A New Year of Exploring Religious Authoritarian Parenting
Continuing to explore the impacts of RAP
STRONGWILLED is a reader-supported publication. Thank you to everyone who has supported this publication and enabled it to exist. If you appreciate our work, please consider subscribing, sharing, or financially supporting this survivor-centric project.
Hello everyone! We know that so many of you are holding dread, fear and sadness as inauguration day looms heavy. We hope you’re taking care of yourself and loved ones during this tough time. We believe that care, nervous-system regulation and community are antidotes to authoritarianism, and hope that you find ways to nurture yourself this month.
We took some time off over the holidays from thinking about religious authoritarian parenting. It’s been some much-needed rest after publishing fourteen chapters on the topic — and that excludes a handful of other posts and several podcast episodes. We’ve been intentional about taking a mental break from this project, both to come back with fresh eyes, and simply because rest is important!
After catching our breath, we’re taking the rest of the month off to continue to prioritize our mental health and to work on upcoming chapters. There’s still a lot to cover, as we haven’t yet talked much about neurodivergence or sexual and gender diversity, among other important topics related to growing up with religious authoritarian parenting.
Thank you so much for your support and engagement with this non-traditional publishing project. We’re excited for continuing this conversation this year (and that is saying something, considering the heavy nature of the topics we cover).
We’d love for you to leave a comment or email (scroll down to the end for that info) about what you think we should cover in the new year. And while we work on new content, make sure to check out the chapters and podcast episodes we published in 2024:
Chapter 1: What is Religious Authoritarian Parenting?
Chapter 2: Under Pressure: What is it like to be child in a Religious Authoritarian home?
Chapter 3: The Beginnings of the Religious Authoritarian Parenting Movement: How the 1960s and social progress movements sparked a long-term backlash that continues on to the present day.
Chapter 4: The Promises of Religious Authoritarian Parenting: What did Religious Authoritarian Parenting experts promise?
Chapter 4: Children as Casualties of the Culture War: What happens to a person when their childhood becomes a battlefield?1
Chapter 7: Adolescence and the Illusion of Choice: Looking for both Self-Expression and Belonging
Chapter 10: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child: The State of Corporal Punishment in the U.S.
And here are the podcast episodes we’ve put out last year:
Send this Episode to Your Therapist
Send this Episode to Your Therapist Part 2
Corporal Punishment and Brain Development (With Tori Williams Douglass)
How Do You Set a Boundary in a Family Like this?
Krispin's Story of Estrangement
What should we cover in the coming year?
As we consider what to tackle next regarding religious authoritarian parenting, we’d love to hear from you as we strive to make this project survivor-centric:
What are aspects or impacts of religious authoritarian parenting that don’t get enough air time?
Are there any topics that we’ve touched on that need more attention or a deeper dive?
Are there any questions you have about the history of this movement?
Leave a comment below or shoot us an email at strongwilledproject@gmail.com
STRONGWILLED is a reader-supported publication. Thank you to everyone who has supported this publication and enabled it to exist. If you appreciate our work, please consider subscribing, sharing, or financially supporting this survivor-centric project.
Whoops, Krispin mis-numbered this one, so we have two chapters 4’s.
I’m excited for the neurodivergence stuff. A lot of people in the online autistic community talk about how autistic people only follow rules if they make sense and so they tend to get in trouble in school and other settings because they don’t instinctively just obey authority figures. I always found that really alienating because for me part of the way being autistic manifests is I do instinctively trust people and I am both by personality and as we all know by upbringing very compliant as a person to other adults even because I don’t see hierarchical structures, and even as a kid I would feel like I had to obey the other kids because I couldn’t distinguish in my head between me and an adult and so I treated everybody as equal and so I thought well if I have to listen to all the adults in my life. I guess I have to listen to everybody, and nobody ever has to listen to me, which is you know not awesome.
Also, if somebody says this is how you do something then I’m gonna do it that way forever and if I can’t do it that way, I’m gonna panic because I can’t generate alternative ways of doing things and that often extends to thought patterns. I will say recently I have seen more about autistic people who do follow the rules automatically but there’s still isn’t much said about that aspect and I wish there was more. So I’m looking forward to seeing what y’all think. Usually when neurodivergent and control religion gets brought up, it’s framed like here’s all the ways autistic people or ADHD’ers would have trouble fitting into a system like that and I never really see anything on here’s all the ways they actually might be the ideal in a system like this, so hopefully you all touch on that too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the whole “in the world but not of it” really impacted my worldview and concept of reality.
We were very sheltered from pop culture, and very in-depth in scripture and Christian media. I never could relate to my peers in school or the neighborhood, and I don’t know if that was intentional on the part of RAP methods or just a byproduct, but it became such a barrier to friendships with others outside our little enclave.