The Church of Christ and Violence
My brother and I have talked on several occasions about how growing up in the CoC was like being Neo in the first Matrix movie: you can sense that something is off, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is and you certainly have no language to describe it. You just know in your gut that things aren't what they seem and something is very wrong.
I remember even as a very small child feeling uncomfortable and uneasy in that church, and I never felt that I fit in. I always felt like an interloper, an observer, not a true participant. I'm still not entirely sure why I felt that way, but now that I've done some research on fundamentalist churches and have talked with other people who grew up in the CoC and similar churches, I do think I've identified at least one of the factors that made me so uneasy as a child: the ever-present threat of physical, verbal, and spiritual violence.
Physical violence: I've long thought that people in the CoC have an 18th-century view of children--that is, they are no more than mini adults who are inherently evil and must be physically punished to drive that evil out of them. They love to quote Proverbs 22:15, "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him." There is absolutely no understanding (at least among the adults when I was a kid, perhaps things have changed in the last 30 years) that children have a completely different psychology. Their nervous systems aren't even fully developed when they're born, and the frontal lobes of their brains aren't done developing until late adolescence. Thus, imposing adult restrictions and behaviors on kids is an exercise in futility. However, during nearly every church service I ever attended--three times a week every week for far too many years--at least one kid would get slapped viciously or taken out to the "cry room" to be beaten for the heinous crime of daring to fidget during a boring 30-45-minute long sermon. You could hear the child screaming through the paper-thin drywall and cheap wood paneling. It was horrible, straight-up child abuse, but the preachers would praise the parents for daring to discipline their kids, "bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord," and the parents would pat themselves on the back about how well they disciplined their kids. So the sanctioned abuse went on and on, and each generation of abused brainwashed kids would go on to dutifully abuse and brainwash the next generation. I never got inured to this physical violence toward children. It always upset me, and at the beginning of every service I would sit there dreading the moment when some poor innocent child would be hauled out and punished. And to this day, I don't understand how a painful, humiliating public spanking is supposed to help a child learn to love Jesus.
Verbal violence: Many (most?) people in the CoC love to debate and argue about doctrine, and pretty much anything else, and they aren't afraid to jump down other people's throats and tell them exactly why they're wrong and that they're horrible hell-bound sinners. I experienced this verbal abuse first-hand; someone would ask me a seemingly innocuous question about what I was reading (or watching or listening to), and if I gave an answer that they thought was sinful or inappropriate for a Christian, they would jump down my throat and tell me that I had better quit reading those books (or watching those movies or listening to that music) or I would end up in hell. I was a kid and was completely unprepared to defend myself against such an onslaught and I remember being absolutely shaken by the experience. People in that church have no sense of what appropriate personal boundaries are, so I learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut or give meaningless nonanswers to their probing questions. Other examples of verbal violence I either experienced or witnessed in that church included vicious gossip and backstabbing and public accusations of sin. On more than one occasion, I witnessed a man rush up to the pulpit during the announcements to publicly accuse someone of sin. It was insane. How can people who claim to love each other be so angry, judgmental, and self-righteous? That verbal violence is always simmering right under the surface, ready to erupt at any moment, and it always made me very wary and nervous.
Spiritual violence: By spiritual violence, I mean the constant and unrelenting message we received that we were all horrible useless sinners who were pretty much guaranteed to go to hell when we died because we could never be perfect, which God demanded, and we could never do enough to earn our salvation. Again, we went to church three times a week, and no matter what the topic of the sermon, there was always an altar call (the CoC calls this "offering the Lord's invitation" to differentiate themselves from the Baptists) at the end of every service, where we were reminded that if we weren't baptized, we were going to hell. Many times we were treated to loud, angry hellfire-and-brimstone sermons about how terrible we were and how God was going to condemn us all for failing to be perfect and to live up to his impossible standards. It's hard to explain to someone who didn't grow up in such an environment what this unrelenting spiritual violence does to your soul. It's like acid slowly dripping on it and corroding it, to the point where there's nothing left but fear, resentment, anger, and depression.
As I said, I've done a lot of reading on fundamentalism, and this undercurrent of violence is not unique to the CoC. In full-blown cults, the physical violence even goes so far that people are restrained and prevented from leaving the premises. If you think about it, it's a pretty effective tool to keep people in line. That constant threat of violence keeps people off-kilter, living in fear and unable to think rationally, because you never know when you'll be attacked. Just as healthy parents do not need to use the threat of violence to keep their children in line, a healthy church does not need to use the threat of verbal or spiritual violence to keep the members in line. Instead, in a healthy church, love is the motivator. People are there because they truly want to be there, not because someone is making them feel guilty or fearful. Even though I left the CoC a long time ago, it still sometimes blows my mind to attend a church where people are kind and loving and I don't have to constantly be on my guard. I finally feel like I have a place where I belong, where I can be my truest self. It's a gift beyond all reckoning.
I remember even as a very small child feeling uncomfortable and uneasy in that church, and I never felt that I fit in. I always felt like an interloper, an observer, not a true participant. I'm still not entirely sure why I felt that way, but now that I've done some research on fundamentalist churches and have talked with other people who grew up in the CoC and similar churches, I do think I've identified at least one of the factors that made me so uneasy as a child: the ever-present threat of physical, verbal, and spiritual violence.
Physical violence: I've long thought that people in the CoC have an 18th-century view of children--that is, they are no more than mini adults who are inherently evil and must be physically punished to drive that evil out of them. They love to quote Proverbs 22:15, "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him." There is absolutely no understanding (at least among the adults when I was a kid, perhaps things have changed in the last 30 years) that children have a completely different psychology. Their nervous systems aren't even fully developed when they're born, and the frontal lobes of their brains aren't done developing until late adolescence. Thus, imposing adult restrictions and behaviors on kids is an exercise in futility. However, during nearly every church service I ever attended--three times a week every week for far too many years--at least one kid would get slapped viciously or taken out to the "cry room" to be beaten for the heinous crime of daring to fidget during a boring 30-45-minute long sermon. You could hear the child screaming through the paper-thin drywall and cheap wood paneling. It was horrible, straight-up child abuse, but the preachers would praise the parents for daring to discipline their kids, "bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord," and the parents would pat themselves on the back about how well they disciplined their kids. So the sanctioned abuse went on and on, and each generation of abused brainwashed kids would go on to dutifully abuse and brainwash the next generation. I never got inured to this physical violence toward children. It always upset me, and at the beginning of every service I would sit there dreading the moment when some poor innocent child would be hauled out and punished. And to this day, I don't understand how a painful, humiliating public spanking is supposed to help a child learn to love Jesus.
Verbal violence: Many (most?) people in the CoC love to debate and argue about doctrine, and pretty much anything else, and they aren't afraid to jump down other people's throats and tell them exactly why they're wrong and that they're horrible hell-bound sinners. I experienced this verbal abuse first-hand; someone would ask me a seemingly innocuous question about what I was reading (or watching or listening to), and if I gave an answer that they thought was sinful or inappropriate for a Christian, they would jump down my throat and tell me that I had better quit reading those books (or watching those movies or listening to that music) or I would end up in hell. I was a kid and was completely unprepared to defend myself against such an onslaught and I remember being absolutely shaken by the experience. People in that church have no sense of what appropriate personal boundaries are, so I learned the hard way to keep my mouth shut or give meaningless nonanswers to their probing questions. Other examples of verbal violence I either experienced or witnessed in that church included vicious gossip and backstabbing and public accusations of sin. On more than one occasion, I witnessed a man rush up to the pulpit during the announcements to publicly accuse someone of sin. It was insane. How can people who claim to love each other be so angry, judgmental, and self-righteous? That verbal violence is always simmering right under the surface, ready to erupt at any moment, and it always made me very wary and nervous.
Spiritual violence: By spiritual violence, I mean the constant and unrelenting message we received that we were all horrible useless sinners who were pretty much guaranteed to go to hell when we died because we could never be perfect, which God demanded, and we could never do enough to earn our salvation. Again, we went to church three times a week, and no matter what the topic of the sermon, there was always an altar call (the CoC calls this "offering the Lord's invitation" to differentiate themselves from the Baptists) at the end of every service, where we were reminded that if we weren't baptized, we were going to hell. Many times we were treated to loud, angry hellfire-and-brimstone sermons about how terrible we were and how God was going to condemn us all for failing to be perfect and to live up to his impossible standards. It's hard to explain to someone who didn't grow up in such an environment what this unrelenting spiritual violence does to your soul. It's like acid slowly dripping on it and corroding it, to the point where there's nothing left but fear, resentment, anger, and depression.
As I said, I've done a lot of reading on fundamentalism, and this undercurrent of violence is not unique to the CoC. In full-blown cults, the physical violence even goes so far that people are restrained and prevented from leaving the premises. If you think about it, it's a pretty effective tool to keep people in line. That constant threat of violence keeps people off-kilter, living in fear and unable to think rationally, because you never know when you'll be attacked. Just as healthy parents do not need to use the threat of violence to keep their children in line, a healthy church does not need to use the threat of verbal or spiritual violence to keep the members in line. Instead, in a healthy church, love is the motivator. People are there because they truly want to be there, not because someone is making them feel guilty or fearful. Even though I left the CoC a long time ago, it still sometimes blows my mind to attend a church where people are kind and loving and I don't have to constantly be on my guard. I finally feel like I have a place where I belong, where I can be my truest self. It's a gift beyond all reckoning.
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