Christians’ promotion of corporal punishment harms bodies, minds and the gospel

“Spanking? Well, you know, the Bible says, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’”

Actually, it doesn’t. The harsh teacher Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow spoke this popular misquotation of Proverbs 13:24.

Even the website of the conservative Focus on the Family says the biblical passage doesn’t actually say, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” Their article points out the misquoted passage describes not spanking in particular but discipline in general. A rod, the author says, was a shepherd’s tool to guide sheep. For instance, in the 23rd Psalm, the psalmist said of God, “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

However, the assertion that a rod was just a comforting tool of guidance and not for corporal punishment disingenuously dodges the difficulty of other Bible passages. It’s deceptive to pretend the Bible doesn’t endorse hitting children.

Proverbs 20:30 states, “Blows that wound cleanse away evil; beatings make clean the innermost parts.” While some might argue this passage applies to criminals, Proverbs 23:13-14 clearly refers to parenting: “Do not withhold discipline from your children; if you beat them with a rod, they will not die. If you beat them with the rod, you will save their lives from Sheol.”

Our primary problem, then, lies in how we interpret Scripture in historical context and then apply it to our contemporary lives. This already-complex issue gets further complicated by how we communicate about it.

Verses about spanking

An Internet search of “What does the Bible say about spanking?” led to openbible.com’s list of verses addressing spanking. A casual reader of the list might conclude 44 verses address spanking.

However, the vast majority of the list’s verses only speak of discipline in general. One, Galatians 6:1, says a person who has committed a transgression should be restored with a “spirit of gentleness.” The list also contains verses speaking indirectly against spanking.

But then there’s Revelation 1:4: “John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne.” The website gives readers the option to rank the verses as “helpful” or “not helpful.” The day I found the list, this verse had received two votes as “helpful.” Noticeably there was not an option to vote: “What the helpful does this verse have to do with spanking?”

“Are we going to literally follow Scripture on stoning stubborn children to death?”

The only verses that directly mentioned anything akin to spanking were the two verses from Proverbs.

However, another form of corporal punishment is prescribed in two passages on the list. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 commands if a son is stubborn, rebellious, gluttonous and drunken, his parents should bring him before the city elders to be stoned to death. Similarly, Leviticus 20:9 prescribes the death penalty for cursing one’s parents.

In an adult Sunday school class, I once rhetorically asked, “Are we going to literally follow Scripture on stoning stubborn children to death?” Terrifyingly, a man in the class said, “Well, that might solve some of our problems.”

Yes, we have a problem with how to interpret and apply Scripture. If only a Savior would come and steer us from immature legalism to grace.

What to keep and what to explain away

Meanwhile, many biblical inerrantists continue to be selective in passages to cherry pick into modernity. Passages about spanking are among passages many of them want to keep, while other passages are deemed outdated only under overwhelming scientific evidence.

For instance, several places in the Bible describe Earth as flat with the sun orbiting around it, like when Earth is described as having four corners in Job 37:2-3, Isaiah 11:12, Ezekiel 7:2 and Revelation 7:1.

Many commentators simplistically play this off as poetic or symbolic language. This represents an attempt to defend a view that says Scripture was dictated by God, like a boss to a secretary.

“Maybe we should treat biblical passages about spanking the same way we do those about a flat Earth.”

Why would God dictate a message and get the shape of Earth wrong? Thus, defenders of biblical inerrancy say biblical references to a flat earth don’t actually refer to a flat earth. However, if ancient religious people did not really believe Earth was flat, why did the church of the 1600s threatened to torture Galileo for suggesting Earth moved around the sun? This violent reaction derived from a literal interpretation of Joshua 10:13, in which the sun was stopped so that a battle could continue, enabling biblical Israel to destroy an enemy.

Inerrantists blame that flat-earth view on misinterpretation by generations who followed the writers. That begs the question: Why did a loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God not dictate more clearly? Regardless of the answer, maybe we should treat biblical passages about spanking the same way we do those about a flat Earth.

Physical sciences vs. social sciences

How so?

Even if we understand that Scripture writers thought Earth was flat, we cut them slack because we understand within their mistaken views about cosmology, they were seeking spiritual connection. It’s the pursuit of spiritual connection amidst imperfection that should be our focus in approaching Scripture. As my mother’s Christian-college biology professor said: “The Bible is a book of faith, not a book of science.”

“Should not Christians be leading the way to more Christlike forms of discipline?”

So, questions: If we reject Scripture writers’ descriptions of physical science, why do we so often embrace their prescriptions for social science? If there are more accurate ways to view cosmology since the time of Moses and formation of the Torah, might we as humanity have developed better ways to bring up children in the way they should go? Should not Christians be leading the way to more Christlike forms of discipline?

Yet, just as status-quo Christians once defended the practice of enslaving other humans, Christians too often maintain the status quo about corporal punishment.

What’s wrong with the status quo?

What’s wrong with the status quo? For one thing, a spanking is something that can’t be taken back. Second, permissible aggression leads to reckless application.

When I was in eighth grade in 1979-80, corporal punishment was common in Tennessee. One day, after school was over, my teacher sent me on an errand to deliver paperwork. When I returned, my teacher was in the hallway, his back to our classroom door, talking to another teacher.

As I walked to my desk, my teacher came in behind me. He angrily called my name and that of two others and said, “You are not to be out of your seats when I’m out of the room.” As he pulled a paddle from his desk drawer, he said, “Go to the end of the hall.”

I tried to remind him that I was only out of my desk doing something he requested. He told me to hush. When it was my turn to be paddled, I was still objecting. He again ordered me to hush and told me to put my hands on the wall. Not wanting to further incite his anger, I complied.

Fast forward to 2007. It was my son’s first day of first grade at the same school I attended in a system where we both learned from legions of outstanding educators. He and two other boys were sent to the office for fighting. The active-church-member principal pulled a paddle out of his desk and told the boys that was what they would get if they came back to his office for fighting.

“Hitting to teach people not to hit reeks of stupidity.”

I got a phone call from his teacher that evening. She explained she had seen the fight from a distance. My son had actually intervened to break up the fight. A teacher nearby had her back turned. When she turned, she thought she saw three boys fighting, rather than two boys fighting and one breaking it up. She herded them to the office before my son’s teacher arrived and only later found out my son had been accused of fighting.

That was my son’s first encounter with school: Being threatened with being hit — for hitting.

Similarly, but more severely, a seventh-grade boy at a church where I was a youth minister got in a fight during a field trip. His punch in self-defense broke his own arm. On Monday, arm in a cast, he was summoned to the office and paddled for fighting.

In college classes, I tell this story and pantomime giving three licks with a paddle as I say, “We. Do. Not. Hit. People. Do you understand?!”

Hitting to teach people not to hit reeks of stupidity. Spiritualizing the practice makes faith look stupid.

Rash behavior

Permitting corporal punishment leads to rash behavior by adults that cannot be taken back. This overlaps with another problem with corporal punishment: Most misbehavior results from mismanagement of emotions. We do not model emotional regulation if our disciplinary methods spring from lack of emotional management.

For example, while serving as a minister, I told a schoolteacher parishioner I had seen teachers use corporal punishment abusively. I mentioned that when I was in school, three of the students I saw paddled most frequently had gone on to serve long prison sentences — two of them for aggravated rape.

I wondered: “If corporal punishment is effective, why didn’t it change their behavior? All it did was scare the kids — like me — who were prone to being scared and would have been just as scared of nonviolent punishments.”

The teacher, nearing retirement, said: “Don’t you go trying to take away paddling. When a student has been misbehaving and I get angry” — she pantomimed swinging a paddle — “a few good whacks let me release my anger and get it out of my system.”

“A few good whacks let me release my anger and get it out of my system.”

I stared at this active church member in shocked disbelief. There it was: It wasn’t about what was best for the child, it was about what felt good to her.

Address the emotions

A better path to true discipline is to address the emotions driving a child’s misbehavior. I hold a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master of a divinity degree with a major in pastoral counseling, and a Ph.D. in child and family studies. I’ve read a lot of books, to say the least.

The most important and practical one is Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman and Joan DeClaire. It describes how parents and teachers respond to children’s emotions in unhealthy ways and how to shift to healthier emotion coaching. One of the key steps to such coaching is seeing the child’s mismanagement of emotion not as a threat but as an opportunity.

Another teacher seized such an opportunity rather than maintaining the status quo. This former colleague contacted me upon arriving at a new job at a rural Southern high school. The school had just 600 students in grades six through 12.

To set the cultural context, my colleague described a sign on a shop across the street from her new school. It said, “Videos — Tanning — Taxidermy.” She was stunned the 2015 code of conduct cited three steps for addressing misconduct — warning, detention, corporal punishment.

Halfway through the second week of school, she had experienced repeated disciplinary issues with a 15-year-old male. She approached two teachers and asked about the student’s history. Both professional educators — who almost certainly attended church weekly — replied: “Is he giving you problems? Send him to the office and have them bust his ass.”

“Is he giving you problems? Send him to the office and have them bust his ass.”

Instead, my colleague — one of the most effective educators I have known — asked the young man to stay after school. She closed the door and said: “I can’t allow you to go on disrupting class. No one acts like this unless something is going on. We will not leave here until we have this resolved.”

His bravado evaporated into the steam of sulking shame and anger. He sullenly said: “My mom wants me to move to (another Southern state) to live with my dad. I don’t want to live with my dad. I don’t want to live with him because he hates me. He hates me because he thinks I’m gay.” He paused and then opened the door to the source of his shame and anger that surfaced in disruptive bravado: “And he thinks I’m gay because I’m gay.”

What would you do?

When I heard that story, I was teaching at a state university in the South. I taught classes in human development, child-adolescent-and-family studies and ethics. In one survey of my students’ vocational goals, the proportion who planned to go into ministry was higher than I had seen at two Christian universities. These were students who, by and large, supported corporal punishment as a divinely ordained method of discipline.

Each semester, I would tell my classes this story about the disruptive student confronted by his teacher. I would prompt and then ask: “Try to imagine being 15, gay and living in a community with a combined video, tanning and taxidermy shop. Now, by show of hands, how many of you think it would help this young man to hit him three to five times with a wooden board?”

No student — out of hundreds — ever raised a hand. They stared like the proverbial herd of deer in the headlights as their faces clearly indicated cognitive dissonance.

I then asked them what they would do if they were the teacher. After discussion, I revealed what happened with the unruly student.

My colleague asked me if she should refer the student to one of the two school counselors. I suggested caution. “I absolutely would not do that without doing some homework,” I said. “Given what you’ve described about the community, the school counselors might send the kid to some abusive conversion therapy camp. I would recommend going to the counselors one by one and, without using the boy’s name, pose a hypothetical and feel them out for how they would approach such a situation.”

My colleague called back to say the first counselor she approached was professionally equipped and compassionate. The teacher referred the boy to that counselor, and his disruptive behavior stopped.

‘It worked on me’

While my students who discussed this situation quickly questioned their assumptions about corporal punishment, one student in a similar discussion emphatically supported corporal punishment in schools because it had “worked” on her.

She was a world-class athlete who had attended a large metropolitan high school in Tennessee. Her senior year, she was paddled for sneaking off campus to go to a nearby restaurant. With raised eyebrows, she said, “I never even thought about sneaking away from school again.” I asked: “You were a star athlete, right? Would you have snuck away from campus again if you had been suspended for a game or two?”

Now she had the deer in the headlights gaze as realization swirled. The same effect could have been accomplished without physical violence. When she didn’t answer, I pressed: “Well? If you had been suspended from playing, would you have ever left campus again?” She conceded: “No. I wouldn’t have.”

Sexualized paddling

This brings me to an impression I formed well before I knew spanking could be sexualized. In middle school, I noticed one male teacher paddled students frequently. However, of those he paddled, a seemingly disproportionate number were pretty girls in tight jeans. One of my friends was an athlete. She got paddled for being out of her seat, even though school was over and she was getting ready to go to sports practice, like she did every day.

“What is the point requiring a witness for a paddling if the witness is not going to raise an issue with the appropriateness of the course of action?”

In high school, a similar teacher knocked at the door of our class, holding a paddle. He asked my teacher to witness a set of students get paddled. Our class heard two sets of three licks. When our teacher returned, someone asked what happened. He ever-so-slightly rolled his eyes and shook his head, then said, “Two girls were playing tic-tac-toe.”

It was the first time I saw a teacher even subtly object to another teacher’s actions. As a high school sophomore, I wondered, “What is the point requiring a witness for a paddling if the witness is not going to raise an issue with the appropriateness of the course of action?”

Comedian Trevor Noah humorously questioned sexualized corporal punishment. He sarcastically wondered something like this: If spanking were made illegal, how would we learn to be sexy?

A graduate-level class illustrated this juxtaposition of spanking as punishment and as sexual play. A faculty member related, “I was once working with a couple in which the husband was really into spanking, but the wife wasn’t.” To clarify, I asked, “Were they into spanking their kids or each other?”

The professor blankly stared at me a few moments in confusion. Then he blushed and, laughing, said: “Yes! Spanking the kids. This isn’t an S&M class!” All but one of my classmates roared in laughter. I had forgotten about the mom who brought her teenage son to class. She was blushing; he was laughing hysterically.

The question that arises from Noah’s jest and the incident in my class is this: Why is it awkward for an adult to visualize consenting adults engaging in sexualized spanking, but it is far less awkward for many Christians to visualize hitting a child?

Behavioral black market

Although many find it odd at best, consenting adults aren’t the only ones who seek out spanking, and this leads us to another problem with corporal punishment: Spanking creates a behavioral black market.

At my high school, getting paddled was virtually a rite of passage for boys. I went through my own initiation multiple times: Once by purposely leaning back in my chair and twice for being excessively late to class. It was a game. The punishment created the misbehavior. As the adage goes: “Bad attention is better than no attention.”

For one man I met, though, it was not a game. Well into our adult years, we attended a church-based event for men and boys from multiple churches. In private conversation, he and I started sharing personal stories. He became surprisingly vulnerable. I knew from stories in the local newspaper and smalltown scuttlebutt he had been struggling on most fronts much of his adult life.

With deep pain in his eyes, he told me a heartrending story: “At a (high school club) picnic, my dad said to the other dads and our shop teachers, ‘What are we going to do to toughen these boys up?’ One of my teachers suggested, ‘Maybe we ought to paddle them every day.’ All the fathers said that was a good idea. After that, every morning (the shop teacher) would line us all up and paddle us. It got to where I hated going to school.”

How abusive. How tragic.

Remember how my son was threatened with a paddle on the first day of first grade? Later in elementary school, he told me over dinner his best buddy, a Mexican immigrant, had not gotten his homework finished, and his teacher had said, “I hope your mother whups your butt!” My son said his buddy had spent the rest of class crying.

I replied: “Son, I appreciate your concern for your friend, but it’s important to stick to the facts. Now, what did your teacher actually say?” He insisted he had quoted her accurately. Seeing an opportunity to teach him the importance of details, the next day when I picked him up, I told him to play on the playground while I went in to check on something.

His teacher was sitting at her desk at the rear of the room, with multiple rows of desks between us. Smiling, I told her I wanted to teach my son about details. I told her what he had quoted her saying. Her eyebrows raised, and she said, “That’s exactly what I said.” I was taken aback. After a moment she barked, “Do you have a problem with that?”

I stammered, “Well, I think there are probably better ways to address homework not being done than by expressing a desire for a child to be hit. It creates a rather hostile environment, for one thing.”

“Well, I can tell you’re one of these liberals opposed to corporal punishment.”

Bobbing her head side to side as she said it, the teacher blurted, “Well, I can tell you’re one of these liberals opposed to corporal punishment.”

I put my palms up in a “whoa” gesture. “I just think we often don’t know what’s going on at home that might interfere with getting homework done.” I slowly bobbed my head goodbye as I backed away and then turned and walked out the door.

The next day in a restaurant, the school’s secretary asked to speak to me privately. She said my son’s teacher had come to the office and said I had been aggressive and intimidating. Then the teacher had asked for the office to please not grant me permission to come to her classroom.

Yes, I’m 6-foot-2 and 200 pounds. I’m told I can be intimidating just by walking into a room — much like an adult towering over an elementary student. So, with extreme prejudice regarding her accusation against my aggression, I say this: Oh, the irony of this adult educator claiming to be the victim of aggression while she was using aggressive words and endorsing violent hands towards a child.

Our mission to enlarge minds requires modeling creative problem solving rather than animalistic “whup your butt” brute force.

This is hard work

Determining what is best for children — tailored to their individual needs — requires hard work. It’s labor we often fail to consider if our minds are limited by generations of tradition. The hard work requires we focus on students’ needs. Then teachers and parents must do the hard work of emotional regulation.

Defenders of corporal punishment will say: “Of course, these foregoing examples are abusive. Of course, I’m opposed to a teacher getting off sexually via corporal punishment. But you can’t throw out the whole bushel because of a few bad apples.”

So, let me be clear: It’s not just that there are some bad-apple teachers. It’s that corporal punishment is a bad-apple disciplinary method just like a flat-earth cosmology is bad-apple science. It might have been effective when it was all we knew, but it’s now a rotten apple.

“Corporal punishment only appears to be effective in the short view.”

The world appears to be flat when we’re just looking at it from our isolated perspective, but it’s not. Likewise, corporal punishment only appears to be effective in the short view. When it doesn’t lead to catastrophic effects, it’s only because of a host of other offsetting benefits in a child’s life.

And of course, just as some people with good hearts believed Earth was flat, some good-hearted people sincerely believe corporal punishment serves a constructive purpose. I know many such folks.

One such person was another of my middle school teachers. I know not a single student who felt less than profound care from him. Later in life, on social media, he expressed the realization if he had been more creative and thoughtful, he would have found other ways of discipline.

A better way

One exchange highlights the importance of the hard work done by my colleague who dug into what was going on in her gay student’s life and addressed the need. In this post, a friend had asked for memories of middle school.

• Female classmate: Mr. (Doe) paddled me more than anyone ever!
• Doe: Hmm. Did not realize that. I do not remember paddling you.
• Female classmate: I would never do my homework for (your class)! … at that time, had a lot of home issues, couldn’t concentrate. in elementary school they moved me to an advanced math class in the middle of learning multiplication tables. … It all went downhill.

What if this child had been approached by someone following more closely the example of Jesus rather than the model of flawed humans?

Christians follow a Savior of peace and — according to Galatians 5:22-23 — assess righteousness based on the presence of love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and self-control. On this scale, corporal punishment does not balance. Yet as with Christians using the Bible to defend and promote the practice of enslavement, it is people of faith who slow our progress toward better social policy.

The Wikipedia entry on corporal punishment in U.S. schools shows evidence that Christianity not only fails to work to eliminate corporal punishment but also promotes its use. As of 2023, only four states — Iowa, New York, New Jersey and Maryland — have outlawed corporal punishment in both state and private schools.

“Christianity not only fails to work to eliminate corporal punishment but also promotes its use.”

Twenty-nine states in the North and West ban corporal punishment only in public schools — meaning it still can be used in private schools, most of which surely are Christian. Other than Indiana, all the states where paddling still is legal are in the Southeast Bible Belt. The exception is Virginia, where it is illegal in only public schools. It’s still legal in North Carolina and Kentucky, although banned by rule in each public school district.

In 2016, the Houston Chronicle reported on the use of paddling in Texas — the state whose legislature voted to allow untrained Christian chaplains to serve as school counselors. Federal data from 2011 to 2012 recorded 166,807 students were paddled. Of those, 28,569 (17%) were in Texas.

According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2011 roughly 49.5 million students attended U.S. public schools.  In Texas that year, official records indicate 5.4 million students were enrolled in public school. Texas accounted for about 10% of public school enrollment in the United States, but it tallied 17% of the instances of corporal punishment.

This is an incomplete comparison, since a per capita rate would require knowing the enrollment of states where corporal punishment was being used in 2011, and those data were not readily available. However, when we see the legalized practice of corporal punishment is concentrated in the Bible Belt, it seems fair to conclude this practice is fueled in large part by traditionalistic Christian dogma.

What would Jesus do?

Meanwhile, U.S. Christians bemoan the increasing number of “nones” — people who affiliate with no religion. Yet Christians continue to champion behaviors that are not part of the Christian message. Can we honestly imagine Jesus Christ thrashing a child? The fit he threw with a whip in the temple (John 2:14-16) involved standing up to adults using faith to profit off those seeking spiritual connection; that’s different.

“Can we honestly imagine Jesus Christ thrashing a child?”

Christians who want to be salt and light to a more Christlike Christianity need to be showing up at school board meetings and lobbying state legislators to eliminate corporal punishment. Stubbornly clinging to violent punishment causes people to have a negative perception of Christianity.

When corporal punishment lingers in antiquated usage at religious schools and even public schools heavily influenced by Christian voters, we might recall a scene in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. The domineering King Miraz strikes the red dwarf Trumpkin. Eyes filled with disdain, Trumpkin says to King Miraz what many secular people say to religious folk in general and Christians in particular: “And you wonder why we don’t like you.”

In Hebrew, the name Ichabod means “without glory.” In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane, the harsh teacher without glory, vanishes. It’s past time for harshness to disappear from Christian practice and be replaced with Christlike nurture.

 

Brad Bull earned a bachelor of arts degree in psychology, a minor in creative writing and a master of divinity degree from Baptist institutions. He holds a Ph.D. in human ecology with a major in child and family studies and a cognate in counseling from the University of Tennessee. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Tennessee and Virginia. He is storyteller, speaker and freelance writer who can be reached at DrBradBull.com.

 

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