The Sins of Scripture (15 page)

In a
New York Times
magazine story
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about a conservative southern bishop in the Episcopal Church named Peter Lee, who had finally voted to support a gay bishop elected to lead the diocese of New Hampshire, Bishop Lee’s wife, Kristina, was quoted as saying to him, “Peter, do you want to be on the side of the future or of the past?” Bishop Lee voted for the future and received the predictable wrath of his Virginia constituents who, firmly rooted in the past, vowed to defend the “clear teaching of the Bible.” They too will pass, and Peter Lee and others like him will discover that the debate is over and that, for all their struggles, they did finally come down on the side of life.

The Christian ethic is ultimately a life ethic. When behavior enhances life, expands love and calls all parties involved into the experience of a new being, then it must be called good. But when behavior denigrates, uses, violates or diminishes one or more of the parties involved, then it must be called evil. Furthermore, no text from the Bible can ever be used appropriately to validate the prejudiced behavior of homophobia, which is clearly evil. That kind of outcome can never be derived from the “Word of God.”

THE TERRIBLE TEXTS

S
pare the rod and spoil the child” is typical of the way the biblical texts on the opening page of this section are usually quoted. Most people do not know either their source or their literal form. This shorthand version instead has been passed on from generation to generation as a kind of self-authenticating folk wisdom.

These texts are located in a seldom-read part of the Old Testament called Proverbs, which is quite frankly a rather boring book. Thirty-one chapters in length, it is located between the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. It is mostly ignored by the various ecclesiastical lectionaries,
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so it is seldom heard in churches. It is identified by scholars as part of the wisdom tradition of the Jews, made popular in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. It consists for the most part of utterances designed to guide the routine activities of the daily Jewish culture. In Jewish piety this wisdom literature was attributed to King Solomon, building on his reputation as the wisest man in Jewish history. This attribution, however, has no basis in fact. Solomon had actually been dead for at least four hundred years before either Proverbs or the wisdom tradition itself ever came into being, although some of the original sayings may date back to as early as the latter years of the eighth century BCE.

In addition to the verses that underlie the “Spare the rod and spoil the child” dictum, there are a few sayings from the book of Proverbs that have entered our consciousness, though most people are not likely to know their source. Among them would be maxims like “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10) and “A soft answer turns away wrath” (Prov. 15:1) and the suggestion that a friend might be “closer than a brother” (Prov. 18:24).

When Paul wrote in his epistle to the Romans, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head” (12:20), he was quoting Proverbs 25:21–22. In the opening hymn to the divine logos, or the “Word,” in the first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, the author appears to be leaning on a text from the eighth chapter of Proverbs (vv. 22–31).

Although this book has had influence in Christian history, its impact has generally not been recognized by most people. Yet the words from this book suggesting that physical discipline of children is appropriate have played a major role in the history of childrearing and, I would argue, in the history of child abuse. The failure to include these texts in a book seeking to raise consciousness to the “sins of scripture” would be a major oversight.

Words that affirm the rightness of punishment seem to touch something in the human psyche and to illumine something deep in the human experience. If one is the
victim
of corporal punishment, these words suggest a sense of “deserving” and thereby play into a self-negativity that rises from a particular definition of humanity. If one is the
perpetrator
of corporal punishment, these words seem to feed a human need to control, to exercise authority or even to demonstrate that forced submission is a virtue. If our religious tradition suggests that a child is “born in sin,” it is clearly the duty of that child’s parents or their surrogates to curb that willfulness and to control with force that implantation of “the devil.” When this understanding of human life is coupled with an attitude toward the Bible which suggests that its words are in fact holy and divine messages from God, then all criticism is muted. It matters not that child psychologists and child development experts generally condemn this style of parenting. They can be dismissed as “godless people who do not understand the nature of our humanity as the Bible portrays it.” Their insights are also dismissed in the religious segments of our society as “new-fangled learning” that does not value the “traditions of God-fearing people.”

Parents punishing their children for their misdeeds fits comfortably into the view of a God who is also perceived as a parental figure ready to punish sinful adults, or at least to punish the One who is said to be the vicarious substitute for all the people. Is it not of interest that Christians from the very beginning have applied the image of the “Suffering Servant” from Second Isaiah
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to the story of Jesus, so that it is said of him, “With his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5), and “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6)? It sounds very much as if God has a heavenly woodshed reserved for the physical punishment of God’s “wayward children,” or their designated surrogate.

This kind of discipline has been supported through the centuries by a variety of pious claims, allowing it to wear the mask of intellectual and religious credibility. Only in recent decades has Western consciousness been raised on this subject and as that consciousness has risen corporal punishment has begun its inevitable retreat into the past. Yet the glorification of physical discipline for children still lingers in pockets of our culture that, not coincidentally, I believe, tend to be identified with conservative Christian churches. Parochial schools are notorious for their use of physical discipline. The nuns in yesterday’s Catholic schools were in many instances quite clearly feared by the students. When that reality is augmented by the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests that now appears to have been present in shocking, almost epidemic proportions in recent decades, the sickness present in the attitude of the Catholic Church toward children becomes very clear.

Not to be outdone in this evil by the Roman Catholic tradition, in Protestant fundamentalist circles the exultation of corporal punishment is still defended today in the United States by such people as Dr. James Dobson and his “Focus on the Family” organization.
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To press the connection one step further, Philip J. Greven, a Rutgers University professor, has written a book entitled
Spare the Child,
in which he seeks to demonstrate that, almost to a person, the well-known preachers in American history and the popular radio and television evangelists of today have revealed approvingly in their preaching or in autobiographies that they were physically punished regularly as children.
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Dr. Greven has suggested that this life experience helped to shape their evangelical message, which portrays an angry God standing ready to punish sinful people through all eternity unless they repent.

During the late 1990s a task force on children in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, where I was serving as the bishop, chaired by the Reverend Edward Hasse of Montvale, NJ, made a report to the Diocesan Convention. This report included the following resolution presented for debate: “Resolved, that there are no circumstances in which corporal punishment is appropriate as a method of disciplining children.” Prior to the convention this report and its resolution were circulated at the pre-convention meetings, designed to inform delegates of the issues that would be coming before them. It was a normal part of our decision-making process. At this time we discovered that this report had titillated the secular press, which now began to follow this debate rather closely and quite enthusiastically.

When the resolution was ultimately placed before the assembly, the debate was quite revealing. It was for me, as the presiding officer, like watching some six hundred people engaging in a group therapy session. We had people justifying publicly their own behavior as parents by praising their methods of discipline and the ways their own parents had disciplined them. “My father beat me regularly,” said one man well into his seventies, “and it made a man out of me.” Another said, “My children have said to me that the physical discipline I meted out to them was the best thing I ever did for them.” Still another used the old cliché that attempts to turn violence into virtue by insisting that “I did it for their own good and it always hurt me more than it hurt my children.”

Other delegates to this convention, however, spoke in very different tones, as childhood memories emerged through adult voices. These men and women shared their sense of being violated and humiliated in ways that were so deep they had never spoken of it publicly until that very moment. They told of the psychic damage they had sustained, the rage they had felt and the residual anger they still felt as adults. They shared openly feelings of being humiliated anew when their parents would speak of a particular disciplining session to neighbors, friends or extended family in a casual manner as they sought to gain approval for their form of parenting.

The debate was interesting in one other detail and that was how the vote turned out. This was a relatively well educated, socially prominent assembly of approximately 150 clergy and 450 elected lay delegates. Yet no consensus ever emerged and they were not willing to vote the resolution up or down. Finally, in a face-saving leap toward easing the assembly out of this dilemma, the Reverend John Hartnett, a priest from Ridgewood, NJ, offered an amendment. For the words “corporal punishment” in the resolution, he moved to substitute the words “injurious or humiliating treatments” so that the resolution then read: “Resolved, that there are no circumstances in which injurious or humiliating treatments are appropriate as a method for disciplining children.” No one thought their own use of corporal punishment was either “injurious” or “humiliating,” so they leaped on this way of removing the subject from debate. The amendment passed almost unanimously, which in church gatherings means that it falls into the same category as resolutions opposing sin and extolling virtue, or what politicians call “God, motherhood and apple pie” resolutions. It committed no one to anything.

Yet the interest shown, the emotions expressed, the stories shared and the anguish revealed in this debate painted an unforgettable portrait that is still vivid in my mind, for it made clear the levels of inner conflict that still mark so many lives. It also made me wonder why it is that the physical punishment of children is apparently validated by a book called the “Word of God.” More significantly, it caused me to wonder what there is about Christianity itself that has brought about its constant emphasis on God as a punishing deity, its concept of hell as a place of eternal punishment and its portrait of Jesus as the one who took our punishment for us. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is one more biblical injunction that opens a doorway that needs to be entered. In this section of this book, that is exactly what I plan to do.

T
he physical abuse of children under the guise of “proper discipline” has been practiced in Western history for so long and so frequently that it has come to be thought of as normative. It has had the approval of our recognized sources of cultural values—tradition, Bible, church, school and family. It has found expression in popular novels written by such noteworthy nineteenth-century authors as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and by the twentieth century’s ultraconservative political pundit William F. Buckley, who also wrote detective stories when he was not otherwise stating his opinions on current events.
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When some of these novels (not Buckley’s, to be sure) were turned into motion pictures, the scenes in which corporal punishment was administered in school settings were often quite graphic. One thinks of the violence displayed in
Nicholas Nickleby,
for example. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl in my generation can recall the scene from the movie
Tom Sawyer
in which Tom volunteered to take the punishment about to be administered to his girlfriend, Becky, which won for him not just Becky’s devotion, but her words, “Tom, how could you be so noble?”

In the schools of Western history—which were normally church-related, whether parochial or public, given the role of Christianity in Western civilization—corporal punishment was regularly employed until quite recently, certainly within my lifetime. Almost always such punishment was meted out with parental approval.

Reuters News Service in 2004 told the world of a Roman Catholic order of nuns in Ireland, known as the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, who had “apologized unconditionally for the physical and emotional trauma its nuns had inflicted on children raised in its orphanages and schools.” This abuse had been uncovered in a television exposé of enormous maltreatment in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s. An earlier apology that did not go far enough had been rejected by the victims.
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In boarding schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this disciplinary activity sometimes had about it a ritualistic quality and even came to be thought of as a kind of “liturgical observance.”
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That is, the act of discipline was carried out at a certain time. It was scheduled on a particular day for all offenders during a specified period of time for which the school staff prepared the instruments to be used, such as a bunch of bound switches or a freshly cut cane. It was followed through in a prescribed, unchanging and traditional manner. The intended victim or victims would have to wait in fearful anticipation until the proper moment when the price of their misbehavior was exacted. The disciplinary act clearly defined boundaries and made all aware of where authority resided.

In my own experience, as a public schoolboy growing up in the southern Bible Belt, corporal punishment was employed, but much less ritualistically. It was administered on the spot whenever it was deemed essential to control the classroom and as a response to a particular act of misbehavior.
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Although not used frequently, it also followed a set form that we all recognized. I recall in my seventh-grade class, which was the last time I knew such discipline to take place, only two of my classmates were subjected to it during the entire year. The fact, however, that I can still recall both instances some sixty years later indicates that each of these occasions made an indelible, albeit not a positive, impression upon my young mind. Most of us who were not the actual recipients of the punishment were in fact intimidated by it.

The offending student, in both cases a boy twelve or thirteen years old, was asked to accompany the teacher with ruler in hand to the room adjacent to the principal’s office, which was reserved solely for this purpose. That room also happened to be next door to our classroom, so even though we could not observe the act of discipline, we could not fail to hear it. The students remaining in the classroom sat in silence during the period of time it took the teacher and the pupil to reach the required location and to assume the proper positions for discipline. Then the noise of the ruler landing on its target resounded. No cries were ever heard, because proving that he “could take it” preserved the pupil’s last shred of dignity. Finally the blows would cease and in a few minutes the chastened student would return to the class, followed by the teacher, still gripping her ruler. The student, taking his seat, would say something about it “not hurting at all,” a brave attempt to reestablish his place in the social fabric of the class. It always seemed to me, though, that it took the disciplined child a day or so to absorb the humiliation before he began to ease back into the life of the school community.

The teacher used each such episode as a teaching moment, warning the other students that a similar fate awaited each of them if their behavior made it necessary. The ever-present threat that the ruler would be employed again instilled apprehension and fear and developed something of a herd instinct among us all. Instead of enhancing life, it seemed only to bruise fragile egos. It certainly taught by example that physical force was a proper way to deal with those who are smaller and weaker. It surely issued in a more controllable classroom, but it was never, in my opinion, a pathway into maturity.

It is interesting to note what classes of people, besides children, were subjected to corporal punishment during at least some part of the history of our Judeo-Christian world. There were basically four types of adults for whom corporal punishment was deemed, in years past, to be appropriate discipline. The one thing each of these four groups of people had in common was that they were thought to be deserving of the status of a child.

The first category was adult prisoners—those who had violated the rules of the society in such a way as to be judged a threat that must be removed, jailed and punished. I suppose the reasoning process was simple. If physical punishment made schoolchildren more pliable and obedient, to say nothing of being easier to control, then why should the same tactic not be used on those adults who consistently disrupted the well-being of society? So the right to use corporal punishment was written into the penal codes of most Western, and by implication Christian, nations.

The public whipping post was a regular feature in the criminal justice system in nations like Great Britain and the United States until the twentieth century. The last state to make it illegal in America was Delaware in the 1970s. It is still employed to this day in Singapore and in several Muslim nations, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The familiar jail diet of “bread and water” was just another form of corporal punishment; that is, it was the physical punishment of the body.

By extension from the penal codes, physical discipline was used in situations where control was deemed essential to survival. It was a standard practice, for example, on the ships of the colonial powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The whole world was shrunk to the dimensions of an individual boat, with the captain exercising the decision-making responsibility for discipline, indeed sometimes for life and death, with no further appeal. Physical discipline was also employed in the military expedition led by Lewis and Clark across the continental United States on their journey to open the West to the Pacific Ocean. As we saw in the epigraph to this chapter, the diaries from that journey describe what Lewis and Clark believed was the salutary effect of this discipline. There is a sense in which both ships at sea and military expeditions operated with prisonlike rules.

The second class of adults to be treated in this physically abusive manner during our history was slaves. Christians must never forget that even in the New Testament the institution of slavery was accepted as normal. Paul, in his epistle to Philemon, directs a runaway slave named Onesimus to return to his master Philemon, not with the request for his freedom, but with the request that he be treated kindly. In Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, he orders slaves to “obey in everything those who are your earthly masters” (3:22) and urges masters to “treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven” (4:1). With no rights accruing to the slaves, who were defined as subhuman and therefore childlike, it followed that punishment for disobedience was to be administered to slaves in the same manner that it was deemed to be appropriate for children. It is worth noting, even if it is embarrassing, that many church officials including popes have historically been slaveholders.

No one can deny that slaves were lashed in the United States for everything from disobedience to running away. The records of this part of our history are indisputable. The master had the right to do to his property whatever he wished. Slaves had no rights, no legal protections. When slavery ended following the Civil War, these tactics of intimidation continued to be employed against powerless blacks in the South by quasi-religious organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Even the murders of black people who were deemed to be “uppity,” or who looked at a white woman in what whites considered an inappropriate or lecherous manner, were protected by racist police, courts and judges in the segregated South. It is not as large a step as people now think to move from the corporal punishment of a slave or former slave whose bare back absorbed the lash while the victim was tied to a tree, to the ultimate act of corporal punishment called lynching, in which the victim was hanged from that tree. That transition happened more frequently than anyone today is eager to admit. Both physical lashing and lynching were tactics of intimidation acted out on the body of the victim. Violence is always violent. The degree of violence is the only difference. I still carry in my mind’s eye, with deep embarrassment and suppressed horror, the scenes of the beatings and lynchings of both slaves and freed African-Americans that were depicted in the serialized television presentation of the powerful book
Roots
.
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What the inmate and the slave had in common was that neither had power and no vestige of adulthood accrued to their status, meaning that they could be treated like children who had no rights. If it was the proper thing to punish powerless children physically, it must also be appropriate treatment for powerless adults—so went the reasoning. Violence is never contained. It always seeks new victims. Corporal punishment was and is legalized violence.

In the most deeply patriarchal part of our male-dominant Western history, women became the third category of adults who were defined as fit subjects for corporal punishment—but at the hands of their husbands. This exercise of power was carried out with the full approval of both the state and the church. A husband could beat his wife whenever the husband deemed it beneficial or expedient to do so. She was, if not his property like a slave, at most his ward, with no more status than a dependent child. Physical abuse of one’s spouse is not unknown today, but it is now called “domestic violence” and is recognized as a crime for which both arrest and incarceration are seen as appropriate.

That, however, has not always been the case. A book written by Suzanne Fonay Wemple, a medieval historian, made me aware for the first time that one of the primary functions of nunneries in the early Middle Ages was to be a safe haven to which an abused woman could retreat.
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Not even the power of the male in a rigidly patriarchal society could invade the domain of the Mother Superior! Modern readers, both male and female, whose sense of history is rather short, blink in disbelief when reading of the accepted domestic violence during this period of history. Perhaps they need to be reminded that the word “obey,” as a part of the bride’s sacred vows to her husband, was in almost every wedding ceremony in every part of the Christian church until well into the twentieth century. The word “obey” implies dependent submission to the authority of the one who requires it, and it carries with it the implicit threat that the failure to obey will bring upon the disobedient one the power of enforcement. Society in that day deemed physical discipline the necessary means of enforcement. The word “obey” did not get removed from the wedding ceremony in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer until 1928. It was mandated for the bride alone, of course. It was inconceivable that the groom would take a vow of obedience. The prevailing social system would never have approved that. Because the 1662 Prayer Book of the Church of England is still in use in England and throughout the nations that once constituted the British Empire, the word “obey” is still, to this day, required of the bride in many English-speaking marriage ceremonies the world over. Wherever it is used, wherever obedience is assumed to be appropriate, the subservient person is deemed to be dependent, childlike and by implication an appropriate recipient of the discipline of the authority figure. That was the fate of women for more centuries than most of us would be happy admitting today.

There is no question that the definition of a woman as a dependent child, subject to her husband’s authority, is one of those legacies from the Christian past that has had to be challenged first and dismantled second. Perhaps that helps to explain why it was that the conservative parts of the Christian church resisted so deeply and so emotionally the women’s liberation movement, with its goal of the total emancipation of women. Even today in the Catholic tradition women are in many ways still treated as second-class citizens. The embarrassment of this attitude in a world where consciousness has been raised on this issue has resulted in some rather convoluted rationalizations that hint at an ecclesiastical version of the old racist slogan “separate but equal” as this church seeks to defend continuing anti-female practices.

In the evangelical wing of Protestant Christianity leaders have accused the women’s liberation movement of being home-breaking, family-violating, godless and lesbian assaults on traditional values.
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At every stage along the way, from the suffrage movement that won for women the right to vote in 1920, to the battle to make birth control and abortion legal in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Christian church has been a vigorous opponent.