How do Evangelical communities model parenting?
And what happens when you realize that the values you learn as a child are different from the values of the larger religious system?
This article is free to everyone. Please subscribe to Relationship 101, and donate so Julia and I can continue to write extensive content about relationships and religion like this one:
Julia and I are already prepping for the summer. As a heads up, from June-September, we’ll be recording one (or two) episodes per month. And since we’ll be taking a break from weekly podcasting for a season, the title of our series is “Taking a Break From ____”.
We’ll start with the series about taking a break from parenting. Before the alarmists suggest that Julia and I are hippy dippy or anti-child, keep in mind that when you and your partner go on a date, you are taking a break from parenting, especially when you make the agreement to 1) not bring your kids, and 2) not talking about your kids while you’re out. We’ve worked with way too many parents in couples therapy have become absorbed in the lives of their children, and their marriages and partnerships are suffering as a result.
Our podcast development process whenever we don’t have guests starts with Julia writing out an episode outline that contains a series of questions. I’ll answer a few in advance. Julia will answer a few in advance. And then Julia combines our information and morphs it into a brilliant script that we use as a foundation for the episode.
One of the questions that Julia sent for this episode is:
How do EMPish (Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal) communities model parenting?
There’s the stereotype of what EMPish parenting involves, rooted in the practice of traditional gender roles, where the father is the “high priest” of the family, as I saw in one article, and the mother is the facilitator and orchestrator of the family experience. Tia Levings talks about this through the lens of the the Umbrella of Authority in A Well Trained Wife.
There's also the stereotype of the construction of “authoritative parenting” and the performance of discipline, which can include everything from allowing a child to choose their consequence to corporal punishment delivered from the parent. The majority of my childhood, when not in school, was with a babysitter, as my parents both worked odd hours. While it’s unclear if the corporal punishment that happened in that home was the result of multigenerational trauma—I later learned that her mother was physically and emotionally abusive—or the enactment of Dobsonian parenting values (or some combination of the two), the physical abuse that I witnessed and worked like hell to avoid on my own body still holds psychological consequences in my late-30s.
There’s obviously a lot of Christian self-help books about parenting; after all, James Dobson started Focus on the Family with the book The Strong-Willed Child. Corinne Keirnes explores the content from a diversity of Christian self help books in her dissertation for Fuller, such as the aforementioned work by Dobson, Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp and Parenting God’s Way by Alistair Begg.
While most of these authors agree about centralizing the practice of reading Scripture and Bible stories, she explains that the advice given in these books is quite expansive: a hodgepodge of advice pulled from different schools of parenting and theological practices, all of which, she notes, doesn’t address the attachment and neurological development of children, which is her professional interest.
It’s important to remember that one of the primary purposes of parenting is rearing and molding young humans and future adults into people with a high sense of moral and civic responsibility. In 2016, Lene Arnett Jensen, professor of psychology at Clark University and author of Moral Development in a Global World and Jessica McKenzie, professor of child and family studies at Cal-State, Fresno, co-wrote The Moral Reasoning of U.S. Evangelical and Mainline Protestant Children, Adolescents, and Adults: A Cultural–Developmental Study., which can be found in the journal Child Development.
(It’s always an important reminder to think of Evangelicalism as a culture, rather than a religion.)
For some context, in her earlier work, Jensen writes about three types of ethical frameworks that inform the decision making of children, adolescents, and adults:
The Ethics of Autonomy: This focuses on the morality of the individual, such as fairness and reciprocity, avoiding punishment of self, conscience, and psychological and physical wellbeing.
The Ethics of Community: This explores the responsibility to people in social groups, such as duty to others, collaboration in the welfare of others, and concern with the customs and interests of other people.
The Ethics of Divinity: This explores the role of moral agents, such as deities or spiritual entities. Reasons for making decisions from this lens include spiritual purity, God’s authority, and quote, “natural law”.
She explores how these three ethical frameworks evolve and get utilized throughout the development of the American human, explained through this line graph (p. 447):
Jensen and McKinzie interviewed 120 people—40 children, 40 adolescents, and 40 adults—in mainline and Evangelical Presbyterian communities. Participants were asked to assess and process their way through case studies that addressed six moral dilemmas:
Giving money to homeless people on the street.
Corporal punishment to discipline children.
Divorce
Interracial marriage
Capital punishment.
A moral dilemma of the participant’s choice.
Jensen and McKinzie also distinguish between public and private spheres of morality. Public moral issues are where judgments are applied to humans writ large, and are often instigated by public positions and debates by communities and ethical institutions of origin (i.e. the church). They explicitly use the term “culture wars”as a synonym for public moral issues. Private moral issues are where judgments are made about one’s own individual behavior.
Jensen and McKinzie discover the following pertaining to how Evangelical and Mainline Protestants similarly and differently navigate ethics, based on their written and oral responses to the ethical dilemmas presented to them:
Ethics of Autonomy
They discovered that in Evangelical and Mainline spaces, the ethics of autonomy are the primary ethical decision tools used by and taught to children, as is true for non-religious folks. For instance, children in these differing spaces tend to think about fairness and reciprocity in similar ways, both in private and public/hot button moral dilemmas. However, there are quite a few differences from there:
Mainline Protestant children were much more likely to think about another’s psychological wellbeing in private and public moral scenarios.
Evangelical children tend to think about their own interest in private moral dilemmas, while Mainline Protestant children tend to think about themselves in public moral dilemmas.
Evangelical children think about avoiding punishment and their conscience when processing private moral dilemmas, while Mainline Protestant ones do not. This one made me especially sad as I thought of young Julia attempting to go through all of the spiritual practices in order to avoid going to hell if the world were to end Tim LaHaye style.
However, as children age and become adolescents, the focus on Ethics of Autonomy drops significantly for Mainline Protestants, and virtually disappears for Evangelicals.
Mainline Protestants tend to be fairly connected to advocating for fairness, reciprocity, and human rights throughout adulthood, while Evangelicals lose that entirely by adulthood.
Mainline Protestant teenagers tend to develop a noticeable interest in avoiding self-punishment and the self’s psychological wellbeing, while Evangelicals report being less concerned in that through adolescence.
Evangelicals hold a high interest (though not psychological wellbeing) of the other throughout adolescence and adulthood, though the interest and psychological well-being of the self don’t seem to inform ethical decision making. (I see you selflessness.)
In adulthood, the only significant form of Ethics of Autonomy for Evangelicals is the other’s individual interest. In mainline Protestants, as stated earlier, Ethics of Autonomy diminishes significantly when it comes to self and other interest and psychological wellbeing, but increases when it comes to fairness, reciprocity, and human rights.
Earlier this week, we posted a question on Instagram that asked folks to describe the values that they learned as children that are being carried over into adulthood post-engagement with religious spaces. We got a lot of responses—hospitality, compassion, love your neighbor. And we also read comments with themes of mourning, a reflection of this research of how Ethics of Autonomy disappear within Evangelical adults, a hypocrisy that gets experienced differently in adulthood than as a child or adolescent.
Ethics of Community
As shown in the graph above, ethics of community are used by some children, but don’t tend to develop until adolescence. Interestingly, among both Evangelical and Mainline Protestant children, ethics of community were non-existent. Which makes sense, when you consider that much of the Sunday school material is about how to be a righteous, morally upstanding individual, but not relational person. I found these other statistics to be extremely interesting as well:
Youth groups are meaningful. Evangelicals and Mainline Protestant adolescents practice moralism through what they learn in their community. Interestingly, Mainline Protestants use the values of their community much more significantly as adults, while Evangelicals stop using these values to process their private moral dilemmas, and use these values to process public issues, especially when there’s a means to community goals. (Mainliners do this as well, but not as significantly as Evangelicals.)
Evangelical and Mainline Protestant adolescents process ethical dilemmas from the perspective of the collective interest and mental well-being of the organization. Evangelicals do this for private and public issues, while Mainliners only do this for private issues. As adults, the collective interest, be that of a family, small group, a church, or the denomination at large, becomes more important for Evangelicals, and slightly less important (thought still important) for Mainline Protestants.
Evangelical and Mainline Christians tend to think more collectively than the average individualism of America. I think my own zeal from doing systemic work comes from growing up in Evangelical spaces, where family, youth group, and relationships were incredibly valued. However, it’s important to note that there might be different interpretations of what “collective” means.
Ethics of Divinity
One of the most interesting parts of this study pertained to the Ethics of Divinity.
With children, God’s authority and scriptural authority are ethical frameworks that informed a high volume of Evangelical Christian children. When Evangelicals become teenagers, God’s authority and scriptural authority become more significant, especially around public issues, where scriptural authority was by far the highest variable for ethical decision making for Evangelical teens. God’s authority and scriptural authority become even more significant as adults. The two primary ways that Evangelical adults processed moral dilemmas was from Scriptural authority and God’s authority, with the means to a community goal coming third.
Mainline Protestant children and adolescents do not consider God’s or spiritual authority. These become even more significant while Mainline Protestant children report seldom (if ever) using these two frameworks. God’s authority becomes important to adults, but only on private issues.
And this gets us back to the dilemma around the question how EMPish communities model parenting.
EMPish children seem to be learning values about self-interest, psychological well-being of self and other, and fairness and reciprocity through their parenting and religious education.
However, EMPish adults almost exclusively rely on scriptural authority, God’s authority, and the interest of the collective (i.e. family, church, denomination at large) and the members inside that collective to make ethical decisions. The existence of belonging and aligning with a larger organization seems to supersede the practice and processing of the values taught to them as children.
The exvangelical community that Julia and I study seems to be responding to this inconsistency, which
, author of The Exvangelicals summarizes so well in this week’s episode of Sexvangelicals:“And then to see, at the time that the evangelical political movement was critiquing Bill Clinton, it was also telling me to dress modestly, to not have sex before marriage, and that all kind of felt aligned. And then to see that kind of alignment fall apart, but only for certain people, later on, there's a pain in that.
And also, a sense of betrayal.”
Our parent-child relationships require us to also live and embody the values that we teach our children. Julia and I are happy to work with couples who are trying to figure out how to define their values for their children, and then simultaneously enact those values while not getting completely consumed into the role of parenthood. Email us at sexvangelicals@gmail.com to learn more about how you can work with us.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia