The Evangelical Strategy of Weaponizing Parents

Becoming a parent has been the most healing and joyous life experience, as well as incredibly enlightening. It has shown me just how pervasive and toxic the impact of Evangelical doctrine really is. The brainwashing has to be truly powerful in order to influence a parent to forsake their natural instincts and disrupt the strongest natural bond. As a mother, I cannot imagine looking into my precious daughter’s big blue eyes and deciding to hit her. As her life source, I cannot comprehend withholding her food as a way to punish or train her. I cannot understand holding her tiny body close and believing that she is inherently evil. I cannot even think of interpreting her little cries for her needs to be met, as manipulative. And yet all of these are common throughout the spectrum of Christianity.

Growing up in Evangelicalism, I experienced firsthand the parent-child relationship being strategically weaponized to indoctrinate young members, break our will, and create compliant clones who would serve the cult. Teachings from places like Growing Families International (Growing Kids God’s Way) and Focus on the Family destroyed precious family bonds time and time again. Christian organizations and curriculum instructed parents to commit atrocities like refusing nightly feedings to 7-week-old babies, hitting infants who crawled off their blankets, ignoring children as a way of teaching they are less important than their parents, and spanking for minor offenses like feeling tired and cranky.

The bond between parents and children that should have been the safest and most nurturing of relationships became a place of control, neglect, and abuse leading to children with hypervigilant nervous systems who grow into vulnerable adults.

Recently I was honored to contribute to the research for an article on the permeating impact of Growing Families International founded by Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo. The article was written by Jensen Davis with Airmail News who did an amazing job of shedding light on the dangers and scandals surrounding this common Christian parenting curriculum and it quotes myself and others who were directly damaged by it.

I sincerely hope you’ll read and share the article, linked below. You don’t have to pay anything to read the full piece – just enter your email address.

https://airmail.news/issues/2023-11-25/the-parent-trap