think should have us humbled and sobered and hopefully not paralyzed like with the overwhelming weight, but to be able to say, this child belongs to the Lord and always has. Like, how do I come alongside?

They've been entrusted to my care for a short time, such a short time, and there's tremendous influence there, but there's also this kind of respectful.

There's a space for respect in that, I think, more accurate understanding of that proverb that allows parents to respect the wonder that is their child, this child that Christians say was knit together by God, that God knows intimately, and can

really make parenting as a vision of parenting as like discipleship or mentorship more of an exploration of like, parents are uniquely equipped to study their children, to try and know them well, and then to discern what would serve them, to what

serves my own personality as a parent. What is going to work here to coach, to make good use of this time we have together, to teach, to instruct, to disciple, all the things that are part of this biblical concept of discipline, which really revolves

But not punishment.

But not punishment.

This idea of punishment that we get hung up on, wow, I do credit a lot of that to James Dobson and the beginning of all the Christian parenting empires, that that has become, when we hear discipline, we think spanking, right?

Most of us, we think punishment.

Synonymous.

It's a synonym, and that's simply not sound when you look at the original proverbs, but also just outside of our little corner of evangelical Christianity. I think people are operating under different things. So anyway, much to explore there, but...

Yeah, my desire is to see families freed up, people currently parenting, and also hopefully to give some language for people reflecting back, to help them name and identify things in their own experience, to help them feel seen.

I think there's so much shame often surrounding these conversations, particularly for parents who may be operated by these ways and do experience regret. There's a lot of shame.

And I think for adult children, there's a lot of grief and loneliness and longing and anger. I think anger, and again, many people ill-equipped to even identify feelings, right? Feelings have been perceived with skepticism, but a lot, a lot.

People are carrying a lot around this.

Yeah. I love how you kind of addressed toward the end of the book, you know, like if you were raised with this, you know, and you're looking for something better, you know, and you put the onus back on the individual, know God, do this work.

And then also, I'm just curious if you would speak to, because I think probably most of the people who are attracted to this podcast, I mean, it's called Barely Christian, Fully Christian.

1:05:10

Healing Parental Wounds

So, you know, like we're weeding out a whole large swath of the population with that name.

So probably people, I would guess that most folks listening to this would come from the camp of probably had been raised adjacent to this kind of parenting and are now wondering something different.

But you name something really important, which is in stress, if we are not really equipped or or in the middle of our healing, we might tend to revert back to what we had learned. Right.

And so you write about this mom who is saying, like, I don't mean to, but I get triggered and then I just spank my kid because I I don't have any better ideas.

I'm wondering, Marissa, if you could just speak a little bit into what would be the next right step for somebody trying to heal their own wounds while they are actively raising children right now.

Yeah, it's so tough.

And yeah, it's so tough because it's difficult work to be trying to heal and learn and understand this from your own path while being, especially in the very intense parenting years of early parenting, you know, where you're sleep deprived and you're

you're trying to deal with behavioral things and you're like, logistically, this would be a lot easier if my child would obey right away. That sounds really good. Yeah, right.

Like just like we could get out the door on time, for instance, or something. So I just want to name that it is hard. That doesn't mean people are sinning or somebody's at fault.

It can be a hard and stretching thing and it can feel very foreign to allow yourself to do it imperfectly.

That I think is really hard for people who are raised with the right away all the way to reckon with that feeling that it might be a process that you will make mistakes with your children and need to learn to repair.

Because I think there's still that anxiety of like, well, just tell me the right way to do it so I can get it right. Because of course, parents, this is the relationship that for many parents, it's the most meaningful to them.

They want to get it right. So I would encourage people to acknowledge that even if the ingredients change, that pressure cooker, you still could be operating under that pressure cooker.

Even if you're not drawn to something like spanking or right away obedience, you could be still thinking, I've got to get this right or else I'm in trouble with God and I'll hurt my children. Now I'm worried I'm going to hurt them long term.

And so I would sort of encourage people to kind of be able to accept the imperfection, accept the hardness, and then to seek external help as much as possible.

I do think qualified mental health therapists, people who have experience with family systems, even maybe a trusted spiritual director depending on your tradition, can help you name some of the things in the past, in your past and what things were

like in your home. Because I think even to get to the place of the one anecdote I mentioned is someone who messaged me explaining how they just, they don't want to spank but they can't stop. As you mentioned, they can't stop and they hate it so much.

Even getting to that place where you can identify the disconnect between your desires and your actions comes from being able to identify desires which again is a piece missing from this parenting.

I think that can help and then seeking tools that do align with your goals and ideals as a parent. What we hope our book doesn't do is paralyze people from looking for other help from other people.

Yes, there's a lot of self-appointed experts, but there are also people who have relevant qualifications. You know, learning from child development professionals is helpful to hear, oh, the no phase of toddlerhood is normal human development.

It's not sinful defiance.

Things like this, I think, can help parents just take a pause, learn how to regulate their own emotions in those means, hopefully be able to reclaim some of those skills that they never got and be able to not respond so reactively, instinctively.

But you have to, the first step is really being able to name some of those things. And people ask me for recommendations all the time. As you mentioned in the book, we are very loathe to do that.

We do not have to replicate this. In my own parish, I'm married to a pastor. I do the one I do recommend.

So if people are like, oh, but please give me something, I do point them toward connected families. It's a Christian resource that really models connection as the primary goal, but does give some practical tools.

So if you are just desperate from some practical help, I really recommend their one-up, their coaching, because it's so important to know the individual needs of the children in question and the individual culture of the family to be able to

effectively help people. So we offer some takeaways like that. But I think, gosh, so many things.

One more thing, and then I'll stop and see if any of this is in the realm of what you had in mind with this question, is for people still who retain some degree of faith. And I note the name of your podcast. I know people are all over on the map.

I think it's helpful maybe for people to hear like, it's okay. Like at the end of this isn't an angry deity who's like, you didn't get it right. That there can be patience.

And I think a lot about this when I think about this kind of teaching or spiritually abusive churches.

And I think the way we expect people to just get right back in there and be Christian after experiencing all kinds of harm doesn't even make sense with the reality of the abuse people have experienced.

It makes me think of, I think it's Ezekiel 34, but the passage about the bad shepherds who have injured the sheep. And this picture of sheep being scattered, injured sheep being scattered on all the hills.

And the end of the chapter is this beautiful Messianic promise that God himself will shepherd those sheep. He will come looking for them. And I think sometimes all these messages have people feeling like, what's the right way?

And am I going to get it wrong? And I think this prophetic picture of hope that says God sees and knows what people have experienced.

Like a lot of this happened behind closed doors, but, oh, the Lord sees and the way he may shepherd an individual person may look really different from what they think they ought to be doing or someone else thinks they ought to be doing.

And I hope there's there's freedom there both for people to parent in that way, to recognize that there's individuality there, but also to receive that as parents trying to figure this out, that that their story matters, that what they've endured

matters. And the getting it right isn't the end goal, right? The right behavior isn't the end goal.

It's that the shepherd comes looking for the scattered sheep to tend them, not to break their leg, not to get them to obey, but to gather them home and takes great joy in that. And so I think, gosh, I wish it would be an instantaneous process, right?

Like whatever our experiences were. But I think for many people, it's just a long process of exploring, getting through all these layers and learning new practices, practicing new things to displace those old messages.

But it is difficult, courageous work. I just commend people. And it gives me so much hope.

When I hear from current parents who are saying, we've decided not to spank, you know, we're not going to do that. We don't know what we're going to do, but we're not going to do that. Right, right.

Well, something you pull out is the importance of naming, just really saying, hey, this happened to me.

Here was the underlying philosophy behind it. Here's how it felt to me. Here's what I thought about myself.

Here are the conclusions I came to. Just to be able to be honest and name what we've experienced. And then to say, I want something better for my own children.

Yeah, really beautiful.

We can tell the truth. We can tell the truth.

We can tell the truth, and God can handle it. And God's not upset that we're, even if we're angry, that's okay. She likes it.

I'll just throw that in there, because I like to talk about God, my mother, unnerves some people and makes other people really happy. Well, I just want to thank you and Kelsey from the bottom of my heart for doing this work.

I read the backstory to how this book came into being at first, and I just thought, thank you because this is so important. It helps us to name the harm and to find better ways forward.

We cannot do that if we are not really clear about what happened and what's being said. And so thank you for the countless hours that have gone into this, the love, the sweat, and probably tears.

And then I just want to ask you because we are in such a thick cultural moment, right? I like to end my discussions these days with this question. What is it, because I believe that you have hope about humanity, about Christianity, about all of it.

1:15:02

Sources of Hope

I'd love to know if there's something specific right now that's giving you hope that you're holding on to as we open up our headlines and we read about the atrocities. And it would be so easy to say, we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

Never mind, this is like the end scene. What keeps you going? What gives you hope in this moment right now?

Yeah.

Oh, I love this question. I'm so curious to hear what other people would say. Currently, so currently I'm reading a book called Strange Religion by Dr.

Nijay Gupta. Subtitles like How the Early Christians Were Weird and Different. I can't remember all three of the subtitle.

It's great.

But what gives me a lot of hope is the testimony of the early church in general, because when I think of those first followers of Jesus, the very first followers of Jesus who were believing the unbelievable, who were just, I mean, I think if we could

peel back the layers and even get an angle, a little sliver of what they were navigating to think that it's always been this way. Like, I don't mean to be like doom and gloom, but to be like the way of the world has always been at odds with the way

of Jesus. It's why the world put him to death, right? It's why when he came and God incarnate embodying this different way of doing things, that was the human response, ultimately, to flee or to call for his death. This was the response.

So I think it is not surprising to me that there's always this conflict that is at odds with the Christian faith. And yet, God in his wisdom, I don't understand it, has designed for the church, human beings to embody the body of Christ in this world.

And over the centuries, that has been a very tragic story and also a very life-giving story. It's always been this beautiful and heartbreaking mixture of both.

And so even in a moment when the church is chronically breaking my heart collectively, I also think of the witness of people who are embodying Christ, who are living in their full giftedness, who are serving others, who are coming alongside the least

of these, who are advocating for change. And so I think that gives me hope because I don't understand entrusting that to such broken, frail humanity, the broken earth and vessels.

But I do think beginning with the early church and seeing this story of church history gives me a lot of hope because it's all the remnant, the witness to Christ is always there, threaded throughout and is spreading.

It does spread the image of God throughout the world, even alongside all the fractured, fragmented ways we've gotten it wrong. So I hold on to that hope that the Spirit is still at work. He's always only ever had us to work with.

Just stupid, he's still at work. He's still, the nature of God is to bring resurrection from death. I feel like whether we want it or not, there will always be resurrection from death.

So I hold on to that. Well, how would you answer that question?

That's beautiful. Oh, how would I answer that question? It's funny because as a teacher, I always embodied this truth, like never ask your students to do something that you wouldn't be willing to do.

So I should be willing to answer this question. Yeah, fair.

It's okay if you don't want to, but.

No. What is giving me hope these days actually is everywhere I look, people are naming truth.

Also, particularly exciting to me is I see everywhere, even in Christian spaces, people wondering about God's maternity, which I could talk for hours and days about why I think that's necessary and important and good and helpful.

I see the feminine consciousness, the consciousness of the feminine divine rising in every space I look at.

A few years ago, when I first started following the breadcrumb trail of all of the maternal imagery for God in the scriptures and I was like, wait, is there something here? I thought I was the only Christian becoming aware of this.

And I literally, I would be so afraid to even tell my friends and I would do so very apologetically, like, please don't hate me, but I think God might be my mother as well as my father. Don't tell the pastor. Right.

Like it was such a terrifying thing. But now it's like I have conversations with people all the time about this.

And so that's giving me hope because I think when we can, as Andrew Harvey writes, when we can respect the profound sacred equality of women as well as men, and then I'm always quick to say there's other genders, just I don't want anybody to feel

left out on my podcast. I hear you intersex folk and trans folk and I love you. Then when we can recognize the profound sacred equality of all of us, we can see the Imago Day in every human being. And I look at my dog and I don't see much different.

So, you know, call me a pantheist, but I see Jesus in my dogs. Then I think we start to heal a lot of what has been broken. So it gives me a great deal of hope even in these really like baffling, like I don't even have words.

What the what is happening in the larger world? Everywhere I look, I want to throw up, but then I see the feminine consciousness rising and I go, oh, wait, okay, I think we could pull this. I think something good is coming.

I think this could be pulled back around. So, yeah, thanks for asking. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talks.

Yeah.

Well, I have one final question for you that came up while you're talking because I know you spend a lot of time looking at the really dark stuff.

1:21:34

Researcher Well-being

I know I read your whole Doug Wilson thing and I was like, oh, my first thought, well, I had several thoughts, couldn't tell you which one was first, but one of them was like, oh, Jesus, send Marissa a whole bunch of grace today because it is hard to

have such an open, compassionate heart and look that deep down these dark pits that you're seeing. So my question for you is, what do you do to maintain your sanity, your sense of balance, your peace, your well-being, your self-care?

What do you do for you to balance out all of the really yucky stuff you look at?

That's a good question because it got really heavy at some times. We spent three years researching and writing this book, and I would love to never hear from Doug Wilson again in my life. I would love to never read another word from them again.

I think at the beginning of it, this idea, this biblical image, I think it's Ezekiel, talks about the forehead of Flint.

I really do feel like there's been grace there because I've read a lot of difficult things, made more difficult knowing people are applying these in their homes, right? None of this is theoretical.

And so, I don't know if it's healthy or not, but there's a degree of detachment and kind of like, this is like, keep that forehead of Flint there, of like, this is engaging it, to analyze it, to offer this forward and trusting the God's heart of

compassion, the both and, again, that says, can I see these people as the children they once were? You know, even a Doug Wilson, who is responsible for exponential harm, to remember him as a little boy whose father held his fist in front of his face

and spanked him up the stairs and all these things he recounts, and to say, Lord, you know, you know how to parse that out. I don't. I don't know how to parse out, like, how do how are people accountable for their harm?

And also, how does the Lord see what they experienced in tender years? I don't know. But I think that has helped me just navigate the realities of this to try and hold both of those and then to try and step away entirely what I can.

And I'm not very good at this because I'm a researcher at heart and I'm kind of all involved in it.

It's really difficult, but to be grounded in my embodied community has been a help on Sunday mornings to look around the parish and remember the individuals, particularly writing about something that can be such a tender topic, to try and remember

the humanity of the people involved. And then on a more superficial level, the last year of writing this book, I found myself being like, I just need to read some novels. I need to counterbalance all of this by reading some good novels.

And that was a good thing to return to, just like, whoo, I just need a breather for all of this. And exercise has been really helpful to just walking, to just walking.

I have a walking pad in my office to just walk, even to process when I'm writing while I walk, has just been a really grounding thing.

So some of those creaturely things to just be like, oh yeah, just some movement, just some good nourishing can help. So those have been helpful for me, but I don't know. Sometimes I wonder like, when is the receipt coming to for all of this?

I don't know, talk to me in a couple of years, a moment, because it has been a lot in a number of ways.

But it does help, I'm not going to lie, it does help to be middle-aged, to be in the We Do Not Care Club of who's been a puzzle woman, to just be like, oh no, thank you, we will not be doing that. So that kind of energy has helped a little bit.

I don't think I could have engaged this 10 or 15 years in the same way.

That Perry mid and post-menopausal experience, it's doing good things and actually I was just musing to my daughter, I'm really glad we go through menopause, because can you imagine if we were in our 80s and people were like, well, you're still

fertile, so you should still be having, I'm so thankful, so thankful we get to be done with that. For those of us who have been mothers with our wounds and our bodies, and at least we get a break from that, and then yeah, we stop caring as much about

It's such a gift and this grace of like, okay, so I don't know, I know we need to end up here, but have you seen the new show Matlock?

It's not very new, but the new iteration of Matlock with Kathy Bates plays the main character. It's amazing. I'm really enjoying this show.

It's like a legal show slash kind of mystery isn't the right word, but kind of like, anyway, it's good.

But I love it because the premise is, as an older woman, I think she plays a woman in her seventies, she's invisible in the workplace, so is able to kind of like pass unscathed. And it's great storytelling, great acting.

I really enjoy the show, but I love that too. I think that's accurate.

Like, I don't like that it's that way, but because it's that way, there's something empowering about being in the, I don't know, what are the sage phase of life, whatever it is, the wise woman.

I don't know, to just be like, yeah, I'm not intimidated anymore or don't hold it in the same way. And that's a grace. It's a strange, unexpected grace.

I've appreciated that.

It is. It's like where we finally go, oh, I am not under your authority just because you have this title. Like you're not a better person than me and God doesn't like you better.

So I mean, I listen to what God and I are saying and also take from the cloud of witnesses and the can of scripture, if that's my jam and all these other things. But I don't need you to tell me how I am to be in the world.

Yeah. Yeah, that's good. This has been so fun.

Thank you.

What a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you.

I am so grateful and I look forward to our next conversation.

Yay.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's connect. I'm always happy to hear from my listeners and readers.

You can find me at barelychristianfullychristian.com. And now for more of my favorite song by Wynn Doran and Paul Craig, please enjoy Banks of Massachusetts.