Authoritarian Parenting: Obey Whom?

“If you don’t teach your children to obey you, then they will not obey the other authorities in their lives - including God - when they are adults.” 

 

~ Literally every “christian” authoritarian parenting guru ever

 

Look in my eyes

What do you see?

The cult of personality

I know your anger, I know your dreams

I've been everything you want to be

Oh, I'm the cult of personality

 

Like Mussolini and Kennedy

I'm the cult of personality

The cult of personality

The cult of personality

 

Neon lights, a Nobel prize

When a mirror speaks, the reflection lies

You won't have to follow me

Only you can set me free

I sell the things you need to be

I'm the smiling face on your TV

Oh, I'm the cult of personality

 

I exploit you, still you love me

I tell you, one and one makes three

Oh, I'm the cult of personality

Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi

I'm the cult of personality

The cult of personality

The cult of personality

 

Neon lights, a Nobel prize

When a leader speaks, that leader dies

You won't have to follow me

Only you can set you free

 

You gave me fortune, you gave me fame

You gave me power in your god's name

I'm every person you need to be

Oh, I'm the cult of personality

 

~ Living Color - “Cult of Personality” 

***

 

This is another installment in my Authoritarian Parenting series. You can find the others in my index of posts about toxic religion.

 

Here is the question:

 

What is the ultimate goal of authoritarian parenting? 

 

Well, to create humans who are docile and obedient, never questioning or talking back to authority. 

 

Who is that authority?

 

Well…that’s the real question isn’t it? 

 

OBEY WHOM?

 

In the short term, obviously, it is easier as a parent to have little compliant robots, particularly if (as I suspect is true for a lot of parenting gurus) you don’t actually like children, and wish they would just leave you alone. 

 

So there’s that. Never mind that it doesn’t actually work. Children have an astonishing ability to be human and resist becoming robots. And they are incredibly skilled at irritating parents - it’s in the union contract, I am pretty sure. 

 

But the long game is about something else entirely. That question of “obey whom?” is the key to understanding why the Religious Authoritarian Parenting industry was created and why it continues to be maintained. 

 

***

 

The usual explanation given by the Parenting Gurus is that the most important thing a child needs to learn is to obey, so that the child will be an adult who obeys God. 

 

This is problematic both as an idea and in practice.

 

After all, there seems to be a distinct lack of burning bushes and pillars of fire in our time. 

 

Furthermore, if someone claims to literally hear the voice of God, we rightly view them with suspicion and even alarm. Why?

 

Well, that “voice of God” seems more often than not to be telling people “murder your family to save them from the Devil.” Not good. 

 

Which is why, with our current scientific knowledge, we label this as mental illness, not an actual voice from the Divine. 

 

Even the parenting gurus do not literally intend to create followers who hear literal voices they think is God. In fact, if people were to follow a literal voice of God, that would be a problem for the gurus. 

 

The WORST thing that could happen is a generation of humans actually following Christ. 

 

Instead, the REAL goal is unquestioning obedience to certain approved humans. 

 

As a child, I was taught about some of these “approved” humans to obey. For example, teachers (which is fine - kids, you generally should behave for your teachers!) Or the police (which, most of the time, probably not an issue in our current society.) 

 

But the other two are really problematic. 

 

First, you are expected as an adult to obey certain approved religious leaders. In order to be approved, these religious leaders need to hold certain theological views (and only those theological views.) 

 

In other words, the goal is that a person be trained to obey another person who claims to speak for God.

 

That’s it. That’s the goal. Obey a human who has a god complex without questioning, talking back, or having a “bad attitude.” 

 

That’s the definition of authoritarianism, naturally. Someone else gets to take on the role of god in your life. 

 

So, disagreeing with one’s parents on theology is a huge problem, even as an adult child. This literally led to my mother threatening me with hell on my last birthday, because I was not “walking in truth.” (The specifics are beyond the scope of this post, but you can probably guess some if you read this blog regularly.) 

 

As I have discussed in other posts, there is no such thing as One True Interpretation™ of scripture - at every level, there is human involvement. Human decisions as to which ideas to embrace and which to reject - because everyone picks and chooses. There are zero exceptions. The loyalty in this case is to specific human doctrines and teachings which have risen to the level of ideology, immune from challenge or reconsideration. 

 

Second, certain right wing politicians are considered legitimate authorities. Specifically, right wing Republicans with certain views about race, religion, gender, and economics. As many of us have noted, there are never any consequences for clergy or congregation for moving further to the right. But any step even remotely to the left is immediately punished. 

 

You can even see this split in our recent Covid epidemic, where white Evangelicals were the worst at refusing basic public health measures such as masking and staying home when sick. Why? Well, the authorities weren’t seen as “legitimate.” They weren’t right wing enough. Too “woke.” 

 

Sense a trend here? 

 

If you wonder why white Evangelicals so completely embraced worship of Donald Trump, this is a significant reason. They have been primed for two generations to “obey approved authority.” (And, in my experience, parents who embrace authoritarian parenting are actually the ones who are most conditioned by the experience toward blind obedience of approved authorities.) 

 

In a previous installment, I talked about this as being the way to create the perfect concentration camp guard, who would “follow orders” regardless of their morality. 

 

It helps to understand that the goal of Authoritarian Parenting is thoroughly POLITICAL. It is to maintain an ideology of hierarchy - men above women, white people above everyone else with black people at the bottom, rich over poor, Americans over everyone else, cultural fundamentalists over liberals, and so on. 

 

What a reactionary movement like the Religious Right needs is foot soldiers who obey without questioning, without talking back, without thinking too hard about the morality of what they are being asked to do. 

 

And thus, the REAL goal of Authoritarian Parenting isn’t what it claims to be at all. God has nothing to do with it. Certain men (and they are mostly men) want to be like gods, and have compliant minions to help them fulfil their political goals and express their power.

 

It is thus no surprise that when a skilled demagogue like Trump comes along, and dog whistles the core political agenda, people already trained to obedience line up to kiss the ring. 

 

***

 

For me, one of the reasons I fought back at my parents so much over the years was that I have an active bullshit detector. (My wife is the same.) 

 

When you can see through the religious charlatans your parents are following - and see that they are fakes - it is difficult to believe in their teachings. Although god knows I tried for a long time, in order to please my parents. 

 

Asking the question of WHOM I was supposed to obey as an adult eventually led to my rejection of the entire idea - and I know I am far from the only child of authoritarian parents to do this. In fact, the estrangement rates are really high in authoritarian families. 

 

***

 

Throughout history, there have been heroes who stood up against authoritarianism. We bible nerds would naturally cite figures like Shadrach, Michach, and Abednego - who refused to bow down to the king who claimed to speak for the gods. Or, their compatriot Daniel, who stuck to his moral values rather than outsourcing them to his authority. 

 You can't go wrong with Gustave Dore's classic illustrations...

We might in more modern times point to the various people who were part of the Underground Railroad and helped the enslaved escape to freedom. Or the men and women in Europe who hid Jewish people from the Nazis. Or those like Galileo, who refused to simply agree with authority, but explored the universe in search of truth, not dogma. 

 

There are so many more, most of which will never be famous. 

 

The ones who are the villains of history, though, are not just the Hitlers of the world, but the millions who valued submission to those who claimed to speak for God over the lives and wellbeing of other humans. 

 

I intend in a future post to look at the two competing models for morality, which I think is, more than anything else, at the core of our current political polarization. But understand that the point of authoritarianism is to get people to ignore their consciences and do the unconscionable.