Talia Lavin: Ministry of Violence (Trigger warning)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Talia Bracha Lavin
@chick_in_kiev
Here is the piece I have dedicated every waking hour to recently. It is about corporal punishment in evangelical households. 150 people reached out to me to share their stories. I did my best to honor their trust and candor.

Ministry of Violence
“Pain is a marvelous purifier”: Corporal punishment, Evangelicals, and the Doctrine of Obedience
theswordandthesandwich.substack.com
11:57 AM · Oct 25, 2021

https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/ministry-of-violence

In some hands, a wooden spoon is an innocuous object, a kitchen tool for stirring and scooping. In others, it is a weapon. “My mom wasn’t averse to carrying around a wooden spoon to hit us with,” Liz van Noggeren, 46, told me. “She broke that wooden spoon on me more than once.”

If you strike a child enough times and with enough force with a wooden spoon, it will shatter. Many of the people who wrote to me about their childhoods had spoon after spoon broken on their thighs and backs. At 23, Riley refuses to have one in her house. “I don't even keep them in my kitchen for cooking purposes,” she said. “They're not allowed in my house at all.”

Wooden spoons are insulated and relatively nonreactive and are excellent implements for stirring even the hottest and sourest of things. They are also instruments of pain that linger in the memory far longer than any taste could linger on the tongue.

I started researching evangelical Christian corporal punishment quite recently, though I had known for years it was and remains a common practice in millions of American households. Knee-deep into parenting guides that read, to me, like alien and sadistic torture manuals, I realized I wanted—and needed—to supplement my reading with the voices of people who had lived with the tactics laid out on paper. So I put out a simple Tweet, asking people who had had such childhoods to reach out to me for a research project.

*snip*

[Celerity]

1. So so fucked up. It is impossible to integrate these motherfuckers into a modern, functioning,

tolerant, pluralistic, 21st century nation state.

[secondwind]

2. No wonder this country is so fucked up! Wow

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[Nevilledog]

4. Kick