Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture invites you into transformative conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Each episode, host Joshua Johnson engages guests who challenge conventional thinking and inspire fresh perspectives for embodying faith in today's complex world. If you're curious about how cultural shifts impact your faith journey and passionate about living purposefully, join us as we explore deeper ways to follow Jesus in everyday life.
Subscribe now and shift your perspective.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 355 Kelsey McGinnis & Marissa Burt - The Myth of Good Christian Parenting
What happens when “biblical parenting” becomes more about control than compassion? In this episode, I talk with Kelsey McGinnis and Marissa Burt, authors of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, about the rise of evangelical parenting culture, from James Dobson and Bill Gothard to today’s influencer economy, and how these ideas have shaped generations of families. Together, we explore how fear and hierarchy took root in the church’s imagination, why so many parents feel trapped by formulas and shame, and what it might look like to recover freedom, grace, and mutuality in our homes. This is a conversation about rethinking authority, rediscovering gentleness, and learning to see our children as people to love, not projects to manage.
Marissa Franks Burt (MTh, Columbia International University) is a novelist, editor, teacher, and cohost of the At Home with the Lectionary podcast. She lives in a small town in Washington’s Snoqualmie Valley with her husband, six children, and heaps of books.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis (PhD, University of Iowa) is a musicologist, educator, and correspondent for Christianity Today, writing on worship practices and Christian subculture. She is an adjunct professor at Grand View University in Des Moines and previously worked at the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights.
Marissa & Kelsey's Book:
The Myth of Good Christian Parenting
Kelsey's Recommendations:
Marissa's Recommendations:
Subscribe to Our Substack: Shifting Culture
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com
Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.
Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTube
Consider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below
Contact me to advertise: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com
Catch On Fire PodcastsThis channel does a deep dive into the scriptures so as to teach what it means to be...
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
When someone like Gothard is like, this is biblical, and then there's enough Christian language around it to make it sound religious or appealing, then it becomes kind of this bedrock that remains unchallenged and continues to circulate, and I think, forms people's spiritual imaginations. Oh, John,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shift in culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, in this conversation with Kelsey McGinnis and Marissa Burt, co authors of the myth of good Christian parenting, we trace the roots of evangelical parenting culture from James Dobson and Bill Gothard to today's influencer driven moral certainty. We talk about how these teachings formed a generation's spiritual imagination, why biblical became more of a marketing term than a measure of faithfulness, and how recovering the way of Jesus means reclaiming curiosity, compassion and mutuality in our homes. It's about rediscovering Grace after years of formulas control and fear. It's about learning to see our children not as projects to manage, but people to love. If we take Jesus seriously, his gentleness, his playfulness, his way of lifting up children as examples of the kingdom, then maybe the work of parenting isn't about getting it all right, but about being present, about being humble and about being human together. So join us as we uncover the myth of good Christian parenting. Here is my conversation with Kelsey McGinnis and Marissa Burt. Marissa Kelsey, welcome to shifting culture. So grateful you are on so thanks for joining me. Thank you for having us. This is so fun. Yeah, it's going to be a good conversation. We're going to talk about the myth of good Christian parenting. Your new book you co wrote together. Let's go back to the start, where these Christian parenting empires really took off. Describe the types of Christian parenting you're talking about, where it came from, and what are these Christian empire?
Kelsey McGinnis:Yeah, so we start in our book. We start that our history. In 1970 there was Christian parenting advice out there before this, but 1970 really brought a new era. It's the year James Dobson published dare to discipline was his first book, and James Dobson, of course, went on to found Focus on the Family and became this hugely influential voice in American evangelicalism. And so we put 1970 as sort of a bookend as as a beginning of a new a new season for Christian parenting books. And in some ways, it was a new era for parenting books broadly, because you're dealing with the baby boom and the aftermath of the baby boom, so parenting books in general, we're picking up steam, but this is happening as there's a ton of cultural panic and political upheaval, and you have a contingent of conservative parents that James Dobson kind of finds and says, Oh, these these parents are really receptive to messages about discipline. They're looking around at the world, and they're really panicked about the direction of culture. They're really panicked about what the kids are up to these days. And he was able to distill a message about discipline and how the upheaval around him and around them had to do with the failure of parents to instill respect for authority and discipline. That really gets the ball rolling for evangelical parenting books of the post 1970 moment, and really sets the tone, too, in terms of like laying out the land and staking certain positions on things like parental authority and discipline. Marissa, what would you add?
Marissa Burt:Yeah, well, and some other things come along with this. Right around the same time you have the discussions around inerrancy of Scripture, you have the rise of complementarianism, this idea that there is a biblical hierarchy for the home and that it's important that everyone stay in this chain of command. Almost you also have the newthetic counseling movement, biblical counseling started by Jay Adams. That is saying, Look, we need to view outsized sources of expertise like psychologists and social scientists with skepticism. The Bible alone is the instruction manual for life. So all of these things contribute to what's becoming a increasingly lucrative market of explicitly Christian parenting advice and gives experts a platform to say I'm here not just to give you my opinion on parenting. I am here to tell you the biblical way to parent that we can know and we should apply, which, of course, is very appealing to devout people who have a high regard for scripture. Of course, if there's a biblical way to parent, they want to know it, and then the teaching itself kind of. Pulls on two levers. It really pulls on parental fears. There's a lot of vivid descriptions of worst case scenarios in these books, so it kind of lays out to parents, here's what you can prevent happening if you parent the biblical way. And it also appeals to understandable longings and aspirations and says, here's what you could have if you parent the biblical way, you can have this godly legacy. You can ensure your child's well being, in fact, their eternal well being perhaps a generational legacy. So all of these things combine to make this a really appealing framework. And Dobson paved a way for many to follow, who who followed this pattern. And in fact, entire ministries developed around Christian parenting resources and drew people into two ministries. And we see that with Focus on the Family and a number of others to the present day. I
Joshua Johnson:think when something gets really popular, people take that that learning and that teaching, and then they propagate it. They go, Okay, I've learned that. Now I'm going to write something about it now. I'm going to do it and continue. I want to know who, who Paul Popenoe is that he wrote the foreword to dare to discipline Dobson's first book. It seems like he got some of his his thinking from Paul Popenoe. So who is he? Why is he writing the forward to Dobson's book,
Marissa Burt:which was removed from later editions.
Kelsey McGinnis:Worth noting. That's right, that's right, for good reason. Yeah, Paul Popenoe was a researcher and one of Dobson's mentors, and he was at the time, one of the more influential voices on like family and marital counseling, but from the perspective of wanting to preserve the white American family. I mean, he's now, looking back, we would call what he advocates for eugenics for the most part. I mean, it's, it's very clear that Popenoe is animated by wanting to preserve the white American family unit, the nuclear family marriages between white Americans, and sees that as a way of preserving, you know, the health of American culture. There's I, and I admittedly have not read a lot of writing by Paul Popenoe, but we did read about him, and he does make an appearance in our book as well. Because I think it's important to know that the tone of Dobson's work, and the tone of Dobson's writing, especially when it comes to the value of the nuclear family is very informed by Paul Popenoe, and divorce is something that comes up quite a lot, no fault. Divorce was relatively new at that time, and Dobson's very alarmed by this. He sees this as this move of even like the US government toward dismantling the family. There is like this. This this is like where you start to really see this, like attack on the family discourse that kind of sows the seeds of now what we have is a parental rights movement. You can see this line here. In some ways. You can trace this back to someone like Paul Popenoe.
Marissa Burt:And I think when people think of Dobson, they often think of recent years Dobson, and it's important to note that dare to discipline comes out in 1970 Dobson has just finished his graduate work, and he's working under Popenoe, and when you read that book in the original edition, it does not have much Christian verbiage at all. There's like a couple pages at the very end that have some Bible verses. That's right, it is very much a conservative parenting book, and I think it's fair. I think it's a reasonable assumption to say Dobson's young at this point. He's worked in the schools. He's the father of a preschooler and an infant. A lot of his ideas are theoretical. So I think it's reasonable to look to who his influence was at that time and say This formed his theories about parenting in a significant way. And while he did, in later books begin to draw on Christian vocabulary and kind of become known for that, he also didn't reject these earlier ideas. He more built on them. So I think that's important to note, because a lot of people maybe haven't revisited dare to discipline. It was interesting in the wake of his death, to hear how many people were kind of reflecting back positively with reverence on his legacy, who had never read his his parenting books. I thought that was kind of fascinating. How, how many people hadn't actually read the words he had said.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, I heard that a lot. We're we're focusing on the family positively, because Dobson, really, when you actually just say and put your name out there as Focus on the Family, that's going to have a positive connotation for a lot of people. And somebody that just has a cursory look at what that is and not doesn't dive deep into something, but they're talking family is a certain certain thing, but is also discipline is a certain thing. And they're talking about biblical. You, Marissa, you'd said biblical probably 10 times and and your your answer, what were they thinking was biblical? What is biblical? For them when they're talking about parenting. What does biblical mean?
Marissa Burt:Kind of, whatever they want it to be, honestly. I mean, biblical is such a slippery term, right? And it can get a response from people in many ways. It's a marker of correctness, like, if you are taking a stand on what's biblical that automatically says something about maybe what you're attacking as not biblical, as incorrect, and it's a little bit of an uncontestable authority. Some of these resources will even open with that. They will, they will offer the disclaimer that, look, this isn't me. This is God's Word, the authority of God's Word. So it's really an authority claim. But some of the key recurring themes you see people point to as biblical are this hierarchy in the home of authority. You can think of if you've seen Bill gothard's Umbrellas of authority. Ted Tripp has something called a circle of blessing, this idea that God's order for society goes God maybe, maybe a governing figure or pastor, husband, wife, child, and that this is God's order for the nuclear family as a biblical concept. Often what comes alongside that is this idea that parents can and should act as agents of God who expect instant, cheerful obedience that's also presented as the biblical standard and then spanking as the primary tool for discipline is presented as biblical. And then there's all sorts of like stowaway theological ideas and proof texted Bible verses that hold up these frameworks. But I would, if I had to pick the top three, these are the three ideas that continue to recirculate as essential. Would you add things to that? Kelsey, yeah,
Kelsey McGinnis:no, that's right. But biblical, this is my, like, cynical hot take. Biblical at this point, is a really useful marketing term, right? It becomes this. It's a, like a virtue signal for a certain kind of Christian who considers a very important part of their worldview, the inerrancy of Scripture, and a very particular kind of inerrancy, I would add to that, and it's just a way of signaling. This is the kind this is the kind of Christian book, than the kind of Christian person that you can trust, and that it allows authors to sneak in all kinds of claims, often based on personal experience and other parts of their worldview, and kind of just slip those in there, and they go unnoticed and unexamined. And we saw that quite a lot in these books. You can see them across Christian self help, across these genre marriage books are another, you know, common offender in this way as well. And when you go back and you know Dobson, I don't even we should have gone, we should have looked, but I don't even know if Dobson uses the word biblical in dare to discipline. That kind of becomes this Shibboleth later, it is interesting to see how that becomes more and more common, though, as just like a signal here you can trust this one for white evangelicals especially,
Joshua Johnson:I want to talk really briefly about the hierarchy and then the Gothard umbrella picture. When I saw somebody post that, I was wondering why anybody else needed an umbrella, if the umbrella that covers everybody, yeah, I don't understand it, but that that actually like it just doesn't logically make sense. The umbrella picture, yeah,
Marissa Burt:well, and I think it's really based on presuppositions. You know, Ted Tripp, at one point he wrote shepherding a Child's Heart, another really, still popular parenting book in the 90s. He talks a little bit. It jumped out at me when I read it while researching. He says something along the lines of, he's attacking, kind of the civil rights and feminist movement, movements in American society. And kind of says, We know that biblically speaking, there's not grounds for equal treatment for everyone. And it was, he says it better than that. But it was interesting to me, because from today, you think, excuse me, can you repeat that again? Like, how? How is he landing at this conclusion? What? What a lot of these researchers do is begin with a pre presupposition, x is biblical, therefore I must reject y. And this is really, I think, the fruit of biblical counseling. So I think when someone like Gothard is like, this is biblical, and then there's enough Christian language around it to make it sound religious or appealing, then it becomes kind of this bedrock that remains unchallenged and continues to circulate, and I think, forms people's spiritual imaginations. So unfortunately, in many ways, these resources appeal to people in vulnerable times, right? Like New parenthood is a vulnerable moment. Like people are often overwhelmed. A lot of times they're picking up these resources because things aren't working out well for them, or as they expected, they're looking for help. So this kind of certainty, this authority, this very like clear, this is the way to do it. This is the way not. To do it are very appealing, but it really hijacks critical thinking in a lot of ways. Yeah, that would even look at an image and say, This doesn't this doesn't even make sense.
Joshua Johnson:If I'm overwhelmed, I'm tired, I'm exhausted, I really don't have the mental capacity for critical thinking as a as a young parent, when I am sleep deprived, it does help to say, Okay, this is the right way to do it. I'm just gonna, just like, put one foot in front of the other, and I'm gonna do this. Hopefully it's gonna work. How do we then help to reframe some of this, to bring in some critical thinking? Maybe it's not like all on the parents at an early stage. Maybe it's on the community to come in and support and be but what does it look like then to say, bring in critical thinking instead of just following the script that we've been given?
Kelsey McGinnis:That's such a good question. One thing we're hoping our book helps people do is start that process by just giving people permission to say, like, this doesn't seem like good advice, or this seems like, this seems like a bad idea, like, because, you know, we often get, we have a good questions, like you're saying this person had nothing good to say. There's nothing good here. Well, no, but when a book is marketed to you as, here's the key for biblical parenting, you are kind of being told from the jump, okay, absorb this and apply this. You know, there are some fine ideas in some of these books, right? And I know many parents who would say they they felt like shepherding a child's heart was like a game changer for their parenting and made a huge impact on their family. And I don't want to take that from anyone like, if they learned something valuable that really did serve their family. Well, I want to say that is absolutely possible, but I think there is greater freedom that parents can have in engaging with some of these resources. It is completely reasonable for a Christian parent to want some advice that comes from their world view, but that kind of advice tends to come with such high moral stakes, and so many of these resources are sold making promises that they can't deliver, that I think parents who want to go to them should go with an open hand, an open mind and absolute freedom to take, reject, throw away, keep all those things and to go and seek out resources that aren't from that niche. One other destructive thing that these resources do is discourage parents from going and looking at secular parenting advice that could actually be helpful, like a lot of Christian parenting books, because they are assuming this biblical worldview will really just forget that child development research exists, or kind of say we don't really need that because we have the Bible. I don't think there's any grounds to say that, and there are a lot of resources out there, especially for parents of neurodivergent children, that will give some useful tools. They don't come with the eternal stakes. They sort of come with a little bit more pragmatic here's what here's what you can do to de escalate behavior. Here's something you can try. They're a little bit more boring that way, but some of them are really valuable. And I think that kind of freedom to hand to parents and say, you know your children better than any author of any of these books, so you are better equipped to come up with, you know, whatever this, whatever, cobbled together version of this advice works for you and to trust your own instincts more than you trust what's in these books. That's the other insidious thing is that a lot of parents walk away from Christian parenting books feeling like they can't trust their own instincts at all, like my parental instincts are going to lead me to be a permissive, terrible parent, to ignore the Holy Spirit's prompting, to let my children run the roost. And I don't think that's always true either. Of course, it's possible, but, but I think those messages that parents internalize over time leave them vulnerable to then these, these really escalated, false, baseless promises,
Marissa Burt:yeah, I think really deflating some of these ideas down to just like, here's someone's opinion. It's kind of like talking to another parent can really help free parents up to say, look, if you're looking for biblical, biblical parenting principles, there aren't, there isn't parenting methodology on the pages of Scripture, we get stories of families and general relational principles in the New Testament. The only direct parenting instruction given to Christian parents in the New Testament is fathers do not embitter or provoke your children in Ephesians six, it's followed up with but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, there's tremendous freedom regarding methodology, and certainly if devout parents want to look for principles, these are the general one anothering principles that apply to all relationships, be compassionate, be forbearing, love the one who sins gently, love your neighbor as yourself. These sort of things that aren't going to be prescriptive. Again, in some ways, it can feel like free fall to people who are looking, whether because of biblical frameworks that have shaped them to look for certainty or because. Of our American culture that likes to life hack everything. People who are looking for that map may find themselves in free fall, but there's opportunity for growth there. And as Kelsey said, to really study and know the people in front of us understand our own temperaments, our own personalities. And so there's a lot of opportunity there as well, if parents can be freed up to grasp
Joshua Johnson:that. I mean, if I look at Ephesians six in a lot of the relationships that are there, to me, it talks a lot about mutuality and and care and love and respect for each individual and and people, whether no matter what type of relationship it is, whether it is a husband and wife relationship, whether there is a parent child relationship, whether in that is a master slave relationship, there's actually respect and dignity and love for each of them. And so how do we get from a place where I can see mutuality in a parenting relationship, and actually like lifting up the dignity of the child into a place of control, authoritarianism and wanting to just do everything that the parent says because of I think it's probably because I have shame and fear in my own self, and I don't want to see them actually Do the same thing I've done in my life. So how do we move from one place to another?
Marissa Burt:Yeah, I mean, I think a big piece of why we start, why evangelical parenting books start at the other place, is some of the things we've talked about, the the hierarchy is so baked in this, this idea that that is the way things need to operate that I think a lot of people are very uncomfortable if you start saying a parent child relationship is mutual in some respect, like, Whew, that is gonna make people feel a certain way. And some of it, I think, is fear of loss of control. A lot of it is, frankly, the kind of snap judgments we make. These books are full of anecdotes. Social media is full of anecdotes of people who see children they perceive to be out of control, and are kind of like, that's a huge problem, and it's probably that the parents are can't get it together, you know. So these kind of snap judgments. So I think a lot of parents feel a lot of pressure, just societally and culturally, to have well behaved children like still, we reward that and sort of say that's a win. How did you do it? So I think there are a lot of reasons parents feel like I can and should and ought to try and control and elicit this kind of good behavior, even if maybe they can get there on principle. Theologically, there's still a lot of pressure in the moment, and certainly in communities, Christian communities that place a high value on obedience, there is an intense amount of pressure for parents, whether that's their children's behavior in church, their children's face faith choices, because the community has bought into this idea that parents are agents of God who can and should control these outcomes. So So I think all those things make it difficult for people to walk away, because they will fear being judged. They will fear that they've maybe done it wrong. We hear from people all the time who are kind of saying, I don't want to spank my children. I feel like it's wrong, but my community has such pressure on me, and I'm also a little bit worried, like, Can I trust myself in this? What if I don't do that and mess things up? You know, there's a lot of that going on, which I think maybe just reveals, for Christians some underlying theological beliefs that we have, that everyone needs to really perform to the standard of perfection and get it right, or else there's cosmic kind of spankings awaiting everyone. I mean, I do think it reveals theological beliefs that whatever we say about grace and freedom. A lot of times we we don't really act out of that.
Kelsey McGinnis:And I would just add, I think one way to start moving from one end to the other is to start looking at children as fully human, as like obvious as that sounds, but when you read a lot of these books, the language used for children is very dehumanizing. It runs the gamut. You know, you sort of get the impression that a lot of these authors think of children more like pets to be trained than like humans to be related to. And it is true that children are in a different developmental phase than adults, right? Like that is that's real, and relating to children is different than relating to your spouse. It doesn't mean they aren't human, though they aren't pre human, and there's also potential for them to encounter God, for God to be present to them in a real way, for them to and their experiences are not less real because they're children, I think especially in some of. These books that really advocate for corporal punishment and spanking, you kind of get the impression that, like these formative experiences of childhood, the like the morality and ethics of them almost don't matter, because these are these are children, you know, and that's just not true. And I think anyone, if I pose that to anyone, they would say, Well, of course, that's not true, but I think in practice, that's how some parents are basically told to think about their children, right? Like you'll you'll have authors like Larry Christensen, author of the Christian family, saying things like, you know, don't be bending over backwards to like, be fair to your children, right? Like parent, children shouldn't feel entitled to their parents being like that, responsive to their sense of justice, you know, sort of like dismissing their internal sense and like, of course, children don't always express their feeling wronged in ways that are easy to deal with. For adults, that's absolutely the case, but neither do adults, and you're not allowed to hit an adult. So, you know, there are just there are ways that we can start reframing how we talk about children and how we think about their experience of the world, and saying to ourselves as adults, their difference does not give us the right to treat them as subhuman, to not apply the same ethical frameworks that we do for relationships with adults. And in fact, because they are the most vulnerable, because they are new and vulnerable and dependent, we should be even more compassionate about their position of vulnerability in the world, not less. And that is, I think, the opposite of what you get from someone like Dobson is sort of like, stop being so compassionate with these little brats. You know, it's that kind of tone. And, yeah, I think that can set parents up for real antagonistic relationship with their child.
Marissa Burt:Yeah, and I would add to that too, there's, there's really possibility to look to the life and ministry of Jesus. I mean, you would, you would, maybe you wouldn't be surprised. I was surprised at how few of these resources mentioned Jesus or reflect other biblical teaching exactly right. Like there's a list Christian you would think, you would think, but it's remarkable when you get there and you think, I wonder if it's because Jesus's way of leading was not lording it over, and was service, and was a way of humility and self sacrifice. And that displaces a lot of these myths immediately, because there's no place for a parent to act in a God like way if, if the invitation here is this kind of service, there's, there's, there's space for a parent to grow in maturity, in patience, in the fruit of the Spirit, in dealing with the difficulty of navigating some of the intense parenting seasons. So So I think that could be a way for people who still retain faith to consider how to shift. Would be to give more attention to the life and pattern of Jesus than these kind of prescriptive voices about what is biblical coming at
Joshua Johnson:them? I think one of the things in your book that was helpful for me was just to imagine Jesus as a child and how he was raised and how he needed to be raised, Jesus as a child, and then Jesus actually encountering children and how he interacted with them and played with them and gave them dignity, and said that you must be like a child to enter into the kingdom of God like he's giving high priority to children, which we don't often do. Yesterday, during church, we were I was facilitating conversation around the prodigal son story, so the good father, and it was really interesting, as we were discussing this story that Jesus shared so much, parenting came out of that story. They were like, Oh, I could see that my first instinct is that my child has done something wrong. I want to correct them. But the the Father You know, met him with love and compassion, and not like this discipline, like you're degenerate, which, hey, he still took his father's money, spent it on prostitutes. He's done he's got it all. And then there's love and compassion that he was met with, and they're like, Oh, how come I don't always do that as a as a parent. And to move that it was, it was just interesting how all these parenting questions came out of that one story. And it just gave me, you know, a big heart. I was like, Yes. Like, this is amazing to see that we're wrestling with some of these things, because we see the actual character of God, and not just the script that people have given us to say this is the biblical way to parent.
Kelsey McGinnis:Yeah, and I, I will let Marissa tackle. Marissa told me, if I'm like, going to do a heresy here or something. Like, I think, you know, in the process of working on this book with Marissa and thinking about how quick parents are to step into the role of God, and all of these stories, I look at that narrative now, and I feel compelled to say, I, along with my child, am one of the two sons, right like, and in moments where I feel like my child is the rebellious one, it's more likely that I'm the older son than God, you know, like, I think there's this opportunity there for us to be, you know, we are. We are children of God, along with our children. I think that that is a, maybe a more powerful and more life giving way of reading that story, as opposed to putting ourselves in the position of God. I understand why parents do it, and I don't want to shame anyone who has but I also think that was a radically new thing for me in the process of writing this book, and I hope other parents can maybe consider that to be a valuable thought exercise too.
Marissa Burt:Yeah, I love that. And also I think this, you're recounting Joshua of the store of the conversation around it really spotlights the way theological beliefs are woven up in these ideas. Because I do think beliefs about God and what his fatherly behavior is, like, inform a lot of this in maybe not explicitly outlined ways. There really is an underlying stowaway belief that that God is kind of waiting to punish us, like waiting to catch us messing up. And I do think Jesus's story kind of shadow dispels that myth. Nobody's punished. Nobody's punished. You know, the invitation is to both the sons to come enter the father's joy. And I think that can make us very uncomfortable, kind of like the mutuality of we are siblings together in Christ refers back to what you were saying about the mutual relationships that can make us uncomfortable. So does this idea that that a child could err in such a grievous way and not a weight punish. That really starts to poke at one of the big theological underpinnings of all this teaching that shows up again and again, is this. Ideas around the ideas around penal substitutionary atonement bolster a lot of this, and I think that makes people very uncomfortable to kind of poke at that lower level of a house of cards, is how I think of it. Sometimes with these teachings, because they're all built on these things that you poke at one or another, the whole thing can crumble down, which is, I think, why a lot of times people are so defensive when you begin to to poke, poke at these ideas. Because it it inevitably leads to a kind of faith deconstruction. It inevitably does, because the ideas are so woven up around ideas about God and what he's like.
Joshua Johnson:You know, one of the things I really love about your book is that you, you know, you start in 1970 but then you, you bring it out wide. Have like one thing has been influenced by another thing, and it becomes that a whole culture, that a whole subset of Christianity is swimming in, and they're swimming in this culture, and they don't realize that there's anything outside of this little pond that they're in, like this. They believe like this is the whole world. This is biblical. This is everything. And I just really, I'm fascinated by these subcultures and these cultures of of things that they believe, like, this is it? This is all we have. This is the world. This is how it works, because we're all swimming in it together. How is that continued? How is this little pond actually even grown with even the the influencer culture of today, where we do see things like, I mean, we're we're looking at Trad wife culture, where their kids are doing great. They're homeschooled. They have, you know, they're in line. They're doing the right things. They've disciplined them enough to say a we have perfect little children. How does this this culture of taking that we see now, take what has been before and propagated it to a whole new audience. The
Kelsey McGinnis:evolution of Christian media in the US since 1970 is really, really fascinating, and it's amazing to me. I write a lot about Christian music for Christianity today. It's amazing to me how closely tied together, like the evolution of Christian publishing, Christian parenting literature and Christian entertainment media, these things kind of evolve together. And one thing that has become a very strong selling point for a lot of American evangelicals is this set apartness, right? Like the Christian parenting advice is set apart, it will help you raise a family that is set apart, that is remaining clean and pure in this world that's going wrong. It's kind of the same selling point for like contemporary Christian music for CCM, right? Here's this little clean, safe ecosystem of media over here, there was this moment when the internet started to kind of break. The possibility of those separate ecosystems like the internet really disrupted Christian music because it had been able to live in its little bubble of Christian bookstores and Christian radio, and then all of a sudden you had streaming, and all these young people had access to all the music at once. But in our algorithmic moment right now, it is, again, very easy for these ecosystems, but sort of these individualized ecosystems of your own making and your own construction based on your worldview and what you want to interact with, and that has allowed this sort of separate universe of Christian parenting advice to continue to to find people and to kind of gain new converts and lift up new voices. What's interesting, though is that as fewer relatively millennial and Gen Z parents are buying parenting books, they are following Christian parenting influencers. Some of these influencers are, in turn, writing their own books, but others are just recycling ideas from books that were written in the 90s and early 2000s we see this a lot with content from shepherding a child's heart. It's amazing to me how often I see the hashtag shepherding a Child's Heart, or see Ted Tripp quoted in the post of someone often like a kind of Trad ish presenting female parenting influencer. It is really, I mean, it's hard to track because, because the internet is so algorithmic, it's hard, even as a researcher, to get a sense of what other people are experiencing and how they are finding this content. But it's not hard once you start engaging with any Christian Orient, Faith oriented parenting content, you get sent in that direction, and you're fed this content from any number of Christian parenting influencers, each with their own kind of orientation and set of concerns. There are dad fluencers, there are mom influencers, there are Trad wife influencers. There are parents who are super concerned about what their kids are eating and biblical parenting. I mean, it's like the niches are so specific, but you can find the audience via the algorithm, and so people still have this incentive to have somewhat extreme messages, because those tend to draw more reaction and interaction. Yeah, it's a real Wild West, though.
Marissa Burt:Yeah, yeah, I tend to. I think it kind of exacerbates what's what was already there. So in the same way that a lot of the people writing books in the 80s and 90s were self platformed, were you making their own experience normative for everyone? You have that, but on a bigger scale, with increased incentives, with more smoke and mirrors, right? Because you have cameras and you have lighting and you can set things up. So it does look like these perfectly behaved children in their neutral tones in the beautiful kitchen, you know? So it really amps up some of those appeals, the appeal to aspirational longings. It can also amp up the fear mongering. So I think it it takes it to another level. It also is mutually reinforcing, because there's this sense that people might follow someone because they like their, you know, home decorating tips or something, but then an influencer is also giving their parenting advice, and their children are there, and so it becomes this kind of way of identifying with a lifestyle one likes and wants to participate in. And I think that's a new element that maybe wasn't as much there in the books or in like radio programs and things like that, because you it's participatory in a different way. And the comment sections on posts are participatory in a different way that that say, not just I'm doing it biblical, we are doing it biblical. So there's this, this social dynamic. I would say it's also distinct, though, because there is evidence now like this is not theoretical. So you can look back to the 70s and 80s and think, Okay, I understand why parents saw the appeal of that maybe why they were misled, why they jumped on board that train. However, we have generations now of adult children saying that train took us to places we did not want to go. It was, it was a negative experience, a net negative. You have older parents saying we deeply regret parenting this way. We too, felt misled and betrayed. So I would say all this stuff is still recirculating. There are voices out there, though, saying, hey, this isn't theoretical anymore. We have data. We have people testifying to the fruit of this. And I do wish hope that Gen Z parents and younger parents can break out of their algorithms to discover some of that to kind of stop this cycle from continuing. Because, as Kelsey said, a lot of this stuff people are sharing, for instance, quotes from Ginger Hubbard, another popular parenting influencer who wrote in the 90s and early 2000s she's still on social media today. Her books quote heavily for. Books from the 70s. I think the parents sharing ginger Hubbard's quotes today do not envision that they are relying on out of print books from the 70s to parent but that's functionally what's happening. So I do hope that with the possibility on the internet for greater conversation and exposure, people can hear from some of the survivors of these kind of religious communities that were very high control they can hear from adult, adult children and parents reflecting back. And that might empower them to to say, Wait a second, this looks very shiny and appealing, but I don't. I'm not so sure about that. And also it does provide parents with alternatives. Certainly there are other other alternative ways for it at at their fingertips that maybe wasn't the case when parents showed up at a Christian bookstore before
Joshua Johnson:I go on to x formally Twitter every once in a while, not very often, because every time I go on, people are just mean, and most of it is just, they're just mean. Like, most of it's because you're wrong I'm right. Like, it's just the I am correct. How did the belief there that say, Okay, we now have the keys to the to the kingdom. We have the keys to the universe. We know what is right, biblically. How does that actually hinder relationships with people to actually always say, I'm right, you're wrong.
Kelsey McGinnis:Gosh, I was just thinking about this the other day. Is this, you know that the parenting book market is so lucrative, and there are a lot of different little niches within it, but the Christian parenting book market is kind of the only one that comes out and says, like, hey, we have the right way, not like, we have the best way. We have the way that's like, in line with the created order of the universe, right? Like, the stakes of it are so high, the promise is so appealing, if you find the audience that's looking for that kind of certainty and that moral clarity, or perceived moral clarity. So you end up with people reading these books who are reaching for them for that certainty, if they find it, if they buy in, they are parenting from a place of zealous, earnest belief that they are doing it according to what God is telling them to do. But then, as those parents get older and their kids get older, if the kids turn around and say, This harmed me, I think this was wrong, that parent is then faced with this decision, and when we read, when we read responses from people who responded to our survey, and we did these interviews, we talked with adult children for whom it was incredibly painful to have a parent who was unwilling or unable to consider that they had not done it the right way, or that they had made mistakes, or they had listened to bad advice. Because if you make decisions as a parent that you think are you're making them because God is telling you through another author to do it this way, you almost feel like questioning those decisions. Is questioning your own faith, questioning your salvation, questioning the questioning, am I indwelled by the Holy Spirit if I was able to make those kinds of mistakes with my children? Like, what? How is that possible? I think that's a really painful reckoning that is downstream of the kind of certainty that these resources often bring, that kind of certainty, that kind of zeal, and in some cases, kind of militancy even. And I think that really sets families up for a lot of pain later, not everyone. Some families come out the other side, and they're like, that was fine. Those, those serve us well, but gosh, not everybody.
Marissa Burt:And it's such a double whammy, because the skills needed to navigate that kind of relational tension have not been skills families have been practicing all along. Right? What we talked about earlier, the seeing the child in front of you, cultivating an ability to listen or tolerate a different perspective, right? If you are accustomed if you've trained yourself to expect instant, cheerful compliance, it can be very disorienting to have an adult reclaim their autonomy and disagree with you, let alone make choices you think are wrong or unbiblical or any number of things. And so it's not only what harmful advice families were given and practiced, but what they were bereft of, and that can be very difficult to reclaim because it requires a lot of internal work. Of that says what drew me to these teachings in the first place? Why did I find them so appealing? Why did I override my intuition, and how can I reclaim that? And also, it is difficult for people who have these ideas about reward and blessing. We call them prosperity gospel parenting promises to reckon with mistakes, whatever their intention to be like i. Made a mistake. I I meant well, but it turned out badly, because a lot of times those frameworks, there's no tolerance for mistakes. The parents, too, have been expected to obey instantly, perfectly cheerfully, and that can feel very frightening, like, what? What is the punishment awaiting me for this, and I I want to be clear, there are often very real relational consequences from parenting this way. We hear from a number of families experiencing inauthentic connection, painful estrangement, and so it's not like, Oh, now here's the new prosperity gospel parenting method to say, how do you repair that and get it all right? There are very real consequences. But I think there's an invitation for parents there to encounter grace in a way that can get them off that performance behavior treadmill. But it's not an easy process. Some of these things are really deeply rooted in that sense. The proverb that that observes that you train children up in a certain way, and it will be formative, is making a wise observation, and entire families were trained up in these frameworks that can be very difficult to untangle and unravel later
Joshua Johnson:on. How do we break these cycles of these frameworks? So where do we go from here? What does it look like to then receive some of this grace and this freedom to move forward into a way where we see one another and we don't perpetuate some of these harmful things that we say we're certain because the right things. What does it look like?
Kelsey McGinnis:Well, I mentioned kind of some of the pitfalls of Christian self help before, and I think, you know, in the same way that, like, bad dating books encourage you to sort of think of a relationship as, like, packable thing, like a thing you can, sort of like, plug in these, you know, I don't know these tips and tricks to make it work for you,
Joshua Johnson:just because we're computers, right? We're just machines, discourages
Kelsey McGinnis:you from looking at the person in front of you as an individual and responding to them on their terms and according to their quirks and needs and individuality, I think parenting books often do the same thing. Obviously, there are parents of toddlers who would say, sometimes I want a tip that will help me maybe figure out how to survive bedtime. Totally understandable. But I think with with Christian parenting books, a lot of the time, this escalates to looking for sin struggles, looking for you're sort of constantly evaluating your child and and trying to implement these formulas in order to not save your child, but program them correctly. There are just so many ways that these books encourage parents not to just respond to the child in front of them as a person with individual needs. And so, I mean, I try really hard not to give parenting advice, because the process of reading all this parenting advice has made me just say like, you know what? I don't think, I I don't think I know how to tell another parent how to parent their child, because I don't know their child. I don't know them. But I think that would be my one, like, I don't know key takeaway for a way forward would be to to say to parents like, you know your child and and you are free to have a relationship with them. That's hard. It feels hard to have a reciprocal, mutual relationship with a two year old. I get that, but I do think that you can think of that as a relationship, as opposed to, like, a programming process or a training process, you know, like, I think, you know, things like blanket training, which doesn't show up in a lot of these resources. But every once in a while that really does kind of frame a child as this thing that you are supposed to program parenting young children. Is this, this programming process, and it's not, and the decisions you make, it's not an input output situation. Yeah. I mean, there are some things we can look at correlation in child development and certain things that certain patterns in a home tend to have certain outcomes, but it's not a perfect input output process. It's a relationship. And so I think the more that parents can start there and then add things that are helpful and let go of things that aren't, I think, I think that's a good way forward.
Marissa Burt:Yeah, I agree with all of that. We at the appendix in our book, we created kind of a metric to try and help parents evaluate resources. Because we would love to return agency to parents to say, you know, here are some things to consider, maybe some green light things, some red light things, because, of course, you will, you'll need help for different seasons, but I think that can kind of again deflate some of these things down to like, see if it serves, see if something else serves in a different season or with a different child. And I do think that shifts the entire framework from product and outcome and behavior to connection, and that has interesting implications for the way the parent. It is in the world as well, and relates to God and relates to other people, because it's kind of like in video game parlance. You know the difference between like a Quest game, where you are like on the path to achieve a quest, and like the sandbox game, where you are there exploring the world and just seeing what happens. And I do think that, especially for Americans who can be very efficient and interested in productivity and output, can just be like, what if, though the task here is to love your smallest and newest neighbor is not to ensure an outcome, to program a desired result, which God himself doesn't do with his children. And then I think the grace found, there is a flip of that, what if God is most interested in being with you, too, in your life and in your moments, and not as interested in your performance? And so I do think that there are some interesting implications that freedom and Grace just they taste so good. And we would love for the people who've consumed a steady diet of this kind of get it right. Do it right. Work harder. Get it right in your kids lives, in your lives, to hop off that treadmill and rediscover their freedom and grace in Christ.
Joshua Johnson:Oh, that's beautiful, you know? Because, yeah, shame just goes from generation to generation to generation, and it fuels so much of our productivity and their performance. And man, let's just get into the sandbox and play with God, and that would be amazing. Thank you. This has been fantastic. I have a couple of quick questions at the end for both of you. One, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Marissa Burt:Oh, bless. Give her any advice she was so she was on that treadmill trying hard. I would be like, Oh, honey, I just give her a big hug and be like, it's gonna be okay. Yeah.
Kelsey McGinnis:I it's so funny. I similarly, was on the like spiritual advice treadmill at 21 like I was in college and in a campus ministry, just consuming all the Bible studies, all the books, all this stuff. Similarly, I think I would just, but I think my advice to myself would just be like you are not. You do not see as clearly as you think you do. That's good as a 21 year old who had grown up in evangelicalism and was still very much in that world, yeah, that you don't see everything as clearly as you as you think you do.
Joshua Johnson:Well, good. Any recommendations from you, anything we've been reading or watching or listening to you, that you could recommend.
Kelsey McGinnis:We're recording this the weekend after Taylor Swift released her new album, and I'm like, I'm not, I just wrote about it. I'm not gonna recommend it. I'll just say I have been listening to it. So that's like, what's on my brain. But no, I mean, I will recommend Sorry,
Joshua Johnson:I'm in Kansas City. We got, oh, Taylor Swift fever in Kansas City. So
Kelsey McGinnis:yeah, I'm sure you are experiencing a different level than what I'm experiencing here in Iowa, for sure, but I actually just revisited two books for a couple articles I wrote. One is Caitlin Beatty's book, celebrities for Jesus. I revisit that book a lot because I write a lot about Christian entertainment, media and culture. It's a great book. I highly recommend it for anyone who's sort of thinking about how they relate to Christian media and how, you know, good ways of thinking about it and commenting on it. The other book is Claire debtors book monsters a fan's dilemma. It's about engaging with media made by monstrous, problematic people. And you know, both of these books are sort of examinations of how we relate to media and art. What moral engagement looks like? Is there such a thing as moral engagement? These are questions I spend a lot of time thinking about. So highly recommend both of those books, and I'm not not recommending Taylor Swift's new album. I actually think there are a couple like great tracks on there, but as I am a Christian commentator, I do feel like I have to qualify it, because you you know, even I, who tend to take a little bit more of a liberal approach to content, would say it's not safe for little ears, necessarily.
Marissa Burt:So take that as you will. Yeah, I have on this on the like reflective front, I have lined up to read Joe ash Thomas' book, the justice of Jesus. I'm really excited to read that just came out last week. Once we're through launch, I really want to read that. I am currently dealing with all the whirlwind of launch by reading like cozy mysteries, because that's my like escapism. So I've really enjoyed the Thursday murder club books, I have enjoyed the show Ludwig and and the reboot of Matlock. So these are kind of, that's my little puzzle solving, not too, not too psychological through I don't like the psychological thrillers the go. I like it when it's a puzzle solving kind of quest. So I recommend those to people if you also like some sleep. Thing,
Joshua Johnson:excellent. Well, the myth of good Christian parenting will be out anywhere books are sold. Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to? How could they connect with you guys? Where can people go to find more of what you're doing and get the book?
Kelsey McGinnis:We both. We both have sub stacks that we would, you know, love for people to come find us. We write kind of on on stuff related to the book, but also outside of that. So you can find a lot of my writing at Christianity Today, music related, Christian culture related. We both are very active on Instagram. That seems to be where a lot of our readers are, where you can interact with content related to the book. We have a whole backlog of videos that we made, posts that we made as we put the book together, and you can go back there and kind of get a sense of what that research process was like. So if that interests you, you'll find a lot there. And we're across social media, so we'll send you the links so you can put those in the show notes, and can find us, am I forgetting anything? What am I forgetting?
Marissa Burt:Yeah, I would agree with all that. We have some of them on YouTube. We have those posts kind of organized on playlists, so that if someone's interested in really diving in, but yeah, we'll send you the links. We also did a limited run podcast series together called in the church library, where we discussed individual resources and also interviewed other authors with adjacent books and topics. And it was really fun. So if you want to connect with us that way, you can find us at in the find us in the church library. Excellent.
Joshua Johnson:Well, Kelsey and Marissa, this was fantastic. It was a great conversation. Really loved talking to both of you. Thank you for illuminating us about the this culture of good Christian parenting and the myth of it, and actually talking about Jesus and parenting, and where do we go from here, and some curiosity and grace and freedom in the midst of this high control, authoritarian type of controlling parenting that has actually done some harm to some people and kids growing up. And so hopefully there's a new day and a better day ahead, is what I pray and that we can do that. And so this book has been really helpful, and I think it's gonna be helpful for a lot of people to see where things have come from, and then where we can go from here. So thank you. It was fantastic.
Marissa Burt:Thank you so much.
Unknown:You.
