In my quest for further understanding as to why so many Christians (and non-Christians, though I am mainly looking at Christians for this study) are adamant pro-spankers, I have begun a journey into some of the darker history of Christianity and the harsh treatment of children starting as young as infancy.  My purpose in doing this study is to uncover some of the main Christian advocates of harsh treatment of children in order to show that spanking came from man and not from God as so many truly believe.

Sadly, as I pointed out in Part 7 of my “Spanking is NOT God’s Will” series, brutality of children can be traced back to Biblical times which is why Jesus radicalized the way He wanted society to view and treat children.  Despite Jesus placing such a high value on children and never once advising the people to harshly punish young children when He had ample opportunity to do so, Christians have, for centuries, used the Holy Bible to advocate and justify spanking and abusing young children.  For some unknown reason, at least to me as of now, physical punishment runs deep within the roots of Christianity, especially within the sects of the Protestants, Fundamentalists, and Evangelicals.  It is important for me to note here that I proudly consider myself an Evangelical Christian and have always taken the Bible quite literally.  It appears to me as I continue my study of God’s Word and the history of this subject that pro-spankers seem to focus more of their attention on the God of the Old Testament.  Yes, God is the same today, tomorrow, and forever (See James 1:17 & Malachi 3:6a). However, the God of the Old Testament was quite harsh at times in His righteous anger allowing men, women, and children to be killed because of their sins against Him.  But, as I point out in Part 8 of my series, “Spanking is NOT God’s Will,” we also see God’s grace and love for His people.  The minute His people cried out to Him in the Old Testament, God forgave them and had mercy on them.  “So you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD Almighty” Malachi 3:6b-7.  With the coming of Jesus Christ, God allowed His grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness to be much more accessible and evident to mankind.  Through Jesus, we can now have a very personal relationship with the God of the Old Testament.

As I have been pointing out throughout the “Spanking is NOT God’s Will” series, Christians, as well as the secular culture, use primarily the Old Testament to justify the use of physical punishment with children—especially the book of Proverbs.  In fact, the main saying that Christians and non-Christians use to justify and advocate spanking is “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”  While this saying sounds very much like a Proverb out of the Bible as many people believe, it is not from the Bible whatsoever!  So, where does this saying come from?  According to scholar, Philip Greven (1992), “The aphorism is from Samuel Butler’s poem ‘Hudibras’ (1664).  See Ian Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Dukworth, 1978), p. 49” (p. 227).  The saying has absolutely nothing to do with God’s Word; it only sounds as if it does.

It is concerning that when Christians choose to focus primarily on one aspect of God—His harshness—some Christians have even questioned whether He applied harsh punishment to His own Son.  This would basically be saying that God killed Jesus which is only partial truth and leaves out crucial information regarding Christ’s sufferings and death.  This feels dangerous to me!  It must be pointed out that while Jesus was God’s only begotten Son (John 3:16), Jesus was also God Himself (Philippians 2:6a; John 8:58; Revelation 22:13), and chose to suffer and die on the cross for us (Philippians 2:8; John 10:11; Matthew 26:38-39)!  Yet, many Christians continue to only look at the harshness of God instead of looking at all His aspects which reveal His True Identity as I have just pointed out.  Jonathan Edwards, an eighteenth century American theologian, chose to focus much of his attention on the harshness of God depicted in the Old Testament.  Because of this viewpoint, he “believed that the Crucifixion ‘was willed and ordered by God,’ a condition that made ‘one of the most heinous things that ever was done’ by men, ‘one of the most horrid acts,’ into ‘the most admirable and glorious of all events.’  For Edwards, at least, ‘the crucifixion of Christ was not evil, but good.’  This argument, however, implies that God the Father was directly responsible for the death of his only earthly son” (Greven, 1992, p. 50).  That is simply preposturous as while God allowed the crucifixion and death to happen, He did not bring it on Himself.  It was brought on by the hands of men.  This is sad because people who focus on the harshness of Gods seem to lose sight of who God is!  After all, the Bible couldn’t have made it any more clearer exactly who God is.  “God is love” 1^st John 4:16.  It is clear from the following Bible passage that God didn’t harshly punish His Son.   There was no reason to.  God loved us so much that He chose to do something so major in order to make it easy for us to be reconciled to Him and have an intimate relationship with Him.  “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” 1^st John 4:9-10.  To use the harshness of God to justify and advocate the use of physical punishment is completely illogical after seeing all the aspects of God in the same lens.

Along the same lines as focusing heavily on the harshness of God, many Christian pro-spankers have been quite influence by the threat of eternal punishment—Hell—throughout the centuries.  They have also been influenced by the feeling of an imminent apocalyptic end (Greven, 1992).  Hell has always been a part of Christian theology and teaching.  The threat of eternal damnation has terrified many people throughout time.  While it is true that eternal punishment does await those that purposely reject Christ’s gift of forgiveness and salvation by not asking Him for the forgiveness of sins and accepting Him as Savior (Romans 6:23; Matthew 25:46; Luke 16:19-31), some parents and pastors seem to use this to justify spanking children.  A seventeenth century pastor, “Michael Wigglesworth, whose parents were among the first generation of settlers in New England, wrote an extraordinarily popular poem about the approaching ‘Day of Doom.’  Punishment and affliction were the central themes shaping the obsessions of this anxious and tormented Puritan preacher, whose poem vividly portrays the final days on earth before the Last Judgment and the ultimate separation of the saved from the damned” (Greven, 1992, p. 55).  Jonathan Edwards was also quite focused on the terrors of eternal punishment during the eighteenth century (Greven, 1992).    They seem to truly believe that “beating the devil out of them” will somehow save them from Hell.  This is often based on Proverbs 23:13-14 which states, “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell” (KJV).  Pro-spankers throughout history have taken these verses quite literally.  Please see Part 3 of my series entitled “Spanking is NOT God’s Will” for the correct interpretation of these verses.

It seems that this focus on the harshness of God and on punishment traces back to Europe.  Yes, while we can be sure that the harsh treatment of children was occurring during Old Testament times, it is unclear if it was done commonly or by those that were naturally prone to violence.  What is quite interesting is that advocates of spanking use the Old Testament to justify their claims and yet there is not one single passage in the Old Testament, or in the entire Bible for that matter, of a parent spanking a child.   As I pointed out in Part 7 of my series “Spanking is NOT God’s Will,” the Romans were very cruel to children during the first century.  It seems that physical punishment was brought to America by the European settlers.  We read throughout our history books that these Puritans convinced the Native Americans to allow their children to go to English boarding schools where they would supposedly get a great education.  In reality, the Native American children were treated very harshly and physically punished by these Christians who thought they could beat the evil out of them (Cushner, McClelland, & Safford, 2006).  They were not allowed to speak their native language or go back to their parents.  See, the Native Americans did not typically use physical punishment with their young children.  Therefore, in the eyes of the Christian English settlers who had been taught by their leaders that spanking was an absolute must for obedience to God, the Native Americans were disobeying God and the children needed to be “saved” from their impending doom.  “Anglo-American Protestants have always been among the most vocal public defenders of physical punishments for infants, children, and adolescents.  They have provided many generations of listeners and readers with a series of theological and moral justifications for painful blows inflicted by adults upon the bodies, spirits, and wills of children.  These defenses remain crucial to any understanding of the earliest sources of suffering and violence in our culture” (Greven, 1992, p. 60-61).  It makes me wonder why they went wrong in following “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” Matthew 5:16.  I can’t imagine spanking children would be truly glorifying God.

Another theme occuring throughout the centuries among advocates of spanking is the absolute need to break children’s wills.  It has (still is) been suggested that the breaking of a child’s will happen during the first two years of life!  That way the child supposedly will not remember that they had a will.  This idea is sad because infants and toddlers do not understand the concept of wills.  They are mainly conncentrating on discovering their abilities.  It is important for them to be separate beings  from their parents, otherwise they will grow up having a sense of shame and self-doubt (Erikson, 1963).  Yet, this breaking of wills seems to dominate many Christian sects.  Greven (1992) states, “Breaking the child’s will has been the central task given to parents by successive generations of preachers, whose bibically based rationales for discipline have reflected the belief that self-will is evil and sinful.  From the seventeenth century to present, evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants have persistently advocated the crushing of the will even before a child can remember the painful encounters with punishment that are always necessary to accomplish such goals” (p. 65).  Is breaking a child’s will even biblical?  Jesus does say to “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” Luke 9:23.    We are to die to our flesh (Romans 8:13).  God obviously wants us to surrender ourselves to Him.  However, He gently brings us into submission through grace, mercy, forgiveness, and natural consequences.  Ephesians 5:21 also tells us to submit to each other out of reverence for Christ.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that we must hit each other in order to submit to each other.  God doesn’t strike us to make us submit to Him.  So where exactly does this breaking of a child’s will by their parents come from if there’s no actual biblical support for this concept?

Susanna Wesley, Jonathan Wesley’s mother, was an early proponent of breaking children’s wills beginning in infancy through corporal punishment.  For example, if her infant son cried too loud, she spanked him (Greven, 1992).  Accounts also say that she would not allow her children to eat or drink anything between meals except in the case of illness.  If she found that they had asked the slaves for something between meals, she beat the children and harshly reprimanded the slaves.  She wrote a letter to her sons regarding her beliefs on child rearing.  Sadly, this letter is often quoted by many pro-spankers today.  “Susanna Wesley was certain in 1732 that ‘religion is nothing else than doing the will of God and not our own: that the one grand impediment to our temporal and eternal happiness being self-will, no indulgence of it can be trivial, no denial unprofitable.  Heaven or hell depends on this alone; so that the parent who studies to subdue it in the child works together with God in the renewing and saving a soul.  The parent who indulges it does the Devil’s work; makes religion impracticable, salvation unattainable, and does all that in him lies to damn his child body and soul forever’” (Greven, 1992, p. 62).  This seems to be saying that salvation lies in how a parent raises his/her child.  This couldn’t be more wrong.  Salvation lies in receiving God’s gift of Jesus Christ who paid for all of our sins!  No human or other god can save us.  “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people” 1 Timothy 2:5-6.  (See also Hebrews 8:6; 1 Thessalonians 5:9; 2 Timothy 3:15).

The thing about breaking children’s wills through spanking is what happens if their wills never break sufficiently?  The pro-spankers say that we must repeat the spanking.  Children have been spanked to death with one of the most recent cases occurring in 2010 with 7-year-old Lydia Schatz who was repeatedly spanked with a whip type instrument during a biblical chastisement.  In 1982, a 2-year-old boy was also spanked to death by his parents.  “On October 3, 1982, two year old Joseph Green died from a spanking by his parents, Stuart and Leslie Green.  Leslie Green began spanking her son Joseph when he refused to apologize to another two year old after striking him.  After a period of spanking, Stuart Green, Joseph’s father, entered the room and continued to spank him with a paddle while both parents unsuccessfully tried to force Joseph to apologize to the other boy.   After approximately two hours of intermittent spankings, petitioner, who had been out of the sight and sound of the room where the spanking was occurring throughout the two hour period, was summoned to the room by another.  As soon as petitioner Dorothy McClellan arrived, she told Stuart Green to stop the paddling.  Petitioner and others rendered first aid to Joseph, and he was later taken to a local hospital.  Shortly thereafter Joseph Green died from shock and hemorrhaging” (Greven, 1992, p. 38-39).  These parents were trying to do what they thought was biblical and right in God’s eyes.

What is interesting to me is that many of the proverbs that are quoted by pro-spankers that seem to advocate spanking say the child will not die from spanking (“Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die” Proverbs 23:13 KJV), and yet, children have died from repetitive and/or the force of the spanking.  Every time a child is hit, slight injury can occur as pain is a signal that injury is occurring or is about to.   Redness after a spanking shows that the skin has been irritated.  Slapping several times can cause the tissue to break down.  Over time, this can lead to organ damage and hemorrhaging.  Surely, God, who formed us in our mother’s wombs (Isaiah 44:24; Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 139:13-16), knew how hitting affects our bodies; especially a small child’s body that is much more vulnerable to force, did NOT mean hitting in the rod verses.  God does not lie to His people.  So, to say that a child shall not die from being hit with a big, heavy walking stick (the rod), He must have meant authority and not physical punishment!  The Holy Bible is Truth—PERIOD!  “For the word of God is alive and active” Hebrews 4:12a.  Yet, Satan loves to skew God’s Word whenever possible.  He is the father of lies (John 8:44b).

Throughout history many Christian advocates of spanking claim that if parents don’t spank their children then they are disobeying God.  They use Proverbs 13:24 to coerce parents into believing that if they don’t use physical punishment then they hate their children.  Of course, based on the correct interpretation of these rod verses (see Part 3 of “Spanking is NOT God’s Will” & “The Rod Study”), this couldn’t be farther from the truth!  And yet, sadly, pro-spanking advocates continue to teach that spanking is an absolute requirement from God in order to raise obedient, godly children.  “Parents are often advised to tell their children that they are acting as God’s surrogates when they inflict pain.  As Jack Hyles notes: ‘So God is like a father and He chooses fathers and mothers to represent Him in the punishing of little children.’  He advises parents: ‘Explain to him that you are a child of God and if you refuse to obey God in His judgment upon your children, God will pour out His wrath upon you.  For you to be a good child of God requires that you be a good parent to the child.  Let him understand this.  He will get the idea that God is a holy and just God, One Who loves and yet One Who wants us to become our best.  For this to be so He must punish us when we are deserving” (Greven, 1992, p. 63).  I must ask where do grace, mercy, and forgiveness come in here?  If we are forgiven, then we are saved from God’s Wrath.  “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” John 1:14.

“And all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” Romans 3:23.   (See also 1 Timothy 1:14).

It also appears that throughout history advocates of spanking have treated the parent-child relationship as a battleground in which the parent must always win over the child.  Susanna Wesley and other early seventeenth and eighteenth century evangelical Christians were adamant in regards to using physical punishment to conquer children.  The most prominent advocate of spanking in today’s Christian society, James Dobson (1970), states, “The child may be more strong-willed than the parent, and they both know it.  If he can outlast a temporary onslaught, he has won a major battle, eliminating punishment in the parent[‘]s repertoire.  Even though Mom spanks him, he wins the battle by defying her again.  The solution to this situation is obvious: outlast him; win, even if it takes a repeated measure” (p. 45).  Or the child is beaten to death.

It is very sad that somehow all of these seemingly unbiblical themes and misinterpretations have continued so prevalently throughout history.  Countless children and families have been harmed, some more visibly than others, by these great misinterpretations of God’s Holy Word.  I do not know where all these beliefs about child-rearing came about.  My purpose in this quest to uncover the historic roots of violence against our children, who Jesus so dearly loves, is not to point fingers at anyone.  My hope is to show where some of this comes from.  It seems obvious to me from studying Scripture with an open heart and  listening to the Holy Spirit convict me that spanking, hitting, beating, coercing, belittling, and punishing young children did not come from God.  Jesus renounced all violence when he came to Earth.  It is my hope that as we continue this journey that we “See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end. As has just been said:

‘Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion’” Hebrews 3:12-15.

(Continued)

The Christian History of Spanking by Steph is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.whynottrainachild.com.