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Theological Trends Column
This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 04 (2025).
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Summary Critique
The Myth of Good Christian Parenting:
How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families
Marissa Franks Burt and Kelsey Kramer McGinnis
(Brazos Press, 2025).
Parenting a child is one of the most culturally fraught inflection points in American culture today. What was once as natural as the rising of the sun, the stars sparkling in the firmament, is now vexing, like trying to puzzle out some impossible sum. How can a mother put her baby safely to bed each night? What should an 18-month-old eat? What is the proper balance between permissiveness and boundary setting? For as many conundrums about the health and happiness of children, there are gadgets and products that promise to make it straightforward and easy.
Modern parenting is fraught, I believe, in part because many parents don’t know what the task is. What end result are they trying to attain? The crisis of purpose is then exacerbated by the reality that so many parents have to do whatever it is all by themselves with no cultural, familial, and theological structure to lend meaning and material relief. Millions of Americans, including many Christians, are completely at sea in their parenting, tossed along by fads, statistics, influencers, and even the Christian book publishing market. In this last category I would include a new book by Marissa Franks Burt and Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families (Brazos Press, 2025).
Experts and Evangelicals. Burt and McGinnis found each other online. A friend asked what “extremely niche topic” they would choose if they could write a book on it. Burt posted a response — “a book that examined the history and theological assumptions behind ‘biblical’ family-life teaching, including the resulting impact” (p. ix). A few days later, McGinnis private-messaged her. As the project took shape, they tapped into the growing number of deconstructing exvangelicals carrying around burdens of grief passed on to them by their parents. Thousands have been abused, both physically and spiritually. As part of their research, Burt and McGinnis “conducted an informal survey with open-ended questions and invited adult children and parents to share their perspectives.” Overall, respondents “felt betrayed by these teachings” (xi).
One crucial term needed definition. What is an “evangelical”? In a footnote they write:
We ultimately decided to rely on Daniel Vaca’s understanding of American evangelicalism as a “commercial religion” that aims to reach the segment of American Protestants who purchase the books, music, and other forms of entertainment media labeled “Christian.” Vaca writes, “Both the evangelical market and the evangelical population have taken shape continually, through commercial and cultural efforts. And if evangelicalism’s growth has fueled industries that have supplied the demand of evangelicalism’s consumers, the inverse has also occurred: industries have helped generate evangelical demand, evangelical identities, and the very idea of a coherent evangelical population.” (201)1
To put it another way, “evangelicals” are not people understood in terms of their theological and doctrinal convictions so much as by their consumption of content.2 If evangelicals are people mostly governed by the books, podcasts, and reels they consume, then who are the people producing all that material? People purporting to be experts like James Dobson, Ted Tripp, Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo, Doug Wilson, and a host of other household names.
According to Burt and McGinnis, self-proclaimed experts often lack the credentials to speak authoritatively on this subject. They take issue with Dobson, who, in the early part of his career, offered advice about children and discipline, when “he was a brand-new father” himself (21).3 The Ezzos, likewise, grew a following by meeting with people in their living room (2).
The other problem, though, is that “Many Christian parenting experts assume that successful families all look the same.” They observe that “there is rarely mention of single, divorced, or widowed parents — or extended family members taking on parental roles. Most authors don’t address neuro-divergence or disability.” Adding to this narrowness of vision, “The majority of the most influential evangelical parenting experts are White” (4).
When “pastor-teachers” weighed in, lacking credentials in childhood development or knowledge of secular research, they relied on their own spiritual authority. The result was troubling instruction like the “umbrellas of protection,” a picture that shows literal umbrellas over the heads of men (under God), women (under men), and children (under women) (47).
Readers might wonder if there are any other explanations for the popularity of parenting literature — including the umbrella drawing. In contrast to the thesis of Burt and McGinnis, it would be important to remember that American society secularized rapidly through the 80s and 90s. The seeds of the Industrial and Sexual Revolutions were ripening into fruit.4 Christians were insulated, by and large, from secular trends that transformed American conceptions of the family because of the very rootedness of God’s Word.
Out with the Old Biblical Style, in with the New “Ethical” One. Evangelicals have been the last to let go of corporal punishment, believing that the Bible teaches it is the best, and perhaps only, method to train a child in the way he or she should go (130). The kind of authoritarian parenting that made use of the rod is very much out of fashion in contemporary America, and many Christians are choosing “grace-based” parenting instead (145).
Burt and McGinnis assert that the Bible does not teach the necessity of corporal punishment (145) and claim that to believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God is, in itself, problematic. In fact, Burt and McGinnis dispense summarily with biblical inerrancy, about which they write: “Inerrancy, as commonly understood, claims that the Bible is without error, authoritative, and understandable. This view offers evangelicals confidence and assurance that a ‘common sense’ reading of Scripture will help them discern the value of almost anything. Devotion to inerrancy and reverence for the Bible’s authority compel people to view Scripture as a kind of instruction manual for every area of life” (29).
That the Bible contains instructions for a variety of life circumstances is indisputable. However, the claim that evangelicals who believe that the Bible is inerrant are compelled by those beliefs to reduce the Scriptures to an “instruction manual for every area of life” seems anecdotal at best. There is no footnote to substantiate this astonishing assertion.
The authors of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy5 don’t claim that the Bible is trying to answer every question a person might have on any subject. Rather, they claim it is inerrant because of the claims the biblical writers make — that it is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). That is why almost every evangelical would claim to try to live “biblically,” to parent “biblically,” to think and act “biblically.”
The trouble for Burt and McGinnis, however, is that “For many evangelicals, ‘biblical’ is more than a label; it’s an ideology. It signals a commitment to a particular way of interpreting Scripture as an integral part of a truly Christian worldview” (27). They appeal to Jason Blakely’s theory that ideology functions “as a map we use to help us navigate the world but which we can end up mistaking for the landscape itself. We can allow ourselves to be so immersed in ideology that it becomes our world. For some evangelicals, commitment to a particular approach to the Bible is the whole of the Christian faith” (27, emphasis in original).
Not everyone who claims to follow the Bible does, of course. A person who tries to live as though the Bible is authoritative is no more ideological than someone who believes the world is going to end because of climate change. She is, however, more likely to encounter the living God by her attention to the text, however small.
Rather than pursuing the “myth” of biblical parenting — that if you obey what God says in the Bible, God will be honor-bound to deliver on His promises that your children will grow up to be productive Christians — the authors counsel readers instead to practice what they deem to be ethical parenting. “To deal ethically with children is to be willing to be moved by their desires, needs, and preferences,” they write. “It doesn’t mean letting children always have their way, but it does require parents to value a child’s perspective rather than reduce their agency to the binary choice between obedience and disobedience.” Raising children ethically, they explain, “means leaving behind a framework of rules based solely on hierarchy” (92).
Deceitful Hearts and the Holy Spirit. Along with the rejection of biblical inerrancy, Burt and McGinnis assert that the view that Jesus died a substitutionary and propitiatory death for sin — penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) — “has become the primary and often only way of understanding salvation for most conservative Christians.” Moreover, “making it the perspective — and then formulating ritualized discipline and spanking around it — verges on idolatry” (124, emphasis in original).6 In fact, they claim, many Christian parents use corporal punishment in a manner derived from PSA such that “children must atone for their own sins amid sacraments of spanking” (124). The theological way parents conceive of this action leads to violence and a lack of control (102–103). This is very harmful, according to Burt and McGinnis, because “abuse is the true legacy of spanking” (143). Worse, teaching a child that love and pain go together makes them at risk for committing domestic violence as adults (165).
Evangelicals too often joke about how sinful little children are. The authors take issue with the late Rev. Voddie Baucham’s affectionate epithet for children: “viper in a diaper” (98). To speak of children this way dehumanizes them, they claim, and makes parents take actions they are increasingly coming to regret — like spanking or speaking harshly (97–99, 157).
It isn’t just the work of Jesus that is under scrutiny. Too many parents, according to Burt and McGinnis, “assume the roles of God the Holy Spirit (searching hearts and convicting children of sin)” (124–25). None of this, according to the authors, accounts for the vulnerability and frailty of children, questions of neurodivergence, nor the developmental milestones children need to reach in order to flourish as adults. By so spiritualizing the task of parenting, children are subject to the anger and volatility of adults who believe they are doing the Lord’s work (103).
Spoil the Child. My grandmother was a beloved kindergarten teacher for 30 years in a Christian school. To anyone who asked her about what made each class so happy and successful, she always gave the same answer — obedience. If you don’t learn to obey your parents, she said, you will have a hard time ever obeying God. And if you can’t obey God, you won’t be happy. Her favorite hymn, which she played with relish on the piano, was “Trust and Obey” (1887). When I was young, I did not appreciate the simplicity of her plain, unapologetic reasoning. Behind her back, I rolled my eyes. I thought she was hopelessly old-fashioned.
Then I had a child. I believed the chances of raising Christian children were bleak. Their father — my husband — after all, is the pastor of a church, and you know what they say about MKs and PKs. There was probably no way the task that would govern the next twenty years of my life would end well. Anxiously, I read some books, and then I had several more children and simply reverted to instinct. Which meant that I parented the way my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother parented. I wanted my children to be happy in Jesus, and so I taught them to obey me. I was so busy, I didn’t have time to second-guess myself. Now they are living lives of obedience to Jesus. It wasn’t complicated, in the end. Hard — of course — but not like trying to build a ship that will go to Mars.
I had something else that made parenting — for me personally — obvious and straightforward. I grew up in a pre-modern (at that time) country. Children there did not cry (it is a mystery to me how this was accomplished — continual nursing, I imagine), and it was acceptable, in church, to bonk them on the head (lightly) with a stick if they wiggled. I grew up in a culture that was not coming apart, that was blessed with traditions that lent meaning and significance to every word and action. We in the West have not lived in such a world for several generations. The anxiety of our children, the soaring rates of depression, isolation, the degree to which so many young people believe they will be happier if they radically transform their bodies through hormones and surgery — all these did not exist in the past.
It cannot be, of course, that if only all children had been spanked more none of this would have happened. Rather, it is the case that Western culture has been transformed into an anti-culture. Thus, it is perfectly fair to insist that parents who resist modern assumptions, who return to “traditional” forms of parenting, are not the problem here. If their children reject their Christianity, it may be because they grievously sinned, but it may also be because the entire foundation of shared culture is crumbling. Take the central issue that is dividing the church today — sexuality. Burt and McGinnis write that no less than “60 percent of adults leaving their childhood religion identify ‘negative treatment of gay and lesbian people’ as a motivating factor” (68).
McGinnis and Burt insist that administering the rod, expecting a child to obey the first time, and governing the home with authority all produce unhappy, anxious, and aggressive children who will certainly leave the church. To make this claim, they take the testimonies of people who grew up in tragic circumstances of abuse and authoritarianism as the norm (155–58). The book is replete with accounts of beatings, manipulation, and the ungodly, self-serving application of biblical principles in the wrong way and at the wrong time.
For those who say of their more “traditional” childhoods that they grew up well enough, and that they are grateful their parents spanked them, they equivocate by relating how Martin Luther and Dwight Moody were badly beaten in childhood (134). Though they acknowledge that for most of human history, spanking children was the norm, they do not believe there is any justifiable reason to spank children today. In fact, those authors and speakers and pastors, those ordinary people like my grandmother who leaned on Holy Scripture, should instead consider that everything they thought they knew is wrong.
That’s Not Funny. Two points disappointed me about Burt and McGinnis’ characterization of evangelical parenting through the 80s and 90s — a time when I was, as I said, being brought up in evangelical spheres. These are minor in comparison to their questionable view of Jesus’ work on the cross or what evangelicals believe about the Bible. The first is the dismissive way in which they cast phrases like “olive shoots around the table” and “arrows in a man’s quiver” (49). Of course, these came to be cliches, tossed back and forth at church potlucks and in Sunday school. When a Bible verse gets co-opted to be a “movement,” it might be that the plot has been lost along the way. But to be snide and dismissive about how people thought of their children, because they didn’t express themselves in ways the average Christian in 2025 prefers, illumines something awry about American culture in general. That is, we do not respect the past.
In every previous generation, it was unthinkable to throw away everything that one’s parents, grandparents, and ancestors believed. And this, one might say, is biblical. When Jesus discovered, for example, that the elite of His day were dishonoring their parents by not caring for them, through the hole in the law called “Corban,” He castigated them as revilers of God’s Word (Mark 7:11). It added to their many other sins of not recognizing Him as their Messiah and Lord. It is not that the old owe the young an apology for having done it wrong. It is that the young owe the old honor and gratitude, whether the old deserve it or not, for dessert was not part of the Ten Commandments — honor your parents if they forbear from falling under the influence of James Dobson in the 90s.
The second point on which I was disappointed is that Burt and McGinnis made no charitable allowances for the authors and pastors they covered. Pastor Voddie Baucham’s use of the term, “viper in a diaper,” is not dehumanizing to babies. It is a rather crude way of talking about how we are all sinners from our mother’s womb. Just saying that we aren’t sinners from birth does not make it so. There is ample evidence that children, just like adults, sin against God, their parents, and even themselves.
What Is the Point of Parents and Children? For Burt and McGinnis, what is wrong with the state of parenting is that traditional forms of discipline constitute abuse. The trouble is that Christians read the Bible as a literal rule book and expect that if they did things according to what it said there, God would hold up His end of the bargain and make everything all right. This expectation constituted a kind of prosperity gospel approach to family life, a transactional bargain with God. This is a compelling theory. It has the advantage of aligning almost perfectly with modern views of evangelical culture as well as parenting in general.
Unfortunately, it ignores other explanatory narratives, trends, and data. Why 40 million Christians stopped going to church between 2000 and 2020, for example, is a complicated tale. Why people deconstruct is no straightforward matter, although many testimonies of deconstruction fall to type. And more complex still is the state of the family, which, according to Christopher Lasch, writing in the 1970s, had already been “in crisis” for more than 100 years by that point.7
Burt and McGinnis, from my perspective, are correct on many points. I grew up in evangelicalism in the 80s and 90s, and I saw, firsthand, the kind of authoritarianism that eventually drove children from the faith. I endured, along with many others, the entangling spiritual manipulation that occurs when well-meaning people try to peer into your soul and do the work of God, the Holy Spirit. Later, I watched friends apply Ted Tripp’s disciplinary techniques with near-disastrous results. I am very amenable to examining the parenting literature and trends of the last century and throwing away some of the very bad ideas and habits that entrenched themselves in the minds and hearts of Christians.
I draw the line, however, at leaving Christian parents languishing in the mire of rootless, meaningless, anti-culture. It is possible to read the Bible and derive principles that will help you raise your children in a dark and spiritually forlorn world. It is possible to dig around in the past and find tricks and tips to help you in your troubles. Children, said God in the Bible through the mouth of the Psalmist, are a heritage from Him (Psalm 127:3). He gives them as a gift to steward for a time, but ultimately, they belong to Him. Knowing they are His, the Christian parent walks the narrow way of love to render unto God the person that is God’s, to show honor where honor is due, to discipline in the fear and admonition of the Lord, to offer mercy and grace to the littlest in God’s kingdom, and ultimately to stand before the judgement throne herself, forgiven and accepted by the precious blood of Jesus, or cast out because she trusted in herself and her own understanding. That bracing clarity is the way through every perplexing trouble we endure.
Anne Kennedy, MDiv, is the author of Nailed It: 365 Readings for Angry or Worn-Out People, rev. ed. (Square Halo Books, 2020). She blogs about current events and theological trends on her Substack, Demotivations with Anne.
NOTES
- Burt and McGinnis cite Daniel Vaca, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard University Press, 2019), 2.
- This choice seems to be a growing trend, one I encountered first in reading Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020).
- Burt and McGinnis cast doubt over Dr. Dobson’s expert credentials. In fact, he had a PhD in child development, was a licensed psychologist in marriage, family, and children, was an associate professor of pediatrics serving for seventeen years in a children’s hospital in the division of child development, and he was a member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. See “James C. Dobson, Ph.D.,” National Gambling Impact Study Commission, CyberCemetery, University of North Texas Libraries, accessed December 9, 2025, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ngisc/members/dobson.html; and “James C. Dobson,” Research Starters: Biography, accessed December 9, 2025. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/james-c-dobson.
- Christopher Lasche, in Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (Norton, 1977), documents the rise of the “expert” as something that transformed American society in general.
- The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), archived at the Way Back Machine, September 29, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20040929085816/https://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/creeds/chicago.htm.
- They cite Andrew Remington Rillera’s Lamb of the Free (Cascade, 2024), a work that argues Jesus died as an act of solidarity rather than taking on the wrath and condemnation of God upon Himself as a payment for sin. For a helpful critical review, see Derek Rishmawy, “Lamb of the Free — A Critical Review,” Mere Orthodoxy, October 15, 2025, https://mereorthodoxy.com/a-review-of-andrew-remington-rilleras-lamb-of-the-free.
- Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World.
