Evangelical patriarchs justified brutal child discipline as theological training.

Evidence

Hyles prefigured a style of militant masculinity that other evangelical pastors would perfect. Known for angry outbursts and a nasty temper, Hyles had “a penchant for ironfisted control” over his growing religious empire. He instituted a dress code—men wore jackets and ties and close-cropped hair, and women skirts below the knee—and he commanded women to “be in complete and total submission to their husbands and to male leadership.” Whereas boys must be trained to be leaders, girls should be trained to submit. They “must obey immediately, without question, and without argument.” By enforcing submission, parents would be doing a future son-in-law “a big favor.” Hyles also advocated corporal punishment of children, even infants. (Spankings should last “at least ten or fifteen minutes” and should “leave stripes,” as necessary.) Parents in his church took his advice to heart; one woman recalled receiving more than three hundred lashes from a leather belt, and Hyles advised the girl’s parents how to avoid arrest after authorities were notified. “Our natural man” might rebel at such punishment, Hyles explained, but children must learn obedience or end up in hell. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 125

Categorization

• XREF: The Hyles case is an extreme instance of the submission-to-authority dynamics in the reader’s sources on obedient children and on how hierarchy is reproduced; also links to Hannah Arendt’s banality-type questions about ordinary people enforcing brutality. — connects to: Theocratic leaders justify state violence by analogy to corporal discipline of children — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 168
• CANDY: The detail that a pastor advised parents how to avoid arrest after beating a child with 300 lashes is striking in itself.