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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:30
Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment - The Author Interview
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Hello everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I am thrilled and delighted to have Janet Heimlich on the show.
For those who don't know, it was your grandfather who actually invented the Heimlich Maneuver?
No, my father.
Your father who invented the Heimlich Maneuver and so for those reasons she declined my invitation to a dinner interview because I was intending on eating a fishbone sideways and just seeing how well this thing worked.
So she has, I think, quite wisely decided to do it remotely and I will still be eating a fishbone later in the show.
So we'll see how well the remote Heimlich works.
So, you've written a very powerful and grim, I mean, you know, there's no other way to put it.
It is hard reading.
I think it is important reading.
The book, of course, is Breaking Their Will.
And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, dare I say, the genesis of this project.
I've been a journalist for quite a long time.
Mostly, I was working in radio.
I reported for National Public Radio as a freelancer for quite some years.
And I have done quite a bit of investigative journalism, writing articles.
It wasn't until I came across this topic, though, I felt it really needed to be a book.
Simply because, even though it's something everyone kinda knows about, thinks they understand, and may have actually experienced.
It's never been given a name, and I feel that the research that's been needed to understand religious child maltreatment has never been compiled into a volume.
So, given the dearth of information that's been uncovered, I felt that it had to be a book.
Really became interested in the topic just as I have other topics where I feel like there was injustice happening and not enough people understood how it was happening and Largely I came across the topic as most people have By by hearing about some of these horrendous high-profile cases in which children have been severely harmed through extremist and authoritarian type religious beliefs.
Right.
And I really wanted to compliment you.
I mean, obviously, you're an excellent writer, but I thought that the book was very even handed.
And of course, when you focus on a topic like religious child maltreatment, the natural reaction of some people is to say, oh, so you're saying that only religious people maltreat their children.
And I think you're very clear in pointing out that religion can have some salutary effects on children in terms of community and helping them through stressful periods and so on.
And of course, what you're trying to do is, if I understand the project correctly, is to fill a gap in our understanding of child maltreatment.
That there seems to have been this, dare I say, Moses-like parting of the Red Sea when it comes to examining how religiosity can affect people's parenting negatively.
Is that a fair way to characterize what you've been up to?
Yes it is.
A lot of the criticism I get from people who are very pious.
They initially want to remind me that child abuse and neglect happens everywhere, that it is not just in religious homes.
I recently met with an attorney general who, when I was trying to talk him into getting a bill together that would require clergy to be mandated reporters.
His response was, well, you know, pedophilia is everywhere.
It's everywhere.
You know, why do we need to have any statutes that pertain just to, in this case, religious leaders?
I actually was asking him just to get rid of a privilege that was only for a Catholic priest in the law.
And not singling anybody out as having to abide by stricter laws than other people.
But the fact is that we know a lot about abuse and neglect in terms of the different risk factors.
Poverty is a big one.
Mental illness, of course.
And many other factors.
What I feel just needs to be better understood is when the risk factor is religious belief.
I just want to quote a few statistics from the book which I think are always worth reviewing, and of course you give good reasons for focusing on the US in your book.
But of course more than 80% of Americans belong to one religion or another.
More than half of Americans say religion is very important in their lives, and more than a quarter of Americans say they attend church at least once a week.
86% of Americans believe in God, a universal spirit, a higher power, and so on.
More than 80% believe in heaven, Nearly 70% believe in hell and 70% believe in the devil.
And they're more likely to believe in the devil, hell, and angels than in Darwin's theory of evolution.
And a higher percentage of Americans firmly reject the concept of evolution than do those living in any of the 32 European countries and Japan.
More than three quarters of Americans believe God sometimes intervenes to cure people who have a serious illness.
More than 40% of Americans believe Jesus will return to earth within the next 40 years.
And more than one-third of Americans believe the Bible is the Word of God.
And the progress in pushing back some of this religiosity, at least from the agnostic or atheist perspective, has been somewhat lacking.
And so, although the Bible doesn't have a lot in it pertaining to parent-child relationships, how to raise children, I think it would be crazy to say that the most influential book in The world, really, if you count the Old Testament, and certainly in the West, if the Old and New Testament, does not have an effect on how parents interact with their children.
And you outline some of the effects in the book.
I was wondering if you could go through those.
And, sorry, just before we move on, I want to make sure.
ReligiousChildMaltreatment.com is the website where people can review and order the book, if I remember rightly.
That is correct.
Also, BreakingTheWill.com will take you there.
Well, I wasn't a big Bible reader before I started researching this, but my main focus when I was turning to the Bible was to see what the book said, or I should say the series of books said, says about children.
For starters, it really doesn't say a whole lot.
Some passages refer to children in a positive light, but the vast majority of them Look at children in a negative light, and I think that it's not unreasonable to see why that would be.
Certainly, hundreds of years ago, the issue of children's rights was not on the tip of everyone's tongue.
Look, I point out in the book that the Ten Commandments, which many people consider to be, you know, if you're going to follow any set of rules, you can stick to the Ten Commandments.
Well, the Ten Commandments mention the word children once.
And all it says really is that for those that disobey God, it's the children and future generations that will be punished for their iniquities.
So the Ten Commandments doesn't even speak to parenting at all.
One thing that I bring out in the book is that these problems of abuse and neglect don't exist in every religious family's home or in every religious community.
It is clearly only happening in what I call religious authoritarian cultures, which we can talk about.
But one thing that I found very common in religious authoritarian cultures, whether they be places of worship, communities, or individual households, is that when they do look to the Bible for parenting, they seem to skip over a lot of the wonderful passages that speak to children in very glorious and glowing ways.
Instead, they want to adhere to Proverbs in the Old Testament, which clearly promotes an authoritarian type of parenting and Using what it calls the rod, which some people interpret to mean wisdom and that kind of thing, but clearly there are some uses of that term that speak to corporal punishment.
The Book of Proverbs, which was supposedly written by Solomon, does not have more than maybe a couple of passages, which I think any current expert in child development would say are beneficial to a parent-child relationship.
Right.
So there's two sides to the coins of where you consider the most potential for religious child mistreatment to occur is in the authoritarian slash obedience.
I mean these are two sides of the same coin.
You're heavily authoritarian because there's this perception of course in some households that children are born
malevolent and selfish and corrupt and infected with original sin and prone to all sorts of devilry and it is really an act of compassion on the part of the parent to sort of thrash the demonic aspect of children out of their hides to save them from everlasting damnation and this desire to which of course is embedded in the title of the book to break the will of the child is very very explicit in a lot of Christian teachings not just Christian but Jewish and Muslim teachings as well
to break the will of the child, to have them become obedient to God through the parent.
And I think this is where you identify the great risk factor for abuse.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, I certainly believe that.
I have a chapter called An Obsession with Child Obedience, and I see that definitely across the board in many different faiths, and so I provide examples of that, as you were pointing out, in Christian households where they look upon children as being sinful, just as they do all humans.
I'm talking about fairly conservative Christians.
I was talking to a former principal of a Christian school who just casually went on about when a a baby cries that sin.
If you perceive children in that light, then it's easy to see how this need to overcome them and overpower them and control them, using corporal punishment can lead to abuse.
And the idea that children can be cleansed of sin through physical punishment has clearly been a problem in a number of criminal cases where children have unfortunately been beaten to death due to these beliefs Now, certainly you can say that, well, some of these perpetrators might have been mentally ill and that kind of thing.
But very often, when they go to stand trial, you find that it's not just one crazy perpetrator, it's actually a couple or perhaps a group from a church, and they're not found to be insane.
They're found competent to stand trial.
They're not found guilty by reason of insanity.
So I do think that some of these extremist beliefs do play a big role.
Well, I think it would be pretty specious if any ideological or religious group to have in their holy texts unbelievably cruel commandments towards children and endless depictions of child abuse in the Bible sanctioned by some of the holiest if not the most holy characters in the Bible and to have exhortations like spare the rod, spoil the child, the famous one of course where in Deuteronomy 13 people as you quote should kill family members or friends who as much as suggest worshipping gods other than
The Old Testament God, the Bible is riddled with threats and actual acts of violence against children as you write, including murder, animal attacks, rape, incest, and cannibalism.
And of course the violence is carried out by humans, but in a number of instances they're on God's orders and God himself commits some of the acts.
So to have a whole series of commandments and depictions in the holiest of texts that are incredibly abusive towards children For Christians or other religious people to say, well, this has no effect on how we parent, to me, is to be a cherry picker that's almost schizophrenic, which is to say, well, this whole series of commandments from the deity and in the book have no effect.
And that's to say that the book has no effect, because it's all over the place in the book.
And I find that to be a bit of a guarded and not very honest response.
Yeah.
advocate in the book for people to not worship or glorify the Bible in its entirety, to use a little critical thinking, to decide for yourself as a parent, as a member of the clergy, or just anyone that spends time with children, to find passages that you think speak to raising children in a compassionate way.
I can't see how the story of Abraham nearly stabbing to death his son is a good tale that benefits society.
And yet, for those that feel compelled to only swallow the whole book like this precious pill and not be able to look at it and decipher anything other than that, I think that That can only lead to problems when it comes to perceiving children in a positive way, to treating children in a way that recognizes their rights as human beings.
My particular perspective is that religion tends to act as a hyper-accelerant to existing personality traits.
So there have been studies where people who are more fearful tend to be more Old Testament and people who are more affectionate tend to be more New Testament.
But the problem of course is that, and you quote some examples of this in the book, where people went to, children went from relatively benign if not hands-off households to very intrusive and controlling households when their parents became religious.
But if you are somebody who has, you know, say been physically abused and has that tendency, finding the divine commandment to spare the rod, spoil the child, I know that's not in the Bible, but that's how it's generally interpreted.
But finding that commandment is not exactly going to put the brakes on your natural tendencies.
On the other hand, if you're a kind, generous, charitable person, finding the example of Jesus and so on is probably, you know, and looking at that particular silhouette is going to accelerate those tendencies in you.
And so I really want to point out that it tends to be an accelerant.
In other words, if you're going in the right direction, it'll help get you there faster.
But if you're going in the wrong direction, it really seems to grease the slope.
Well, I do take issue with people that say that there are no passages in the New Testament that don't reflect well on children or that anything Jesus said was wonderful in terms of feeling towards children because that's just simply not true.
When Jesus says, I come bearing a sword and I don't come in peace and my purpose is to separate girls from their mothers and boys from their fathers, children will learn to worship me over their parents.
Well, that is just what cult leaders say.
I'm not saying that Jesus actually said that, but that is what he says in the Bible.
So I do have some issues with some of the things that are said in the New Testament, and specifically what Jesus is said to have said.
But the other thing I want to point out is There are a lot of folks that really have blinders on when it comes to looking at faith in a critical way.
Oftentimes they'll say, well, you know, if somebody is leaning towards abusing children, they're going to find some justification for it, whether it's religious or something else.
And that's certainly true for some people.
However, I've interviewed a number of people who I don't think were that way at all.
They were not sadistic and that kind of thing.
They simply grew up in an environment where those kinds of attitudes towards children and those kinds of Uh, methods for treating children were just part of the culture, and then later on when they got out of it, they looked back in horror at what they had done.
So, you know, I think that it's not necessarily that somebody might have some inner driving need to do harm, and so then they're only going to look at ways to justify it, uh, looking at scripture.
I do think that just a, uh, back to the idea of the religious authoritarian culture I think can spawn bad parents of those who might otherwise be terrific parents.
The problem with religious authoritarian cultures is they sap autonomy from parents.
They don't help foster parents' natural instinct to care for their children.
Instead, there are all these rules and restrictions placed on parents to obey certain rules and treat their children a certain way.
So, I feel when we take away those restrictions and we just allow parents to decide for themselves how they're going to discipline, how they're going to treat their kids, and we don't let these
Outside influences interfere, you know, we have a lot less to worry about Yeah, and I mean I don't think at the one hand most religious people would argue and I would actually quite accept that that Christianity is the foundation for vast majority of Western thought and opinions and then say well except for bad parenting then it has no effect then it's simply in a manifestation of existing personality traits and has no capacity to shape ideas or behavior that's
I don't know, that's just parting the river a little bit too close to something which really needs to be dealt with, to my taste.
Yeah, that's the theory that, well, it's only these few bad apples that really should be blamed, you know, just like those that say, well, the Catholic Church has nothing to do as a system for allowing pedophilia and sexual abuse to continue in that institution.
Instead we should just look at these mentally ill clergy, these individuals, and we should just punish them and get those few bad apples out of the way and then all would be fine.
Well, clearly we know that's not the case.
Right, right.
And just to talk about the scope, of course child abuse is When you dig into it, and these are even with just the criminal definitions of child abuse, which some people would argue, the psychohistorians like Lloyd DeMoss would argue, is not quite comprehensive, not close to comprehensive enough.
You know, it's over a hundred billion dollar a year problem in the US alone.
Five children every day die from neglect or abuse.
And of course, these are not all within religious households, but it is a huge, huge problem in society.
I mean, the rape or sexual molestation of girls and boys You hear statistics, three and five girls, one to two and five boys.
I mean, it's incredibly problematic.
One of the things that you point out, and I certainly don't fault the church or religious institutions alone in this, but they do seem to have escaped some targeting or some recognition in this area, is the degree to which they are not vigilant for signs of child abuse and intervene, which really an ethical moral community must be on the lookout for such a prevalent problem and intervene wherever possible.
But you provide quotes of pastors in the book who say, oh, in my 30 years of mentoring this congregation, I've never seen any child mistreated once.
And then statistically, So close to impossible that you can't even calculate it.
So what are the issues within religious communities of not opening up and dealing with issues of child abuse, but rather covering them up or neglecting them?
The difficulty that people have with facing the issue of child abuse has been around a long time.
Certainly not religious people that have a problem with dealing with it, with reporting it, and that kind of thing.
However, if you look at say a public school where there's a child that's being abused, You may have some cover-up.
You may have a particular principal that wants to maintain the reputation of the school, or may not be as educated on child abuse issues and not do what he or she should do.
But it's nothing compared to what you would see in a religious authoritarian environment, where the need to Separate the group or the community from outsiders is intense.
They need to preserve the reputation of the group.
They need to prevent outsiders from finding out the flaws because there's this fear of being persecuted.
So you have, even if a group is located in an urban environment, you have this separation that oftentimes works against children because those on the outside that are there to protect children Be them police officers or welfare workers and others.
Don't find out about these crimes happening.
So you'll see abuse of various kinds, not just happening frequently and not being dealt with, but continuing on generation after generation.
Right.
Now, you've also talked about some of the studies that show that, you know, regular old vanilla child abuse, when combined with religiosity, seems to be particularly damaging, psychologically in particular.
I mean, I think the argument for that, there's probably many, but one that pops into my mind is that it's metaphysical abuse in a sense that.
So if you have some abuser in your household, you can at least go to the mall and you're away from that abuser.
You have privacy.
You can go climb a tree.
You can go for a walk or so you can find some place to escape.
But in the place where God can see you everywhere, God judges everything you do, and these are the religious commandments you have to hold, in a sense, you end up in this ultimate big brother state where nothing is private, nothing is personal.
And in a sense, there's no place to escape to to have any kind of respite from this kind of monitoring or this kind of surveillance.
And I mean that's one of many possible reasons for it, but you have, I think, quoted some quite compelling studies about how child abuse combined with religiosity seems to be extra toxic.
Yeah, when it comes to indoctrination of children, isolation of children, when that is infused with religious belief, you have something called exploitation.
I combine that with isolation, two forms of emotional abuse, because that's frequently found in some of these homeschooling type environments, where not only is the child kept away from, say, mainstream media or getting close to people that are not part of the belief system.
But you also have the religion more or less shoved down their throats so that, you know, everything in their life is viewed through that prism.
So you're not allowing the child to develop in a way that is healthy.
So a lot of times people will say that having any kind of religion in a child's life can be abusive.
I do take issue with that.
It really comes down to whether or not you cross over a line of a clinically accepted form of of emotional maltreatment, which is exploitation.
I mean, that is really what is so psychologically damaging.
Once you control the child's mind in that way, then there's really no place for them to go, as you say.
And if they do get out, it's going to be years and years of therapy to be able to deal with that in a healthy way.
A lot of people I interviewed, you know, even those that weren't in so-called cults or that kind of thing, oh, they were, say, 18 when they left this conservative Amish group where they got out of this very confining Household, where everyone lived and bereaved the religion.
They talked about just interacting with other people on the outside or doing very commonplace things as a way that was extremely difficult.
One guy said, you know, he didn't know how to order a beer.
With a group of people he's working with, and he doesn't know how to do that.
I mean, we're talking the most basic language skills, and it wasn't that he just wasn't allowed to drink beer.
It's that he didn't grow up in an environment where he was permitted to go to a restaurant and order it for himself.
There are extreme controls put on children for the good of the overall community without enough attention paid to the children's individual needs.
Yeah, I mean, not to single out religion, but my perspective, and it was reinforced.
I'm not going to say you agree with it, but it was certainly reinforced by some aspects of the books.
I was really, really reading in a very concentrated way to not fall prey to confirmation bias, and that's why I really wanted to point out the balance and even-handed approach that you took.
But I think about whether it's religious or not, the more irrational and sort of counter-empirical a belief system is, The more aggressive it has to be with children.
I mean, as a stay-at-home dad of now three and a half years, my daughter is relentlessly empirical, you know, does not believe in things she can't see, tries to integrate all new knowledge into her existing stable of knowledge, and if you, you know, say, well, Santa isn't real, but Jesus is, and, you know, you're burning hell and all this kind of stuff, it's really tough for kids to process that because, I mean, it does not accord with the empirical evidence of their senses or reason itself.
And I think then you kind of have to pile up a bit more aggression and I think that the households where religiosity is not as damaging or may even be positive in some ways, you know, Jesus loves you, we're happy for everything we have and let's help the poor.
I mean that's really hard to, you know, from a philosophical standpoint the methodology may not be sound but the conclusions are, you know, it's a good place to be, we like to help others and let's be grateful for the good things we have in our life.
That's hard to really criticize.
But, you know, and I imagine sort of rabid fascist or Nazi or communist households would have a similar problem, but it may be much more atheistic, where if you have an irrational belief system that is very high stakes, you know, like we have to believe this, we have to beat the original sin out of you know, like we have to believe this, we have to beat the original sin out of you, we have to keep the devil away from you, or you or I or both of us
That makes things kind of so high stakes that I can see how that can lead to much more of a slippery slope towards harming the child.
And as you point out in the book, the more than a quarter of religious related victims in one study had come to the belief that their abuses were religiously justified.
And sorry for that long, hopefully not too rambling rant, but I think that the more insistent and high stakes the irrationality, the more you really have to threaten or scare the child into believing something that just goes against the evidence of their senses.
I agree.
You know, it is sometimes difficult to draw lines to say, you know, what rises to the level of emotional maltreatment or psychological neglect and that kind of thing.
But I can certainly say for myself, philosophically, that I don't believe it's right for any parent to tell children things that either they believe to be false.
I certainly am not going to look my child straight in the eye and say there's a Santa Claus and a Tooth Fairy and what have you.
And at the same time, I don't think it's right for a parent to say something is true when they don't know it to be true.
So to say that God is thinking good thoughts about you, or God wants this for you, or we all are going to turn to the Spirit, and the Spirit is such and such, and this is what the Spirit's like, and Well, they don't know that.
How could they know that?
It is not something that can be known by a human being.
So, philosophically, I have a big problem with that myself.
Yeah, and I think for children, if not for adults, in the law, I mean, the secular law, let alone the moral law, threats are not wildly separate from actions.
In other words, if I threaten to go strangle your cat, that's obviously a a bad thing to do and probably a criminal offense in most places.
I don't actually have to go and strangle your cat.
And the issue I have, I mean there are two particular tenets that I was taught when I was very little that I really had to struggle my way free of.
The first, of course, is that Jesus died for my sins when I was three or two or whatever it was when I was first introduced to the concept.
That the best and most noble human being in the universe was nailed to a cross of agony because I had done something bad before I was born or someone else had done something bad that I was responsible for.
I mean that's a pretty heavy load to put on a young mind.
And the second, of course, is the threat of hell.
I mean if an adult were to threaten to throw a child into a fire, that would clearly be criminal and egregious abuse.
The fact that the parent is introducing a supreme being who is going to throw the child into a fire that never ends to me is only an escalation of that kind of threat and I mean James Joyce writes about this in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a truly terrifying sequence on descriptions of hell and you point one out in your book about the woman I think it was from the 19th century that the woman with the cap on fire that burned and never consumed her and her whole body was burning and so on.
These are very vivid for children and I think that the condemnation of original sin on children and The resulting or I guess associated threat of hell to me is very detrimental to a child's sense of security and well-being.
I agree, and I do think that there is a huge disconnect, certainly in American culture, where when a child is abused or neglected, and neglect is the most common form of maltreatment, but when those things are happening, if religion is infused in there, somehow it gets a pass, somehow it's considered to be fine.
There was one case that I came across where this woman chained her son, who was a teenager, to a bed.
You know, for like two days and beat him and all this kind of thing.
It was all done as part of an exorcistic ritual.
And the judge actually dropped the case because he thought that her belief pretty much matched what everybody else in the community felt about Satan and that kind of thing.
What was the quote?
It was something like, you'll be hard-pressed to find somebody in this county who doesn't believe in the existence of Satan.
Yes, I applaud you for actually finding that quote.
It's one of my favorites.
But you see countless examples of this bias where children who are abused religiously, where the perpetrators are not being punished Another example is the Amish, where they're allowed to take their kids out of school after the 8th grade.
And I don't see any reason why, you know, the Supreme Court saw, there was one dissent to that decision, that's brilliant, and I wish people would read that, because he foresaw exactly what would happen.
But basically, they were saying that children who are not raised with this particular kind of belief system, they need an education.
They need a high school education.
So it's fair that it's required for those children.
But these children that are raised the Amish way, they're not going to get that kind of right.
So this uneven playing field, You know, I find very bothersome.
One of the worst examples of that is religious medical neglect, where nearly every state in this country, due to the power of the Christian Science Church during the 70s, passed these laws that allowed parents whose children died from faith-healing-type medical neglect to be immune from prosecution.
These children suffered horrendously.
We never even found out about a lot of those cases because they never went to trial.
Well, I include them in the book because there are just so many examples, mostly those cases uncovered by former members of, say, the Christian Science Church and some of these other churches.
But again, I mean, to say that we're going to let a child die a horrific death just because what was in the perpetrator's head had to do with some kind of disbelief, to me seems really outrageous.
It is.
It is.
I want to mention something.
I mean, I got a lot out of your book, and I highly recommend it to people.
But one of the really interesting aha moments that I had, and you do talk about this in the book, so I don't want to make this about me.
You know we have this standard in the West which has been around for oh gosh I mean centuries really but in popular culture and in sort of the mainstream way of thinking for about probably 40 or 45 years which is that abuse is a deal breaker in relationships.
You know significant long-term serious abuse is a deal breaker in long-term relationships and we recognize this you know with husbands and wives.
If the wife has been abused by the husband for many years then she should probably get out and get help and get therapy and so on.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
out in the book that the biblical commandment to honor thy mother and thy father does not take into account whether or not they're abusive.
And it's something because, you know, in my sort of show, a couple of times people have called in complaining of abuse and I've sort of said, well, you don't get to therapy and so on.
But remember, you know, if they're real monsters, you don't actually have to see them as an adult.
It's not a legal requirement that you see your parents and so on, which would be uncontroversial if it were a sort of marital relationship between adult children and their parents.
And so just the way that you explicated this in the book, which I thought was really good, it just gave me this kind of a, oh, well, it comes from this commandment, which doesn't take into account any issues of abuse.
So what are your thoughts on that?
Well, it certainly serves many parents well if they want to control their children.
There is actually one passage in Corinthians that says, you must honor your parents in all things.
I mean, you know, the There are no exceptions if your parents are abusive.
If they're so mentally ill, they can't take care of you.
I mean, the list goes on.
You know, I do think, too, that a lot of people just, you know, if they were abused as children, they're so struggling and desperate for their parents' love and affection.
It's ingrained in them to such a degree, and Alice Miller writes about this a lot, that they really do have a hard time Looking at those adults that they do love and see them for what they've actually done to them.
That's psychologically, I'm sure, an extremely difficult thing.
But we also have to acknowledge that part of that comes from this indoctrination of this idea that children, their duty is to honor parents In all things.
And then, as far as the relationships you talked about, I mean, you do see the same kind of thing in these authoritarian cultures because they're always patriarchal.
And you have these religious doctrines that support the idea that a woman doesn't have the right to question her husband.
So, you know, you do have women who are abused, having real difficulty in looking at that person they've married and criticizing them or viewing them in a healthy way.
Oh, yeah.
And again, I think you captured this beautifully in the book, well, beautifully, compellingly, where you talked about – I'm not sure you put it quite this way.
So please, you know, if I'm getting your sentiments wrong, just correct me, of course.
But you talked, I think, about the story of Billy Graham's mother – Billy Graham, for those who are not in North America, is a very, I think, pretty much the most famous and influential American pastor of the last, I don't know, 800 years.
How old is he?
He's still alive, I think.
No, he might have died recently, but he's influenced presidents and he's been a televangelist for many years.
But his mother was proud to overcome her own instincts and to not intervene when Billy Graham's dad was beating the living crap out of him as a boy by basically saying, well, you know, the father is the head of the household.
He is inspired by God.
It is my duty to obey the husband as he obeys God and so on.
And her natural instincts to intervene when her child is being beaten were really, and pridefully I got the sense of in the passage you quoted, squelched by this sense of religious duty and obligation and in the same way when you talk about the very powerful chapter that you have on female and male circumcision, The woman who says to the doctor, you know, if I'd had a gun when you were cutting the tip of my boy's penis off, I think I would have shot you.
She says, I would have shot you, not even I think.
The power of ideology to overcome what I think most biologists would say are pretty primal human instincts to take care of a young, to protect them from harm and so on, is incredibly powerful and I think gives light to the fact that people say, well, these doctrines have no influence on parenting.
Right, especially if the person is raised with those doctrines from birth.
And again, I think it goes back to this idea that a child, and then later an adult, will receive love, whether it's God's love, a parent's love, or a religious leader's love, that all of that will be theirs if they follow these rules, and if they are Uh, completely obedient.
So, you know, Mrs. Graham, uh, was proud of herself because she was doing what she had been taught was, was the right thing to do.
Was, uh, and, and, and as a result of her obeying that, you know, there was some reward there in terms of, uh, uh, people, people respecting her, uh, or appreciating her.
I, you know, I can't, I can't talk about her on a, on a very individual level.
I didn't know the woman and I, I, I just read her autobiography, but that one particular passage did, I think, really point out how subtle these kinds of influences are, where there's actually a reward for not recognizing a child's need for protection, for safety, for the need to develop one's mind, and that kind of thing.
And I think if the parent is brought up with that from birth, then you're just going to see this cycle continuing.
Yeah, just by the by.
I mean, reading one of the hugely influential books in my life was Paul Johnson's Intellectuals.
I don't know if you've ever read it, but it's a sort of a history of the childhood and adulthood and moral choices of some very prominent intellectuals in the 20th century.
And reading the history of the childhood histories of US presidents and so on, I mean, the amount of unprocessed pathology in public figures makes you wonder if the entirety of society might just be incredibly traumatized and not notice it.
It's just a minor point there.
I think the book has been out, is it two years now?
No, one year.
One year.
How's it going?
How's your baby doing in the world?
What kind of feedback are you getting?
Obviously, you've got some incredibly glowing feedback from me.
Of course, I know that's all that matters to you, but from the people who've reviewed the book are giving a very positive feedback.
I imagine, though, that there may have been a darker whiplash to the book's reception.
How's that been going?
I think so far, the folks that really need to hear about these problems haven't.
So, majority of people that have read it are those who are survivors themselves, those who work with children and have been concerned about these problems, including clergy.
So, yes, I've gotten a lot of very positive feedback and people express a lot of gratitude that it's out.
One woman When I gave a talk at the First Baptist Church of Austin, a woman came up to me at the end, quite emotional, and she said, thanks for giving it a name.
I think that in and of itself has given people something to hold on to, to understand that there's this recognized abusive pattern that they were victimized by.
I want more people to read this book or at least hear about the issue who need to hear about it.
And so one thing that I'm doing is trying to reach out to religious leaders.
I think most of those who want to hear about it, as well as churches and religious organizations, tend to be progressive and liberal, and my hope is that I can I can sort of pass this information off to them and have them figure out the right way to approach the more conservative believers and the more extremist believers whose communities are where these problems are occurring.
Right.
And if you don't mind me asking a mildly personal question, as you mentioned at the beginning of the book, you came in, you know, and I don't mean to trivialize your history with a pat summation, but secular Judaism kind of under the radar, going to synagogue once in a while, not particularly religious.
Has your worldview changed?
I mean, the research, the interviews, I mean, how has your worldview changed?
I assume it has to some degree over the course of researching and writing this book.
Well, I can't really say that it has.
I can say I've been astounded by the intensity of religiosity I didn't realize existed in this country, where people believe that if they beat a child then demons are going to escape out of their body.
I mean that to me is just incredibly bizarre and extremist.
And many other beliefs and behaviors that are just customary at a certain point.
Circumcision is a great example where we find it abhorrent and abusive that people would conduct female genital cutting even if it's a very mild version of it.
And yet, to do a similar version or even more extreme version, which is the complete removal of the poor-skinned babies, is okay.
To me, it's just shocking.
And a lot of that is not even religiously motivated, although there are some Christian-based beliefs that gave rise to both girls and boys being cut in this country in the early part of the century, and it extended even until the 60s and some believe beyond.
The Blue Cross was covering clitoridectomies in the 1970s.
So, you know, something is customary.
If it's what everybody is doing, binding children's feet in China, I mean, I'm just amazed that people are willing and will fight to keep doing something because everyone else is doing it, even though it's incredibly abusive.
And then, of course, all the teachers and preachers and parents in the world will say to children who want to follow the crowd, well, if everyone jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?
Sorry about your foreskin.
Anyway, sorry, that's a minor thing that I just always remember being told not to follow the crowd by people who were reproducing some rather crazy cultural beliefs themselves.
That probably was when the children were being bad and you wanted to join them, so they were trying to talk you out of it.
That's a group we don't agree with.
And it was something that, again, the book has, it had these little lightning strikes for me of clarity where you point, I think it was a Baptist church that you were talking about, when a child, you know, because they have these two or three hour services of droning.
I remember I was in the church choir when I was in boarding school in England and I mean these services just, I mean, it was like I think I got a, I think they were really designed to give you a taste of what purgatory was like so that you'd avoid it.
But they point out, you point out in the book that the belief is, in some circles, that if a child disrupts the service, that's not actually the child who's doing it.
It's the devil.
It's the devil working through the child.
And so when you assault a child, when you attack the child, even if you just terrify the child with streams of verbal abuse and threats, you're actually saving the child from the devil who is attempting to disrupt his path to heaven.
And again, that's a kind of weird Darth Vader helmet of perspective to put on.
But the way you describe it in the book, it actually had a real click moment for me where I really do understand it is a twisted kind of love.
I mean, I hate to say this, but it's a twisted kind of love in a way.
Was that your experience at all in thinking about this or writing about it?
I can only say about that that, you know, maybe psychologically they're distancing themselves from their love of their child to be able to attribute this bad thing to this third party demon or evil force.
But, you know, I think that when there are pressures for people to control their children and, for example, not cry in a service, not fidget in a service and that kind of thing, you know, there can be all kinds of justifications so that parents feel okay about whether it's feeding the crap out of their kids or locking them in a room for three days or whatever the punishment might be.
But it struck me like, you know, if your kid has, you know, I say God forbid, if your kid has leukemia, you go through chemotherapy or something, that's very painful and unpleasant for your child, but it's with the purpose of saving him.
And if you genuinely do believe in the devil, the devil's going to take the soul of your child.
It could be kind of like a chemotherapy argument that if they genuinely believe it, and it's hard to know exactly what religious people believe, it's hard to know what anyone believes, it's hard to know what religious people actually believe and what they're just quoting, but I can certainly see that if you accept the essence of the argument that the devil is trying to take your, you know, you're in this cosmic tug of war for the soul of your child and the only way to drive the devil out is to chastise the child physically.
Again, if you kind of put that belief system in place, I don't believe it's objectively morally justified, but I could see how you could Find it a good action.
And again, I know this is, I always try and put myself in the other person's shoes, you know, it's strange and uncomfortable that they may be at times, but I think, and I'm not saying that you would call this love or any kind of benevolent treatment, obviously it's not, it's completely abusive, but I can see how the perspective could work in that way.
So much of this abuse is perceived by the perpetrator as being good for the child.
If I cleanse my child of sin or get this demon out of the body, I make that child more heaven worthy.
What more could a parent do for a child?
So, if you have that kind of belief, there's really no end to what can be done if they have that kind of belief.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think that is what's the biggest hurdle to get over and why I
I feel like I must rely on people of faith to try to translate this message in a way that can be perceived and understood and absorbed, is because I think most rational people couldn't even get their arms around the idea that by putting this person through this ritual where they have to walk through a ring of fire and that kind of thing,
is actually good for that child or we're going to pray over this child who really just needs some insulin to save their life.
That mindset is very difficult, I think, for any loving parent who is educated, hasn't been raised in that kind of culture to really understand.
But yeah, having this perception that they're actually helping their child, I think is incredibly insidious and makes these kinds of abuses really hard to stop.
Oh yeah, and certainly I think anyone with a more secular perspective sees any parent standing over their quivering child with a belt and will say that the only devil in the room is the parent.
There's nothing else that's motivating it.
Now, you didn't seem to touch on this in the book, and this may be an unfair question to lob at you from the sidelines, but you can bat it away if it's irrelevant, but certainly some of the people that you talked to who were the SNAP organizer and some of the other people you talked to had lost their faith or gained their reason or however they had become atheists or agnostics or maybe even deists you could say.
Did you talk with anyone about the relationship that they had with their parents when they lost their faith because I think that of course is a particularly challenging transition point for religious families if you have a child who becomes an atheist or secularist or someone secular humanist Because, of course, if the parent is truly committed to the faith, then he's going to burn in hell, you know, the devil won, they're never going to be together after life.
I mean, even if you, you know, it's like, oh, you're an atheist, good, you're only gay, good, I thought you might be an atheist or something.
But did you have any sense of how any of those conversations went or what happened with, I mean, it just seems weird to me to choose an imaginary friend over your own flesh and blood.
That's just my perspective.
Did you have any conversations with people about if they came out as non-religious to religious parents?
Oh, sure!
And the decision to do that, you know, depends on all sorts of things having to do with their particular relationship.
Some people are going to feel uncomfortable with that Well, I would say if the parents are still part of the belief system, then I can't imagine anyone feeling comfortable with saying that if they actually want to pursue a great relationship with their parents.
The problem, of course, is that if the parents are still part of this authoritarian belief system, that the adult child is taking a huge risk by discussing it with the parents.
Oftentimes they don't even get that opportunity because, as you say, if the child has left the faith, and again back to that dissent from the Supreme Court decision regarding the Amish taking their kids out of school, I mean he pointed out that when somebody leaves, in that case the Amish faith, again I'm just pretty much talking about the more conservative plans, they are believed to be bound for hell and they are
Very often completely cut off from the social network.
So they may not even have the opportunity to have any kind of discussion with the parents.
It's usually relegated to something like, well, just so I can coexist with them and say, see my nieces and nephews or younger siblings or something like that, you know, I'll wear the get up, you know, I'll, I'll go along with the customs and that kind of thing.
I'll just do what I have to do to keep the relationship going.
Um, No, but again, it's like coming out to parents.
If somebody is gay, I mean, you know, it's going to take all different forms depending on what their relationship is like and how the parents have or have not evolved.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this cutting off of unbelieving or atheistic children or agnostic children or children maybe who've joined another faith, I mean, it's a truly horrible fulfillment of Jesus' promise to Come as a sword and cut off family ties and so on.
It's tragic.
I always try to come up with some intelligent questions, not talk too much about what I believe.
Is there anything that you wanted to mention?
Any future projects?
Any speaking engagements?
Anything else that you'd like to talk about?
Remember, it's ReligiousChildMalTreatment.com or as you said, BreakingTheirWills.com which can get you to the books.
What's going on for you next?
Well, I first do want to point out that the second to last chapter of my book does propose solutions to eradicating religious child maltreatment, so it's not all bad news.
As far as my speaking events, I'm thrilled to say that I will be going to the UK in November and giving talks there, and I'm really looking forward to that because I think it'll be really interesting to compare the reception there to what is here in the United States.
But yeah, I have been doing that as well as forming associations with, as I said, religious leaders as well as humanist clergy.
trying to reach out to parents and teachers and first responders, child protective services, law enforcement, and that kind of thing, to help them to identify when a child is being religiously abused.
One partnership that I've formed is Child Protection Institute, which is going to provide training for members of the clergy and teachers and others who work with kids.
So there's a lot of work to be done.
Right.
Well, I mean, I really wanted to...
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for the work that you did on this book.
It's a grim subject matter to tackle.
It's a controversial subject matter to tackle.
And I really wanted to just express my huge appreciation, you know, carbon-based life form to carbon-based life form for shining a light on this area because as so many atheists, I'm not putting you in this category necessarily, but as so many people who are not believers have pointed out, there does seem to be kind of a get out of jail free wall around certain there does seem to be kind of a get out of jail free wall
And I think that we really need to start to expose some of this stuff and to remind people that where there is this authoritarianism, this demand for obedience and so on, there is a great deal of potential.
As you point out, a great woman has been on my show, Elizabeth Gershoff, she pointed out that There are significant issues where abuse arises out of the desire to discipline.
Where there is a stronger need for discipline and control, you know atheist abuse is all just chaos, religious abuse is a lot more about control, there is this great danger for escalation and it is not inherent in religiosity but it is inherent in a lot of people's interpretation of religiosity and I think we need to not, we need to stay focused on the effects, the objective psychological and physical effects on the child And just step around the belief system because the belief system can be a kind of maze of mirrors that can disorient us.
Exactly.
And I always start out each section of the book defining what is physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and so on.
These things are definable.
It's possible for people just to learn if they get on the web what constitutes Uh, abuse of corporal punishment and that kind of thing.
Well, some people think it's all, it's all abusive, but, uh, there, there it's, it's really important to understand what, um, what defines abuse and what defines neglect and that kind of thing.
So we can just look at that and say, okay, yes, as you say, strip away the religious influence and determine, uh, regardless of the, of, of the motivation, uh, of the perpetrator, Was this child a victim and I think if we could just look at things that way We can really do do a lot of good to not let Some of these religious beliefs get in the way of helping kids and protecting them and keeping them safe Yeah, I mean everyone to me.
It's just I call it the Harvey principle.
I don't know if you've ever seen that movie with James Stewart has got the big giant invisible rabbit that follows him around and tells him what to do.
I took very seriously when I was reading about Voltaire, reading Voltaire's work.
I think it was in the 18th century they had this whole genre of literature where space aliens or I guess from them it was like savages from the new world or so on.
People who'd never been to France would come to France and just everything would be incomprehensible and ridiculous to them because it was their way of trying to get people's perspective out as you've talked about this historical Indiana Jones giant ball momentum of history and have us look at the world that we live in with fresh eyes.
And this is a very great challenge.
So I sort of say, well, okay, according to this book, I'm allowed to do this.
And it's like, well, according to Harvey, my pet rabbit, I'm allowed to do this.
It only matters what this is.
It doesn't matter where it came from.
It only matters that this that is happening.
And so again, I want to give you your summation of the book.
But I think that We have to really focus on the events rather than the ideology.
And can we please let go of this irrational fear that our religious freedoms are going to be ripped away at any second?
That has been a big problem in motivating people to do horrible things to kids.
And oftentimes perpetrators are going to proclaim religious freedom as the reason why they did something and why they should have been allowed to do something to kids.
So, I don't know where that comes from.
What seems to me often to be a paranoia are religious freedoms, to me, are not in huge jeopardy and they're certainly not more important than the rights of children to live happy, safe lives.
I think that is a perfect note to end on.
Again, Janet Heimlich, thank you so much for the book.
Thank you so much for your insights, your energy, your time and your commitment.
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