Evangelicals are mean to kids, beginning at home

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on June 13, 2025.

Every Father’s Day weekend, complementarian women post on social media about how thankful they are for their husbands’ loving leadership. Photos of confidently smiling men who think the gospel requires them to be the heads of their households grace our newsfeeds.

While many of these men may be generally kind and while their wives likely mean what they’re saying, their theology of male headship makes one thing clear: These people think their patriarchs are the protectors of society.

But if these guys are the leaders of white evangelicalism, then they are the ones responsible for white evangelicalism being in the condition it’s in. Which begs the question: If these guys are such good fathers who care about family values, why is their movement so mean to kids?

Being mean to their own kids

“For white evangelicals, everything begins in the home.”

For white evangelicals, everything begins in the home. And their meanness toward kids is no exception. Much of their modern meanness has been shaped by the Institute in Basic Life Principles that is exposed in the Shiny Happy People docuseries. And for those who would dismiss IBLP as a fundamentalist organization that’s completely different than supposedly more even-handed organizations like The Gospel Coalition, TGC partially defended IBLP in a piece written by Alex Harris, who criticized the series and added, “I know people who had positive experiences with IBLP. These were homeschooling families with parents who genuinely sought to honor God and do what was best for their children.”

An 1970s-era handout from a Bill Gothard Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts seminar that shows the father as the hammer who hits the wife, the chisel, to shape the children in a Christian home.

Those of us who grew up in the independent Baptist world of the IBLP recognize full well the parallels between the hierarchies of IBLP and The Gospel Coalition.

It all begins with their view of authority. “When we are rejecting God’s delegated authority, we’re also rejecting his authority,” one IBLP representative explains. In their world, God’s hierarchy of delegated authority begins with men at the top. “They turned every father into a cult leader,” one of the interviewees says.

One of the clearest examples of white evangelical meanness toward their own kids is through the ever-present threat of hell. My earliest memories in this world were going to bed as a 4-year-old with my 2-year-old brother in the room, as my dad laid on the floor and told us stories about the horrors of hellfire. Being eternally roasted is hard enough for a 40 year old to deal with, let alone a 4-year-old.

Because white evangelical men are so terrified of what they think God the Father plans to do to their kids for not submitting to God’s hierarchy of delegated authority, they often promote a discipline strategy that prioritizes spanking. As Shiny Happy People demonstrates, fear of hell is referenced as reason to use spanking as “encouragement” to break “the rebellious spirit they’re born with.”

The piece I’ve written that I’ve received the most consistently angry feedback from over the years has been my exposé on Voddie Baucham, who calls babies “vipers in diapers” and promotes spanking so much that he recommends having “an all-day session where you just wear them out.”

Perhaps the clearest example of white evangelicals being mean to kids has been their response to their sexual abuse crises. As BNG’s Mark Wingfield described the Southern Baptist Convention’s handling of sexual abuse, “The house is still a mess.”

Being mean to other people’s kids

So imagine what happens when the movement these men rule over expands its territory to take over the United States government. If my thesis is correct that their movement is mean to kids in their homes, then one would expect their political movement to be mean to kids in society as well.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.