Nate Phelps & Fred Phelps: Religion as Child Abuse, Mental Abuse

Liberal and moderate believers object very strongly to any suggestion that traditional religious dogmas might in any way qualify as emotional or psychological abuse when they are taught to young children. If there is any truth to such an idea, it would most easily be found among those believers who take traditional religious dogmas most seriously — believers who don't try to minimize the dogmas or "reinterpret" them in the light of modern, humanistic ethics.

Nate Phelps was recently interviewed about his history and break with his father, Fred Phelps, and the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. Nate rejected the extreme fundamentalism of his father and so didn't try to impress it upon his own children. However, it appears that what the he did try to teach his children was the straightforward, unadorned truth of Christian dogma with no attempts to soften the message. The results weren't what he expected.

“Every Sunday, I was listening closely and trying desperately to find something in the preaching or in the words that would convince me that this was right. Even while I was doing that, I was always skeptical…but I never voiced it. I was very good at playing the apologist for the Christian faith. In fact, I had quite a reputation for writing and talking in defence of Christianity.”

The turning point was one Christmas, when Nate decided to teach his children about God. In the end, his son Tyler began crying in the backseat of the car, saying that he didn’t want to go to hell.

“He wanted to believe because he didn’t want to go to hell,” Nate said. “I was just stunned because I didn’t know what I had said or how I had left him with that fear. I thought I was doing a good job of presenting it without the fear.

“Thinking about it after the fact, I realized you can’t do that. With a young mind it doesn’t matter. You can try as much as you want to talk about how good God is, but the bottom line is there’s this intolerably frightening punishment if you don’t accept it. And how does a young mind deal with that?”

Source: The Ubyssey

So Nate Phelps didn't go out of his way to teach his children to fear and, in fact, may have managed to avoid raising the issue entirely. That's a long, long way from how his father and his father's church teaches things. Specifically emphasizing any need to fear, though, clearly isn't necessary because as Nate came to realize, teaching people that they will suffer immeasurably for all eternity if they don't believe the correct things can only lead to fear.

Nate agrees with prominent atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins, who has said that religion can be “real child abuse.”

Dawkins tells the story of an American woman who wrote to him. She was raised as a Roman Catholic and was sexually abused by her parish priest in his car. Around the same time, a Protestant school friend of hers died tragically.

“Being fondled by the priest simply left the impression (from the mind of a seven-year-old) as yucky,” she wrote, “while the memory of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never lost sleep because of the priest, but I spent many a night being terrified that the people I loved would go to hell. It gave me nightmares.”

“The threat of eternal Hell is an extreme example of mental abuse,” Dawkins says on his website, “just as violent sodomy is an extreme example of physical abuse.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” asserted Nate. “In so many different ways we have abused children with religion over the centuries.”

For some people, sexual abuse can be a lot more traumatic. For some people, thinking about their friends suffering forever in hell can be less traumatic. Dawkins' argument isn't that religion is always and necessarily worse than physical abuse, though. Dawkins' argument is the far more modest proposition that some religious teachings may be worse on a psychological or emotional level for some children than sexual abuse. Given the above testimonies, it's difficult to think of any basis for denying that position categorically.

It's curious that the people who have howled the loudest in protest of Dawkins' argument are also those who seem to do the most to soften or modify traditional teachings about hell and damnation. It's almost as if they recognize how harmful or even evil those teachings are and so refuse subject their own children to such notions, but as soon as an outsider publicizes what has become an open secret, everyone is up in arms, ready to attack the heretic.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, Nate’s sister, commented on the above article:

At the end of the day, rebel Nate who is a man of the flesh according to the Bible, cannot get it into his head the the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. The child crying over a fear of hell is exactly what is intended by the plain language of the scriptures. You can love that and live that and own that and be one with that, as they say, or you can foolishly fight against that. WHO thinks they can beat God? YIKES! He never one time mentions HIS duty to teach HIS children every day in every way with every thing that does and says what the Lord their God requires of them. God is a consuming fire. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, WE PERSUADE MEN! Just look at the way you two brutes got together and tried to put a fluffy spin on rebellion AND the consenquences thereof.

It sounds an awful lot to me like Shirley Phelps-Roper is arguing that psychological and emotional abuse of children is the point of the Bible. Given how atrocious many of the stories and teachings in that book are, I find it hard to argue against her — but rather than treat this as license to engage in abuse, I treat that as a reason to reject the Bible and seek guidance or inspiration in more moral sources.

I think other Christians at least unconsciously agree and this is one reason why they aren't flocking to churches like Phelp's. Unfortunately, they can't completely let go of ancient superstitions so they continue to cling to the Bible by reinterpreting in ways that more closely match morals, ethics, and standards what would have been foreign and abhorrent to the original authors. In effect, they want the authority of the Bible behind ethics that have little or nothing to do with the Bible.