I don’t generally ingratiate myself to anyone who could be described as a “theobro.” I’ve spent too much of my adult life recovering from the rigid theology these guys usually espouse to be particularly hospitable to very many of their rantings. Usually what I find in theobro camp is dogma trying to pinch hit for an actual relationship with Jesus. It’s just not my jam.
So earlier this week, when I encountered a tweet from theobro Samuel Sey, I cringed. Hard. He was talking about needing to “discipline” his 4-month-old baby and about how much pain this duty brought him.
I just rolled my eyes and kept scrolling. I knew what I was looking at. I knew that Samuel was theobro lite, not yet hardened and heartless and cruel like the John MacArthurs of the world. I knew from previous exposure to his tweets how much he actually did love his son. I knew that his baby was not in actual danger and that the tweet was performative, an attempt to model his commitment to a theological framework he’s trying his best to illustrate for the thousands of people who follow him. There was zero percent chance in my mind that Samuel was actually going to physically harm his son.
“See how much I love my child?” he was trying to say. “See how willing I am to do hard things to guide him down the straight and narrow path that will ultimately save him?”
As a Presbycostal who’s still recovering from this hardlined Reformed type of thinking, it was familiar language, and I knew what he was trying to accomplish, even if I do think it’s entirely ridiculous to assume that a 4-month-old who won’t stop crying is in any way sinning. While I do believe all humans are born with a sin nature, I also believe babies this age lack the cognition to sin. They’re entirely driven by stimuli and response. They aren’t willfully defying adult directives they can’t even comprehend.
And I do think someone with influence in this camp needs to gently encourage the theobros to take a chill pill in this capacity. Let babies be babies. There are a ton of good years left for sin-seeking and correction. You’re off the hook for the first few months. Just hold your kid and try to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. The rod of correction can wait a hot minute.
In any case, while I thought Samuel’s tweet was misguided, I also recognized that it was well-intended and that his son was not in harm’s way.
It seems I was in the minority. Christian Twitter had an absolute conniption over the tweet, many calling for Samuel’s custody to be revoked, others encouraging abuse reports to Child Protective Services. They wanted his head on a platter, and they wanted it now. The judgment was as intense as it was swift. They wanted to Samuel to be the whipping boy who paid the price for all the abusive Gothardish harms that had ever befallen any of them. Watching the responses was like reading a diary of hundreds of survivors of IBLP fundamentalism. Because their parents had gotten it wrong, Samuel must pay. And anyone with the audacity to encourage a more measured approach (myself included) was quickly branded an enabler, a threat to children everywhere.
As it turns out, Samuel would go on to delete the fateful tweet and issue a clarifying statement, wherein he explicitly stated that at no point did he ever strike his child. When he talked about “disciplining” him, he was referring to sleep training, a method of attempting to get a young child to self-sooth. And again, I personally don’t think a baby this age is a great candidate for sleep training, but I also realize that Samuel is a new parent, and he, like the rest of us, is just trying to figure it all out.
But the whole situation left me with a bad taste in my mouth because I think it illustrates a deeper, more nebulous truth that’s been bothering me for quite some time as it relates to the Christian abuse survivor advocates community. I tread lightly when I say this, but sometimes it feels an awful lot like the wounded are looking for vengeance, not justice, and there’s a knee-jerk inclination to demonize otherwise good people at the first hint of a problem without taking time to be careful or measured or thoughtful about the implications of hasty action. They would rather send the nanny state to Samuel’s doorstep and have a group of strangers insert themselves into the situation to create chaos than they would to spend an extra five minutes trying to gain clarity about what was actually happening.
It’s as though the advocates have become these self-appointed arbiters of truth and justice, and anyone who dares to question their authority is roundly dismissed as an abuser themselves. They end up projecting their unprocessed trauma onto unrelated situations in a way that creates trauma for other people, but if you name this problem, you’re the bad guy.
Heck, I lost a ton of followers today for merely stating that I don’t always think spanking is abuse. And I am not going to call CPS on parents merely for believing that spanking is a legitimate disciplinary action. Sorry, but I’m not. Some of the best parents I know believe in spanking. It’s not my personal go-to, but if you’re someone who thinks it’s reasonable to try to remove children from their parents’ custody because their parents believe in measured discipline this way, we probably aren’t destined to be buddies.
And hey, maybe I’m a bit sensitive to the reality of falsified CPS reports because my abusive ex used to file them against me all the time, and it was extremely traumatic for both me and my kids. It’s actually pretty consequential to have strangers who don’t share your faith or parenting standards show up at your home and file through your refrigerator and decide on your behalf whether or not you’re a fit parent. When this happened to me, I was in the middle of a very public stand against trans ideology, and I had no idea if the people assigned to our case were sympathetic to my views or not. I worried they might try to punish me using my children as leverage. Eventually, we were appointed a case worker with eyes to see my ex’s abusive use of conflict, and I ended up with nearly full custody, but not before the damage was done. Baseless reports can be really hard on a family. It’s embarrassing for kids to get called out of class to communicate with authorities. It makes kids feel unsafe to have strangers in their home observing their parents and looking through their belongings and asking invasive questions about their lives.
It’s all just so unfortunate. I think this is absolutely a good opportunity to initiate some broader conversations about how bad theology can be weaponized against children in a way that puts them at risk. Yes, let’s have that conversation. We are long overdue.
But let’s also start a conversation about the dangers of fostering mob mentalities against strangers on the internet. If your goal is to mitigate/reduce trauma for children, then I would respectfully remind you that separating children from their parents is one of the worst things you can possibly do, and this should be a last resort, one you only employ when you are sure children are being harmed. It’s important to intervene if you’re legitimately afraid actual abuse is occurring. But it’s also important to question your own biases, to refrain from leaping to extreme conclusions about people based on a decontextualized tweet or your own trauma. It took about five minutes of digging for me to discover that Samuel was not, in fact, referring to spanking his son. Anyone with the intellectual curiosity of a goldfish could do this work, too. You just have to care more about truth than you do about vindication. And you have to be willing to believe that people can be decent humans even if they don’t share your theological convictions.
I'm not a fan of social media mobs, obviously. But for some perspective: I have no memory of a Christian parent (mine, or the parents of my Christian neighbors, friends, fellow congregants, and classmates) ever using the word 'discipline' to mean anything other than 'hit', and a performative sorrow was part of nearly every discussion of hitting. A lot of fundamentalist churches firmly believe that children should have their will broken by the age of one year -- blanket training, hitting them if they wiggle too much on the changing table, etc. So while the mobbing was inappropriate, the initial assumption of what he meant being that he needed to strike his four month old is perfectly in keeping with my own and many other people's experiences. The only experience I have with a Christian using 'discipline' to mean something other than 'hit' was in a Christian school, where discipline might mean a paddling or it might mean writing 1,000 lines. But usually the paddle. And with parents it was *always* hitting. There are likely many people in that mob for whom this was the *very first time* they're aware of a Christian parent saying 'discipline' to mean something other than hit. Combine that with the declaration of sorrow, and I confess that part of me isn't sure if he was trying to avoid a CPS call. If he truly means he didn't hit his four-month-old, that's great, but in my experience of Christian parents, this would be a unique usage of that word. I hope he was being truthful.
Good, well-balanced commentary.