The Child's Song: The Religious Abuse of Children

by Donald Capps

Theological ideas and biblical injunctions have frequently been employed to legitimate the physical abuse of children. Some theological ideas are inherently abusive because they create fear in a child's mind, causing a child to feel alone, odd, and of little worth. Donald Capps exposes the abuses that theology and the Bible have inflicted on vast numbers of children. In particular, he is concerned with the "hidden" abuses of children by well-intentioned adults and the role that religion plays in the legitimation of these abuses.

Genres: Religion, Childrens

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Donald Eric Capps was born in Omaha, NE, USA on January 30, 1939. After studying at Lewis & Clark College (B.A. 1960) and Yale Divinity School (B.D. 1963, S.T.M. 1965) and University of Chicago (M.A. 1966), he earned his Ph.D. also at the University of Chicago in 1970. His dissertation explored a psycho-historical analysis of the personality of the English theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman, and particularly his vocational struggles.
His academic career started as Instructor at the Department of Religious Studies at the Oregon State University during the Spring/Summer of 1969. He then became Instructor and Assistant Professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago between 1969 and 1974. Later, he was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he lectured between 1974 and 1976. Between 1976 and 1981 he was Associate Professor and then Professor at the Graduate Seminary of Phillips University.
In 1981 he joined the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was appointed the William Harte Felmeth Professor of Pastoral Theology. In May 2009 he retired with the status of Professor emeritus[2] but remains lecturing as adjunct.[3] In 1989, the Uppsala University, Sweden awarded him a degree of Doctor honoris causa in Theology for his contributions to the Psychology of Religion.[4]
Other honors include the William F. Bier Award for contribution to Psychology of Religion, granted in 1995 by the Division 36 of the American Psychological Association; the Helen Flanders Dunbar Centennial Award, granted in 2002 by the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York; and the Joseph A. Sittler Award for Theological Leadership, granted in 2003 by Trinity Lutheran Seminary.
He was the book review editor for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion between 1980 and 1983 and editor for the same journal between 1983 and 1988. Furthermore, between 1990 and 1992 he was the president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
He is an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America since 1972. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E...)

Reviews

[max theodore]

read the first 2/3s or so for an essay on christianity + youth liberation, solely because my professor lent it to me, and i was so pleasantly surprised by the clarity and boldness of capps' writing on christianity's adverse effects on kids. (some kids.) (#notallchristians.) (i'm a little hater because i have catholic damage.) i don't really buy into psychoanalytic theory (or, at least, it is not my preferred theory), so that end of things was a little meaningless to me, but capps being like "yeah let's make a lot of christians uncomfortable. we have to pay attention to this happening in our community. also i'm gonna psychoanalyze augustine of hippo" is so based and pilled and cool of him that idc. also, i think i should get kind of weird about biblical scholarship.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Capp explores many themes of Alice Miller. For example, the vicious cycle of child abuse, and the mutilated soul. This book will make you want to do something to end the religious abuse of children.

From an Amazon.com reviewer:

This book is an important but disturbing look at the mixed messages and hidden curriculum in modern churches. Congregations which paradoxically use blind obedience while asking one to trust a loving God who kills can either provoke a crisis of personality or a self-destructive impulse in children/teens/then adults. Christianity has too long been an adult dominated, child exploiting patriarch which vehemently denies children (and often women's) rights to life, self, happiness, and proclamation.

[T.Kay Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few more books like this in seminary and I might have actually found my place in Christianity.

[Hannah]

Chapter 2, 35-36--"Others, of course, may not react to this deathbed scene as I have reacted, and, since the silencing of Adeodatus has not been commented on by other interpreters of this scene, I am aware that my reaction may be totally idiosyncratic. The point, however, is that this is the episode in Augustine's narrative of his life where I experience a shift from reading his text to being read by it. And, I find that, when this shift occurs, the episode depresses rather than inspires me, and causes me to take no pride in the fact that I, like Augustine, am a Christian. Rather, it fills me with a sense of the tragic limitations, not only of Augustine's life and his insights into his life, but of human life in general and of our capacity to understand ourselves. As I consider his struggle with the problem of whether to shed tears or to contain them, I feel shame for him...How trivial, and yet how tragic, that he would experience this dilemma—to cry or not to cry—as a reflection of who he is, as a person, and as a faithful Christian. And yet, wasn't this the very issue he confronted as a boy being beaten at school—to cry or not to cry—and didn't everything, including his very selfhood, depend on which course he took? Is it any wonder, then, that he should come to view his comportment in the death room of his mother as a test of who he is, both as a person and as a child of God? Then the shame that I feel for him, I begin to feel for myself, as I sense that I am no less concerned to "do it right," not only or primarily in grieving, but in all areas of my life where I feel that others are observing me. As I reflect on past scenes, trivial by any objective standards, where I struggled so manfully to play my own part oh so correctly or demanded of my own son that he act so as not to embarrass me, I realize that I am no different from Augustine. The shame I feel for him comes back to me, and I am left feeling very much exposed and ashamed. In this shame there is a deep sense of loneliness, of being without God in the world, for my God—as for Augustine too—has been a God who discloses himself in the order and quiet dignity of our lives. I have known him, as did Augustine, in the psalms and canticles I have sung on occasions such as this. Although not without feeling, these songs have not much to do with primitive cries of pain and chaotic, unmanageable emotions, but with maintaining control. Surely I am not alone in feeling as I do, ashamed for my obvious skill in keeping emotions in check, but the weight of Christian tradition after Augustine is against those of us who feel this way, and this only increases our sense of loneliness."

Chapter 5, page 85 "The most that Miller has to say in this regard is her suggestion that Isaac ask Abraham what kind of God is this who would demand such a thing as the murder of one's own child? This is a valid question for Isaac to ask, and the asking of it does take us a significant step beyond the perspective of the biblical storyteller who does not think to ask this question. But to ask this question is not yet to have asked the much more fundamental question, Why should we give the idea of sacrifice—in whatever form—a religious legitimation, invoking the will of God in its support?"

[Natalie Baker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does NOT have a solid foundation. Capps has a way of disregarding scripture, and I shrugged my shoulders at first, but eventually his amendments started talking away significantly from the gospel. So nope.