Also coming out in the same vein: a documentary on Amazon Prime about the Duggars and their fundamentalist guru.
If you're looking for another place for your charity dollars, let me point out the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, its staff and board mostly homeschooled trying to make better regs for the generation after them, some Quiverfull survivors.
When the grandparents buy decorations for a "Flowers in the Attic"- themed prom and your kids are still in elementary school, you start to wonder.
I was thinking of suggesting this article to Heebie! CRHE grew out of this really great defunct blog but I think the blog went under when they had a leadership change (the original guy running things was doing financial crimes iirc?).
I was sort of part of this homeschooling culture growing up, but also sort of not, in the sense that we were evangelical and we were homeschooled but we weren't homeschooled *because* we were evangelical. I was homeschooled for educational reasons and then we just sort of kept at it. My homeschooling education was top-notch, which just isn't true of a lot of these ex-homeschoolers. There's this weird thing where in the early days you just had to be a member of HSLDA as a homeschooler because that was the only way to get good legal representation if there was some kind of truancy investigation, but they're also evil. It's like how lots of people are AAA members for towing, but then a bunch of the dues goes towards lobbying against public transit and other problematic stuff.
I would be very interested to hear more about the subjects of this article's marriage, this kind of relationship between an exvangelical christian and an exvangelical who has left the church is a fascinating dynamic. (Not a hundred percent sure if the mom here would identify as exvangelical, but she's certainly christian and questioning large aspects of how she was raised.)
3: AAA lobbies against public transit? The stuff they lobbied for here was about "right to repair" I.e. giving diagnostic codes to independent mechanics so that you wouldn't always have to go to the dealer for repairs.
I taught a 10-week session of ASL classes for a local homeschooling co-op and boy howdy the mix of who does homeschooling in Missoula is amazing. Definitely at the so-far-left-and-right-they-meet end of the circle, but also a pretty interesting mix of families within both right and left.
Anyway the result was that I had both fundie evangelical Xtian families with endless children and the nonbinary goth offspring of old hippies, teenagers and parents all in the same class. But since I strictly enforced an ASL-only policy and none of them knew how to talk about anything except what color things were how many toys to put in the box, we all got along swimmingly.
6: But I was hoping for someone who identified as both Goth and not Goth.
4: AAA lobbies about a lot of different issues, but they certainly see themselves as representing the interests of car owners as a group and that often means supporting stuff like new highways over transit. Their webpage on this is kind of hilariously defensive.
They push for more money in the transportation budget to go to roads and not other things, so for less public transit funding. They also were against the Clean Air Act, against airbags in cars, against gas taxes, etc.
Well, that's not where I was putting the and in, and also I didn't actually ask anyone if they identified as goth or not, so maybe!
Yeah, we also had a book group with hippie lefty homeschoolers who called their parents by first name. There's also a weird thing where "Jesus people" 70s Christianity was kind of hippie adjacent, even though many of them have become fascists in their old age. So in some sense it's a bit less weird if you go back to the early days of homeschooling.
The argument that the Big J endorses, much less commands, child abuse, is erroneous and immoral, and kindles within me a great anger.
The Romans were overrun by the Cisgoths, but later historians read it wrong.
There's also a weird thing where "Jesus people" 70s Christianity was kind of hippie adjacent, even though many of them have become fascists in their old age.
We had some fundamentalists in our Montessori school parents.
8 and 9: Yikes! I'm a member because of the towing, the car loan, the travel services and the fact that the license renewal services. I mean, I want much better public transit, but I do want our roads and bridges repaired too.
I wasn't criticizing being a member for those reasons, just pointing out why we were HSLDA members and how they got so much power despite being utterly whacko.
Being willing to do free work will do that.
Anyway, I'm a AAA member because it gives me enough piece of mind to drive a 17 year old Chrysler product.
18: I'll confess to AAA membership as well. I'll also admit to not having considered the moral implications of this at all until reading this thread.
There are alternatives! For example, Better World Auto Club (I've been a member pretty much since owning a car as an adult), which also has options for bicycle roadside assistance.
20: I didn't even know anyone else did roadside assistance on their model! Have you had good experiences with BWAC when you needed them?
A lot of fancy credit cards also include roadside assistance. I'm not sure how it compares to AAA though.
I had roadside assistance via my insurance when I was in a state without AAA insurance. When I went back to AAA, I looked at Better World but had concerns about whether they'd be as reliable as I've found AAA to be, based on reviews I found.
Anyway....how....do you have diktats about home schooling? Isn't the concept that, well, you do it like you want?
I mean if Robot Command sends out diktats, well, what's the point?
Who mentioned diktats? Doesn't appear in the article or on this thread before 24...
One thing I learned from the homeschoolers anonymous blog, that's brought home in this article, is that anything Gothard-related is just so much more fucked up than even normal evangelicalism. I didn't really know anyone in the Gothard circles I don't think?
Anyway....how....do you have diktats about home schooling?
By passing laws? Like how government usually does things, especially when it has plenary power?
Several states already require homeschooled children to take periodic tests to ensure they are actually getting educated up to some sort of basic standard.
Here is CHRE's policy wishlist.
Honestly, not knowing shit is the wave of the future.
PA had one of the earliest modern homeschooling laws, and it's a pretty good law that has a lot of the stuff on CHRE wish list. Shortly after I graduated there was a big ugly fight to try to replace it with a totally laissez faire law more like what most states have. One of the big people pushing for it was the mom of some of our good friends and at some point she called me to try to talk to convince me that it was good, and I vividly remember her arguing that no parents have ever abused their kids because Jesus said "Which of you fathers, if your son asks for f a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" and this means that no parent has ever done bad things to their kids.
28: so this whatever state literally mandates and requires corporal punishment? I mean, it sounds really state legislature, could happen.
What the hell are you talking about?
Here is the OP.
The thing that ended up providing the first crack in the foundation was when they were confronted with the dictate to use corporal punishment on their own kids.
Ah, that's explained in the article:
"On a spring afternoon in 2012, the couple sat in a small church in Queenstown, Md. In preparation for marriage, they were attending a three-day seminar on "Gospel-Driven Parenting" run by Chris Peeler, a minister whose family was part of Gary Cox's home-schooling group. The workshop covered a range of topics, including the one they were now studying: 'Chastisement.'"
And then later:
"As a wedding gift, they said, Aaron's brother and sister-in-law had given them "To Train Up a Child," by the popular Christian home-schooling authors Michael and Debi Pearl."
It's their church, their family, and their homeschooling community.
That makes me think of the Castle Anthrax.
Basically homeschooling was one of the things they thought they were required to do by God, but there were other things that were similarly required, and that included corporal punishment. So when they questioned that they started questioning other things and eventually questioned homeschooling.
""When it came time for me to hit my kids, that was the first independent thought I remember having: 'This can't be right. I think I'll just skip this part,'" he says. But if that seemingly inviolable dogma was false, what else might be? Aaron gradually began to feel adrift and depressed."
37: That paragraph was one of two moments in the piece where I choked up (the other was the email her parents sent supporting her desire to send her children to public school and calling her a wonderful parent; it seems understandable given the contrast in how their parents react that she explicitly still identifies as a Christian and he, at least in this story, doesn't).
I am thankful that I went to public school even though my parents subscribed to most of this kind of discipline. It was a revelation to me when I met other kids whose parents didn't hit them -- and they were fine. They weren't degenerates, which means I was getting hit for no good reason.
More than a little worried that my sister who is basically Dreher adjacent is going to try to homeschool my niece to keep her world nice and small and religious.
I have a cousin everyone is worried about her kids for similar reasons. But she has lots of kids.
Her dad is worried and her dad has an antiabortion meme-like thing on his checks.
Well, whether it's a purely hypothetical public mandate to practice corporal punishment, or the very real (in many places) laws against doing the same, or purely moral suasion by cultish organizations, we can all agree homeschooling is not fundamentally a "you do it like you want" autarky.
When my mom was the school librarian, she was always put out that she couldn't do holiday stuff for the kids because of the Jehovah's Witnesses. They also didn't do blood transfusions, so one of their kids died of treatable cancer.
I was a BWC member for several years until the first time I needed roadside assistance and they literally didn't even answer the phone. I now just have Geico's whatever that maybe isn't any better but at least doesn't cost anything.
What did you all make of Talia Lavin's three-part series on corporal punishment in evangelical culture? Her writing style sometimes ranges into the rococo, but I thought it was interesting to watch an outsider uncover all these horrors.
I'm in a weird place concerning spanking. I think it's objectively wrong and I was spanked as a kid, but I don't think it harmed me in any serious way. It just isn't a part of my religious trauma at all. Of course we didn't do any of this fucked-up Pearl blanket training, and I know lots of people spank in ways that are genuinely abusive, but it just puts me in a strange place where I feel like it should be acknowledged that a lot of spanking just isn't a big deal (even if you shouldn't do it).
Obviously the situation is terrible, but this quote is kind of funny:
"Looking back, I have no idea what I did that was so strong-willed... [story removed]... I would tense myself up to endure hours of spankings. I felt that showing pain would mean they won."
That's the strong will! Right there!
I was spanked as a child and it gave me a lot of ideas about violence and power that were a struggle to put behind me.
I was loved as a child and it's really given me unrealistic expectations.
My upbringing was about as far from evangelical-fundamentalist-home-schooled as imaginable (Jewish-athiest-public schools) but my professor father did spank. It was mostly employed as a threat, but I do remember being spanked a couple of times. I don't think I was traumatized.
You live in Ohio though. Maybe you can't tell?
My upbringing was a lot like peep's, without the spanking.
I was spanked a bit, but the main thing I learned was that my mom won't hit me very hard. I think the punishment was the indignity.
48: I wasn't spanked as a kid, but I spent a couple of years in Samoa where corporal punishment was totally normal, and I'm kind of with you. It's wrong, it's a bad idea, and for definitely many maybe most kids it's a trauma. But there are also definitely lots of kids and families where it didn't seem to be a big thing at all.
I do think it matters if the corporal punishment is done as an expression of anger, and also the degree of fear instilled in the kid. Obviously kids can be scared of consequences without anything abusive going on, but there's an amount that's too much fear.
I must have been a bad kid because my parents didn't give me their wifi password until I was over 40.
Plenty of stuff my parents did (and nearly all other parents did) are now illegal (sending me to buy cigarettes, ignoring the seat belt/car seat laws) or widely seen as bad (smoking constantly around children, spanking). Just in general, the amount we were unsupervised would probably count as neglectful among the richer, white people groups now.
I had to save up my money earned from a job statistical programming at a research university to get my first phone.
Actually, those things were illegal then.
56: it's really contextual but I have a very strong memory of my sister, about age four, running through the house because she didn't want to get hit with a paint stick. It also seems like the people that I know who were spanked more sanely it wasn't a regular thing, for serious offenses, and didn't continue into adolescence. It wasn't for dawdling at the table. (Though I get it. Pebbles' food will compost before she gets to it how slow the kid eats.)
I choked up reading this article. The physical abuse they suffered was wrenching to know about.
I was spanked a couple of times (what a weird word), I think. But mostly, I remember the threat. One time in particular, I remember feeling dread and that it was unjust. And mostly, I was a well behaved child.
I'm not sure how much younger than, Moby, I am, but I was a lot less supervised in the late 70's very early 80's than kids born 10-15 years later. I may have been an outlier, but sometime between 4 and 6, I was allowed to go to the corner store (which was literally a block away in an otherwise residential neighborhood, and where everyone knew who I was, to buy Cinnamon rolls on a weekend morning.
In general, 52 is me.
46: Free-associating, less from what's actually in that piece than from things it hints at and questions it raises:
-The childrearing described is strikingly similar to the training of child soldiers.*
-Relatedly, to what degree is the requirement that children be beaten used to alienate congregants from surrounding society, and mutual complicity in the beating used to maintain group cohesion?
-To what degree do these corporal punishment doctrines include collective punishment/mutual surveillance groups?
-Relatedly, how much verbal self-criticism is demanded of the children, and how much of the same is demanded of parents by their congregations, and of the congregations by their churches (or more probably by other congregations in the same theological current)?
-The whole phenomenon reminds me of regimes lacking strong legitimacy, and thus forced continually to exert violence in order to maintain control (cf. self-criticism, mutual surveillance). I speculate that the violence of the childrearing doctrines advanced by evangelicals reflects the instability of their churches AIUI: they have no durable church hierarchies; their authority is charismatic rather than institutional; they suffer very high attrition rates, retaining IIRC only ~50% of the children born into them.****
*From which, we should expect to see, if we haven't already, literal child soldiers emerging from appropriately intersectional Americans.**
**Preemptively to split hairs: though of course the US already has from its gun culture any number of children with some degree of firearms training, and I assume from the militia movement some small number with pseudo-military training, neither of those things yield the dehumanized, desocialized killer connoted by "child soldier";*** whereas the piece describes the construction of unthinking obedience to ingroups which is ripe for marriage to unthinking violence against outgroups.
***Given militias are AIUI built mostly around veterans, who are products not of child-soldiering but of professional military training, and will presumably tend to reproduce such training in their own programs.
****Which, among other things, makes me curious about the Mormon equivalents of these phenomena.
Relatedly, to what degree is the requirement that children be beaten used to alienate congregants from surrounding society
I remember from the social media or podcast of one person with a Quiverfull upbringing that the father in fact shuffled their choice of evangelical/fundamentalist church several times over their childhood, apparently in search of one that would be so deferential to patriarchal authority that it would not under any circumstances serve as a refuge or support for family members against him.
56: It's wrong, it's a bad idea, and for definitely many maybe most kids it's a trauma. But there are also definitely lots of kids and families where it didn't seem to be a big thing at all.
I suspect this is true of all forms of domestic violence, to be honest. "Why do they stay with a partner who beats them up?" is always the cry when this sort of thing pops up in the media/celebrity universe, and the answer, a lot of the time, is: Because they don't regard it as a big deal, they don't find it terribly traumatising, and the rest of the relationship is good enough that they think it's worth staying.
Samoa also has very high levels of domestic violence, of course. (see https://thecommonwealth.org/news/blog-samoas-response-violence-against-women-and-girls-can-guide-other-countries for the figures against women and girls. Couldn't find an overall number.)
See also: romantic relationships between adults and teenagers can be non-traumatizing. (As can abortions, although that's not surprising to anyone here. But it's in the same category of surely-traumatizing for a lot of people.)
For a teen, falling through the roof of an abandoned mall is probably traumatic.