Chapter 12: Estrangement in Religious Authoritarian Families

It's a predictable outcome of authoritarian parenting practices and enmeshed families, not a "trend" that will be easily reversed.

Thank you for reading and supporting STRONGWILLED. We know that many in this community are reeling after a triggering and devastating election season in the United States — where many religious authoritarian ideologies were on full display. Today we are looking toward the future, and to a reality that is playing out in families all across America. Please take care of yourselves during this time, and know that you aren’t alone. Thank you for your support of this project and our work. Now, more than ever, learning how to walk in our own power and autonomy will be essential to resist religious authoritarianism, wherever we find it.

Trigger warning: corporal punishment/spanking

A note for readers: If you’re currently estranged from your family, there are portions of this chapter that may be upsetting, particularly the newsletter email we reference at the beginning of this chapter. Also to note, we know that there are many causes for estrangement, and that everyone’s story is different. This chapter focuses on common patterns in white evangelical families. 

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I’m on the Focus on the Family mailing list to keep tabs on what the organization is up to these days. Over the past two years, there's one newsletter they’ve sent multiple times, and it always grabs my attention. The subject line reads:

”Do you wish this was an email from your adult child?”

The body of the email reads as follows:

They won’t return your calls. They ignore your texts and emails. Either you have little to no idea of what they’re actually doing, or their only communication is to rub in your faith¹ the sinful lifestyle they’ve embraced. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. 

You poured yourself out to help them grow from an innocent, precious child, so full of potential, into what you hoped would be a responsible, virtuous, capable adult. You envisioned moving from caretaking parent into trusted friend and confidant. You dreamed of a future where you, beaming with pride, would send your son or daughter out into the world. There, fortified by a deep personal faith in Christ, they would accomplish amazing things, and would reach out often with all the updates, and with sincere gratitude for all you sacrificed to help them succeed. 

Instead, your child has grown into an adult who rejects you and everything you believe in.

How can you possibly rebuild your relationship? We have something that might help.

This email is part of a campaign by Focus on the Family’s Vice President of Parenting, Dr. Danny Huerta, written to parents whose adult children had gone no-contact or low-contact.

this is the sign-off from the man claiming to help parents mend their relationships with their adult children! The “however old they may be, or act” line clearly expresses and models disdain rather than understanding.

Dr. Huerta was promoting a new program that parents can purchase to heal their relationships with their adult children. That’s quite an audacious pitch from an organization that made countless promises to parents for decades that following their parenting advice would lead to strong, healthy, and life-long relationships with their children. Now that a large portion of their audience is facing estrangement from their adult children, they’re selling a new product to repair the harm, without ever taking accountability. They continue to profit off of the devastation they created, encouraging parents to engage further into their cult.

Focus on the Family has identified the biggest problem facing their audience and their adult children as the absence of communication. They could’ve provided resources about “How to talk with your adult child when you disagree on important issues,” or “How to manage holiday plans when your adult child gets married.” But, as the subject line implies, the issue that so many parents are experiencing is that their children are cutting off unfettered access to them. The parents are left wondering how to repair the relationship with someone who no longer communicates in the same ways (or at all). As Focus on the Family validates the feelings of these parents, they also discourage them from taking accountability for the very actions that led to a family dynamic where their children do not feel safe to express their true emotions, values, and beliefs to their parents. 

As a therapist, and someone who grew up in a home that utilized religious authoritarian parenting methods, I am not surprised at all by the wave of adult children who are putting up needed boundaries with their parents. Despite what groups like Focus on the Family say, estrangement is not a fad — it’s the natural result of a family that systematically disregards, controls, and denies autonomy to the children².

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When parents who utilized these types of methods complain that their adult children won’t speak to them about their concerns, they find solace in groups and experts and organizations that assure them that this is simply a trend. They send their money to groups like Focus on the Family who are ready to sell them another set of books and courses on how to deal with the troubling trend of estrangement. But the truth is that estrangement is the expected outcome of religious authoritarian parenting methods. After a lifetime of having their emotions, experience and values ignored, dismissed, and belittled, the adult child has no reason to trust that their parents will suddenly be open to hearing their perspective and individual needs, and accept expressions of who they are. 

Religious authoritarian parenting proponents, like James Dobson, taught and encouraged a family culture where children were discouraged from having a voice³. Using your voice to ask for what you needed was shamed, and often lead to physical abuse. Children were taught to simply obey, fall in line, and agree with their parents. In these kinds of homes, children were physically punished and emotionally shamed and then forced to hug their parents after being spanked. For many adult children, the legacy of violence and forced compliance echoes through their interactions, even into adulthood. Your nervous system learned that to speak in opposition to your parents is to face real danger. In these families, the premise of the parent-child relationship is one where the child has no power, leaving an absence of trust that adult children will be heard, seen or understood. When a parent doesn’t allow their child to have a voice, it should come as no surprise when the day arrives that their adult child stops speaking to them.

As they grow up, many adult children in these families find themselves at a difficult crossroads: Do I continue engagement in a family where I must silence my feelings and values constantly in order to keep a fragile peace? Or do I choose to withdraw, instead investing in relationships where I can express myself?

In religious authoritarian families, peace has always relied on the suppression of our emotions and true selves. It’s a peace that has only ever benefited the enmeshed and often toxic family systems centered around patriarchal hierarchy. It’s a peace that relies on adult children ignoring and silencing their own pain, discomfort, and anxiety, and catering to the needs of the emotionally immature parents. And it is no wonder that many people are simply walking away from relationships that are predicated on the suppression of who they actually are.

Enmeshed Family Culture

The common dynamics found in religious authoritarian parenting homes are what family therapists call an enmeshed family system. The common conception of an enmeshed family system is one where one or both parents share their overwhelming emotions with their children, looking for support and parentifying the child in the process. But this is only one expression of enmeshment. There are many enmeshed family systems where emotions are never talked about or are bypassed using spiritual language (although everyone feels and responds to them). 

At its core, an enmeshed family system is one where there’s a lack of boundaries between family members. Boundaries indicate where “where you end and I begin,”⁴ but in enmeshed families, those lines are not clear, so there is a lack of boundaries that allow children the space to be their individual selves (and to grow into individuated adults). Parents struggle to understand where they end, and where their children begin — and these very dynamics were nurtured and promoted in religious authoritarian parenting methods as a “godly” form of control.

In the email from Focus on the Family I mentioned earlier, Huerta champions a vision of an enmeshed family:

You poured yourself out to help them grow from an innocent, precious child, so full of potential, into what you hoped would be a responsible, virtuous, capable adult…You dreamed of a future where you, beaming with pride, would send your son or daughter out into the world. There, fortified by a deep personal faith in Christ, they would accomplish amazing things, and would reach out often with all the updates, and with sincere gratitude for all you sacrificed to help them succeed.

Here, we see a picture of a family where the children are not individuals who live their own lives, but instead exist on behalf of the Christian faith and their parents’ pride. Parents do not simply give to their children, they give with the expectation that their children would live in a particular way, and in return, their children will show “sincere gratitude for all you sacrificed to help them succeed.”

Most often in enmeshed families, belonging comes at the cost of individuality⁵. To be a part of the family means to suppress your own emotions, preferences, critical thinking, and individual expression in order to help one or both parents feel comfortable. This can look like the child who learns to hide their sadness because it upsets their father, or the young adult who chooses the career that their mother wasn’t able to pursue because she stayed home with her kids.

In RAP families, it often means that belonging in the family comes at the cost of dismissing or hiding your sexual, gender or relationship diversity, maintaining your parents’ political and religious beliefs, and more. Often in families like these, the very idea that it’s okay for people to have differences is a foreign concept. In the majority of RAP homes, you were assigned your roles at birth — male or female, Christian, Republican, obedient — and any deviance was policed throughout your lifetime. Belonging was assured, as long as you never strayed from your role in your enmeshed family system.

Real Closeness

Many families who used RAP methods describe themselves as close families who are building up a “legacy,” when in reality they are just benefitting from enmeshment and high control. In contrast, healthy families are emotionally engaged and value togetherness, but they also allow for independence, space and have emotional boundaries that allow each person to make their own decisions. They give space for individual needs and preferences. They like being together but they can handle being apart — whether that’s physically or by honoring differences⁶. And they can show delight in who a person is and how they express themselves, rather than simply how they reflect on the family⁷.

The difference between a close family and an enmeshed family can be determined by asking a few questions about the family system:

1. Are individuals allowed to make their own decisions? Can individuals choose career, gender, sexuality, religion, where they live, how they spend their money and more without judgment? Is the family system accepting of each person having their own autonomy?

2. Do family members feel responsible for another's emotions? Do you find yourself thinking, “I could never do that, because my parent/grandparent would be so upset?” Is the goal of family interactions to increase knowing one another and appreciating one another, or is it to keep the peace?

3. Does your parents’ identity or life meaning hinge on the decisions you make or who you are as a person? Does it feel like your parents’ psychological well-being is dependent on you living into the vision they have for you?

4. Is there flexibility in family traditions that is responsive to individual needs? When the parents of a newborn say, “We can’t make it to the family reunion this year?” are they supported and celebrated for making a choice that’s good for their nuclear family — or do family members become upset with them? If there are family members with varied gender expressions, are pronouns respected? If there are neurodivergent children, are their accommodations taken into consideration or are they seen as a threat to the family system/tradition? 

There are other ways to determine between a close family and enmeshed family, but the above questions are a good place to start. For many people raised in RAP homes, they have been told their entire lives that their families are healthy, close, and loving. In reality, it is a false peace, predicated on continuing the hierarchical authoritarianism in our families, even in adulthood. This week, many are feeling this cognitive dissonance as they prepare to celebrate holidays with those whose political actions are harmful to them individually, or to those they care about. 

As people move into adulthood and engage in the hard work of reclaiming their autonomy, it can be incredibly painful to set boundaries with the people you most want care and connection with. We’ll continue to explore this topic in later chapters, but for today we wanted to identify what an enmeshed family looks like -- and examine who benefits from a false peace in the family system. 

Estrangement is not a trend, it is an expected outcome of a high control environment where people are not allowed to be themselves. More and more people are putting up boundaries with people in their lives who hurt them constantly with their beliefs, political affiliations, and actions, and yet still expect to receive a “hug” from the person they hurt. This reality will continue to accelerate thanks in part to the 2024 elections, and organizations like Focus on the Family will continue to profit off of it. 

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For today, take some time to sit with the questions above and let us know in the comments : if you were raised with RAP methods, did you experience enmeshed family dynamics? 

1. Yes, that is not a typo. It really says “rub it in your faith.”

2. Or, as the Bible says, “every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.” (Matthew 7:17).

3. In The Strong Willed Child, Dobson said “It is unreasonable to think that a child who has only ‘negotiated’ with his parents and teachers has been learning to submit to the authority of the Almighty” (P. 172). I’d say that it is unreasonable to think that a child who never negotiated with his parents in childhood would suddenly feel safe to do so in adulthood.

4. The title of a 1994 book by Anne Katherine, MA

5. This is true of white evangelicalism, as well.

6. Honoring “differences” does not mean excusing or allowing ideologies like racism, homophobia, or misogyny, as those are values that are fundamentally opposed to honoring differences and are predicated on the oppression of marginalized groups.

7. An emphasis on how a child reflects on their family is a hallmark of enmeshed family systems, and as we discussed in Chapter 2: Under Pressure, it’s also a hallmark of religious authoritarian parenting.