Our Hatred of All Discipline
Tue, 2010-06-22 12:12 — Joseph Bayly
In my last post about discipline, a commenter that I have great respect for said this:
I'm not so sure our culture hates discipline; it hates the Lord and HIS discipline. But that's not what a lot of them see. They see abuse. The fact that unbelievers in the absence of His Word - can't see the difference between Christian discipline that heals and "discipline" which exasperates, humiliates, and destroys seems to me to be more an indictment of OUR failure, as the church, to teach, model, and occupy "hard places" ('social work' has to be one of the most thankless and PAGAN occupations in our nation...). Are our churches teaching this stuff?
Let's see . . . how can I say this delicately? This is a terrible error! Flee from it!
Discipline, just like authority, has its root in God and His character. And our culture hates both of them. It makes no sense to say that our culture hates God's discipline but doesn't hate discipline in general. It's like saying that we don't hate rain, we just hate water.
Open your eyes and you'll see that our culture hates discipline. We're removing it everywhere:
- Some schools (for example, Harmony in Bloomington) refuse to grade the students. Others give everybody good grades (Harvard). And most refuse to fail anybody.
- Thousands of youth sports programs around the country have no winners or losers. An official at a YMCA soccer game reprimanded my brother for keeping track of the score.
- At universities, the police won't do anything about public intoxication, underage drinking, drug use and much worse. I know. I was a head resident at Vanderbilt University and sometimes I had to call the police about certain issues. They wouldn't respond because the administration didn't want them to.
- Criminals being "treated" for their "condition". The treatment? All they need is somebody to "believe in them". I heard this line myself a few weeks ago about a man who had driven drunk, with a loaded shotgun and the police chasing him, to his son's house after leaving threatening messages on his voicemail.
Seeing abuse does tempt us to turn from discipline. But the anti-discipline crowd uses fear of abuse to strong-arm us into not disciplining. If all we're worried about is abuse, why are the alternatives to spanking the following?
- redirection
- positive attention
- take a break
Is there anything even remotely like discipline on the list? Why not? Because we hate *all* discipline. I mean, imagine this conversation on the playground:
"MARY! Tommy is in the street!"
"Well, Dear, two weeks ago I tried to redirect Tommy from the street to the slide. Last week every time he ran into the street I told him how much I loved him. This week I'm taking a break from it."
So let's be honest. We're afraid to discipline our children because we know that the world will persecute us. If we think the world doesn't hate discipline, we're setting ourselves up for one of two things. Either we'll accept the world's defination of discipline - meaning we don't discipline at all. Or, we'll be shocked when we do discipline and the world responds with persecution.
Comments
Great post. I am in
Great post.
I am in agreement with you that our culture cannot stand discipline. The only point I would want to make is that the *consequentialism* that you mention in points #1,2,3 seem to be subsets of the main problem or a symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself.
Dan
Yes, Dan. My point was to
Yes, Dan. My point was to show the fact that this rears its head in all aspects of society. You can't have all those symptoms without having the disease of hatred of all discipline.
-Joseph
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