Chapter 15: A Recipe For Abuse
On the systemic nature of abuse and exploitation within religious authoritarian communities
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This chapter discusses religious, sexual, and physical child abuse, as well as indoctrination and gaslighting. Please feel free to skip this chapter if the abuse of children is a triggering topic.
At this point, there is no way to convey the scale of abuse against children in authoritarian, patriarchal Christian institutions in America and across the globe. While right-wing grifters love to talk about the dangers of queer people, drag queens, and liberals, in truth it is often the youth pastor, lead pastor, church volunteer, or a Republican Senator who is arrested for sexual crimes against children in the United States1. Child protection advocates such as R.L. Stollar2 have been pointing out for years the troubling truth about the average predator in the US, who “is a religious adult male in a heterosexual marriage; in fact, 80 percent to 96 percent identify as heterosexual.”3 Those who sexually abuse children also consistently speak about churches as the preferred places to find victims. As one predator said, “Church people [are] easy to fool… They have a trust that comes from being Christians.”4 According to Christianity Today in 2015, the top reason churches were brought to court was specifically related to the sexual abuse of minors (11%).5
Abuse of any kind is about control, and as we have outlined in previous chapters, control is at the heart of religious authoritarian parenting methods. We believe that any family, institution, or faith community that stresses the importance of instilling in children immediate compliance to authority, frequent corporal punishment, and the doctrine of original sin is setting children up for exploitation and predation. And this is because the patterns show us that both the protection of predators and the abuse of children is a feature, not a bug, of American evangelicalism, and has been from the 1960s on.
The cover has a child with a severe bowl cut sneaking a cookie out of a giant cookie jar. The child is gleefully looking to the left of the camera as he prepares to bite a jam-filled treat, almost as if he is daring someone to discipline him. The title in bold says God, the Rod and your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents by Larry Tomczak.
This book — published in 1982 — has all the hallmarks of a popular evangelical religious authoritarian parenting (RAP) manual. It aims to strike a “cheeky” tone when it comes to child discipline while also connecting its methods directly to orders from God himself. The first page tells us that Tomczak — who helped found the evangelical denomination Sovereign Grace Ministries — is a proponent of the only God-ordained way to raise children. It’s a “scriptural approach whereby affection and correction go hand in hand,” and he promises that these methods will help parents “shape your children into the kind of people God — and you — want them to be.”
Like every RAP book, parenting must be framed as a part of a larger culture war happening where the “traditional” (patriarchal) family was under constant attack. The biggest enemy, according to Tomzcak and other evangelical leaders, was liberalism — feminism, gay people, and permissive parenting practices. All of this was leading to the “disintegration” of the family and the destruction of America itself. The cure? The Christian family must commit to: the authority of the Word of God, an active relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, and authentic commitment in a Christian fellowship6.
The rod that Tomczak wrote about so often was defined as the authority of the Bible, God, and the “Bible-believing” church. In evangelical communities, like every high-control group, the individual must prove their devotion to the group. Parents must come under the authority of God, the Bible, and the Church first, and then indoctrinate their children to do the same. When it came to children, the rod was no longer a metaphor, and chastisement (often with wooden instruments) must be doled out for each act of willfulness. If the Bible “clearly” says that children must be punished in order to be saved, then parents who refuse to do so are negligent, endangering their children by their permissiveness. Parents were pushed to equate harsh corporal punishment against toddlers as the ultimate sign of devotion to God, to the Christian worldview, and to the white patriarchal way of life.
The child’s body, so gleefully talked about by Tomczak and a host of other RAP writers, belonged to God and therefore it belonged to the church7. Which, in effect, meant that the bodies of the children belonged to the men who led the church and claimed to understand God the best.
In a lawsuit filed in 2012 against Tomczak and multiple other male leaders involved in Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM), there were claims of systematic abuse against children in particular. The lawsuit starts by stating “the facts show that the Church cared more about protecting its financial and institutional standing than protecting children, its most vulnerable members. The church failed to report known instances of sexual predation to law enforcement, encouraged parents to refrain from reporting the assaults to law enforcement, and interposed themselves between the parents of the victims and law enforcement, leading law enforcement to believe the parents had ‘forgiven’ those who preyed on their children. Defendants’ acts and omissions were not isolated events. Defendants repeated acts and omissions created a culture in which sexual predators were protected from accountability and victims were silenced.”8
Larry Tomczak is one of eight individual defendants named in the original lawsuit — including lead pastor of Sovereign Grace Ministries CJ Mahaney. The lawsuit alleges that SGM constantly engaged in organizing the care of children, and was responsible for 800 children during Sunday meetings, in addition to organizing homeschool groups and childcare during home Bible studies. While simultaneously catering to families with children, SGM failed to implement the measures necessary to protect children from predators9. Including, but not limited to, not requiring pastors be licensed or even ordained, having zero policies in place to deal with sexual predation, and failing to train volunteers and leaders about how to identify and report sexual predators.
SGM, the lawsuit argues, perfected a pattern: claim you care about children and attract families to your organization, require endless hours in the community for families, and then do nothing to protect children in your care from predators. SGM also instructed people to not disobey the teachings of the church — allowing leaders to pressure parents not to report abuse within the community to the outside authorities when it occurred. This pattern, when coupled with the doctrine of “forgiveness” for abusive men in power, created the perfect conditions for the abuse of children to happen unchecked, over and over again.10
In light of the lawsuits against Tomczak, as well as the pastors, youth pastors, church volunteers and conservative parents who consistently make headlines for abusing children, a sobering question begins to emerge: did these parenting methods raise children who would be ideal victims for child predators?
Let’s take a basic premise of religious authoritarian parenting books: all of them tell parents that God insists on corporal punishment for children every time they assert their will against authority. Some of the authors, like Dr. Dobson, coach parents on how to hurt their children in a ritualized way that inflicts pain but also utilized coercive control — hurting your child in a calm manner, describing how you love them and that it is for their own good, and forcing the child to agree that it was loving and that they deserved it. Sometimes parents even required their children to hug them after the abuse. In order to control children and teach them their place in the social order, authoritarians used corporal punishment and religious language to baptize their physical abuse of children as the only godly way to shape a person.
By using Christianity, God, and the Bible as the ultimate authority to be obeyed, RAP authors, Christian pastors, and Christian parents all trained children to defer to outside authority rather than pay attention to their own internal cues, instincts, feelings and thoughts. The goal was to produce obedient and well-behaved children, who would obey older, trusted adults at the expense of their own will. In order to secure compliance, “God” became the ultimate surveillance system and the average evangelical child was pressured into not only outward obedience, but an internal conformity that encouraged them to dismiss any thoughts or feelings that conflicted with Biblical authority, or any adult who represented it. Children were held to impossible standards of obedience, which led to more opportunities to punish and shape a child’s nervous system response to authority. None of this equipped children to stand up for themselves against abusive adults.
The doctrine of original sin in particular was used to paint children and parents as being on the same level spiritually without any discussion or acknowledgement of power differentials, developmental stages, or the impacts of trauma on the nervous system. Children, as authors like Dobson, MacArthur, Tomczak, Piper, Ezzo and others explained over and over again, were just as sinful as fully-grown adults. They came into the world ready to defy authority and to live like selfish tyrants and dictators who were begging to be disciplined. As RAP author John MacArthur wrote, “the human heart is programmed for sin and selfishness…every baby has the potential to become a monster.”
This distorted view of children not only gave authoritarian-leaning parents permission to view their children as their adversaries that must be conquered in a holy war, but it also served to encourage both parents and children to view developmental stages through a moral lens rather than a developmental one. Normal developmental stages like self-determination and identity development were targeted as sinful, and in this kind of an environment research has shown that children are more likely to feel guilt or shame for events in their life (even those they had no agency in), and are more likely to feel that any sexual experience was their fault, evidence of their own sinful nature.11
Spanking — whether it was ritualized or not — created not just compliant children, but children with disorganized attachment to their caregivers. It blurred the lines, on purpose, between what was abuse and what wasn’t, and taught children to equate pain from godly authority figures as love. If you protested your abuse, then your “willfulness” would be further punished. The ultimate aim of RAP methods was to coach children into the fawn response to godly authority, to deny their own boundaries and disown their own feelings that say “this doesn’t feel good.”12 By insisting parents use corporal punishment, RAP authors coached parents to deny their children the right to say no to unsafe and unwanted touches. Children who were not in touch with their own bodies or the boundaries and privacy due to them could then be potentially exploited by parents, pastors, employers and predatory people.
This lack of understanding consent is a crucial element in making children vulnerable to predators. In communities where RAP methods were practiced, teaching about consent was not only ignored, it was seen as dangerous to the entire framework. If parents, pastors, and Christian leaders taught children that consent was a human right, then the child might start to question why their caregiver was hurting them. To teach consent would undermine the whole concept of corporal punishment and whether or not a child was allowed to say “no” to it13.
But without teaching consent, parents forgo protecting their children from abuse — because consent is integral to keeping them safe from abusive people. R.L. Stollar writes in The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology that, “the principles of consent are foundational in the world of child protection. Teaching children that their bodies are their own, their bodies are good, that their bodies deserve to be safe and secure, and that they have a right to say no to touch that makes them feel unsafe and uncomfortable . . . we want children to feel confident in saying ‘my body is my body, and it belongs to me.’”14
For Stollar, consent is not just about teaching physical safety to children, it also applies to their inner worlds, or their emotional and mental safety. “Children have a right to their own feelings and thoughts — even if they conflict with the adults in their lives — just as they have the right to say no to a hug.””15 But for children in high control homes and religions, neither their mind or their body belongs to them. And as they grow older bodily autonomy for women and those socialized as female is often maligned and mocked in these communities and is seen as un-Biblical.
Another pattern that helps abuse thrive is the weaponization of Christian concepts of forgiveness and grace for abusers. In high control Christianity there tends to be an emphasis on the sinful nature of man/humanity, but once again, it is the most vulnerable people who pay the heavy price for this kind of theology. Reb Bradley, RAP author of Child Training Tips: writes:
“One dangerous, humanistic idea that has crept into the Church is that children are basically good and need only be loved and cared for to bring out that good. This view not only ignores the basic teachings of Scripture, but encourages parents to let a child’s nature take its course. That is tantamount to taking a wild skunk as a pet, believing it will never release its stench because of the good home you will give it. The Bible teaches that allowing a self-centered heart to take its natural course will bring heartache to parents.”16
In religious authoritarian spaces children are given countless messages of their own sinfulness while receiving precious little grace in return for their natural developmental stages. Adults, on the other hand — particularly if they are male and in a leadership position — are forgiven time and time again for their sins as long as they repent and commit ever more to advancing the work of the Church.17 Sometimes they are even held up as “more” godly after a “mistake,” following the footsteps of King David, a man after God’s own heart.
In these contexts, the Christian idea of forgiveness is crucial to protecting predators from true accountability. Individuals are pressured to forgive their abusers because this is what the Bible and God commands. They are often told that if they speak up about the abuse they experienced at the hands of their Christian parents, pastor, or youth leader, they could damage the work of the Church. Here we see the importance of indoctrinating children into the supposed goodness of Jesus and Christianity at young ages, as it becomes another pressure point to silence critiques and criticism and ultimately victims.
All of these patterns and elements together create the perfect storm for abuse and exploitation to happen in spaces that claim to care about children. And the saddest part? The authors, pastors, and predators benefitting from these twisted theologies have been telling us what they are doing, all in plain sight.
While the allegations against Tomczak and SGM made headlines back in 2012, the lawsuit was dismissed on a technicality due to the statute of limitations in Maryland18. In 2013 an amended lawsuit was put forth with many more horrific details regarding what was alleged to have happened in SGM churches — this time with several plaintiffs making the incredibly difficult choice to reveal their full names and identities. This lawsuit states that “from 1982 to the present, the individual defendants participated in a conspiracy to permit sexual deviants to have unfettered access to children for purposes of predation. Defendants covered up ongoing sexual and physical abuse of minors, and routinely and repeatedly violated the mandatory reporting laws designed to keep children safe from sexual predation.”19
Sovereign Grace Ministries isn’t alone in standing accused of a conspiracy both abuse children and protect predators — the Roman Catholic Church continues to have its own reckoning, as does the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Mormon Church, among others. And in truth, the exploitation and abuse of children shows up wherever power hungry people congregate: in Hollywood, politics, and the music industry, predatory people continue to be exposed in the public eye.20
But we want to make clear that there is a pattern that has played out across countless homes, churches, youth groups, and Bible colleges across the US: millions of children were raised in independent or non-denominational churches where there was little hierarchical oversight and very little media attention on the systemic nature of the abuse of children within these groups. And one of the main common denominators between so many seemingly disparate and widespread religious communities in the United States is that so many of the people in the pews and in the parishes of patriarchal Christian spaces all read the same parenting books and implemented the practices in order to show their obedience to godly authority.
Fundamentalist Christians across the US all believe different points of theology, but they agree on one thing: how breaking the will of children — through physical abuse — is essential to crafting the perfect Christian in these communities, and the outcomes are bleak: not only do children suffer under corporal punishment, but they are made more vulnerable to sexual abuse from those within these groups. Isn’t it time we stopped letting them get away with it?
If you have a population of children that believe they are inherently sinful and deserving of abuse, and that they have a duty to obey those in leadership and never tarnish the work of the institution, you have a recipe for exploitation. Add in the doctrine of forgiveness for abusers, an unwillingness to prosecute offenders, and the lack of trainings, education, and safeguards put into place to protect children, and you have communities that are not only grooming children to be vulnerable to abuse, but for the predators to get away with it time and time again.
But no longer is that the case. Just like the reckoning is happening in Hollywood, so too is it happening in American Christianity. We are grateful to be doing this work of exposing the patterns of abuse in evangelical ideologies and practices alongside a host of other brave survivors. While there is no real way to document and catalogue every child who has been abused in patriarchal Christian spaces, we continue to do the work to highlight the impact of parenting methods that create children who are easily exploited. We do this in the hopes that one day, these cycles of abuse will be interrupted, and no child will be told that their pain and silence is necessary for the continuation of Christianity.
One of our next chapters will be focused on the ways people can protect children in their communities by educating themselves on what predators are like and how to hold them accountable.
We do this work at STRONGWILLED precisely because we believe the world would be a radically better place if children were listened to, given basic human rights, and were taught from an early age that their body belongs to them alone. Not god, not their parents, not their pastors — only them.
With all the talk going on in authoritarian communities about grooming, it’s important to ask: Who is creating a dynamic between adults and children that makes children less likely to speak up when they’re abused? Who is putting children in vulnerable positions? Who is ensuring that predators will be safe from consequences should they be discovered? Who is doing the grooming here?
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While writing this chapter I decided to make a note any time I saw an article that pertained to a Christian who made headlines for abusing children and link them in my first paragraph. I lasted two days before I had already reached my quota of links. In the time it has taken to edit this chapter, more people have made headlines — and these are just the cases we know about.
We are incredibly grateful for the insight and feedback of R.L. Stollar in the writing of this chapter and we encourage people who are interested in child advocacy in Christian spaces (including homeschooling communities) to follow his work
God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod p. 26
For more information on how RAP authors talked about children’s bodies in relation to corporal punishment and also pressured parents to use their methods, see our previous work in Chapter 9: This Hurts Me More than it Hurts You
You can access the original lawsuit against SGM here: https://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/970485/22706864/1368737527397/Doc+1+-+Original+Class+Action+Complaint+Oct+17+2012+1.pdf?token=rpaxUEqF8YUYsO8JUMgj%2FA6qS5E%3D
We recommend reading R.L. Stollar’s book The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology for more insight on how Christian churches and organizations can have a framework that protects children. Stollar himself recommends the book The Child Safeguarding Policy Guide for Churches and Ministries by Boz Tchvidjian and Shira M. Berkovits for churches looking to implement measures to keep children safe from predators.
For a good breakdown of the allegations against SGM, as well as some of the history between Mahaney and Tomczak, please read this article published in 2016 about the culture of abuse and coverups within the network of churches founded by SGM.
Read more about the psychology supporting this notion: https://strongwilled.substack.com/p/chapter-7-the-political-threat-of
For more information on how spanking was ritualized in RAP spaces, read our previous chapter here:
Chapter 9: This Hurts Me More than it Hurts You
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We find it very troubling that folks like Dr. Dobson -- a clinical child psychologist who boasted of working with traumatized and abused children and who talked about being forced to watch CSA content in his anti-pornography work -- never wrote about the importance of teaching children about bodily autonomy, consent, or how predators most often come from friends, family members, and church leaders. If he was aware of the toll of sexual abuse against children, why didn’t he put information in his books that would help teach parents how to accurately spot predators and help their children identify abusive behavior from adults?
The Kingdom of Children, pp 168-169
P. 169
Child Training tips p. 5
Tomczak is still alive and still doing ministry — including writing anti-LGBTQIA+ books and writing columns for Charisma magazine.
You can read some of the disturbing allegations included in the 2013 amended lawsuit against SGM here, but please take care :https://spiritualsoundingboard.com/2013/05/14/second-amended-complaint-against-sovereign-grace-ministries-filed-today/
Jeffry Epstein, Shawn “P. Diddy” Combs, and Republican state representative RJ May all come to mind.
I echo Janice Lagata: “when I want to be charitable I say evangelicalism is a net-negative. When I’m honest I know it is evil.” My bones demand to see the day where the whole edifice (systems) that produces and protects abusers in the name of a religion devoid of justice and empathy is torn down and held accountable for the hell on earth it created. We deserved better. Today’s children deserve better. Our planetary future depends on us doing better.
It’s wild to me how once you recognize the permission structures that sanctify abuse in one area (i.e RAP literature) you can spot its existence elsewhere. I’m examining various Charismatic Christian and mainstream evangelical “deliverance” methodologies that purport to bring inner freedom and identity alignment. They all have in common the demonization (to various degrees) of emotions and normal biological responses to trauma and unmet needs, the conditioning and sanctification of self-doubt and hypervigilance, and the stated goals of perfect submission or obedience to God (and by default, God’s mouthpieces) for missional efficiency. The victims are frequently vulnerable young adults or isolated individuals whose desire for purpose and meaningful connection gets exploited for controlling ends. Like RAP methods, God is turned into the ultimate surveillance system to keep people in-line and afraid of their autonomy and sovereignty.
“None of this equipped children to stand up for themselves against abusive adults.“
Especially our own parents! It left no one for me/kids to safely talk to or feel like they’d be believed and harms and abuse addressed.
Makes me think that educators could benefit from training to understand RAP and resulting abuse, recognize fawning in children, and learn to be a safe adult whom a child could trust to talk to about what’s happening in their homes and churches.