I became a mother

Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him

Proverbs 22:15

I read a lot of parenting books when Moses was a baby because I had not yet discovered the joys of owning a smartphone I wanted to be a thoughtful and skilled parent, and study therefore seemed necessary. I started with the books I’d been recommended by family and church friends, such as To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debi Pearl, and Tedd Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, both of which explain, in Hemant Mehta’s words, “how to properly hit your kids.” The premise of these books is fairly simple: my darling child was basically an evil heart wrapped in adorable toddler flesh, and it was my job (Alan’s too, of course, although no one saw fatherhood as being his primary responsibility) to smack the sin out of him – preferably with a stick, if I wanted to take the Bible literally/seriously – to win him over from Satan’s side to God’s.

EASY PEASY!

(To be fair, I'm not sure any of these authors argue that smacking your children should come easily. Tripp, at least, suggests that you should wait until you’re feeling calm before whacking your child, and that the whacking should only happen after you’ve patiently explained to said child that it makes you very sad to have to do what you’re about to do. Apparently it’s best if, on top of being hit, kids also feel shame and guilt for forcing you to hurt them even though you really didn’t want to. It’s sort of like an emotional abuse cherry on top of a physical abuse poo-cake. Let’s continue.)

The child’s problem is not an information deficit. His problem is that he is a sinner. There are things within the heart of the sweetest little baby that, allowed to blossom and grow to fruition, will bring about eventual destruction.

From Tedd Tripp’s Shepherding a Child's Heart

Despite having enthusiastically immersed myself in evangelical Christianity, I wasn’t convinced by these arguments. I understood early on that my son’s behaviour was an attempt to communicate with those around him rather than evidence that he was, in fact, in cahoots with the Devil. It was clear to me, even back then, that any difficulties he had with being a pleasant person were developmental and not a sign that original sin was an actual thing. As for the hitting encouraged by the books (as well as several relatives of ours), I’d experienced the violent approach to behaviour management myself as a child and found that it diminished rather than encouraged respect for my parents. I was keen to be able to justify each parenting decision I made (to myself, to my kids, to others), and smacking seemed unjustifiable; I imagined myself explaining to my impressionable toddler that it was never okay to hit another person, except for the times when I hit him in order to impart a valuable lesson about how hitting other people is something you should definitely never do, and decided that a) my head would surely implode from all the sense I was failing to make, and b) I’d be encouraging Moses to grow up believing any nonsense told him by any authority figure. I was okay with neither of these outcomes. 

Having said that, it was obvious that the upside to smacking was that smacked children feared being smacked and therefore followed their parents’ instructions more readily than the children who were not scared of their parents and therefore engaged them in long debates about the need for pants and/or preschool. Smacked/scared children appeared, by society’s superficial standards, to be “good” because they did what they were told immediately, while non-smacked/non-scared children appeared “bad” because they “talked back to” and “disobeyed” their parents’ “orders.” I had to accept that whilst my child may look “bad” to many of the people around us who measured appropriate child behaviour based purely on adults’ feelings or convenience, I was interested in long-term results rather than short-term glory, and that respectful and gentle parenting was the only approach I could take with any integrity. 

I wanted to work alongside Mo as his equal – in terms of our shared humanness – guiding, listening to, being changed by, and empowering him. We ditched words like “obedience” (focussing instead on the importance of listening to others), encouraged questions (“Pants, my darling, are important because…”), and put our efforts into modelling non-violence and kindness and respect (or aiming to, at least; we still regularly, and often spectacularly, fail at it, but remain hopeful that our kids will have picked up the general gist, and at least be very good at apologising by the time they’ve left home). 

Time passed, Hazel joined our family, and I – inspired by books like Faber and Mazlish’s wonderful How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk and Alfie Kohn's annoyingly impractical but thought-provoking Unconditional Parenting – had begun to challenge not only the idea of punishments, but also the idea of rewards; both, after all, are tools adults use to manipulate the behaviour of others, focussing on extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation. I wanted Mo and Hazel to grow into adults who chose what was right and good and kind and respectful because they genuinely cared about others, rather than because they were scared of authority figures whacking them (literally or metaphorically) if they didn’t, or because they were driven by whatever benefits awaited them if they did. I still want this now.

(I’ll pause here briefly to point out that both of my children are neurotypical, and flirting with the idea of ditching rewards and punishments was only possible for this reason. I’m super aware that different brains benefit from different approaches, and I’m not arguing for or against particular ways of parenting. I’m by no means an expert; I can’t even figure out how to raise children who’ll unpack a dishwasher or pick up their Lego without groaning and whining as if they’re experiencing a level of suffering previously unknown to humankind. If sugar and/or Netflix didn’t exist, we’d be completely screwed. Just so you know.)(Also, to be clear, the sugar and Netflix are for me.)

For those of you wondering why the flip I’m banging on about parenting approaches in a series about losing my religion, I’m pleased to tell you that I’m finally at the point I’ve been dying to make since the start of this post: in refining my views on what it meant to parent my own children well, I found that I’d been simultaneously unconsciously re-examining my long-held beliefs about what God was like as a “Heavenly Father.” If I’d decided that harsh punishments were ineffective tools for connecting with and guiding children, how could I make sense of hell? And how could God possibly be okay with it (I mean, we were told He was sad about it, but certainly not sad enough to use His unlimited power to destroy it)? No matter how awful my kids were or would ever be, I knew I’d never burn them as punishment, or tell them that they’d run out of chances to please me and were therefore banished from my sight forever with no possibility of future reconciliation (whichever your view of hell). Did me disagreeing with God’s harsh approach make me a better parent than God?! 

As I wrestled with these questions, God increasingly seemed less like a loving “Heavenly Father” and more like a desperate dude using outdated and abusive tactics to control the behaviour of his kids. The children’s Bible we were reading to Moses at the time - The Big Picture Bible – didn’t bring any comfort; the text on one of its pages describing God’s anger towards His people is followed, on the opposite page, by a picture of a man looking aggressive and mean, chasing a woman, who’s protecting herself from him. After hearing about God’s displeasure, four-year-old Mo looked at the picture for a long time, then pointed at the man and asked, “Is that God?” 

I was stunned. “No, buddy!” I told him. “God isn’t violent. God is love!” 

Actually, the Bible told me both that God was love and that God was violent. I hadn’t yet made sense of how to marry these contradictory ideas into a version of God I was happy following or introducing to my children. I lied both for Mo’s sake, and for my own.

Gradually, I noticed that none of the qualities I was going for as a parent consistently described God, so being “godly” was no longer a goal I cared to aim for. Even if you ignored the violent sections of the Bible and focussed solely on God’s kinder side, He’s best known for calming His rage at humanity by killing a person (His son, specifically, although, to be fair, His son is also Him. It’s quite confusing). Someone who says wise and lovely things every now and then but later kills his child/himself when he’s angry is kind of a terrible role model for parents.

In such moments, when examining God’s unethical behaviour becomes uncomfortable, we’re encouraged to look instead at Jesus and his behaviour, because, again, Jesus is God. The approachable version. I couldn’t picture Jesus as a parent, though; he was always the Son, and God was the Father (except because they were the one person, Jesus both had an abusive father and was the abusive father [honestly, it’s very confusing]). Also, Jesus was definitely male, and, according to every church minister we’d had up until that point, God was too, so I didn’t feel that either of them could fully grasp my experience of miscarrying, birthing, feeding, and mothering children in a patriarchal world. If God was no longer a role model for me (instead demonstrating how not to wield parental power), nor someone who could comprehend my perspective and therefore provide the right-shaped guidance or comfort when I needed it, why would I want to spend any time with Him? Was the fear of hell the only thing keeping me hanging on? Wasn’t I therefore acting with God in the same way that smacked children acted with their parents, following the rules and feigning respect out of both fear of punishment and the desire to impress churchy onlookers? 

I started to skip particular stories when reading the Bible with my children, accepting at last that the Bible was not G-rated. The stories covered at Sunday school so often centred around people dying – everyone but Noah’s family being drowned in the flood, David murdering Goliath, Jesus being crucified, etc. – and the few stories about women usually involved them being treated appallingly by men. I found it increasingly difficult to use the Bible to teach Moses and Hazel an ethical code that I was 100% on board with, and so, gradually, we read other stories instead. They didn’t seem to notice. (I talk more about deconstructing the Bible in this post.)

I ended up discarding the doctrine of hell because I couldn’t (wouldn’t) explain it to my kids. Mothering not only forced me to confront the parts of God I’d been able to ignore before finding myself in god-like authority over small people, it also forced me to decide which parts of my faith I wanted to pass on to them, why, and when.

Does the one who told us to love our enemies intend to wreak vengeance on his own enemies for all eternity?

From Clark Pinnock’s The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent

It was actually easy to let go of hell. I was barely two paragraphs into Clark Pinnock’s argument against it before signing up to annihilationism (the theory that non-Christians will be snuffed out upon death rather than forced to endure everlasting torment), and I never looked back. It didn’t come up often, honestly; I don’t remember hearing much about it at church. There was no reason to announce my new position or stockpile arguments in its favour. It was one of the easiest pieces of my faith-structure to take down.

I hadn’t mentioned the concept to either of my children yet; at first, I thought I’d introduce it later on, when they were less likely to wake me in the middle of the night crying about it. I’d also wanted to allow them time to explore a gentle and kind version of God as someone who cared for them completely and unconditionally, rather than the volatile, “I’ll-only-love-you-if-you-do-what-I-say” version I’d grown up with. I wanted them to feel free to choose God because they liked God, because they thought God was good, rather than them choosing God because He’d used threats of eternal suffering to coerce them into it. 

Later, thinking about parenting, and punishments-as-behaviour-manipulators, it seemed so clear to me that hell was the Christian version of the Santa Claus story (“He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”). Then, as my views on rewards-as-behaviour-manipulators also began to shift, I saw heaven in the same way, too. Slowly, gently, I pulled down that block as well. I wanted to know for sure that I was making decisions based on genuine compassion for others rather than a sneaky knowledge that I’d eventually be rewarded for my behaviour after kicking the bucket. So there I was: no hell, and no heaven. It felt liberating to finally accept that death was the very end.

Whilst for some months I faced niggly worries that my new views on the afterlife – or lack thereof – would turn out to be wrong, I’d become so opposed to the idea of a God who’d punish me forever for questioning His approach to universe-ruling that opting out of His game completely – no hell, no heaven – felt like the most ethical decision I could make. It also made no sense to me that God expected me to run to Him to solve a dilemma that He’d created: God was the only one who could possibly save me from… God’s wrath? Surely His anger issues were the actual problem in this scenario, so why involve me at all? I had enough on my plate already. I didn’t want to spend an eternity with such a God; I was uncertain about many things, but this was not one of them. 

I wondered if I’d waver at all when faced with the death of a loved one, but my grandfather’s passing revealed that I didn’t feel the need to imagine him singing hymns somewhere, waiting for us all to join him eventually. We’d had our lovely and frustrating time together in this world, and now that time was over. I was grief-stricken, of course, but also at peace.

I no longer fear death, now that I know eternity won’t be waiting on the other side. I’m not particularly keen to die (hurrah for health after years of depression!), and I hope I’m old and exhausted by life before death arrives for me, but I accept that it’s a given, like grey hairs and wrinkles and the increasing desire to nap during the daytime. 

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It’s been so long now that find it hard to remember what it was like to stress about eternity – both for me and for those around me – so thoroughly and so regularly, although I try to put myself back in those shoes to empathise with family members who still weep when considering my eternal destiny. Their tears suggest that they understand how brutal their God can be, but their solution is always to appease such a God rather than to reject Him and choose a sweeter, gentler option. I’ve tried explaining that their concern for me now leaves me feeling as puzzled as they would feel were I to cry while explaining that a book I was now obsessed with had told me zombies were coming to eat their brains. 

They feel sad that I’ll suffer forever while they’re partying non-stop in heaven, I feel sad that they feel sad, and then we both leave the conversation feeling disconnected and misunderstood. 

My kids don’t live in fear, though. Even if that was the only upside of this process, it would have been completely worth it.