Thread by @mcjulie

Reading this thread, sometimes I wonder how the people who raised us in these churches ever got the idea that they were 1. raising functional adults 2. who would remain in the church AS adults

https://twitter.com/medleytrey/status/1390163378501570561

I mean, apparently it never once occurred to them "you know, If we teach a bunch of ridiculous nonsense as crucial to our faith, it gives the impression that our faith is a bunch of ridiculous nonsense"

My own parents didn't go in for this kind of stuff much, especially not my dad, but that just leads to a different problem: "We're raising you in this church where a huge percentage of the people believe in stuff (like creationism) that we don't believe in."

So in church I was constantly being taught things, like Christian patriarchy and young-earth creationism, that my own parents didn't actually want me being taught -- and yet they were the reason I was there, getting taught these things.

In retrospect, I think my parents simply had no idea *what* I was getting taught when they weren't around, in church-related things like Sunday school and youth group and summer camp, but they *assumed* it must be... good? Beneficial? Doctrinal? I don't know.

There's something really odd about the way evangelical parents of the 80s & 90s raised us, because it was in many ways self-consciously *different* from how they were raised, with all these new & relatively untested concepts.

Parents who went to public school raising homeschooled kids, parent raised according to Dr. Spock raising kids according to James Dobson, parents who grew up getting the same news/music/movies as everyone else raising their kids in a Christian-i-fied media bubble.

A lot of those newfangled concepts in evangelical child-rearing were sold by the so-called experts (like Dobson, or the Pearls) as a guaranteed way to end up with perfectly well-behaved & well-adjusted children who would remain evangelical as adults --

And these ideas were not only frequently abusive, they were also *invented by crackpots* and *completely untested in an empirical sense*

So the people pushing them never had any idea whether they even "worked" the way they were supposed to!

Quiverfull is a perfect example -- the vision of the founders of it was to "take back the US" through sheer demographics, for all Christians of the right sort to have a million kids, and their kids would have a million kids, and so on, and so on --

Their math was bad -- it would never have worked *even if* every member of each subsequent generation stayed with the quiverfull plan -- but of course, they didn't.

I guess it comes back to the evangelical unwillingness to see children as fully self-willed individuals.

Of course, if a child is merely an extension of the patriarch's will, the patriarch will know exactly how to raise them for the desired result. How could it be otherwise?

But it's still an interesting sociological phenomenon. Evangelical parents were told in the 1980s & 90s: here's the secret to raising children who will stay with the church as adults, and by the time their adult children were ALL LEAVING it was too late to course-correct.