5 Ways That Fundamentalism and High-Control Religion Grooms Children for Sexual Abuse

I grew up in a religious cult that abused children. As I grew, and throughout my teen and young adult years, I was a part of churches that turned away from the sexual abuse of children in their midst and even protected predators from the pulpit.

I am the fifth child in a family of twelve. My mother homeschooled all of us and I stayed at home until I married. I did everything right and was the perfect daughter. 

Over the years, as I have picked apart my childhood and my experience growing up in fundamentalism, I have come to see a very clear picture of how abusive spiritual messaging and fundamentalist parenting practices lead children directly into harm. It is not a surprise at all to me now that I witnessed the rampant sexual abuse of children while I was a child in the churches my parents chose to attend. Now I talk about all of it publicly, because the harm was done in secret and kept secret by those in power. I won’t keep their secrets any more. 

There are five pillars of large, fundamentalist families are an on-ramp to CSA. Let’s talk about it.

1. Isolationism. 

Many families in high-control religious spaces are encouraged to circulate only within the approved group. Usually children are homeschooled or participate in co-ops within the group, extracurricular and sports, if participated in at all, are often through the group only. Your church friends are your only friends and there’s a sense of evil from the outside of the group that is carefully curated and protected. Because of this, children are often cut off from other social circles, they are not exposed to school counselors, teachers, coaches, and sometimes even other family members outside the group. 

2. Neglect.

Contraception is typically discouraged in high-control religious spaces and churches. It is common for families to have MANY children and even though wives are encouraged (required) to be home with all of their children, there is an obvious shortage of attunement and supervision. When a stay-at-home mother is juggling the housekeeping, meal planning and homeschooling of 12 children, there is not enough of her to go around, not to mention she is often parenting without the practical or emotional support of her husband due to a patriarchal view of family systems that encourages men to work hard outside the home and live like little kings inside the home. Children do not have the attention and attunement they need to thrive and neglect is common in these large families. A child may go for weeks or months without purposeful appropriate connection from a parent, while mothers are burned out and worn thin and fathers are often absent and ill equipped to meet their wives emotional needs, let alone their children's emotional needs.

3. Hierarchy. 

Because there is not enough of Mom and Dad to go around, you will find older siblings taking care of younger siblings in most large fundamentalist families. And I don’t mean helping with bedtime and assisting with chores, I mean that there is usually a hierarchy instituted among siblings that expands beyond necessary care of young children into an obedience pyramid with the oldest at the top and the youngest at the bottom. It is not uncommon for older siblings to be handed down absolute authority over younger siblings from parents. This means that younger children are required to obey without question or complaint an older siblings’ request, as if they were a parent. The idea that each child’s respective authority up the chain of command will keep this power in line is often the only accountability present. 

4. Lack of sex education and consent. 

A hallmark of these large fundamentalist families is a lack of comprehensive sex education. Girls often do not know about their periods until they start bleeding, sometimes going into young marriages without any idea of what to expect on the wedding night. Boys may reprimanded for early porn use, but there is often an abysmal lack of education or support for any sexual misconduct or confusion. There is a learned shame about bodies and natural functions, often no conversation about healthy sexuality, and the concept of consent is entirely lacking. Children are taught that their bodies do not belong to themselves and often that they are dirty, untrustworthy and full of sin. 

5. Corporal punishment as the primary form of discipline. 

In fundamentalist and high-control religious parenting the term discipline almost exclusively means spanking. There is a deep seated conviction that children MUST be spanked and very little debate about how a parent should go about that spanking. It is almost always on the bare bottom while the child is held down across a parents’ lap, exposed. Sometimes this form of discipline can carry on well into a child’s teenage years, sometimes this happens in front of siblings and sometimes this happens among siblings or even from other parents within a community. Older children are sometimes given the authority to spank a younger child on a parents behalf. Spanking is usually followed by a forced hug and words about how God requires spankings for misbehavior and the child must face this consequence in order to be cleansed from their sin. Sometimes there is a prayer. 

Each one of these normative experiences within fundamentalist families plays a significant part in what I have seen and experienced to be rampant sexual abuse against children within these churches and religious spaces. They are the means by which predators groom and abuse these children and also how children are taught to groom and abuse each other. Every part of this system of abuse is purposely curated to put the most vulnerable at the bottom and to break down their will, autonomy, intuition, and natural protective instincts, making them the perfect victim for CSA. 

They tell children that their most important role is obedience, they tell them their obedience is to anyone older with authority, they tell them they have no autonomy, they tell them their body is not theirs, they tell them anybody in authority over them can strip away their clothes and feeling of safety to harm their body in a way that feels intimate, shameful and painful, and then they tell them that God wants that to happen to them and that it was their fault. 

The sexual abuse is almost inevitable. 

As somebody who grew up in a large fundamentalist family, in a high-control religious community, I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again, including within my own family. 

We cannot teach our children how to protect themselves from predatory grooming while simultaneously teaching them that they exist to obey authority, that their intuition and natural protective instincts are evil, and that any older and bigger person has a God-given right to put their hands on them, especially in the intimate way that spanking is. 

We cannot teach our children what safe and healthy relationships feels like if we are hurting them and calling it love.

Spanking is the final nail in the coffin for children who are vulnerable to sexual abuse and Christians have to reckon with the reality that by choosing to spank their children they are participating in grooming them for that abuse.