Bad Parenting and Unconditional Love

 

Huckleberry Finn and father.

A model essay in a current school text outlines the two styles of parenting, strict and lenient, with their pros and cons. This seems to be the universal issue, at least since my own childhood and Doctor Benjamin Spock. And the politically correct position is that parents should be lenient. Indeed, spank your child, and you risk losing them to the government.

 This utterly misses the point. I think deliberately; I suspect another of many attempts to avoid all moral questions. Being strict or lenient is a secondary consideration. The obviously more important question is what the rules are, whether they are clear, and whether they are enforced consistently.

I suspect the term “lenient” is being used as a euphemism. It should mean not exacting punishment, or not exacting severe punishment. Instead, I think it now means not having any rules.

The Catholic Church, for example, is a model of lenience. It never exacts any punishment for sin. All that is needed is admission of guilt, and the matter is not mentioned again. Home free. Yet it is commonly condemned as strict.

In other words, “strict” means simply recognizing a difference between right and wrong.

Children need clear direction from their parents. Childhood is their time to learn. They suffer terribly without it. Moral ambiguity is the great danger, and the worst possible form of child abuse. 

If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

If a parent is strict, that is no big problem for a child: they simply do not do the prohibited thing. If a parent is lenient, that’s fine too, so long as the rules are clear. Children naturally want to please their parents, often above all else. But if a parent does not tell you what they want, is unpredictable, erratic, unjust, or encourages things against your conscience, there is an insurmountable problem. You cannot avoid trouble. 

I suspect this very form of abuse is the root of most of what we call mental illness. 

Which is of course growing now by leaps and bounds.

Unconditional Love

 

Xerxes proposes that there are two competing images of God: for some, God is “unconditional love.” For others, he is a “ruthless judge.”

This is a neat example of the fallacy of the false alterative: it implies that, if you do not believe God is unconditional love, you believe he is ruthless. You are therefore driven to accept that he is unconditional love.

Yet he clearly is not, if by “unconditional love” you mean that he sets no conditions. He does from the very beginning, with not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s love is expressed as a series of covenants: he has obligations, man has obligations, and if man does not meet his obligations, punishment can be swift and severe.

Caritas or agape, divine love, does not mean overlooking faults and flaws; any more than married love does. It means keeping contracts, and at all times wanting the best for the other. It also implies respecting the other’s moral agency. A “love” that demands nothing of the other does not. That would be seeing the other as an object. It is the sort of love one might have for a good steak. It is a form of hate.

This is why the Bible says “One who spares the rod hates his son, but one who loves him is careful to discipline him.”

So is God a “ruthless judge”? The flaw here is in seeing justice as in opposition to love or mercy. Perfect justice is the ultimate mercy.