In Bed With The Right - October 14, 2024


Episode 35： Talia Lavin on the Christian Right's View of Marriage⧸Parenting

Topics
spanking and private discipline homeschooling regulation changes
Episode 34： The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives Episode 36： Jordan Carroll on Science Fiction and the Alt Right

Episode Stats


Length

52 minutes

Words per minute

164.86

Word count

8,602

Sentence count

384

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

26

sentences flagged

Hate speech

36

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.
00:00:07.960 And I'm Moira Donaghan.
00:00:09.220 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:13.720 So, Adrienne, today we have an esteemed guest, Talia Lavin, the author of Wild Faith, How 0.76
00:00:22.380 the Christian Right is Taking Over America.
00:00:24.800 Talia is, for my money, one of the most morally intelligent writers on the far right in America
00:00:31.620 today. She has a real keen insight for what the stakes of their project are. And as we're going
00:00:38.360 to see today, she also has done a lot of the legwork looking at the intellectual origins of
00:00:44.520 the far right and the texts that make up their worldview. Talia, thank you so much for being with
00:00:49.180 us. I'm delighted. I'm a longtime Moira fan, and I'm also an Adrian fan now that we've chatted.
00:00:58.120 You're lucky I don't like send you weird texts at 3 a.m. like I do to Moira.
00:01:02.340 It's always a pleasure.
00:01:05.140 I'm so happy to be here and to talk about my forthcoming book, Wild Faith,
00:01:10.180 A Christian Right is Taking Over America, which is coming out October 15th.
00:01:14.260 And it is terrific. Spoiler alert. TLDR by this book. We're going to be not talking about the whole book here today. We're really, Maura and I got fascinated about a particular part of this book. But the claim of the book is in some way kind of bigger, right? 1.00
00:01:28.640 The basic contention seems to be that we discount the influence of the Christian right at our own peril, that there is this kind of parallel universe that a lot of this stuff happens in, and yet it really influences, you know, public policy and the way many Americans live their lives.
00:01:45.340 And, you know, parts of the book that both Maura and I, I think, found most moving were your interviews with people who were in that life and where you really kind of get a sense of what millions of Americans, what family looks like to them.
00:01:59.320 I wanted to sort of start by asking you, how did you choose the objects through which to
00:02:04.840 study this?
00:02:05.200 I mean, obviously you found interview partners, but you also, I mean, as a literature professor,
00:02:09.340 I was very, very pleased with how the book uses books and uses media to really think
00:02:15.220 through the influence of the Christian right on pretty much all important debates.
00:02:21.180 We're going to talk about transphobia, but we could talk about parenting.
00:02:24.240 We can talk about marriage.
00:02:25.820 We can talk about the sort of cavalcade of self-recycling moral panics we have, the culture wars.
00:02:32.800 We can talk about, you know, rape culture, et cetera, et cetera.
00:02:36.460 It seems like the book is sort of saying because the overall debate around these topics is so strongly shaped by these books that most of us, you know, shitlibs, like never clap eyes on, much less read.
00:02:50.020 Like we don't even understand kind of what America, what American culture really has become.
00:02:55.000 And so how did you work through these objects? How do you combine your discussions with people who were raised in Christian fundamentalist circles with the kind of books that you could, but would never buy on Amazon?
00:03:09.540 Right. Yeah. I mean, this book kind of took a shape I wasn't expecting. Initially, it was supposed to be focused around like right wing terrorism. And then I wound up watching a documentary that referenced widespread child abuse within like a particular church and sort of had this revelation where I was like, this can't be just this one church.
00:03:34.520 and wound up sort of writing a series for my newsletter about child abuse within evangelical
00:03:40.820 context, interviewed a lot of ex-evangelical folks about their childhoods and upbringings.
00:03:47.900 But yeah, you're right. I mean, much of the core of the book is these parenting manuals,
00:03:51.920 these marriage manuals, and in other cases, these novels that use prophecies and very
00:03:59.480 out there interpretations of the book of Revelation as sort of very literal facts.
00:04:05.440 So it is this examination in part of these cultural artifacts. And I guess the way I came
00:04:13.160 to them was just by, in part, I asked people, like, what were some texts that were on your
00:04:19.680 parents' shelves? But also these books came up in interviews because they were important and they
00:04:26.860 were guidelines. So you have James Dobson's The Strong-Willed Child, which to be clear,
00:04:32.140 The Strong-Willed Child is a bad thing and we want to break that child's strong will.
00:04:36.580 Dare to Discipline, hugely influential books. To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debbie Pearl is
00:04:42.820 quite infamous among folks who kind of know stuff about this. It's basically,
00:04:48.840 it's a child abuse manual and it's been linked to the deaths of several children who were sort of
00:04:56.100 very brutally abused wound up dying. And then in their homes, in the homes of their parents,
00:05:01.140 this book was discovered. So it's very, it's dark. And then the marriage manuals, I was like,
00:05:07.640 what are some of the best selling sort of Christian marriage manuals? And I was sort of
00:05:11.600 back reasoning, but also I read, particularly with the parenting stuff, I read about 50 years worth
00:05:18.900 of sort of big parenting manuals. So starting in the seventies, and I think my final texts were
00:05:25.760 published in 2015, 2017. So quite recent. And it is remarkable how much of a consistent through
00:05:34.280 line of sort of God wants you to beat the crap out of your kids. And you have to do this, 0.99
00:05:40.400 otherwise you're condemning them to die of being sinners. You know, it's this very intense,
00:05:49.300 internally coherent theological imperative to physically brutalize your children.
00:05:54.640 To make sure that they're a continuation of yourself and of your own values in some way.
00:06:00.560 Yeah, I looked up The Power of the Praying Wife, one of the books you mentioned.
00:06:04.540 And one of the books that someone had been gifted several times, which is another interesting thing that these things clearly sell well because people own multiple copies.
00:06:13.860 So I'd never heard of The Power of the Praying Wife.
00:06:16.280 But as of this morning, it ranks at 873 on the Amazon bestseller charts.
00:06:20.860 And that's from 2014.
00:06:22.660 I'd never heard of this book.
00:06:23.840 And it does incredible numbers for a 10-year-old book to put up on Amazon.
00:06:27.880 And here I was, I was like, oh, what obscure thing Talia dug up.
00:06:31.520 And I was like, well, no, it outranks literally every book on my shelf on Amazon.
00:06:36.900 Yeah, right? 0.99
00:06:37.740 It's like Daniel Steele, John Grisham, and this Christian marriage manual that is fucking horrifying. 0.97
00:06:47.300 It's one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. 0.99
00:06:50.120 Like, as a woman, as a human being, it's awful. And it's not that there's some great, you know, paucity or failure on sort of mainstream America's part not to have heard of these books.
00:07:05.640 These are books designed to exist within an insular world. They're passed from hand to hand within this select population. And this is true of a lot of evangelical culture, that it's sort of internally developed for internal purposes.
00:07:21.940 And of course, obviously, this is a community that's heavily into proselytizing. So internal, external, the boundaries are a little fuzzy, but there's very much this separate and apart kind of material culture of movies and books and comics that you've never heard of because they're not designed for you.
00:07:44.960 So it's not that you're in some mire of ignorance that you haven't heard of the power of praying life.
00:07:52.600 Sorry, I got to answer the doorbell.
00:07:55.100 Okay.
00:07:56.140 Maybe it's J.D. Vance.
00:07:57.880 Yeah.
00:07:58.400 I'm told there's an eel farm here.
00:08:01.740 For the eels.
00:08:03.600 For normal stuff.
00:08:05.720 That'd be incredible.
00:08:06.960 I'm going to do normal stuff with these eels.
00:08:09.120 Yes.
00:08:09.380 so we've decided that that was jd van showing up for the eels that he needs for non-weird things
00:08:17.520 yeah i did offer him a fine eel skin leather jacket anyway uh so yeah so there's the separate
00:08:27.300 material culture that really exists for evangelicals by evangelicals that's a community
00:08:33.580 of tens of millions of people.
00:08:35.260 So it has this sort of inbuilt audience,
00:08:39.240 an audience that's proselytizing and gaining converts. 0.98
00:08:42.060 But yeah, like you're not dumb 0.68
00:08:43.960 for not having heard of Stormy Omartian before,
00:08:47.260 Omartian, I think it's Omartian,
00:08:49.340 but my heart wants it to be Omartian.
00:08:51.920 But her husband is like the musical director
00:08:54.620 for Campus Crusade for Christ.
00:08:56.500 Oh yeah.
00:08:57.160 And she's written, there are a lot of books
00:09:00.520 in The Power of a Praying series.
00:09:02.520 the power of a praying wife is the most popular i think like there's study group guides for it but
00:09:08.820 there's the power of a praying woman the power of a praying parent the power of praying for your
00:09:14.340 adult children the power of a praying grandparent and so on but there's no crossover a power of a
00:09:19.980 praying chicken noodle soup for my cheese the power of a praying teen it almost reminds me of
00:09:25.800 barbie right like there's any iteration of it that you can imagine they're just doing the same thing
00:09:30.660 over and over and over again with slight variations but like tell us a little bit about what the power
00:09:35.380 of the praying wife prescribes right like what kind of vision of marriage does it put forward
00:09:39.760 it's so dark really i was reading it and i have a strong stomach at this point in time for all
00:09:47.060 sorts of horrors and yet this really threw me fairly i mean it was the same actually with a
00:09:55.560 lot of marriage manuals. I think marriage manuals and child rearing manuals, obviously there's
00:10:01.540 something very horrible about these hate filled screeds and sermons and the way we sort of
00:10:07.740 publicly see policy manifested and all this stuff. But then when you see like people addressing their
00:10:14.900 own folks, right, their own constituency, and they're speaking in this sort of, here's what
00:10:22.000 you do. Here's how you do it. It's very measured. And then what you're reading is like, just
00:10:26.740 incredible cruelty. So this woman basically hated her husband and really wanted to leave him. 0.96
00:10:35.820 And she basically sits down and says, like, I made this decision that I was not going to leave him,
00:10:45.480 that I had to die to myself and be reborn in, in God. Like here's a direct quote. You have to
00:10:57.300 decide if you want your marriage to work. You have to believe that part of your relationship
00:11:01.640 that has been eaten away by pain, indifference and selfishness can be restored. You have to
00:11:06.880 trust that what has swarmed over you, such as abuse, death of a child, infidelity, poverty,
00:11:12.360 loss, catastrophic illness, or accident can be relieved of its death grip. You have to know
00:11:19.160 that whatever has crept into your relationship so silently and stealthily, such as making idols of
00:11:24.700 your career, your dreams, your kids, or your selfish desires can be removed. You have to trust
00:11:30.820 that God is big enough to accomplish all of this and more. And she says the solution for this is
00:11:39.420 literally dying to dying to herself so she says dying to yourself is always painful
00:11:49.180 especially when you are convinced that the other person needs more changing than you
00:11:53.320 but this kind of pain leads to life the other alternative is just as painful and its ultimate
00:11:59.360 end is the death of a dream a relationship a marriage and a family so again this is the
00:12:06.060 instructions for when you've experienced abuse and infidelity oh my god it means being willing
00:12:12.040 to die to yourself and say change me lord oh god this is something you can kind of like detect in
00:12:18.560 a lot of the way conservatives will talk kind of for like a general audience you can almost
00:12:23.800 deduce the subtext being like do you just want women to not have any desires or thoughts or
00:12:31.560 drives beyond marriage and motherhood. And then in this sort of behind-the-curtain,
00:12:38.220 in-group-oriented text, that's exactly, in fact, what they're saying. It is as cartoonish
00:12:44.620 as you might imagine. I mean, maybe not even cartoonish. This is essentially prescribing
00:12:50.620 marriage as a kind of martyrdom. And this is a theologically coherent view. In other words, 0.83
00:12:56.880 It's saying that the most sacred thing you can do as a woman is to ask God to kill you, kill your desires, in order for you to remain in submission to a man. 0.99
00:13:12.220 And this is your sanctified role.
00:13:15.620 So I would say it's not even cartoonish.
00:13:17.720 It's metaphysical almost.
00:13:20.120 Yeah, it's cartoonish in the way that like an icon of a saint is cartoonish, right?
00:13:24.100 Like, it is an image, but this is a sacred image.
00:13:27.600 I mean, and just to quote a little bit more Stormy, Stormy IE, not to be confused with Stormy Daniels, who's very cool.
00:13:34.920 This is her after her, of course, her husband has this, like, intro to the book where he's like, you know, we've had 40 years of marriage and, like, it's been a blessing for me the whole time, but it's been terrible for her.
00:13:48.560 and it's sort of viewed as a joke and then you read the actual like innards of the book and
00:13:53.120 you're like oh god that's not a joke because she says um after a number of years little change
00:13:58.660 and this is him being cruel to her she says he used words like weapons and left me crippled or
00:14:04.680 paralyzed and he's very irritable and angry she says after a number of years with little change
00:14:11.240 i cried out to the lord one day in despair saying god i can't live this way anymore i know what
00:14:16.760 you've said about divorce, but I can't live in the same house with him. Help me, Lord.
00:14:21.880 And then she says, as I sat there, God also impressed upon my heart that if I would
00:14:27.800 deliberately lay down my life before his throne, die to the desire to leave and give my needs to
00:14:33.480 him, he would teach me how to lay down my life in prayer for Michael. He would show me how to
00:14:38.720 really intercede for him as a son of God. And in the process, he would revive my marriage and
00:14:44.400 pour his blessings out on both of us. I mean, it's so dark. Yeah. And that switcheroo of like,
00:14:50.580 right, devotion to God and devotion to your husband, like is, is, seems to be like, it's
00:14:55.860 kind of the secret principle of this book, right? The table of contents, which I briefly looked at
00:15:00.000 is, right. So it's called the power of the praying wife. So you'd think that like the wife would make
00:15:04.100 an appearance in some of the chapter titles. Oh no. Chapter one, his wife, two, his work. Then it 0.98
00:15:10.340 goes his finances his sexuality his affection his temptations his mind his fears his purpose his
00:15:15.560 choices his health it's it's all centered on him right like it's really extreme here in the sense
00:15:20.640 that like it's really sort of self-abnegation and because of the way the chapters are written
00:15:25.540 it's capital H so you're always like wait uh who am I submitting to is it uh is it God and then
00:15:31.160 you're like oh no temptation that seems unlikely so it's probably Michael but that that switcheroo
00:15:36.500 It seems really constitutive of how this book works.
00:15:39.280 I also think it's quite deliberate.
00:15:41.460 Yeah. 0.66
00:15:41.740 You know, this is a theological view in which the theological role for a woman is to submit to her husband absolutely.
00:15:50.320 And this is a form of worship of God. 0.52
00:15:52.380 Right.
00:15:52.860 This is how you fulfill your divinely ordained destiny, just as Eve was sort of commanded to do.
00:15:59.640 And you see that in the subheadings in the chapters. 0.69
00:16:02.080 They're like, shut up and pray.
00:16:03.640 uh like letting go of expectations it's like um but like i need prayer too and it's like don't 0.76
00:16:11.300 expect that don't pray to be set free and healed of any memories of sexual abuse and trauma you've
00:16:17.300 had um and then your sex problems will go away it strikes me as really consistent that the person
00:16:23.200 in need of changing is always the woman with the grievance right and also that what she needs to
00:16:32.060 resolve her grievance is never any kind of moral restitution or material alteration in the
00:16:38.580 circumstances of her life. It's always like an attitude adjustment, you know? It's always about
00:16:43.980 her bad desires or her bad perceptions and not about anybody else's bad behavior or unfair
00:16:52.980 circumstances. I mean, it's very extreme in this iteration. You know, the word selfish appears
00:16:59.300 over and over and over again, but it's always about the woman. 0.63
00:17:04.940 And even when a man's selfishness is acknowledged,
00:17:08.900 there's nothing much more stark or dramatic than die to yourself.
00:17:15.100 Yeah. 0.98
00:17:15.380 Like, die to your own needs, put yourself in God's hands,
00:17:18.940 become essentially a living martyr in order to prevent sort of the death 0.89
00:17:24.840 of this concept of the family to prevent like the death of a marriage, like surgically excise your
00:17:33.480 own desires. It's a crazy ideology, but how does it work out in practice, right? Because something
00:17:39.480 that I really appreciate about your book is how much time you spent with people who come from
00:17:46.640 these kinds of families and are being raised and trying to live in the muck of this ideological
00:17:52.720 prescription what does that do to them how do they actually live day to day i mean obviously
00:18:00.340 the people that were like down to speak to me when i was like hey were you abused as a child
00:18:05.300 under the aegis of like james dobson or or similar authors let's talk about it like that's people
00:18:11.620 who've left that faith many of them like did live that faith for a long time and i mean it's just
00:18:17.280 really grim like you're really sad a lot of the time uh and you know you can't really surgically
00:18:25.940 excise all of your desires through like the transcendent power of prayer i think oh you mean
00:18:30.820 this doesn't work i'm shocked you heard it here first like maybe like if you're really have some
00:18:39.380 spiritual gifts or something but like praying will not resolve like a husband who is abusing or
00:18:45.480 cheating on you. And in practice, people take out their aggression in other ways.
00:18:52.080 It can be expressed politically. And we all know this story. I mean, the original epigraph of the
00:18:58.180 book was going to be from that Yitz poem, September 1st, 1939, where he says,
00:19:04.020 I and the public know what all school children learn. Those to whom evil are done do evil in
00:19:09.220 return. This idea of sort of this cycle of violence perpetuating itself. But I firmly believe
00:19:18.740 that a lot of the cruelty we see in the public sphere, and particularly these theocratic policies 0.92
00:19:25.240 embraced, endorsed, and pushed by the Christian right, really come from family environments that
00:19:32.120 are sort of steeped in this essential cruelty, whether it's the self-abnegation prescribed to 0.59
00:19:38.580 women so that abusive marriages can go on and on and on, whether it is this doctrine of beating
00:19:46.440 your kids from before they can walk in many instances. What we see are these sort of 0.88
00:19:53.520 authoritarian microcosms that then really enable an authoritarian politic because it both accustoms
00:20:01.540 people to violence. It accustoms people to notions of absolute spiritual warfare in which one's own
00:20:11.300 desires and one's own self are to be subsumed under these theological goals. And it also chiefly
00:20:21.200 and above all things, values obedience. Again, back to the idea of the strong will and selfish
00:20:29.100 desire being really bad things. So this is not an individualistic culture. It's the opposite.
00:20:36.600 Saying like, your nature is inherently sinful. The things you want are wrong. Don't trust your
00:20:42.500 own desire. Don't trust your own self. And so that leads to a pretty authoritarian politic.
00:20:50.020 Something I kept thinking about as I went through your book was how there is this kind of
00:20:56.900 conventional liberal attitude that the family and marriage are private, right? That they are not
00:21:04.380 political arrangements and sort of don't merit political inquiry or critique. And what I really
00:21:12.320 felt coming out of wild faith is that the right does not see it that way, right? The right very
00:21:17.600 much understands marriage as a site of enacting of one's own political ideals, right? And you
00:21:26.700 mention the family as sort of like a miniature model of the authoritarian state. And it strikes
00:21:32.480 me that there's not really like, there is not the photo negative critique of how families and
00:21:39.220 marriages and parenting works really being developed on the left. There is just sort of
00:21:44.440 this live and let live attitude that assumes that looking at private life is itself almost
00:21:51.280 too invasive and wrong or nugatory not important right like who cares that shouldn't that shouldn't
00:21:57.280 matter yeah trivial i mean you're not wrong that being said i'm not sure i want the left to be
00:22:03.580 like developing an authoritarian family politic of its own do i want a more full-throated embrace
00:22:10.080 of feminism and like women's equality on the political left absolutely but i'm not sure i
00:22:17.360 am like, there should be a prescribed family structure that's like politically salient on
00:22:23.280 the left. But like, I think a lot of the problem and something that in essence, the book is trying
00:22:29.620 in its own small way to address is that a lot of mainstream liberals, like they're constantly
00:22:36.400 measuring other people's wheat with their own bushel, as it were, you know, this idea that like
00:22:41.240 my sort of rationalist skeptic view of society is sort of the default view everyone else's is
00:22:50.120 probably insincere and i'm like no these beliefs are very very sincere very deeply held very
00:22:58.220 zealous they're just like alien to you and so the book sort of is like well you should understand
00:23:04.620 where these people are coming from and it's weirder than you think and more sincere than
00:23:09.340 you think that these are like earnest theological beliefs that accusations of hypocrisy are really
00:23:14.520 besides the point because what we're talking about is a internally theologically consistent
00:23:19.120 and be expressive of a will to absolute power and if you tell someone who is like expressing a will 0.91
00:23:27.920 to like absolutely dominate american culture that they're a hypocrite it's like what who are you 0.70
00:23:33.380 first of all like you don't have the same faith as me i don't validate your worldview i mean in 0.97
00:23:38.720 order to credibly levy like an accusation of hypocrisy, you have to be someone whom
00:23:43.440 your interlocutor values, finds your perspective worthwhile. And like, that is simply not the
00:23:50.360 case, particularly on the Christian right. So yeah, I mean, there's a huge disconnect here.
00:23:55.440 Yes. Right. You're trying to have a debate with someone who does not regard you as a
00:23:59.600 plausible participant in that debate. The terms exclude you from the get go, basically.
00:24:04.380 Yeah. And particularly if you're arguing for women's rights as a woman, 0.99
00:24:08.720 this is a culture that's like, you need to be being obedient to someone. Like the fact that 0.99
00:24:16.180 you are here advocating for your own rights is a sin. Again, like this is a culture that is just 0.97
00:24:21.860 absolutely indifferent to female death, whether spiritual or physical. And that's how you wind up 0.99
00:24:27.260 with theocratic laws that mandate women dying of sepsis in parking lots. It starts with this idea
00:24:32.920 that like the role of the woman is to submit to god and to man not to it's a real cheerful book
00:24:41.140 you're gonna pick it up and you're gonna love it smile down the street god i sound so dark but like
00:24:47.500 you you can't imagine what it was like reading these manuals every day like talking to all these
00:24:53.520 abuse survivors i was so angry and then i'm like i got to translate this into prose that's sort of
00:24:58.620 urgent, but readable. Yeah. Well, it really succeeds. But let me ask you about The Smile.
00:25:05.020 Because I think you do a really good job showing that how much of this is based on very selective
00:25:09.640 reading of scripture. But what feels to me, particularly American, is you're not just
00:25:15.580 supposed to be submitting, you're supposed to be submitting with a smile. That's sort of where I
00:25:19.080 feel like the 1950s sort of sneak in. Because it's not Surly submission either. It's smiley,
00:25:24.900 beaming, you know, like pathologically cheerful submission, isn't it? Can we talk about sort of
00:25:30.260 the specific affects of this? Because I feel like that's what makes a lot of what you described so
00:25:34.780 scary that like, it's not that people are like, well, this is our lot in life and it sucks, but
00:25:39.020 like, this is how it is. It's like, and I learned to embrace it and to take joy in it, right? Like
00:25:43.480 the books are all like, you know, you're describing them as super dark. If you look at the covers,
00:25:47.660 they're all poppy and fun. Like they, you know, you might reach for it if you didn't know the
00:25:52.340 english language and could read what's actually on the cover um can you talk about the specific
00:25:56.860 sort of american affect that this is all presented in yeah i mean the power of praying wife has like
00:26:03.100 a flower on the cover and it's pink and like similarly incredibly incredibly dark manuals
00:26:10.480 to me admittedly from the bias of like women are human beings this crazy notion yeah this wild 1.00
00:26:16.440 notion so like another famous example which you can buy on such websites as biblical femininity 1.00
00:26:22.180 Boot Camp is created to be his helpmeet by Debbie Pearl, Debbie Pearl being a menace to society and 1.00
00:26:29.760 popular but sort of extreme evangelicalism. It's currently number 107 in Christian marriage on 0.52
00:26:39.700 Amazon. But yeah, it's got this happy woman in a shawl holding some sort of basket on the cover,
00:26:48.180 like she's but she's delighted yeah all of it looks like bridget jones's submission diary yeah
00:26:53.280 yeah i mean kind of but yeah i mean it's it's really like full of these sort of pictures of
00:27:00.100 flowers but it's also inside it's like women who are not married are not fulfilling their
00:27:06.160 god-given like they're not women like they're not fulfilling their god-given purpose and in this
00:27:13.300 world, and they're disappointed old failures, and you must smile all the time. A joyous smile 0.99
00:27:21.240 is your greatest weapon. You know, our first and foremost calling as wives and mothers is to please
00:27:26.840 our husbands. You know, out you pop with an inviting smile and a welcoming body. Oh my god.
00:27:33.580 Oof. Everyone is drawn to a smile. Like nails on a chalkboard. Yeah, it's pretty gross. Men are
00:27:40.700 highly attracted to smile that includes your husband and then it's like and this applies if
00:27:46.580 he's cheating on you and abusing you as well like i mean pearl is really radical on the subject she's
00:27:53.400 really she puts abuse in like quotation marks half the time and she explicitly tells women to stay
00:28:00.660 she says physically abused women are not exempt from the principles i have advanced
00:28:05.920 but their broken emotional state renders them incapable of understanding the difference between
00:28:11.420 service and servitude and between humility and self-degradation well i'm sorry debbie that
00:28:16.420 doesn't seem very obvious to me it's like be meek but don't be too meek but be definitely be meek
00:28:24.280 yeah and it kind of feels like you did something wrong if his contempt for use somehow like
00:28:30.660 becomes abuse like that's kind of on you because like you mistook servitude for what was it
00:28:36.640 yeah you mistook service for servitude i mean jesus christ it's sorry it's really it's like 0.65
00:28:44.160 diet advice you know you just can't fucking win but it's like in this incredibly dark theological 0.88
00:28:49.460 like incredibly like absolutist theological viewpoint where it's like this is what you 0.97
00:28:54.500 were created for this is what god wants of you and and what it what he wants is to run this like
00:28:59.880 impossible gauntlet of self-application and obedience well it strikes me that the demand
00:29:06.660 is not merely for as adrian's alluding to the actions of subservience it's for the elimination
00:29:13.580 of any other kind of selfhood or capacity for yeah differing thought right it is a kind of
00:29:21.620 manual of self-abuse but like not in the sexy way that is meant to enable and further men's abuse
00:29:27.520 not self-abuse in the fun way yes it is a manual of like how to pre-destroy yourself and and many
00:29:36.180 such cases many such manuals and they all have like these pink covers and these inviting you
00:29:41.500 know like you could pick them up off a shelf and just think you're reading like a how to make my
00:29:46.060 marriage work and then it's like ah die to yourself um inside but you know yeah it is american and i
00:29:52.780 think this doesn't negate the fact that it's like a serious and internally consistent theological
00:29:56.860 system, because every religion in every era is influenced by where it is.
00:30:02.420 Right, of course.
00:30:03.480 And like other elements of cultural context. But yes, this obsession with happiness and looking
00:30:09.480 happy. And I talked to a lot of kids, you know, former kids who were beaten for not looking happy
00:30:15.620 enough, which is like so, you know, yeah, like I had to smile and sing a cheerful hymn. And if I
00:30:22.040 wasn't singing cheerfully enough I would be beaten it's like okay this might be a good moment to turn
00:30:29.380 from marriage to parenting right because something I was really kind of surprised by although I guess 1.00
00:30:36.220 in retrospect I should not have been was the centrality of physical violence to the Christian
00:30:43.660 prescriptions for parenting could you tell us a little bit about these parenting manuals that you
00:30:47.720 went through? Yeah. I mean, so if we're talking about like a part of the broader political project,
00:30:52.460 we really see this rise in sort of biblical parenting books, whose premier advocate is
00:30:58.620 James Dobson, a focus on the family, which particularly in the 70s was just unbelievably
00:31:04.320 influential. We're talking about like radio programs going out to tens of millions of households.
00:31:09.540 And first of all, like much of the rise of the Christian right is essentially an attempt to
00:31:14.760 refute the 60s, from racial integration to feminism, gay rights, all of that. They're like, 0.68
00:31:22.720 let's cancel that. And we see that now coming to fruition in many ways. They have succeeded
00:31:29.240 at that project at last. But part of it is that these revolutions and changes were often led by
00:31:39.160 youth. They were led by students and young people. And so, as part of the reactionary backlash to
00:31:46.720 this, we see a rise in biblical parenting. This idea of like, well, if kids were more obedient,
00:31:54.280 it was like 1950s parenting was too permissive, apparently.
00:31:58.720 During a time where a lobotomy was considered a parenting tool, it was too permissive.
00:32:03.260 yeah yeah just oh like those crazy parents in the 50s totally letting their kids run wild
00:32:09.980 but it's this over correction it's the idea of like we've strayed from what the bible tells us
00:32:15.100 about how we should discipline our kids and let's bring back the rod and that will get rid of this
00:32:20.280 pesky problem of rebellious youth so that's sort of the overall political context and then you have
00:32:25.700 this massive parenting industrial complex that comes up and it's very much a part of the evangelical
00:32:31.480 right from then until today starting you know again dobson's book dare to discipline it sold
00:32:37.780 huge amounts of of copies and was super influential and there's even a podcast called 0.99
00:32:44.700 we hate james dobson of just like people who are like fair fuck this fuck this guy 0.99
00:32:50.260 fuck what he did to all these people the the broader point that i think you're you're not 0.99
00:32:55.480 making because you don't have to is that like basically fundamentalism right like it doesn't 1.00
00:32:59.640 come organically out of some kind of traditional Christianity. This is backlash politics and it's
00:33:04.520 worth saying. It is a response to feminism. It's a response to the 60s. It is part of a backlash 0.99
00:33:09.940 to racial integration. People didn't write and read manuals like this, quite like this in the
00:33:16.960 30s, 40s, and 50s. This really is a creation of a new strand in conservative Christianity.
00:33:23.040 And it seems like part of the prescription is once again to eliminate the capacity for
00:33:29.000 critical thought or independent thought among those children, right? And central to that seems
00:33:34.340 to be the frequent and often quite devastating application of physical discipline, physical
00:33:40.340 violence. Yeah. I mean, in Dare to Discipline, which has sold 3.5 million copies, incidentally,
00:33:47.680 he describes in the first, in the introduction, beating the shit out of a dog for sleeping on a 0.96
00:33:55.620 fuzzy toilet seat with a belt. History's greatest monster. Yeah. And also how his life was 0.99
00:34:03.760 fundamentally and salubriously changed by his mother beating him with a girdle, which is
00:34:08.240 psychosexual on so many levels. Like, yeah, I mean, so what's interesting to me is like, 0.61
00:34:15.580 they're very hyper fixated on Proverbs, which is, I think at best, a pretty minor book of the Bible,
00:34:21.000 but it happens to be the one with like the parenting advice and it's like you must discipline
00:34:26.540 your child with the rod or he shall surely die the rod of correction blah blah blah a child who
00:34:32.880 is not like corrected is a shame to his mother this kind of stuff and so proverbs comes up again
00:34:39.100 and again and again the sort of central verse is like train up a child in the way he should go
00:34:44.200 and when he is old he shall not depart from it so it's always expressed as training up uh your
00:34:51.260 child if you see anyone say this is how i train up my child like run away from them and take their 0.97
00:34:57.720 kid and hold them this is my reactive feeling for studying this shit for a while but yeah it really 0.98
00:35:04.640 emphasizes physical abuse and i do think there's no way of hitting your kid that's not abuse so 0.99
00:35:12.880 I'm pretty radical in the don't hit your kids camp.
00:35:16.180 Like, I get it.
00:35:16.760 It's like your kid is running into the street and you like grab their wrist or something to like keep them from running into traffic.
00:35:22.640 But like any sort of systematized spanking, like it's wrong and you shouldn't do it.
00:35:28.940 This is my take.
00:35:30.700 This is a firmly anti-spanking podcast, I think.
00:35:33.640 Yeah, we're not in favor of hitting any children for any reason.
00:35:37.800 But according to Dobson and his acolytes, this is not just acceptable, but in fact, ordained by God, right? And something that really moved me in your book is you quote one parent in one of these guides talking about how much time they just spend in the bathroom beating their children.
00:35:57.280 Because the other thing about this discipline is not only is it divinely ordained and justifiable and in fact mandatory, but that it also has to be done in private. Could you talk a little bit about like the privacy? Because it almost suggests a sense of shame, but that doesn't seem to be exactly what's going on there.
00:36:13.960 I mean, a lot of times you'll see like the sort of, well, you should do it in private, just because like the Gentiles don't understand, basically, like the sort of like normal people who aren't true believers on the just and righteous path of God will see you hitting your kid and be weird about it. And so you should do it in the bathroom or whatever. But yes, I remember that. Seems like much of our day is taken up in the bathroom beating our kids. And it's like, that seems like a you problem. 0.94
00:36:40.520 And this might also bring us to homeschooling, which also has a similar sort of logic of
00:36:46.880 insulating your own parenting, which in this logic is, you know, divinely inspired and morally
00:36:54.240 correct from any kind of public scrutiny, right?
00:36:58.480 Oh, yeah, absolutely.
00:36:59.840 It's real cult logic for sure. It's like, not only do we have to do this, we have to make sure
00:37:03.540 nobody else sees that we're doing this, not because they might intervene in the terrible
00:37:07.020 things we're doing, but because they might stop us from living the way of God.
00:37:12.760 I mean, gosh, yeah. Just one last piece on the physical violence. I mean, it is remarkably
00:37:17.600 pervasive. It's remarkably consistent across different authors, different genders, different
00:37:23.320 decades. The things that are inconsistent is like, when does it start? And for some people,
00:37:27.800 it's like six months. What? Yeah. Blinket training is when you put a baby that can't
00:37:35.260 crawl yet or or is just starting to crawl on a blanket and then if they like leave the blanket 1.00
00:37:39.900 or try to reach out to an object you hit them it's like a whole thing um the duggar family did 0.77
00:37:45.280 this to their kids 19 kids and counting what that's what the pearls prescribe and to train
00:37:52.500 up a child dobson is a little more uh moderate he suggests starting at 15 months but again these
00:37:59.680 are like kids are still in diapers and you're hitting them and often the spanking is very
00:38:03.780 ritualized where it's like you have these like multi-step processes where it's like you make
00:38:09.480 the child fetch their own paddle and then you go to their room and then you beat them and then you
00:38:15.280 have this like sort of ceremony where they like say they won't sin again and then you hold them
00:38:21.000 and you forgive them and i'm like okay this is a recipe to cross solder like a whole bunch of
00:38:27.940 unfortunate wires yeah there is like a side note in the book where i say like is this sexual abuse 0.79
00:38:33.600 as well especially because these books are hyper fixated on kids butts like it's this miraculous
00:38:39.820 organ that like god provided that's perfect for discipline so weird and upsetting yeah no kidding
00:38:48.160 i realized i'm really not doing a good job selling my own well no it's so fascinating
00:38:54.700 i read this stuff so you didn't have to and i i talked to a lot of survivors and i i really try
00:39:00.120 of foreground their voices but yeah like it's like this obsession with kids butts and these
00:39:06.200 you know embrace your child after you've hurt them and like make sure that also like if they
00:39:12.420 cry too much like the constant center of kids emotions one parent who had raised her kids
00:39:18.700 according to like a particularly vicious philosophy was like my obedient quiet non-demonstrative
00:39:25.540 non-tantruming children were meant to be my way of sort of evangelizing and proselytizing. In other
00:39:32.620 words, the hope would be other parents would come up to me and say, wow, how do your kids behave so
00:39:38.060 well? And you say, oh, because of God and Christ and we're Christian. So there is a performative
00:39:45.820 element to this spectacle of sort of legions of obedient and silent children. But it's like
00:39:51.600 that obedience was very hard won. And you can trace a lot of it back to some older parenting
00:40:00.100 texts. Like one of the older parenting texts that gets constantly cited is Susanna Wesley,
00:40:05.640 who's the mother of the founders of Methodism. And this is a very old text, right? This is an
00:40:11.520 18th century text. Yes. And she wrote this letter on child rearing and she talks about the odious
00:40:16.880 noise of the, that most odious noise of the crying of children and how all her kids were
00:40:22.360 corrected with the rod and taught to cry softly and this very rigorous expression of physical
00:40:30.440 discipline. And Dobson quotes her approvingly, so do the pearls. Like the, the Wesley letter
00:40:35.660 comes up again and again and again. And then when I think about Susanna Wesley, I'm like,
00:40:40.120 this lady was continually pregnant for 20 years and survived 11 of her children.
00:40:49.320 Like, I think she had like seven kids die in infancy. So when she talks about the odious 0.99
00:40:55.460 noise of crying of children and like teaching kids to cry softly and like this sort of overall
00:41:01.220 sociopathic seeming disconnect or like profound lack of love towards children, I'm like, could
00:41:09.240 Would this be because you were never not pregnant for 20 years and also watched a lot of your kids die?
00:41:14.400 Yeah.
00:41:15.000 And is there a reason that we have to cite this with like glowing approbation in like 2014?
00:41:21.240 Yeah.
00:41:22.380 I mean, maybe we're rushing back towards that very grim cycle of continual and potentially fatal childbirth.
00:41:29.600 But like, this is a very different social context, one that I, for one, am not eager to recreate.
00:41:37.240 Yeah.
00:41:37.680 Yeah. I mean, it's also really interesting to think about the fact that like, you know,
00:41:41.080 we started with marriage guides where suffering was normalized and basically made meaningful.
00:41:46.960 And then in the parent guides, we basically get that, right? That what you transmit to your
00:41:51.280 children is a sense of really meekness before suffering. And that's indeed what schooling is.
00:41:58.020 And I love the way you put it, that basically it just staples a whole bunch of things together,
00:42:02.420 There's silence, privacy, fear of outsiders, pain, intimacy, forgiveness, et cetera, et
00:42:10.160 cetera.
00:42:10.400 And like, it's not shocking to me that that's exactly the kind of environment where then
00:42:14.580 abuse actually, sexual abuse thrives, right?
00:42:17.820 Because like it brings all these things together that make it harder to sort of articulate
00:42:22.260 that, hey, something seems wrong in the situation, then maybe we should revisit it, which I feel
00:42:26.380 like most parenting guides I've ever read do, right?
00:42:29.140 They're like, oh, you should talk to people about this.
00:42:30.600 Is this normal for a kid?
00:42:32.060 did you do that? What can you do? What do other parents do? And like, if there is,
00:42:35.140 you create these kinds of domes of silence around it, well, something very easily can and will go
00:42:39.520 wrong. Yeah. I mean, I would also say that guides that teach wives to endure almost infinite
00:42:48.860 cruelty, and then also put on them the primary responsibility to rear children in this violent 0.74
00:42:56.380 way. I mean, what you're talking about is like absorb abuse and then regurgitate abuse, right?
00:43:01.480 Alice Miller is the author of the book For Your Own Good, where she explicitly makes this
00:43:06.440 connection between authoritarian parenting and fondest siècle Germany and then the rise of the
00:43:12.520 Nazis. You know, when we're talking about models of the authoritarian family, she makes this
00:43:17.960 comparison of sort of like, the husband is the dictator, the wife becomes the secret policeman,
00:43:24.920 the child is the subject, right? So it's all these like degrees of power and powerlessness. 0.51
00:43:30.120 Yeah. So the woman is the Czechist, the NKVD officer. She's the Stasi of this environment because she's structurally sort of otherwise disempowered and also like absorbs a lot of violence. Yeah. You can take or leave that theory. I find it persuasive or at least an interesting model of thinking about this sort of stuff. 0.98
00:43:53.000 You also see it a lot in how vociferously the Christian right speaks out against any form of sex education for kids, age-appropriate sex education.
00:44:05.980 Up to them, including even teens and eighth graders, shouldn't be taught anything.
00:44:11.360 And when you don't have the words to describe a situation, it is much harder to object.
00:44:19.240 Right.
00:44:19.560 Like, of course, the primary beneficiaries of kids not being taught age-appropriate lessons about sex and what it should be and boundaries and all of these things are abusers, right?
00:44:33.620 And I don't think that's some wild coincidence.
00:44:36.960 It's also just interesting to me, and very American also, that like, you know, like the classic dichotomy in our movies where it's like, we'll show like the most brutal massacres ever.
00:44:45.900 And then like, if there's a butt, like it gets like an NC-17.
00:44:49.560 Like, any amount of violence is acceptable, but, like, any amount of sex has to be, like, enshrined in warnings.
00:44:55.360 And you're talking about kids who are, like, marinated, bathed in violence from literally before they can speak or walk.
00:45:02.000 And yet, like, any acknowledgement of their physical bodies is sort of forbidden.
00:45:07.580 And that is very American to me.
00:45:11.200 But, yeah, about homeschooling, it's just basically all of this taken one step further.
00:45:16.120 isolate kids from mandatory reporters, teachers, and they are much less likely to report abuse.
00:45:22.960 No one's there to be like, what are those bruises? And very explicitly, the Homeschooling
00:45:30.540 Legal Defense Association, which is explicitly Christian right, run by Christian right lawyers,
00:45:36.420 established, I believe, in the 80s. And first, they very successfully dismantled the patchwork
00:45:43.520 of laws requiring kids to attend school and sort of really, you saw the sea change in homeschooling
00:45:49.540 where it was like basically a couple of hippies who like weren't particularly mad at authority
00:45:54.860 and like worked with school districts. It was a very, very tiny percentage of the population.
00:46:01.980 And then in the 80s, you have this like enormous explosion of Christians homeschooling in the
00:46:08.720 Reagan 80s, first coming out of the fact that schools had been desegregated, which is part
00:46:15.200 of the origin of the Christian right in general. The Christian right is a political movement in
00:46:21.140 general, I should say. But second of all, all of these ideas about permissiveness, all of these
00:46:26.140 ideas about indoctrination, you still see about public schooling. And the majority of people who
00:46:31.920 homeschool in the US are doing so for religious reasons. And so the primary lobbying organization
00:46:37.840 for homeschooling in the US is this Christian right organization. And basically, you had this
00:46:44.420 network of laws that came about when mandatory schooling and public schooling were first
00:46:50.440 established. So in the various states. So that's 50 different stories, but essentially, you're
00:46:57.640 looking at end of the 19th century. So this organization was like, hey, these beautiful
00:47:03.700 Christians who will definitely call your office are mad about these like antiquated 19th century
00:47:10.320 laws and they want to like raise their kids according to Jesus. And so fast forward a couple 0.64
00:47:15.280 of decades and what you have now, it's like not that kids are falling through the cracks. It's
00:47:19.820 that kids can vanish into abysses. There are just like a tiny proportion of states that require
00:47:25.620 any sort of accountability. And the vast majority of states in the US, all you have to do is like
00:47:30.620 tell your school district i'm homeschooling my kid there's like no external accountability you
00:47:35.840 don't like you you just have to say like once a year oh yeah i'm teaching my kid and i'm gonna
00:47:41.020 teach my kid these five or six areas and there's no testing and there's no mandatory visits or
00:47:47.640 inspections or anything like that i mean it's nuts yeah yeah i mean there's the same people who
00:47:52.880 make every school library a battleground and want to know exactly what their kids are taught and
00:47:58.020 what they read seem to be absolutely outraged at any suggestion that the community might want to
00:48:03.540 know what they're teaching their kids and whether they're teaching their kids and whether those kids
00:48:07.420 are thriving, in fact. Yeah. The HSLDA has this state-by-state map of like, which is like no
00:48:14.460 notice, low regulation, meaning you don't even have to tell your school district if you pull
00:48:19.260 them out. And that's, you know, Idaho and Texas and Oklahoma and Alaska and Indiana, right? And
00:48:25.320 then there's low regulation moderate regulation and then high regulation which entails such a
00:48:31.260 thing as in pennsylvania like you have to immunize your kids like like you have to fill out an
00:48:39.640 affidavit and whatever and this is considered high regulation in no state do you have to be
00:48:46.500 like accredited as a teacher to teach your kids at home uh to be fair you have at this point read
00:48:53.040 you know the collective works of james dobson so like isn't that as good as uh accreditation
00:48:58.000 yeah yeah and you have all of these curricula that are like the dinosaurs were not real
00:49:02.580 and the confederacy was a depressingly lost cause but it's like yeah like outside of
00:49:09.000 massachusetts where like there are external assessments um really it's this incredibly
00:49:15.900 just permissive landscape and it's not that i'm like in favor of regulation for regulation
00:49:22.560 sake I think there are very good reasons why if a kid is taken out of the school system there
00:49:29.120 should be some policies assuring that they're like being educated and not being like beaten
00:49:35.060 or starved or like isolated or caged and like all of these things have happened to homeschool kids
00:49:43.400 because it becomes exponentially easier to isolate your kid and abuse your kid and neglect your kid
00:49:49.980 if like they don't have to go to school this is something i really value about your book and that
00:49:56.660 i think might be a good point for us to end on is that talia you're like uniquely alert to the
00:50:04.660 suffering that this causes right like we talked at the top of the episode about how as you know
00:50:11.440 sort of normies for lack of a better term we don't understand the extent and pervasiveness
00:50:17.040 and odiousness of this ideology. But I think it also means that we don't really understand
00:50:21.800 the extent of the suffering that it's imposing, in particular on children. And your book really
00:50:28.520 makes that clear and centers their voices in a way I haven't seen done elsewhere. You take them
00:50:34.820 seriously as moral agents and as victims of a really often extremely cruel culture. And so,
00:50:42.720 i'm really grateful for that and for your book and i want i'm grateful also for your time and
00:50:47.560 your insights i think you've given us a lot to chew on so thank you to talia laven the book
00:50:54.420 is wild faith you can pre-order it now you can get it wherever books are sold and i'm so grateful
00:51:00.800 that you got to be a part of this yeah i mean delightful to talk to you guys i'm sorry that my
00:51:05.600 my stories are so depressing i will say i think the book is like kind of a crisp breed it isn't
00:51:11.200 and lugubrious. The story it's telling is a holy war. And as I say at the top of the book,
00:51:17.520 to win a war, one kind of war, like you kill the men, right? You capture the men. But to
00:51:23.880 really succeed in conquering a place, you capture the women and children. And so this book is 1.00
00:51:29.840 largely a focus of how that holy war, how that spiritual war is fundamentally an attack on women
00:51:37.220 and children in the U.S.
00:51:39.180 Kids are people.
00:51:40.280 Don't hit your kids.
00:51:41.520 That's my message. 1.00
00:51:42.520 Talia out. 1.00
00:51:44.540 What a mic drop.
00:51:45.600 If there's one lesson I can bring to you,
00:51:47.500 it's don't hit your kids for Jesus or any other reason.
00:51:50.640 Yeah.
00:51:51.360 So lovely to talk to you guys.
00:51:53.520 Really gotten in bed with the right.
00:51:55.440 Died to ourselves.
00:51:56.540 I had a great time doing it. 0.87
00:52:01.960 In Bed with the Right,
00:52:02.980 I'd like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute
00:52:04.800 for Gender Research for generous support.
00:52:06.800 Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.
00:52:09.440 Our producer is Katie Lau.