The Best Reason Yet to Be An Atheist?
How Childhood Trauma Built Christianity
When someone talks about both religion and trauma, they’re usually discussing trauma experienced while in the religious fold, or the anxieties or personal mistreatment they faced on leaving their beliefs and communities. Often both.
But what if religion itself, especially Christianity, was profoundly shaped by trauma?
What if the Passion, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus became such potent religious symbols because people who lived in the strict, patriarchal cultures that created the Old and New Testaments so routinely experienced traumatic, painful childhoods at the hands of their dominant fathers?
“It sounds ridiculous until you get into the details,” explained the author of this theory, writer and researcher Benjamin Abelow, in a recent Zoom call. We will get into some of those details shortly. (As someone who grew up in Catholic schools and a Catholic home, where full-color crucifixes were considered décor and children were beaten, his idea has only sounded resonant to me.)
Abelow has outlined a causal relationship from ancient childhood trauma to the shaping of religion, which he claims can exist in other religions, but is markedly clear in Christianity. He has been testing his idea for two decades by publishing in peer-reviewed journals and presenting at international scholarly conferences such as the Society of Biblical Literature, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Society for the History of Children and Youth, asking scholars to challenge him if they think he’s making factual errors.
No one has stepped up, although some scholars have told him outright that they’re convinced by his argument. Having presented his ideas to specialists, he’s now finishing a popular book on the topic.
He says that even though he personally is an atheist, he’s not trying to torpedo religion; he understands it can be a comfort for some people. “I feel a certain warmth for Jewish ritual, having had that background,” he adds. “I feel a certain warmth for religion in general.”
What he does want to do is stimulate awareness in two particular areas: the power of childhood trauma to shape lives and cultures, and the potential for religions to soften the harsher, more threatening features of their symbolism and mythology.
Here’s how Abelow states his theory in one of his academic papers:
I suggest that those persons involved in the creation of early Christian ideas, having been reared in a punitive patriarchal context, unknowingly projected or “mapped” patterns of childhood onto a religious cosmos. According to this explanation, canonical themes of innocent suffering, salvation through filial obedience, and the like were fundamentally shaped in response to childhood experience.
And if you don’t regularly concern yourself with canonical themes of Christianity, we’re talking about how Jesus the Son obediently underwent torture and death on the cross so his Father could forgive and save sinful humanity.
Abelow’s background, both experiential and academic, is unusually well suited to having connected the particular dots bridging trauma and religious symbolism. He grew up in a liberal Reform Jewish community, and experienced some trauma as a child, which he doesn’t detail. He studied European history as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, which included studies in the history of childhood. He pivoted into science, earning his M.D. from Yale, where he subsequently taught. His research at Yale was in the field of epidemiology
I asked him, only half-jokingly, if studying how diseases spread was useful in surmising how Christianity took over; he said yes, adding:
I also know how diseases evolve, and under what conditions one can infer causation from correlations. So when I talk about the parallels between childhood experience and the mythic system of Christianity, there’s a whole branch of epidemiology that’s called observational or environmental epidemiology that looks at correlations between disease process and underlying causes. I did my thesis at Yale on that. So that shaped my methodology and my awareness of the parallels in religion.
Abelow had the tools of both history and hard science at hand. But when he started leaning toward possible links between trauma and religion, he realized he knew very little about Christianity. He began by studying Paul, then the Gospels, and kept going. He already knew that ancient Hellenistic and Roman culture, where Christianity developed, encouraged severe child punishment for disobedience to fathers, especially.
“I pretty much saw the whole trauma-religion connection as an intuitive flash,” he says. “And then, to refine it, I dug deeper into all three relevant areas simultaneously: religion and myth, the history of childhood, and the psychology of trauma and symbolic thought.”
The more Christian texts he read, the clearer the scriptural parallels with childhood trauma became.
“I was looking at ways in which concrete childhood realities of trauma can become symbolized,” he says.
He also emphasizes that while he did ultimately want to understand the effects of his own trauma, an intellectual fascination with the subject drove his studies.
“Most people think of ancient Israel as the source of Christianity,” Abelow pointed out in our conversation.
And there certainly are connections between ancient Judaism and Christianity. But the New Testament texts are all written in Greek. They were written outside Palestine and largely reflected Hellenistic and Roman cultural norms.
Because Christianity was deeply shaped by the ancient Roman context, one must attend closely not only to early Judaism but to the culture of ancient Rome. In the Roman world, the highly patriarchal legal principle of patria potestas — the law of “paternal powers” — was a crucial influence. I believe this Roman and Hellenistic influence led to a refinement of a post-traumatic myth that was already evident, in a less explicit form, in ancient Judaism.
Taking his second point first, Christian symbols and writing refined the father-related traumatic punishments that already appear in the Hebrew Bible and culture, as we’ll see, especially the father’s punishment of disobedient sons. (Throughout the ancient world, girls were more likely punished by their mothers.)
As for the severity of Roman childhood: for untold generations, the Roman legal system included patria potestas, the power of a family’s oldest male — who was usually the father — to beat, imprison, or even torture or kill, anyone in his household. The father also controlled whether a newborn child would be kept in the family or exposed (thrown in a river, or discarded on a dung heap or elsewhere outdoors, vulnerable to wild animals and the elements.) The late Yale historian John Boswell estimated that between twenty and forty percent of all Roman infants were exposed in this manner. (Once a family’s heir and older children were in place, younger children and children with disabilities were often abandoned, with older children aware of their siblings’ fates.) One of Abelow’s papers quotes a first century CE Roman law text by Gaius:
Also in our potestas [“power”] are any of our children who are the offspring of a lawful marriage. This right is peculiar to Roman citizens, for there are virtually no other peoples who have such power over their children as we have. . .
Gaius wasn’t kidding.
Abelow notes in the footnotes of one paper how the Roman rhetor, writer, and senator Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) described how boys could be beaten by fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and teachers; fellow Romans Ovid and Seneca concur. The medical pioneer Galen (130–200 C.E.) suggested children be beaten early and often. Starting around age one, they “can be made to obey by the use of blows, threats, reprimands, and admonishments.” Two hundred years later, Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, who wrote in his Confessions about his youthful “torment” of being whipped by his teachers (which was accepted pedagogy), maintained such treatment was needed to break the child’s will for his own good, as stated in his Sermones:
The father who denies discipline is cruel. When a father thrashes his son, he loves him. Truly, his son has no desire to be beaten, but his father has no regard for his wishes. . .
The Roman Empire, at this point, included millions of citizens, as well as noncitizens and slaves, all living under Roman influence. The city of Rome itself included one million inhabitants. That’s a lot of traumatized people.
Rome’s pride in and insistence on wielding painful power over its kids might have been particularly stark — Roman educator Quintillian wrote that terrified children often lost bladder and bowel control during beatings. But it wasn’t unique. Mark Golden, in Children and Childhood in Classical Athens, one of Abelow’s many sources, writes about the prevailing Classical view:
Children were considered physically weak, morally incompetent, and mentally incapable.
And those were the children who survived the father’s judgment as worthy of raising. They would definitely need strong correction, verbally and physically.
The Jews before and during the compilation of the Old Testament also emphasized paternal power, the need for obedience, and physical punishment as an important tool for achieving it. The Jews insisted on filial obedience to the father on pain of beating or, in the most extreme cases, for older children, death by stoning (Abelow notes the inclusion of death was mitigated by later Jewish scriptures.) “Spare the rod” is only one of many biblical recommendations of this kind of parenting: “Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them,” says Proverbs 13:24, written sometime between 700 to 400 BCE.
Abelow also quotes Sirach, a Jewish text of the early second century, still on course for beating babies: “Beat his sides while he is an infant, lest he be hardened and disobey you” (30:12.)
Abelow says, “Within 50 years of its writing, Sirach was translated into Greek in Egypt; the text likely both reflected and influenced childrearing norms in both Palestine and the Hellenistic Diaspora…”
If childhood punishment was so widespread and so often severe, how did such vulnerable children cope? How did they try to avoid the pain and terror of those punishments? Through obedience. An obedient child who submitted to the father’s will would likely escape punishment. A disobedient child encountered a world of pain. Obedience had a saving power.
According to Abelow, the childhood strategy of avoiding punishment — of “saving” oneself — through obedience was the real-world basis of Paul’s theological system of eternal salvation through obedience.
The Effects of Trauma — In any Era
These next few points are not part of Abelow’s work, but my own speculative sideline about the history and effects of child rearing and abuse from my own reading.
Given the father’s commonly accepted historical role as family protector, it is hard to ignore, in any era, the cultural impact and personal dissonance of this level of traumatic pain: that your father can beat you and kill you. For those fortunately unfamiliar with such treatment, or those who have rationalized away their painful childhoods to believe physical abuse doesn’t cause damage, but builds character, I suggest Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s classic, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. The psychiatrist and researcher details how trauma can rewire the brain and nervous system to react in unthinking, damaging ways.
Additional modern evidence of childhood trauma’s damaging effects throughout life comes from a study of more than 17,000 subjects conducted in the 1990s by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente (an enormous US hospital and medical insurance system.) The study labeled traumas such as physical and emotional abuse, abandonment and neglect, sexual abuse, living with an alcoholic or other addict, and several more as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. According to the study, the number of people who grew up with trauma, and the health effects they suffer, is staggering. In the US, 69 percent of mental illness, 41 percent of chronic depression, 78 percent of IV drug abuse, 65 percent of the risk for suicide, and 61 percent of adult incarceration can be attributed to higher ACEs levels (four-plus out of ten) that remain untreated.
It’s also important to consider that Homo sapiens might not beat children by design. Many indigenous Americans, shocked by how early white “settlers” treated their own offspring, called them “the people who beat their children.”
Writer, ecologist, physiologist, and all-around polymath Jared Diamond, who has lived with and studied hunter-gatherer/forager tribes, where they still exist, notes that they typically have no concept of “obedience” or any enforcement of someone else’s will. In his book, The World Until Yesterday, Diamond writes that in decades of field work with different tribes in Papua New Guinea, he’s seen that it is considered terrible manners to tell anyone, even a child, to do anything. Many colleagues have concurred in their field studies. Diamond explains the general effect of this “no command obedience” approach among hunter-gatherers he and colleagues have known: “The other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children…” although he regrets that he and his colleagues can’t measure this scientifically.
Whether this is or was always the case among foragers is impossible to say, but the point is, there are some cultures who don’t physically (or otherwise) punish their children. And if one is at all willing to extrapolate from these findings about surviving small societies to life in the 95 percent of human history in which we lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherers, it’s possible humans may not be well equipped, neurologically and psychologically, to sustain physical punishment, at least not as children. And so ends my own speculation, based on compulsive reading rather than data.
From Trauma to Symbolism
One thing humans are wired for is symbolism. We are a symbolic species. Cultural symbols help us to create meaning and to understand our lives and our societies. If you doubt that, try burning an American flag on the front lawn this weekend and see what happens.
Because Abelow hadn’t grown up with any knowledge of Christianity or its symbols, once he started studying its scripture, theology, and history, he was taken aback to see how childhood punishment fit the teachings.
He writes, “The teaching that divine punishment is a response to disobedience, and that salvation is a response to obedience, is a crucial emphasis in Paul and is certainly one of the most influential ideas in the history of Christian thought.”
Abelow notes that Paul in Romans 5:19 is especially clear about the disobedient son, Adam (and thereby all sinning, disobedient humans) and the obedient son, Jesus: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
Abelow recalls reaching this point in his research:
The amazing thing was almost instantly, as soon as I started reading and getting the most basic knowledge about Christianity, I started seeing these very precise parallels between the religion and the actual experience of children. I think because I didn’t know Christianity, I wasn’t distracted by the details. All I could get at first were the big-picture pieces, like ‘How does Paul understand salvation? What are the gospel points of view? What is the story of Jesus?’ almost like a schematic image in my mind.
“In Judaism, there’s the story of a father-like king and king-like father, and his relationship with the community; it’s more complex,” he says.
But Christianity and the New Testament are about a Father and a Son, and it’s the death and the resurrection that are central. The parallels are very concrete. Father/Son; father/son. The son suffers according to the will of the father. Likewise, the childhood strategy of punishment avoidance through filial obedience is transposed into a vision of human salvation through the filial obedience of the divine Son. According to Christian teaching, one achieves salvation through the obedience of the Son to the Father.
“When I started to get these bare bones, I could see them very clearly. And the parallels with childhood occur within the origins, the level of the bare bones.” Abelow explains that the “smells and bells” and ritual of some forms of Christianity, such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox, might obscure these parallels more than in Protestant sects. “I don’t think a lot of these things jump out at people the way they did to me,” he says about bringing to his study of Christianity fresh eyes, an understanding of the history of childhood, and the psychological and even biological effects of childhood trauma.
Abelow explains how the childhood experience becomes a religious one:
“The culturally stereotypical dynamic between a human father and his child is symbolically transposed into the dynamic between a divine Father and his child, Jesus.” In addition, Christianity clearly sees humans as “children of God,” who can be punished in hell forever for sinning.
So over time and trauma, it doesn’t take much for an abused child, or an adult who experienced a punitive childhood, to slip mentally and emotionally from the household threat of “Wait until your father gets home” into the cosmic threat of eternal punishment by the divine Father.
Abelow notes that children have been painfully punished during most of Western recorded history (for example, Martin Luther’s father beat him often and severely.) He also notes that Luke’s gospel calls Adam “son of God,” and he describes how the portrayal of Adam in the Old Testament is childlike.) The story-become-symbols of a disobedient son (Adam) who is punished by his heavenly Father, and the obedient son (Jesus) who saves humanity by being crucified according to the will of his Father, “is a source of powerful emotional and cognitive resonances among believers and potential believers,” says Abelow.
He adds:
…Whereas the original formulation of a myth, as with a dream, requires the creation of a new symbolic construct to portray reality, psychological participation in an already extant myth requires only a conviction that the symbolic account is in some important way true. I believe this explanation is relevant to Christian narrative and salvation teaching.
So someone who has been painfully punished as a child can already identify both with the symbol of Adam, punished for his filial disobedience in Eden (kids always think things are about them), and with the crucified Jesus as a symbol of ultimate salvation or release through filial obedience. And abused children know all about obedience.
Professor Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament historian, says in his podcast, Misquoting Jesus, about the pagan conversion to Christianity, also detailed in his book, The Triumph of Christianity:
People converted because they heard about miracles, and they were convinced the Christian god was more powerful than pagan gods. There was lots of fire and brimstone from the beginning.
What helped to spread the faith, he says, is that pagans, who weren’t normally fixed on the afterlife, were told,
Our god is also powerful over the next life. If you don’t recognize him, and only him, you will go to hell when you die.
Painful and eternal punishment had taken over and highlighted the afterlife. And it convinced pagans who didn’t want more pain to obey the Christian god.
Abelow has much more to say about childhood trauma as the bedrock of Christianity (and about other religions as well, where, again, the connection is more subtle.) At the end of our conversation, he emphasized the cultural effect of this idea — and the enormous scale:
The idea that trauma might actually underlie Christianity takes on an even more potent meaning when you grasp that Christianity, until recently, at least, was the primary formative element in Western culture. And Western culture has spread everywhere. It can seem too simple to be possible — that the entire world as we know it was shaped by trauma — almost like a post-traumatic dream. That can blow people away.
Imagine if enough people read Abelow’s work, get blown away, and start to change both religious symbols and the treatment of children. Amen to that.
For more on Abelow’s papers, see below.
