Broken Arrows: Obedience
High-control communities teach children that their value as a person depends upon their obedience.
Read the first post in our series here.
Rachael Clinton Chen and Dan Allender describe the mind control that can take place in high control religious communities in their podcast on spiritual abuse.
Mind control is so linked to identity formation. When we’re talking about mind control, we’re talking about how you’re being told to make sense of yourself, how you’re being told to make sense of God, how you’re being told to make sense of the world.”
They explain that these communities isolate people from the world around them so that people will obey the leaders without question.
The message is clear: The world is dangerous. You can’t talk to those people. We’re the only ones who really know God, the only ones you can trust if you want to be safe and happy. What makes these messages so devastating is that they also seek to distort, undermine, and create doubt in your own ability to interact with the world or read Scripture, to the point where you are dependent upon the leader to make decisions and clarify what you believe.
Churches like Christian Fellowship Center are all too eager to tell people what to believe. Their parenting principles emphasize unquestioning obedience, because CFC teaches that children's hearts are inherently bad and cannot be trusted. Therefore, only the authority figures—the leaders and parents—know what is best for a child. There is no room for questions. The child’s role is to simply obey in all things.
This section of the Blueprint for Teens conference in 2015 highlights how CFC uses the slippery slope fallacy to warn children against curiosity. Being curious and asking questions is the first step to moral impurity.
In the Blueprint Conference recordings from 2012, Rick Sinclair states: “ The three critical components of true obedience: obedience must be instant, cheerful, and thorough. “
By twisting scripture to justify treating children with contempt, these parents raise their children to obey without question. This leaves them vulnerable to predators. Consider Wren’s description of how her abuser exploited her obedience training:
His manipulation and coercion felt commonplace and comforting. I was taught to follow the pastor and not to question his teaching. I was taught to do what I was told.
Kira was raised in CFC to be immediately obedient and compliant or suffer the consequences:
It was always little things that resulted in beatings like not saying goodbye to someone after my parents told me to. I was painfully shy, but that was no excuse for the "sin" of noncompliance or lack of immediate obedience.
Training children to respond to instructions with nothing but immediate and cheerful obedience (under threat of physical and emotional harm) leaves no room for a child to question whether the instructed activity is safe for them. Training children to obey adults without questioning the why behind the command prepares them to do the same with any authority figure in the future.
Because children cannot object to commands in any way—even through their body language—they quickly learn that they are powerless to do anything but obey. One Sinclair daughter describes this damaging approach in her blog post for Mom And Us:
“Are you being instant and cheerful?” I grew up hearing this question commonly asked by Mom of a child right after giving an order. “Please be instant and cheerful.” “Are you having an instant and cheerful attitude?” Any way that you could phrase it — it was asked. And it was consistently asked. We knew that having a good response was required of us so every time we heard the “instant & cheerful” words we knew that our response wasn’t up to par.
Rick and Darlene taught their children from infancy that they had no voice or agency. The only permissible response was to act in accordance with parental will. A child’s sense of belonging, contribution, and personhood was wrapped up in their ability and willingness to unquestioningly do what they were told. What happens if a child in CFC doesn’t obey? Kira’s story highlights the consequences of noncompliance:
As a leader at CFC, my parent taught/assisted in teaching other parents at CFC how to "discipline" their children. I remember my parent telling a church member that they needed to hit their child without any clothing as protection, hard enough to leave bruises, and that they shouldn't use their hand, but rather some kind of implement.
Unfortunately for the children raised at CFC or attending CFA, Rick and Darlene’s teachings have created an environment that forces children to be on high alert at all times. Kids who learn that they are more valuable to the family or community when they just do as they are told—often at their own expense—tend to become chronic people-pleasers as adults. These children learn to be emotionally hypervigilant to the needs of others and grow up to be adults who instinctively contort themselves to meet the needs and expectations of people in their lives.
In his account of being raised in the CFC community in the 1990s, Mike shares that he learned to be hypervigilant at an early age out of necessity, not just at home, but at any CFC gathering. Not only were his parents encouraged to spank and correct him when he was “out of line” but so were other adults in the congregation.
It was like some sick show for all the other kids around to learn from, and we did. We learned to always behave or be sneaky enough to not get caught like this sorry loser. This family had a really large house with a barn-style garage and lots of land, and we were on the second floor. 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.
I can’t describe the feeling of terror that knowledge put in me. On the ride home my parents confirmed to us: “You know that if you ever act up like that, any one of those parents can spank you too, right?” Yes, that was also normal. It was understood that most of the other parents in that church could spank us if we stepped out of line.
While many parents who adhere to the “instant, cheerful, and thorough” obedience principles claim that they are raising their kids to have godly character, they are in fact raising children to actively resist their own free will and ability to think for themselves. Children who are not allowed to make independent decisions from a young age will be wholly unprepared to make decisions as adults. Instead of equipping their children for adulthood, these parents keep children in a perpetual state of dependence, which inevitably results in adults who will most likely seek out someone else to tell them what to do and how to live.
In other words, children trained to obey authority instantly, cheerfully, and thoroughly usually grow up to be adults who instantly, cheerfully, and thoroughly obey authority figures in high-control churches. If dissidents leave, the only people left are generations of kids who have been trained to follow orders without question and who defend their parents, church leaders, or anyone in a perceived position of authority. The cycle continues, perpetuating more harm and reinforcing a culture of abuse.
If you grew up at CFC or in another high control religious context, there is hope. You can break the cycle of abuse. You can do one small thing today to break that cycle.
If you have 1 minute
Tell yourself: “People do not automatically deserve my obedience. My thoughts and opinions are valid. I deserve to ask, ‘Why?’”
If you have 20 minutes
Listen to this podcast episode on mind control and spiritual abuse.
