Latest / CrossPolitic Show / Spank Your Kids, Save America
Transcript
- Well, let's talk about spanking, shall we? Rachel was visiting a friend. She's probably three or four in that, that, a four-school age. And our neighbor had little kids, so we would trade back and forth. So I went over to pick her up and when I walked in, she said, oh, is it time to go? So I thought, a big opportunity. I got her home. I didn't address it there. But I did give her spanking, it's true. I did. But I just said, when I come in, you're going to say, hi, mom, you know, that's how we do this. So the next time she went over there, I did the review. Now remember, when I come, you're going to say, hi, mom, you're not going to say, oh, I didn't want to go. So beautiful, because then when I picked her up, it was just all that. Yes, mom is here at last. And the interwebs went berserk. It's going to be a doozy. 3.1 million views on eggs, viral on TikTok, and even newsweek picked it up. Many outrage responses called it child abuse, called for Mrs. Wilson to be locked up and her children taken away. Accutations of assault, even death threats. And I'm thinking, a generation ago, this was normal. You have a grandma that's quoting proverbs telling young mothers to discipline their kids and now it's national news. And now it's even dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, many of these reactions came from professing Christians. OK, as Doug Wilson said in response to the whole ruckus, it is time for us to say out loud what really needs to happen. A very large number of our evangelical leaders need to become Christians. Am I questioning their salvation? Well, yes, yes I am. But if America is full of evangelicals who need to become true Christians, America is indeed trouble. The outrage really isn't about Nancy Wilson. It's about something that most Americans can no longer answer. What is a parent actually supposed to do with the disobedient child? For most of American history, that question had an obvious answer to us. The Bible gave it. Refusal to discipline is national suicide. Now when I say discipline, I mean the whole biblical package. I'm talking about instruction, correction, and yes, the rod too. All three of these are working together to build good humans. But something changed in our society. In two generations, the West abandoned 3,000 years of wisdom about raising children. But the outrage over that clip tells us something else. It reveals just how far that we've drifted from our foundation. And just how expensive that drift has cost us. Prisons are overflowing, nursing homes have become warehouses for our elderly and churches are emptying. A whole generation of parents are so paralyzed by the fear of doing some kind of harm that they've stopped parenting altogether. The Bible says, Folly is bound up in the heart of a child. But the rod of discipline drives it far from it, probably 20 to 15. This is not a video about spanking. Although we're going to talk a lot about spanking. But this video is about something bigger. The biblical household was an economic engine, a welfare system, a school, a hospital. Even a little church, all of that was capsulated into one. And when we dismantled it, we didn't liberate anyone in the process. We just shifted the burden to the state. And the state's failing. Now, as soon as you start talking about spanking, every modern mind has this horrifying text from Deuteronomy in their back pocket. The infamous child-stoning passage from Deuteronomy 21. And the parents shall say to the elders of this city, this our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of this city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear and fear. Deuteronomy 21, verses 20 and 21. There's a similar verse in Exodus. Whoever curses his father or his mother shall we put to death. That's Exodus 21, 17. The shrieks and the howls go up. Cruelty, child abuse, call CPS. Most Christians, they want to skip over that text. Skeptics, they use that text to prove that the Bible is barbaric. What if that passage isn't barbaric at all? What if it's actually the key to understanding everything, the discipline, the household, maybe even the gospel itself? Jesus himself cited this law approvingly to condemn ferrocirical hypocrisy. He did it in Matthew 15. But it's not just an exegetical question. A major player in the reaction to the Wilson's is a modern movement called gentle parenting. One website who's run by a Baptist college president explains this. Gentle parenting is an alternative approach to traditional child ring with a foundation and mutual respect empathy understanding and healthy boundaries. Sounds gay to me. The website quotes an author who defines gentle parenting as, quote, approaching parenting situations with empathy for the child and trying to understand the reasonings behind their behavior, working together to change positively and accepting what cannot be changed. Notice that repeated word, empathy. That website says, quote, in today's culture, children's feelings and experiences are often dismissed, minimized or ignored altogether. That isn't true. Abigail Shryer, author of Bad Therapy told Alibeth Stucky that The rising generation seemed to be suffering so much. They seem to be in genuine distress, genuinely fearful, genuinely full of worry and anxiety and genuinely little depressed, sad. They received the most mental health treatment, the most coping techniques, the most mindfulness, the most therapeutic intervention, the most diagnosis, the most psych meds of any generation. So they really should have been the picture of mental health, a wellness. Instead, instead they were the picture of suffering. That doesn't sound like parents have ignored their children's feelings. That sounds like we've completely catered to their feelings. Shryer has also come out swinging about the problems with gentle parenting. It is a therapeutic method which constantly solicits the child's feelings, focuses on the feelings, puts the parent at the same level as a child, and it's constantly a conversation about how are we feeling about this, and giving a child endless options. Now there are a number of problems with this. There are another reasons that it's not good for kids. And the number one thing is that we've known now for really millennia that kids need parental authority, which doesn't mean cruelty. It doesn't mean an unloving laying down of rules, but ultimately the parent has to be in charge. A child will feel much more safe and secure if the parent is in charge. But if you empathize too much with a child, you'll never do what's right for the kid. Shryer links gentle parenting to the serious problems with empathy. I mean you see people empathizing with terrorists, empathizing with vandals all over the place, because empathy is not bad, it's morally neutral. And that's the point. It can manipulate us and be misapplied all over the place. For example, when law enforcement over empathizes with criminals, victims suffer. If you empathize with a child too much when you're going to give them a shot, you won't give it to them. If you empathize with a child too much who's upset that he's been sent to his room, you'll never punish him. Empathy is neither necessary nor sufficient for doing good in this world. And often over empathizing with certain people will keep us from taking care of each other, for keeping us from doing the right thing, right? If a police officer over empathizes with someone who is a criminal, he might not arrest him and then the criminal could go on to harm others. That's exactly what happened to the 23-year-old Ukrainian woman, Irina Zaruzka. Despite all of this past documented criminal history, when Brown was arrested yet again in January of this past year, a Democrat judge released this insane criminal once again without requiring him to pay any bail. Remember, she was stabbed in the neck by a random violent criminal. The cost of abandoning biblical discipline isn't just measured in anxiety statistics. It's measured in trillions of dollars. What happens when families stop functioning while the state takes over? And it turns out that the state is terrible at the job of being a home. Start with prison, for instance. America, we incarcerate more people than any nation on planet Earth. We got 2 million people behind bars and another 3.7 million on probation or parole. That's not cheap. Total cost of taxpayers is $182 billion per year and direct spending. And the economic costs? Well, you have lost wages, broken families, reduced productivity. Researchers, they estimate that the true burden of all this is about $1.2 trillion annually. Let's turn to the other end of life. We have American nursing home housing 1.2 million elderly people. Medicaid, they spend $179 billion a year on long-term care. The largest single category of state Medicaid spending. A century ago, that cost didn't even exist. The elderly, they live with their children and care was provided by families, not institutions. The hospitals, nursing homes, welfare, prisons, and society starts importing immigrants to replace when its own children fail to launch. After the worship of the true God, the Fifth Commandment is the foundation of all the others. Our disobedience to God's command to discipline our kids and to bring their hearts and subjection to the Fifth Commandment has torn a multi-trillion dollar hole inside of the American economy. And at the root is a simple failure of fatherlessness. The research is absolutely overwhelming on fatherlessness. It's the single strongest predictor of incarceration, school failure, and homelessness, not poverty, not race, the absence of a father. No father in the home means no one with natural authority to discipline. No discipline means no formation of character. No character means no capacity to govern yourself or to serve others. And that cycle repeats. Prisons fail, nursing homes fail, and the state expands, and then the bill comes due. And we can't afford it. If children are not required to honor father and mother, life, marriage, property, and honesty will not be long honored either. So we have toxic empathy in the courts because we have had it in the home. Let's say you don't sit down in the rules for your child. Let's say you always solicit their opinion. You always worry about their feelings. You just hug them when they're in distress. You never punish them when they punch their little sibling. Right? Now you're going to send them off to school, where they have to obey the teacher's rules. Right. And they won't be able to do it. So tell me what ended up the most compassionate. I mean, you're talking about not you disciplining them, but the state disciplining them. The Bible is clear. Whoever spares the rod hates his son. But he loves him is diligent to discipline him. Proverbs 13, 24. Biblical parenting acknowledges that children need comfort and connection. But connection without correction isn't love. It's indulgence. The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. That's Proverbs 29, 15. And here's what they'll never quote. Do not withhold discipline from a child. If you strike him with a rod, he will not die. You will save his soul from shale. Proverbs 23, 14. The rod doesn't destroy your child. It actually saves them. Solomon answered dental therapy objections nearly 3,000 years ago. If you spank your child, he will not die. You will save his soul from hell. That's how powerful that tool that God gives us in scriptures. But all of this assumes something that modern culture has rejected. The fact that parents have the authority to do any of this at all. The family is the seminary of all other societies, the seedbed, the place where everything begins in. What do people learn manners? To respect authority, to work hard and keep their word, to lay gratification to sacrifice comfort for duty. The family. Every institution in society, the church, the business, the military, the government, they all run on character formed in the household. Proverbs is a training manual for kids. If you don't follow the wisdom of Proverbs in the home, you will get major problems and disasters in the public square. Quote, the rod and reproof give wisdom. But a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. When the wicked increase, transgression increases. But the righteous will look upon their downfall. If you don't nip your kids' sins, while they're in diapers, while they're just starting to walk around, before they're 10 years old, whatever, you will get an awful civilization grow out of that scene. That little tantrum will grow up into a man that has no control over his emotions. And that will turn into porn problems. Laziness or violence and cruelty and eventually, yes, national disaster. So what does biblical discipline actually look like? The internet, they've created a character of spanking, a black face version of it. For example, when my wife and I went through foster care training, spanking was listed with other forms of cruelty right next to kicking, spitting, hitting, slapping. When we told one social worker that we objected to that characterization, she asked us how we spanked our young biological children. I explain, well, we're just really briefly, we know if a child has been disobedient and disrupting the fellowship of the home, we take a child somewhere private. In our house, it was usually the bathroom. It could be a bedroom. Explain to them really quickly what they've done. Tell them, you know, you're going to have, you know, this number of slots, usually it was like, you know, two or three, most of the time. And administer the slots. We would comfort them really quickly. And then we would pray together. And ask God's forgiveness for the sin. And then we would make sure that relationships were restored. So, you know, if they'd hit their brother or sister or their mom or whatever, or said no, or threw a fit, they'd go ask for forgiveness of the person. And we make sure that all the fellowship was restored. And I remember the social worker looking at us, a little bit confused. And she said, that actually sounds constructive. The whole point is restoration of fellowship. Sin destroys that fellowship. And when you have kids in the house, you're going to have a lot of sin. And when you have a lot of young kids, you're going to have a lot of sin. And you want to restore that fellowship. And God gave us the tool of discipline. God gave us the tool of spanking to help bring about repentance. You can sometimes sort of put it off and put it off. And it's getting worse and getting worse. And then like you got a bad attitude or just fussyness or whatever. And then if you finally realize, oh, what this kid needs, they just need the love of a spank. And then you go and you spank them and they come out. And it's like the sun came out. And I can remember that distinctly with one child. And it was like, this is so easy. This is so simple. And we just fix this. And you think you're being nice and you think you're being kind and you're getting nowhere. Loving discipline is insisting that a child may not go down that destructive path. Failure to discipline in a firm way allows for sin to grow in a home. And that's what creates a truly toxic environment. This is really simple stuff. When the family produces man and women of discipline and integrity and serve as society flourishes. And when the family produces narcissists who follow their own hearts and resent correction society collapses. What you see in society right now in our culture, it is a report card of our families. The entitlement, the fragility, the inability to handle authority. That didn't come from nowhere. It was produced. And it was produced in millions of households that stopped spanking their kids. Part of the failure to discipline is actually the failure of masculine leadership. Empathy without truth becomes poison. The calling of men and masculine leadership is guarding and protecting from that kind of poison. If your wife is trying to pick up the slack of you not spanking. Of you not thinking discipline tonight is that big of a deal. You're going to frustrate your wife. And she's going to have a hard time getting the attention of the kids even through discipline without your back. Men abdicate to their wives. Women abdicate to therapists and teachers. And everyone ultimately abdicate to the state. This is an example of a feminacy. Men being soft on the same. Refusing to guard and protect their homes, their churches. And ultimately refusing to protect their nation. Our solution here is simple. Men, we didn't need to take responsibility. We need to take responsibility for our households. We need to take responsibility for the teaching of our kids and for discipling them and for spanking them with love. Spanking also means parents must deal with their own sin. Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of meekness. Considering myself, let's not also be tempted. Galatians 6-1. Spanking reflects on you. Spanking means that you need to get your heart right first, because the kids can sense the hypocrisy. And so you need to deal with your own sin before you even go spank your child. And I think that's probably one of the central reasons why dad does not lead in spanking his kids and lead in disciplining his family because he's got a heart that's all gummed up. A Hebrews 12-6 says that God disciplines us. He scourges us and the word there means that he strikes us or whips us because we are his children because he loves us. This is the gospel in action. The gospel is not merely words to think or hear. The gospel is lived out and enacted when parents imitate God's fatherly love. This is how we know we belong to God. This is how we know God is our father. He disciplines the sons that he loves. Hebrews says that if God doesn't discipline us, we're bastards, we're illegitimate sons. That means that if God doesn't discipline us, he's acting like he doesn't care how we turn out. Parents who refuse to discipline their children are functionally disowning us on Scripture teaches. In the wonder, children who are not disciplined grow up feeling lost, anxious, angry. Hebrews also says that this discipline must be painful. Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous but grievous. Nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Hebrews 12 verse 11. It must be painful. Why? So that it will yield the peaceable fruit of righteousness. We have a rising generation of kids who have received the most therapy, the most medication, the most coping techniques, the most gentle parenting and what has it produced. A generation full of anxiety, fear, oppression, aimlessness and anger and growing violence. Discipline your son and he will give me rest. He will give delight to your heart. Prompt 29 verse 17. The Bible commands fathers to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The word nurture there is high day. High day was the inculturation of ideal virtues and values in Greek society. In other words, the Bible requires parents to raise their children up for the good of their nation. Faithful spanking is for the blessing of America. Knox! What about the Stoning Passage? Oh, don't think we've forgotten about the passage in Deuteronomy that talks about stoning kids. Do we really want to insist that there's a place for capital punishment for rebellious sons? Yeah. We must. The Bible insists on it. But let's take a closer look at this. First, in the ancient world, violence in the family was commonplace. But in Biblical law, parents were not allowed to administer civil penalties. They get the rod of discipline. They don't have the rod of the sword. Second. Notice who brings the charges. The parents themselves. This isn't vigilante justice. It's a form of legal proceeding. Third, the men of that city are required to join in the execution of the criminal son. It required buy-in from the whole community. The case goes before the elders, the accusations that has to be proven, the son has the right to defend himself. And the parents who brought him, they have to be present for the execution. But look at what the law is actually doing here. It protects parental authority by making the final section a community decision, not a private decision. It protects children from abuse of parents by requiring public processes. And it protects society from unreformed criminals by removing them before they destroy others. This law was teaching Israel that rebellion against the household is rebellion against God. The stakes are ultimate. Death is on the table. What is really glorious is that Deuteronomy 21 ends with a tree. And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he has put to death, he shall hang him on a tree. Deuteronomy 21, verse 22. Right there, right after that fierce and haunting law about the rebellious son, is the provision for the ordinary capital punishment to be carried out by crucifixion. And so 2,000 years ago, God the Father arranged for his perfect son to stand in the place of all the rebellious sons. And he was hung on a tree. He himself, for our sins, in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. Buy his wounds you have been healed, for you were straying like sheep, but now have returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. Verse 22, 24, 25. The only perfect son was put to death, so the buy his wounds we might be healed. And having been healed, he offers us the way out, the way back, the way back to the peaceable fruit of righteousness, the way back to fellowship in our families, the blessing of our nation. This is good news, but it's not merely good news to believe, it is good news to obey. So grandmother told parents to spank their kids, the world called her a child abuser. But she was right. And the people who attacked her are living in the wreckage of a civilization that forgot how to actually raise their kids. The Puritans knew that the family was the seedbed of all other societies. You get the household wrong and the church fails. You get the church wrong and the state collapses. We got the household wrong. But here's the thing about seed beds, they can actually be replanted. And every time a father takes responsibility for his household, that pattern is broken. And every time a mother refuses to let her children rule her, the tide turns. Every time a parent disciplines with love, rod and reproof, consequences and comfort, the biblical household comes back to life. This isn't about saving your sanity as a parent, though it will. It's not even about raising well-behaved kids, but that'll happen too. What this is about is glorifying God because that's your chief end. And when you seek first the Kingdom of God, all of these other things get added. Your sanity, a thriving society, America's restoration. So seek first the Kingdom of God. Thank your kids. Let's save America. you