“You’ll Understand Someday When You’re A Parent.” … “No, No I Won’t.”

Maybe now that I’m a parent, they’ll actually believe me.

I’ll never understand why yelling at children is okay to teach them that yelling isn’t okay.

I’ll never understand why it isn’t wrong to hit children to teach them that hitting children is wrong.

I’ll never understand why “sinners in need of a savior” are perfectly right all the time once they reproduce – “Because I told you so.”

I’ll never get why it’s okay to treat children in ways we wouldn’t treat adults.

I’ll never be able to support teaching children from infancy that they are flawed and disgusting and evil and that they deserve to be burned alive forever.

I’ll never get why children aren’t allowed to express their emotions in developmentally appropriate ways like crying or stomping their feet, but adults “let off steam” however they feel they need to.

I will never comprehend why children are labeled disobedient for having preferences and opinions that are afforded to adults, like foods they don’t like or clothes they want to wear.

I’ll never agree that whining or complaining or saying no is morally wrong and sinful. As adults we complain about our jobs, we whine about the weather, we say “No, I don’t want to eat that. No, I’m busy right now.” But children do these things and they are punished – because it’s easier to be an absolute authority than to navigate the waters of mentoring and guiding an equally valid tiny human being.

Now that I’m a parent, what I do understand though, is that religious parenting inevitably becomes abusive at some point. Religion causes a parent’s allegiance to be split, and their loyalty is no longer first and foremost to their child’s well-being, but instead to the institution and it’s goals.

Now that I’m a parent, what I understand is that I don’t have to force my spirituality, or any of my beliefs for that matter, on my child. I understand that my “somewhat-hippie-new-age” leanings and my “somewhat-Christian-Mystic-adjacent” spiritual tendencies are mine alone, and while I can talk to my child about my spirituality, I don’t need to save her by forcing her to become my clone. I don’t have all the answers.

Overall, I had great parents growing up. They did their best within a toxic system. Some of my friends weren’t so lucky though. Why do we justify it when someone’s best still isn’t good enough? Doing your best within a toxic system is still toxic. Fulfilling religious obligations in child-rearing turns a parent against their natural instincts for their child in favor of obedience to a deity and its followers.

Often, the result of doctrine mixed with church culture is that Christian parents become little gods and children are their subjects. This toxicity is hidden in a pretty little package of familiar dogma, tradition and “family values”, so it’s easy to miss it, but awareness is a parental responsibility.

Parenthood and pastordom are the two main avenues through which a Christian gets to exercise unbridled power and act out their godlike fantasies, but parenthood is the only one of the two that is reasonably accessible to the average Christian and to women.

After decades in the system, I’m now seeing clearly from the outside that parenthood is the quickest route to success and respect in the Christian world. It’s the first escape from the church’s infantalization of young people. Raising a child in the church is the surest way to prove loyalty to the cause. It’s a tempting chance to avenge your own painful childhood by reenacting the trauma but flipping the script and finally calling the shots over someone else.

Parenthood is an immediate pat on the back in a community where it’s difficult to please anyone. And conveniently for the church, it creates more submissive members to perpetuate the cycle.

Christian parenthood becomes a much-needed vacation from the church’s call to constantly submit, obey and bend to the opinions of others. In parenthood the tables are turned, and you can break the will of another all while being lauded for your godliness. It’s a quick promotion in Christendom that is otherwise earned long and hard or perhaps impossible to reach at all, depending on where you’ve been placed on the Christian status ladder.

Suffocating anxiety and hypervigilance from the constant people-pleasing eventually wears on even the most stoic followers. Christians become victims of their own ideology which in turn gets passed down to the next hurting generation. It’s dangerous to put an unhealed person in power – but that’s what many Christians are. And parenthood is one of the most powerful positions there is.

So yes, I understand. But not the way they wanted me to.

“Someday you’ll understand”, and now as a parent, I do. Religious parenting is inherently child abuse.

I said what I said.