Broken Arrows: High Control Religious Communities and Abuse
“Deep down I always knew that there was something wrong with the way my parents treated me. My parents told me that I was supposed to obey God because I loved him, but why was my compliance enforced with pain? I suppressed those thoughts because questions were dangerous.”
Reflecting on her childhood years at Christian Fellowship Center, the woman goes on: “It wasn’t until I was almost 30 and in therapy that I realized the full extent of the damage this sort of child training inflicts on kids. I want the cycle of abuse to stop with me.”
Our Broken Arrows series names and identifies the layers of harm contained in CFC’s approach to child training. This type of child training sets children up for abuse by teaching them erroneous beliefs about themselves and their place in the world.
Children raised in high-control religious communities like CFC learn in a myriad of ways that their worth is tied to their obedience and their ability to perform. High-control religious communities preach “dying to self” such that martyrdom and suffering become virtues. Stripped of bodily autonomy, these children are taught that they cannot trust their emotions. In fact, natural responses to abuse—anger, arguing, complaining—are identified as "sins" to be rejected and replaced with contentment, compliance, and gratitude.
High-control religious communities frequently isolate children—sometimes by expecting families to homeschool or by limiting socialization to other families within the community— in a context where abuse masquerades as love. In addition, distorted teachings on forgiveness, pressure members, especially children, to love, honor, and pursue relationships with those who injure them.
Abuse that occurs in high-control religious communities is particularly insidious because it is done in the name of the ultimate authority: God.
As described in their teaching literature, Christian Fellowship Center approaches child training as an arduous task in which sinful children must be stripped of their autonomy and beaten into submission for God. Churches like CFC claim that every life has dignity and worth, but their practices of violence and coercion reveal that this dignity is not extended to children once they are born.
What does CFC teach about child training?
Christian Fellowship Center’s child training teachings emphasize that the goal of every technique is for children to love God. This worthy goal is one that CFC’s child training methods are unlikely to meet.
In documentation from early 2000s child training classes, Rick and Darlene Sinclair highlight two main objectives for parents:
To see our children from God’s perspective, enabling us to make the necessary sacrifices and steps of faith in order that they may grow to fulfill God’s plan and purpose.
To realize that as parents we are the main tool God has ordained to shape and mold our children and He will provide everything we need for the job.
These points illuminate several errors at the root of CFC’s child training philosophy. Framing parents as God-ordained authorities easily leads to coercive and authoritarian parenting, because parents feel empowered and even required to control their children. Furthermore, the idea that God will “provide everything we need for the job” becomes license to use the Bible in harmful and inappropriate ways.
The following paragraph from the same child training series demonstrates the deceptive promise of this approach: follow our abusive practices and your children will grow up to be faithful disciples of Jesus. But will children who are raised with violence and coercion truly “become knowledgeable of God’s requirements and acquainted with his nature”? Or will they learn how to perform in order to avoid punishment and grow up to be the kind of hypocritical religious people that their training warns about?
Child training involves more than simply ‘outward obedience.’ Training must also reach the child’s heart, for we are all commanded to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. As parents, we must not only settle for outward compliance but work toward seeing our children have a personal awareness of their own responsibility toward God. They must become knowledgeable of God’s requirements and acquainted with His nature. If we as parents are only concerned with outward behavior, we may end up raising more of a Pharisee than a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Consider Christian Fellowship Center’s starting place: unless parents follow CFC’s arduous practices, which include divinely-delegated authority and high eternal stakes, their children will stray off the narrow path and into damnation.
CFC teaches that parents must restrict their children’s natural inclinations and inflict pain to “recall their children to duty.” Every element of their “child training” comes top-down, using techniques that dominate a child’s will to the will of the parent, supposedly for the child’s well being. The choice of the word “strangle” is all too telling, as both direct and indirect effects of these techniques strangle the child’s capacity for individuality, autonomy, and agency.
In this handout from CFC’s 2015 handout on Forming Straight Arrows, CFC promises parents that their child training method will produce CFC’s version of an ideal Christian. Note the emphasis on respect for authority, being “teachable,” and accepting responsibility, all values that permit people to continue submitting to high control religious teaching.
Communities like CFC are all too eager to define for their members what things are “good” and “evil,” but CFCtoo rejects that there is anything “good” about their child training. Instead of giving children confidence in their parents’ love, this method of child training instead produces a warped understanding of love, resulting in traumatized children who are vulnerable to future abuse.
