Be not afraid

One of our daughters has a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. What happened was this: we brought her home, at birth, as a foster child. At the age of 16 months, she left our home to live with her biological father. Over the course of six months, he descended into drug use and violent crime, and she returned to us at 22 months. This mess inflicted pre-verbal trauma, which means that because of her young age, she literally lacked the vocabulary to describe or define what had occurred to her. Over the last several years, we have worked with her to construct a narrative which enables her to understand what happened during those six months.

To simplify, the narrative is something like this: she was taken away and bad things happened, but we came and got her, and now she is safe. She still (just this afternoon, in fact) asks me questions like "What would you do if a bad guy tried to grab me?" I ask back, "What would I do?" To which she replies, "You would punch him in the face and make him go away." Another way to understand her version of events is that she was kidnapped, but we rescued her, and now we (but me, as her father with a Superman fixation, in particular) will make sure nothing bad will ever happen to her ever again.

Being as I lack certain divine attributes such as omniscience, omnipresence, or omnipotence, it's an incredibly flawed narrative, but it works because she's (just barely) five years old: as she grows up, we'll be working to nuance it a fair bit. I bring all this up because the story my daughter tells herself sounds to me like something I've heard and seen elsewhere.

I'm basically a middle-of-the-road presbyterian, and have had a difficult time understanding why people fall under the sway of the loopy rhetoric of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches' "Biblical Confession for Uniting Church and Family" or the obviously questionable parenting advice dispensed by the likes of Bill Gothard. A few years ago, though, I participated in a panel discussion with a Big Name in the family-integrated/homeschooling-only crowd. The audience contained a goodly number of people from said crowd, but a few curious members of my own congregation as well.

Truth be told, I set up said panel, and had encouraged the Big Name to approach it as an opportunity to win over a new audience from our congregation and others in attendance. I can't say whether he thought of it in that way or considered how to present his message accordingly. Sadly, the audio from that evening was lost, but I can say that his pitch sounded pretty much the same as I've heard it from him on numerous other occasions. To my ears, it ran something like "The secular humanist atheist conspiracy is very scary and wants to take away your children and turn them into homosexual prostitutes. I will give you a few very simple steps which will guarantee you and your family are safe." He had ten minutes to present, and another five to respond to the other speakers, and I'd say he gave about 80% of his time to the former sentence and the rest to the latter.

From what I heard later from members of our congregation, his pitch failed to land with any of them; most found him just plain weird and mildly hysterical. I think I know why: they aren't afraid the secular humanist atheist homosexual conspiracy will recruit their children the moment they're out of sight. Some people are afraid, of course, and it seems to me the easy-answer crowd is feeding their fears. The truth is, the world is a complicated place, and the parenting strategies which work in some families don't work for others; the same can be said for educational strategies as well. (As we've learned in our home, the same strategies don't always work for every kid in the same family!) But this common-sense reality isn't acknowledged by the Big Names in the homeschooling-only crowd. To put the matter bluntly, it seems to me they treat worried Christian parents like a traumatized five year-old: "Yes, you should be scared, but don't worry because I will keep you safe with my very simple recipe for life."

This Easter I'll be preaching again from Matthew 28, where both the angel of the Lord and our resurrected Lord himself tell the two Marys, "Do not be afraid." Jesus Christ has risen: the strife is over and the battle done. A movement which infantilizes parents by preying on their worst fears may be run by sincere Christians, but it seems to me their message and strategy are very much at odds with the heart of the Gospel proclamation itself.

Christ is risen. Be not afraid.