Broken Arrows: Our Bodies
When parents deny children basic human rights of bodily autonomy, agency, and privacy, their children learn that their bodies are not their own but always under the authority of someone else. Children raised in households that use violence to control them grow up believing that they deserve physical harm and that their bodies are not their own. The practice of deliberately humiliating and breaking a child’s spirit lays harmful groundwork for their future relationships as adults, teaching them that love means submitting to abusers who claim authority over their bodies.
CFC teaches parents a law of sowing and reaping: whatever godly principles a parent sows into their young children's hearts will bear the fruit of godly character in the future. What the parents fail to see is that their methods of violence and control are tools of warfare designed to crush a plant rather than cultivate anything good. Tragically, these violent methods teach only warped messages of love and authority and, in so doing, beget further violence. Children must not only endure the fruit of violence in the present moment but will grow to expect it in the future as well.
Diana’s story highlights the ways in which CFC parents dictated their children’s physical and emotional responses during corporal punishment:
At first, I maintained a stoic silence because it felt more humiliating to cry. Occasionally Mom was in a hurry and I could get away with it, but this time she was determined to break me. Whack whack whack. The wooden drumstick swished through the air, striking my butt cheeks with all the determination held in my mom’s petite arm.
I stayed silent and tense, thinking for a split second that I was glad I had managed to hide the thick rubber plumber’s hose under the couch cushions because it had a far more vicious bite than the drumstick. I returned to the present as Mom demanded, “Are you sorry?” I maintained my silence. “That obviously didn’t hurt enough,” she responded, forcing me to bend over the bed again.
She continued for several more rounds, the swats growing harder and faster as her need to crush my resistance intensified. Finally, the humiliation and rage broke my silence, and I cried angry tears. Even though I knew what would happen if I couldn’t stop myself from crying, I was flooded with rage and couldn’t control the explosion.
Mom’s response to my rage followed the predictable pattern. “You’re not allowed to have a temper tantrum,” she said. “I’m going to spank you again until you stop crying.”
Diana’s mother begins beating her daughter with the expectation of a specific performance of penitence. When Diana does not perform contrition with the required number of tears, her mother sees the wooden drumstick as the only available tool. Diana’s angry tears finally come and her mother threatens more violence in order to control her daughter’s emotional response.
Diana’s mother uses what CFC claims is her God-given authority to physically and emotionally dominate her teenage daughter such that any protest or autonomy, physical or emotional, is interpreted as rebellion against that authority.
Note that Diana’s mother sees authentic emotion as a “temper tantrum” to be trained out of her daughter. Again and again, children in high control religious communities must exercise hypervigilance over their bodily reactions in order to survive the immediate abuse and escape further punishment. Diana dissociated, thinking about other things, in order to keep her tears in check and so protect herself in the best way she could. Diana censored her emotions to satisfy her mother and stifled her self-preservation instincts, accepting bodily harm, to survive the moment.
Thomas describes situations in which his father controlled what his son said and when he said it by forcing him to speak in tongues:
As a child, I spoke in tongues frequently. I didn’t have a choice. My father would randomly tell us to start speaking in tongues in our home or on a car ride. He issued this command many times throughout our childhood. He would tell us to do it and pester us if we didn’t comply immediately: “Come on, pray now! I can’t hear all of you!”
Thomas had no choice but to obey his father’s whims and commands. He had no agency or control over his own voice, even to the extent that he had to say and act out lies in order to obey his father. Thomas’ experience is corroborated by Diana, who says: “I pretended that I wasn’t faking it when I spoke in tongues.”
High control communities that explicitly or implicitly require children to perform acts of worship not only set them up for future abuse, but they destroy any authentic relationship with God.
Communities that mandate corporal punishment deny children the most basic kind of bodily autonomy: protecting one’s self from harm. Parents who spank-train their children believe that a parent holds the God-given authority to violate a child’s body at will.
Mike’s Story underscores the harmful and dehumanizing way that parents dominate their children’s bodies to the point of requiring naked vulnerability:
…we could hear his screams and the dad yelling, "Pull down your pants, underwear too. I said UNDERWEAR TOO!"
"Please dad... no! PLEASE!"
"STOP fighting me, you’re ONLY GONNA MAKE IT WORSE! I’m doing this because I love you.
Experiencing the humiliation and physical violence of being spanked anywhere at any time teaches children that they do not get to have control over what happens to their bodies at any given moment of the day. Mike goes on to describe the eerie moments immediately after this incident when he recalls an adult threatening him if he didn’t go back to playing with the other kids as though nothing had happened:
There was no reason they couldn't find a private place to do this discreetly. After the incident, the children were expected to go back to joyfully playing just as before. I hesitated and an adult said: “Does someone else need a spanking too?” A few parents jokingly told stories about how “this one time Billy got out of hand, too” or “oh, that’s nothing, you shoulda seen what happened LAST week!” and all of us knew that this could just happen, anywhere, at any moment, if our parents decided it was needed.
This incident not only traumatized the child who was publicly humiliated and assaulted; it traumatized the other children present. The casual way that the adults present dismiss the incident and expect the children to digest the warning and then go back to cheerfully playing reveals a disturbing level of detachment and regularity. It also teaches children not to expect anyone to intervene should they experience harm. They learn that protesting brings further harm, and the other parents in the community will reinforce adult power.
Minimizing and normalizing an incident like this makes violence and humiliation commonplace in the community. Children in these communities learn over and over again that they have no power over their own bodies and that what they feel about physical abuse done to their bodies—especially healthy self-protective emotions like anger and not wanting to be near those who harm them—doesn’t matter.
Instead, they learn that all such feelings should be ignored and suppressed so that the community can maintain the status quo. When these children become adults, they have been trained to expect harm, accept it cheerfully, and ignore their own well-being, something that invites further abuse even in relationships outside the religious community.
Children at CFC must even submit their personalities to parental control. Introversion was identified as selfish behavior, a sin to be confessed and replaced with others-centered attentiveness. Children with extroverted personalities who mimicked the pastors’ wives received praise. Children who grew up at CFC found their introversion was called selfishness. Consider how Darlene Sinclair directly teaches this at a Mom’s Cadre meeting:
But you've also got the ones that are like, shy and retiring. And they and you would think that I can't make them look that person in the eye and say, ‘Hello’ - it's going to kill them. And, you know, I just want to encourage you to realize it will not kill them. And they need to learn how to control their own emotions and they need to learn they don't have to become Sally Sanguine. But they have to learn that there you are. This is not, this moment is not about me, it is not about my insecurities, it is not about my inhibitions, because ultimately, that really is a me-centered attitude.
In Mae’s story, a mother who left CFC, Mae shared regrets about how her children were treated at Christian Fellowship Academy (CFA). Rather than encouraging each child’s individuality, the mother saw teachers silencing her children:
My kids said that they always felt like they were silenced because they were kids. They weren't allowed to voice their own thoughts and opinions. They were expected to adhere to what those older than them said.
Mae recounts how she also felt pressured to fit a specific mold as a parent at CFA. She describes how listening to other CFC moms idealize CFC child-training techniques made her feel the need to try to implement them. Once she became aware that her actions were causing harm and forcing her children to conform both at CFA and at home, she knew she needed to change her approach:
In my need to have obedient children, I had overlooked all the wonderful personality traits they had. I didn’t want to break their spirits anymore, I wanted to foster them. I started asking questions about their hopes and dreams and how I could help. I had spent years trying to break their spirits and now I had to undo all the damage.
Mae was able to see how these parenting practices harmed her children. This realization allowed her to work toward nurturing understanding, individuality, and compassion in their lives instead.
Another way that children learn that their bodies are not their own is through widespread acceptance of purity culture. Purity culture permeates high control religious communities, further warping and reducing the concepts of bodily autonomy and consent in children’s and young adults’ minds. By teaching young women that their value resides in preserving their body for their husbands or in hiding their body so men won’t “stumble,” young girls learn that their body is not their own and must only be viewed in terms of how it affects others. Purity culture causes harm all on its own, but when added to the compliance and submission training all children at CFC receive—from parents, pastors, and men in general—it results in a dangerous milieu.
Wren shares her experience growing up as a “poster-child” of purity at CFC and how ultimately that conditioning led to abuse.
It was my work colleagues who identified that I spoke like a rape victim, not the pastors that were supposed to shepherd and protect me. If I mentioned any sexual encounters, the pastors responded with disgust. When I “bragged” to Rick Sinclair that I hadn’t slept with my abuser in three months, he didn’t hear me saying that I was finally able to say no. He didn’t see the strength required to reject the manipulation and coercion.
Wren’s story illuminates the insidious ways that purity culture, obedience training, and violence in her childhood upbringing at CFC all impacted her ability to form relationships as an adult. Conditioning your children to be cheerfully obedient, conflict avoidant, and accepting of physical violence and humiliation sets them up to be abused as adults. This is especially true for young women growing up in high-control patriarchal communities like CFC where they are required to submit to men. Carla shares a similar experience, explaining how CFC’s high-control purity culture and the pressure to conform and submit to men led to sexual assault.
CFC impressed upon us from a young age that women needed to submit to the men in their life to do God's will. Specifically, women were under their father's authority until they were married and then they were under their husband's authority. I had such a twisted perspective of my autonomy that I had a hard time asserting myself and terrible men seemed to sense the weakness.
I was assaulted twice. One of my abusers claimed to be a Christian. When I told my parents, they asked what I was wearing when it happened, because I must have been dressed immodestly. When I told one of my non-Christian college friends, her eyes teared up and she told me that I didn't deserve it and then asked me if I wanted a hug. We hugged and I cried.
In that moment, I was seen and not judged. It was the first time I felt sincere compassion.
CFC’s patriarchal and purity teachings trained Wren and Carla to accept abuse and sexual assault and to blame themselves should it occur. When adults proudly use violence as a tool to scare children into submission and teach children that their bodies are not their own, it permanently impacts how these children will interact with the world as adults. When parents teach children that violence and control are tools to show “love,” they normalize abuse. The end result is that their children will also normalize abuse, expecting it to be commonplace in their lives.
If you have 1 minute
Do a body scan: rest your attention on different parts of your body, starting with the top of your head and moving toward your toes. As you notice each one, focus your attention there and consciously relax that part of you. Spend one minute moving through your scalp, eyes, cheeks, mouth, jaw, neck, shoulders, chest, arms, belly and legs.
Practice a mindful minute.
If you have 15 minutes
Watch this video: Violence—A Family Tradition
