Save the Children: Fundamentalists perpetually target kids
Daria Blase, “Beware of Dogma,” flikr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
For Christian evangelicals, brainwashing children is perpetually a primary endeavor, as several news stories in recent weeks reiterated.
One article posted last month in Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog—“No, a Mother Isn’t in Jail Right Now Because She Baptized Her Daughter”—updates a continuing story showing how desperately impatient believers are to indoctrinate the innocent, even when legally prohibited.
That post reported how a North Carolina mother named Kendra Stocks secretly had her infant daughter christened in a Catholic baptism ritual in 2016, even though she had been denied legal custody (a judge had earlier awarded full custodial rights to the father, Paul Schaaf). The judge’s order had “specifically” included “decisions concerning religion.”
As is often the case with devout Christians, immediately implementing the long indoctrination process with young children—in this case with baptism—is seen as divinely ordained and urgent. By considering herself somehow blameless after ignoring a court order, Stock flagrantly revealed her not unique view that imagined divine law trumps actual human edicts. As she told a newspaper reporter after being sentenced to a week in jail for violating custody laws:
“I don’t regret having her [my daughter] baptized. That was in her best interest … I don’t see how this is in the best interest of the family. Her father sending her mother to jail.”
That’s beside the point: she broke the law. And in a secular republic that’s the only law. Besides, Stock’s personal religious demands were court-determined to not be in her child’s best interest. But she was not the only one missing the point. Media headlines across the country too-often implied that jailing someone for baptism was simply unfathomable in America, as indeed for many faithful, it sadly is. This headline was posted online by The Blaze, a conservative news and entertainment network: “A North Carolina mother was sentenced to seven days in jail this week for baptizing her own daughter,”
How could that possibly be a crime, the headline seemed to incredulously ask?
This is exactly how people think who have been programmed since infancy to not see the delusions inherent in magical thinking. It’s reflexive, pre-rational.
Another article, spurred by a new A&E cable channel documentary (“Warren Jeffs: Prophet of Evil”) that aired Feb. 19, reports on years of abuse suffered by Elissa Wall, a fundamentalist Mormon woman, now 36, who was forced by now-imprisoned Mormon cult leader Warren Jeffs to marry her 19-year-old cousin when she was 14. Jeffs, who once led the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, is now serving a life term for sexually assaulting his child “brides” when they were 12 and 15 years old, respectively, among other particularly despicable crimes.
Ultimately, Wall became the lead witness against Jeffs at his trial. In her youth, she said she was brought up in the church community’s “very secret lifestyle,” in which members shunned the outside world. Privately, she sensed the lifestyle was odd.
“I have this one vivid memory being at a beach in northern Utah. I was watching this family play about 500 yards away from us. They looked loving, kind and caring. The mother was hugging and holding her children. They were laughing, and they didn’t look like these evil disciples of the devil like I have been told they were. So, I think my questions really started early on.”
During her four enforced years as her cousin Allen Steed’s wife, Wall suffered several miscarriages and a still-birth, before fleeing the community at 18. When she declined Steeds romantic advances—which the church insisted she was duty-bound to always accept—he physically abused her, she said. And when she left the church, she was terrified for her mother and sisters who remained behind and who still believed in the church’s teachings and Jeff’s absolute authority.
These are exactly the kinds of human atrocities that occur when children are not only raised to unquestioningly obey authority but are severely punished when they hesitate to submit, much less refuse.
Yet, these things don’t always end badly. The American legal system—eventually—held both Kendra Stocks and Warren Jeffs to account. Paul Schaaf has retrieved the legal custody of his daughter that the court required, and Elissa Wall and the man she chose to marry are the parents of a son, 13, and a daughter, 11.
But what about all the other kids still being indoctrinated in nonsense every day?
