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Oct. 4, 2024



Breaking a Child’s Will
The Evangelical family’s twisted obsession with corporal punishment.


By Talia Lavin






Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images





       



Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images






       



Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images



In some hands, a wooden spoon is an innocuous object, a kitchen tool for stirring and scooping. In others, it is an instrument of pain that lingers in the memory far longer than any taste could linger on the tongue. If you strike a child enough times and with enough force with a wooden spoon, it will shatter.
In October 2021, I posted a tweet asking people who had had abusive Evangelical childhoods to reach out to me for a research project that would form part of my new book, Wild Faith. Within 72 hours, 150 people reached out to me, sharing their stories on email and DM. The respondents’ ages ranged from 22 to 65; many were my age, in their early 30s. They were grateful that someone wanted to talk about what had happened to them.
I wound up designing a 12-question survey: What was your experience of corporal punishment like? What parenting books or doctrines do you recall your parents using? Do you feel childhood corporal punishment has affected you as an adult? The responses were intense and contained so much candid anguish it felt as though they would etch holes in my computer screen. I have included many in this story, with the names of my respondents changed to protect their identities.
Within many Evangelical homes, violent abuse of children is cast as a direct act of service to God, and eschewing it a grave, even mortal sin that puts children in peril of losing their eternal souls. In tens of millions of American homes, there presides a structure in which the father dominates over his wife and children with unquestioned brutality, and the wife’s limited sphere of authority over the children is used to inflict further violence.
While Evangelicals might protest that the intended effect of corporal punishment is virtuous instruction, in the moral universe of Evangelical parenting, the ideal child is not necessarily smart, ambitious, or even kind or loving. Above all, he or she is obedient.
Nearly every survivor I spoke to emphasized that obedience was strongly emphasized in their homes — central, mandatory, and necessary, extending not just to outward behaviors, such as making a bed or cleaning a table, but even to the facial expressions of the child performing these duties, which must always be cheerful and compliant. As the novelist and former Evangelical Kristen Arnett told me, “Defiance included rolling your eyes, back talk, or even using a sour tone.”
Rachel, 44, who recalls being beaten with electrical cords, belts, yardsticks, willow switches, Ping-Pong paddles, and fishing rods, told me that obedience extended far beyond external behavior. “Not only should you obey but obey willingly with no rebellion in your heart and with a cheerful attitude,” she said. “I got spanked for not cleaning my room fast enough once, and when I went back to cleaning after my spanking, I had a depressed — or ‘rebellious’ — attitude, so my dad made me sing a cheerful hymn while I cleaned, and if I didn’t sound happy enough, I would be spanked again.”
Wooden spoons recurred in countless interviews. Many of the people who wrote to me about their childhoods had had spoon after spoon broken on their thighs and backs. At 23, Abigail refuses to have one in her house. “I don’t even keep them in my kitchen for cooking purposes,” she said. “They’re not allowed in my house at all.”
“My mom wasn’t averse to carrying around a wooden spoon to hit us with,” Rebecca, 46, told me. “She broke that wooden spoon on me more than once.” For 32-year-old Sarah, a wooden-spoon beating was routinely used until she showed sufficient “repentance.” To this day, she says, “Being struck causes me to feel sick to my stomach, even if it’s something as small as being brushed by a paper airplane.”
Spoons were the least of it. “In our house the whip hung on a nail in the pantry and was used often. We’d be told to go to our rooms, strip completely naked, and bring the whip to our parents in the living room,” said Anna. “They stuck to the 40-lash rule given in the Bible, but that was for each whipping. We might receive several at the same time, so 80 or 120 lashes were not unheard of. My first memory at 3 years of age was receiving one of these whippings after having my clothes and underwear taken off. We would get it from head to toe, front and back. Neither me nor my siblings have a relationship with our parents today. Where they really belong is jail and then straight to hell.”
The belief that obedience to God requires doing violence to children continues to shape American public policy toward children, including in public schools. In March 2023, the Oklahoma legislature was presented with a bill that would have outlawed the physical punishment of disabled students, including slapping, spanking, and paddling. One Republican legislator, Jim Olsen, presented a fierce mien on the statehouse floor as he advocated against the statute. “God’s word is higher than all the so-called experts,” he said. “Several Scriptures could be read here. Let me read just one, Proverbs 29: ‘The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.’ So that would seem to endorse the use of corporal punishment.” The bill to protect disabled children failed, 45–43.
Corporal punishment is legal in schools in 17 states, and approximately 160,000 children are subjected to it every year. In many of these states, parents must sign consent forms signaling their willingness to have their children spanked by strangers with hands or wooden paddles — absent the child’s input about their own body.
The regularity and implacability of physical punishment are two features that abuse survivors remember keenly. “I was young, probably around age 4, and I remember this experience very clearly yet remember almost nothing else from that age,” Mary, age 30, wrote to me. “We had been out in public. I’m pretty sure that the initial infraction was I started crying when my dad went to zip up my coat. … By the time we got home the punishment being dealt was 100 hits without any pants or underwear. My dad didn’t skip a single one. I just remember hearing my own screaming and wondering if it would ever end.”
Leah, 43, told me that ADHD had prevented her from always accurately understanding the orders she was given; as a result, she had been beaten three to seven times a day for years.



In 1970, a child psychologist named James Dobson published a book, Dare to Discipline, that would galvanize a movement toward “biblical parenting.” He positioned it as a necessary curative for the permissive, sinful culture that had swept through the United States in the 1960s. Like much of the Christian right that came to transform  American politics over the last half-century, the “biblical parenting” movement was a reactionary backlash to the rapid social change brought on by the youth-led feminism, civil rights, and anti-war movements. Dobson’s vision was undergirded by repulsion at this perceived social chaos, and at its core was his solution: the enforced submission of children to absolute authority.
“The parent’s relationship with his child should be modeled after God’s relationship with man,” Dobson wrote. “This same love leads the benevolent father to guide, correct, and even bring some pain to the child when it is necessary for his eventual good.” He recommended squeezing the trapezius muscle at the back of the neck to control children of all ages. Several people I interviewed said that as a result, any touch on the shoulder still makes them flinch. But Dobson’s book says that God created pain “as a valuable vehicle for instruction.”
“In the last half-century, conservative Evangelicals were coalescing as this partisan political movement and coalescing around a particular cultural orientation, and child rearing is right at the center of that,” Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told me. “Out-of-control children were unraveling the social fabric of the country. So it was absolutely critical for parents to get their kids in line. It started in the home: you discipline your kids, and then your kids will grow up to be functioning members of this social order, which was always understood in a hierarchical sense.” Dobson’s The Strong-Willed Child (1978; reissued 2004) is primarily a guidebook in how to create pliant, submissive children through judicious blows.
“I remember reading my mom’s letters or diary about how she wasn’t sure what to do about my ‘strong will’ and she just couldn’t break it,” said Bathsheba, 37. “Looking back, I have no idea what I did that was so strong willed. I remember her telling me a story about her telling me not to touch a plant when I was crawling and that I grinned a big ‘knowing’ grin and went and touched it anyway. I would tense myself up to endure hours of spankings. I felt that showing pain would mean they won.”
“Almost every spanking I’ve ever received was a result of me asking ‘Why?’” said Chloe, 34, of her parents. “I think they really tried to break me of ‘defying authority’ because they felt it was necessary for me to be a good Christian and a productive member of society and a good wife.”
By the end of the 1980s, the Dobson view of child rearing had permeated American culture to the point that when confronted with a choice to abolish cruelty against children as a society, Americans and their government responded with a resounding rejection. In November 1989, the U.N. General Assembly ratified an international treaty known as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It was an effort that had been 30 years in the making, expanding upon 1959’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child, whose ten principles take up a scanty two pages. A child is granted the right to a name; to a nationality; to an environment in which he or she is loved, protected against neglect and cruelty, and guaranteed an education. The 1989 convention extended the ten articles to 54, largely extrapolations from the earlier, terser text: A child shall not be subject to torture; the jailing of a child should be a matter of last resort; children have the right to adequate medical care and to a free and compulsory primary education.
As of this writing, every U.N. member state has ratified the UNCRC except one: the United States. (Somalia and South Sudan, the previous lone holdouts alongside the United States, ratified the treaty in 2015.)
Of course, this does not mean that children enjoy freedom — from cruelty and neglect, from filicide and abuse, from educational deprivation and hunger — everywhere else in the world. Wherever there are children, there are those who are cruel to them. But the CRC is an aspirational document, a set of standards that every other U.N. member state has agreed are worthy of adopting. The CRC would require a two-thirds vote of the Senate to be ratified. It hasn’t come close.
By the 1990s, Dobson’s ministry, Focus on the Family, was a media empire with book sequels, family-oriented radio programs, educational materials, and newsletters — a parallel culture that existed alongside but apart from secular Americana. As Du Mez put it, Dobson was “a fixture in the homes of tens of millions of Americans.”
Legions of imitators followed, some more fixated on pain and others more faith-centric than Dobson’s neighborly, folksy persona. They continue to shape Evangelical parenting culture by emphasizing the perils of “sparing the rod.” His immediate successors include Michael and Debi Pearl, whose work through No Greater Joy Ministries includes the infamous To Train Up a Child: Child Training for the 21st Century (1994; 1.2 million copies sold), a book that, to me at least, is best described as a child-abuse manual. There are also gurus such as the pastor Tedd Tripp, whose Shepherding a Child’s Heart (1995) seemingly erases the line between physical abuse and parental love. Christian child-rearing guides have become no gentler in the ensuing decades. In 2017’s Grace Based Discipline: How to Be at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst, Karis Kimmel Murray, a daughter of Tim Kimmel, the founder of the internationally popular Christian ministry Family Matters, emphasized the centrality of causing pain in imposing obedience on children. “Remember that pain is necessary for correction. You cannot discipline without it. Pain plays a loving role in discipline, and it has its rightful place,” she wrote in an appendix advocating the use of “grace-based spanking.” “After all, God uses pain to discipline us. If you disagree, your argument is not with me; it’s with Him.”
“I specifically remember my mom paraphrasing sections of To Train Up a Child while she was spanking me,” said Ophelia, 30. “Nearly every time my mom spanked me, she’d cry and beg me to give in so she could stop spanking me because she hated doing it so much.” This touches on the most sinister parts of corporal punishment advice in Christian circles: the idea that a parents’ instinct to shield their child from pain is ungodly and that instead the best parents will intentionally inflict pain.
Millions of children have been raised with these principles and this pain. At least three killings have been circumstantially linked to the parenting doctrines of the Pearls in particular: Between 2006 and 2011, Sean Paddock, 4 years old; Lydia Schatz, 7; and Hana Grace-Rose Williams, 13, all died brutal deaths at the hands of parents who followed the teachings of the Pearls’ To Train Up a Child. Sean died of suffocation in North Carolina, wrapped too tightly in blankets as a punishment; Lydia died after being spanked for several hours without pausing in California; Hana, emaciated, was left naked outside in the cold under the guise of punishment in the chilly winter weather of Sedro-Woolley, Washington.
It is vital, according to this doctrine, to start early, utilizing violence at 5 months (per the Pearls) or 15 months (per Dobson). The books describe children as tyrants, anarchists, belligerents, and hardened revolutionaries. The texts are filled with palpable disgust, even rage, toward children. In The Strong-Willed Child, Dobson wrote, “The child has made it clear that he’s looking for a fight, and his parents would be wise not to disappoint him!” Both Dobson and the Pearls aver that children who cry too hard, or too long, after spankings are being manipulative and should be spanked again to silence their tears.



Among the general populace in the United States, support for hitting children is quite high — 35 percent reported using spanking as a punishment in 2017 — though it has lessened in recent decades. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that physical punishment offers no benefits to children whatsoever and puts them at significant risk of both mental- and physical-health issues throughout their lives. But there remains a broad and widening gap between Evangelicals’ perceptions of spanking and those of the general public. Roughly half of Evangelicals support spanking, and those who do seem to believe in it fervently.
According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Evangelicals make up 14 percent of the American population. Half of that is 24 million people.
The Christian right has enormous influence in the halls of power — and that influence is reflected, strikingly, in the transpartisan rejection of the CRC. In 1989, the George H.W. Bush administration refused to bring it before the Senate over “concerns of sovereignty.” Bush’s son George W. wasn’t much better: In the delicate wording of the Congressional Research Service, the administration “questioned the impact of U.S. ratification on state and federal laws and argued that the treaty was at odds with the emphasis of the United States on the duty of parents to protect and care for their children.” Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama brought the CRC before the Senate, either, due to Republican opposition; the mere specter of its ratification led Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra to introduce, in June 2008, a resolution “proposing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution stating that the ‘liberty of parents’ to raise and educate their children is a ‘fundamental right,’ and that no treaty may ‘supersede, modify, interpret, or apply’ this right.”
In lieu of the rights of the child, the right has developed a parallel but opposing movement: the campaign for “parental rights,” a campaign that has its origins in segregationist parochial schools. As construed by the American right wing, “parental rights” is a way of expressing that children are their parents’ property, subject to absolute control, and not accountable to any standard outside the nuclear family unit.
The idea of “parental rights” obviates the notion that society has a collective responsibility to secure the welfare of children. As former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum put it in a screed entitled “Children Belong to Parents, Not Government” in April 2013, “So we go from telling the small-business man that ‘you didn’t build that’ to telling parents that ‘they don’t belong to you!’ It harks back to Marxism’s trumping of the family in favor of the state.”
There’s a laundry list of abuses that are permitted daily under the aegis of parental rights: physical and sexual abuse; the deprivation of education under the guise of homeschooling; and the denial of any outlet, in school or otherwise, to talk about what’s happening at home.
Parental rights also enables child marriage, which is legal in 39 states.
ParentalRights.org is a right-wing nonprofit whose president served in the Trump administration and whose chairman is also a vice-president of the massively powerful Christian lobbying group Home School Legal Defense Association. The boards of the organization and its associated foundation are loaded with a galleon of right-wing lawyers, legislators, Grover Norquists, and the president of Salt & Light Global, a ministry committed to “speak of Jesus in the Public Square.”
Unsurprisingly, ParentalRights.org really, really hates the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In a 2020 post, the site laid out its opposition in a way that paired the maximum of contempt toward children with fearmongering tactics about globalist overreach. Here’s why children shouldn’t have rights:
“Consider, for instance, the prohibition of corporal discipline … Ratifying the Convention would leave it to that elitist, foreign committee to decide when or if our treatment of children was acceptable under the CRC. But you and I know that parents, except in extreme cases, are the ones who love their children most and know what is best for them.”



Once a violent childhood ends, what happens to the child who was and the adult he or she now must be? The trauma that thrums through body and mind remains; for those who stay in the evangelical community, it is passed on to their children. For others, those who leave the faith or adopt a new attitude toward their upbringing, it is the work of a lifetime to excavate the pain inflicted in their earliest years.
“I have a constant fear of failure and a lot of anxiety around succeeding. It damaged my ability to be creative and to be willing to stand up for myself or set boundaries,” Jeremy, 37, told me. “I have felt as though I had no real goals of my own without someone telling me what to do. I still struggle mightily with taking initiative and fear of punishment.”
What does it feel like to be struck as a child? Children feel pain, as any human being does. But to be struck as a child by a parent is to experience a different kind of pain, an entanglement of emotional and physical suffering. It is a violating and bewildering moment, and the lessons it imparts are rarely those the parent sought to convey: to go to bed on time, to refrain from sibling conflict, to get better grades. Memories of the infraction fade, but a sense of betrayal lingers, as well as the sense that love and pain flow from the same font; that the child, through his or her fundamental flaws, caused the violence he or she endured from the idolized parent.
Most of the people who wrote to me experienced corporal punishment as a physical and psychological violation — as violence and as emotional pain. And for girls raised in an Evangelical culture with a primary focus on modesty and purity, the prospect of having to strip bare before their fathers to be struck was humiliating, a source of profound shame and discomfort. Women told me that they had experienced spanking as a sexual violation.
Rebecca, 46, recalled the sexualized humiliation of one specific beating. “I don’t know what precipitated this particular assault. What I remember is being taken down the basement and my dad grabbing an old two-by-four and beating me across the ass with it,” she said. “The rough edges and the nail heads in the old wood made a bloody mess of me, despite my clothes. Afterwards, once he’d calmed down, he had me lay on my tummy on my bed and exposed my bare ass and spread ointment on the bruised and bloody skin. I couldn’t sit in a chair for some time, but the revulsion of him touching my bare ass when I was 11 or 12 years old stayed with me far longer.”
For other respondents, the connections were more vivid, even from an early age. Dinah, 30, recalled that being forced to strip created guilt and confusion — an extreme form of immodesty. “I had separately ‘figured out’ masturbation as a toddler (obviously without knowing what it was) and would often use it to self-soothe before and after getting spanked,” she wrote to me. “The combination of authority figures forcing me to get naked and endure pain; blood rushing to the general area from the spanking itself; and masturbating afterwards to calm down created early connections between shame, pain, and sexual pleasure that were definitely inappropriate. I don’t remember how early it was, but I know it was before the age of 6. As an adult, I believe corporal punishment is virtually always physical abuse and often sexual abuse as well.”
“There’s something about being beaten in such a religious, ritualistic, intimate way that feels almost sexual, even if it’s not intended as such,” said Abigail, 40. “Child me picked up on that, too, and started having sensual feelings about it. And felt extremely guilty for that and wanted it to stop, but those thoughts intruded in my head, so much that I asked God to kill me. He didn’t.”
“Every position I was put into as a child to be hit is also a sexual position that adults use,” Esther, 32, told me. “The muscle memory is still very linked, and there are times that my partner and I have to stop interacting because I am having a flashback.”
Jillian Keenan, a self-identified spanking fetishist, wrote in her memoir Sex With Shakespeare: Here’s Much to Do With Pain, But More With Love that given her proclivities, the vicious spankings she remembered from childhood felt to her like a profound sexual violation. Memories of being spanked with a hairbrush caused her, many years later, to vomit violently at the recollection. Parents may not intend to harm their children sexually through spanking, but that, Keenan argued, doesn’t matter when compared to its effects; parents who protest that they don’t beat their children but only spank them are in fact “nonconsensually assault[ing]” an “erotic body part” in their children’s developing bodies. Moreover, with regard to that lack of sexual intent, she asks, “Are you sure? … How much would you gamble on that certainty?”
When she was very young, Hannah remembered, her parents often sent her to the copse of weeping willows beside her home. There she was instructed to pick her own switch — a short length of willow that would be used to beat her. When she grew older, plastic hangers and dowel rods from Home Depot were the tools of choice, but in her youngest years, she was made to participate in the ritual of her own punishment.
Hannah left home at 17, winding up with a man 12 years her senior who strangled her, beat her, and attempted to throw her out of a moving car. “I was denied autonomy, told I was evil and defiant, isolated from the world, denied friends, told I was an abomination, and beaten daily for at least 12 years of my life,” she said of her upbringing. When it came to finding a partner, “I did not know what love was supposed to feel like, I didn’t know what safety or security felt like, and I found myself in abusive relationship after abusive relationship.”
A 2017 Journal of Pediatrics longitudinal study of 758 adults found that children who were spanked — even when controlling for other types of physical abuse — are more likely to be involved in violent romantic relationships, often as the aggressors. Other research suggests that undergoing violent experiences during childhood makes people more prone to both perpetration and victimization of violence in romantic relationships. In each case, the wires that link pain and love have become soldered together, manifesting in either the instinct to violently dominate another person or the instinct to accept cruelty.
“Hearing my parents say over and over that they hit me because they love me, that they wouldn’t have broken that spoon across me if they didn’t love me, I have love and pain entangled in my psyche,” Deborah, 34, told me. She remained in an emotionally abusive marriage for ten years, she said, because her childhood had primed her to accept it. “I felt defective and unlovable because I was told by my mom during punishment sessions during my whole childhood that if I didn’t shape up my character and behavior, nobody would ever want me for a wife.”
Martha, 24, was beaten with paint stirrers and a two-by-four with a handle shaped like the top of a picket fence. After her father beat her, he would tell her he loved her; he made her say she loved him back. “I was in an abusive marriage for years because I believed I deserved to be hurt by figures of authority,” she said. “I thought it was making me a better person or keeping me safe from myself somehow. That’s inextricably linked to corporal punishment for me.”
Joanna, 38, was beaten on a weekly basis with wooden spoons and spatulas until she was 12. She was told that it was the only measure that could correct her innate sinfulness. “I stayed with one guy who would throw me around when I ‘acted wrong,’” she said. “I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t articulate what wasn’t right about it. I was so used to being punished for my wrongness that he just sort of fit the pattern. I only left after he raped me.”
Men face their own challenges in building healthy romantic relationships after a childhood of enduring corporal punishment. Both men and women wrote to me of struggling to build and maintain emotional openness, hindered by fear that love and vulnerability would invite further pain. Some had never had a successful relationship; others struggled to feel anything but fear.
“I carry a paralyzing fear of screwing up, being less than perfect, having thoughts which I find immoral,” said Paul, who grew up in a Baptist church in Virginia. “I find it extremely rare to feel safe in any environment, even my home.”
While violent upbringings scar individual lives, the accumulation of them — and the institutionalization of violence across generations — accrues into societal harm. Pain left unaddressed can turn to anger, shame curdle into rage, the memories of hurt turn into a desire to hurt others. The child trained violently to unthinking obedience becomes an individual who readily identifies with oppressive and authoritarian figures; for whom cruelty and violence are banal and expected; who in turn perpetuates violence in their own life. And the particular elements of violation that accompany a culture of corporal punishment can render sexual abuse common to the point of banality — an inevitability rendered invisible by its own ubiquity.
In the mid-1970s, Larry Tomczak, a charismatic, clean-cut neo-Calvinist pastor, met a peripatetic, long-haired “Jesus freak” named C. J. Mahaney in Washington, D.C. Tomczak and Mahaney shared a love of impassioned worship, filled with music and speaking in tongues. In 1982 they founded Sovereign Grace Ministries, an Evangelical denomination that would eventually encompass some hundred churches and 28,000 adherents. In the same year Sovereign Grace Ministries was founded, Tomczak published his first book, a manual on biblical parenting entitled God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents. The book, which was purchased by his congregation, emphasized obedience, and lamented that in modern homes “everything is controlled by a switch — except the children.”
In 2012, eight plaintiffs brought a class-action lawsuit against Sovereign Grace Ministries, alleging that Tomczak and Mahaney had carefully orchestrated a wide-ranging cover-up of child molestation and abuse throughout the 1980s and 1990s. “Defendants taught members to fear and distrust all secular authorities, and expressly directed members not to contact law enforcement to report sexual and physical assaults on children,” the plaintiffs alleged. A woman using the pseudonym “Carla Coe” alleged that Tomczak had imprisoned and starved her over a 25-year period extending from her childhood to her early adulthood. The complaint stated, “On multiple occasions, including occasions after Carla Coe reached the age of majority, Defendant Tomczak forced Carla Coe to strip out of her clothing against her will, and be beaten on her bare buttocks. Defendant Tomczak continued to engage in this forced undressing and beating of Carla Coe until she fled and escaped from the abuse.” The lawsuit was dismissed in 2013 on the grounds that all but two of the plaintiffs had exceeded the statute of limitations for child sex-abuse cases. No court ever examined the truth of the allegations; Tomczak denies them, and Sovereign Grace Ministries has not admitted that its pastors ever perpetrated or covered up sexual abuse.
It’s difficult to overstate the profile of figures such as Dobson, Tomczak, and others within the Evangelical community: These charismatic figures embodied political and social forces that made corporal punishment of children not just permissible but nearly mandatory within countless church communities. Their relentless pursuit of obedience in children created a culture across evangelical denominations that made the beating of children with rods and hands a daily ritual; the theological framework they provided made it seem like a mortal sin to refrain from doing so; and they preached to congregations that took sin very seriously indeed. The generations that were molded by those brutal teachings are grown now, running congregations of their own.
The tragedy built up of small tragedies, like the innumerable tiny men who make up a state in the famous illustration of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, is that sometimes parents don’t want to beat their children — until they are told that God requires them to. It’s some combination of the voice of God, the voice of a pastor, and the voices of the ladies at church who give you the parenting books that impel the hand holding the paddle, and the impact is no less painful even if the parent holding it is weeping. The true cunning of such a system is the way it makes people into copies of itself, machines to perpetuate cruelty.



Excerpted from the book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America. Copyright © by Talia Lavin. Published in the United States by Legacy Lit, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

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            All of the Allegations Against Diddy
              
                One of the most explosive sexual-assault lawsuits, naming both the rapper and Jay-Z, has been dropped.
              



       





royals

12:18 p.m.


            Meghan Markle’s Jam Business Has a New Name
              
                She announced the launch of As Ever, the lifestyle brand formerly known as American Riviera Orchard.
              



       





pregnancy announcements

11:59 a.m.


            Cassie Is Expecting Her Third Child
              
                The singer announced the news with some very sweet photos on Instagram.
              



       





celebrity

9:58 a.m.


            What to Know About A$AP Rocky’s Not-Guilty Verdict
              
                The rapper hugged Rihanna after a jury acquitted him of felony assault on Tuesday night.
              



       





spring fashion

8:00 a.m.


            Buy All This, Look Rich
              
                How Quince, the one-stop shop for everything from cashmere sweaters to caviar, seduced a generation of jaded shoppers.
              


              By Chantal Fernandez



       





advice

8:00 a.m.


            ‘How Do I Stop Dating Men Who Are Bad for Me?’
              
                You need to vent to a roomful of strangers. I know just the place.
              


              By Emily Gould



       





spring fashion

7:00 a.m.


            Let Him Cook
              
                New York chefs shop for date-night (and morning-after) recipes — and schlep it home in the bags everyone wants right now.
              


              By Sasha Mutchnik



       





spring fashion

7:00 a.m.


            Bow Down to Doechii
              
                Fresh off her Grammy win, the unapologetic Florida rapper is just getting started.
              


              By Danya Issawi



       





astrology

5:00 a.m.


            Your Daily Horoscope by Madame Clairevoyant: February 19, 2025
              
                Today, the behind-the-scenes work matters most — focus on the details and don’t worry about making a splash.
              



       





celebrity news

Yesterday at 8:11 p.m.


            Pete Davidson Sure Had an Eventful Weekend
              
                The comedian is currently living his best life.
              



       





fashion

Yesterday at 5:58 p.m.


            Kim Kardashian Could’ve Tried Harder on This Collab
              
                The name of the Nike and Skims joint venture doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
              



       





engagements

Yesterday at 5:37 p.m.


            Winnie Harlow Is Engaged to Kyle Kuzma
              
                The pair broke the news in a shared Instagram post filled with roses.
              



       





celebrity

Yesterday at 4:58 p.m.


            Woman Who Said Jay-Z and Diddy Raped Her at 13 Drops Lawsuit
              
                “The trauma that my wife, my children, loved ones and I have endured can never be dismissed,” Jay-Z said in a statement.
              



       





always shopping

Yesterday at 3:45 p.m.


            25 Leggings for Any Type of Workout
              
                Because leggings can make or break a workout.
              


              By Bianca Nieves



       





politics

Yesterday at 3:21 p.m.


            Did Elon Musk Have Another Baby?
              
                The right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair tweeted on Friday that Musk was the father of her 5-month-old child.
              



       





relationship rumors

Yesterday at 3:12 p.m.


            Ana de Armas and Tom Cruise’s Dinner Was Totally Platonic
              
                She’s still dating the stepson of the Cuban president, don’t worry.
              



       





obsessive tester

Yesterday at 3:00 p.m.


            The 17 Best Mineral Sunscreens to Buy
              
                A cleaner way to protect your skin from the sun.
              


              By Shanna Shipin, Bianca Nieves, and Morgan Evans



       





power

Yesterday at 2:35 p.m.


            What We Know About the Murder of Sam Nordquist
              
                Police say they have no evidence the “horrific” torture and killing of the 24-year-old trans man was a hate crime.
              



       





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There has never been an evil, violent and cruel person who had an happy, violent free childhood. IMO

The idea that you have to hurt your child as a way to express your love and turn it into an decent person is so sick and twisted.

Every evil and powerful leader in this world that is or/was responsible for the suffering of millions had a traumatizing childhood and experienced extreme parental violence.

That's true for the leaders that were responsible for WW1 and WWII and it is true for all the human monsters who endanger the world now.

Stop using violence against children!
Stop creating monsters!