Santa Claus and Biblical Discipline

Santa Claus and Biblical Discipline
Reflections following the Christmas season

By Governess

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This story is intended for ADULTS ONLY. It contains explicit depictions of sexual activity involving minors. If you are not of a legal age in your locality to view such material or if such material does not appeal to you, do not read further, and do not save this story.
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For children today, Father Christmas is a welcome and friendly red-coated figure who distributes presents from a large sack. However, this is a sentimentalised version of the true St Nicholas – Santa Claus – from central Europe and the Low Countries who came at Christmastide with gifts for those children who had been obedient throughout the year, but carried a birch rod for those who had not. Sometimes the birch rod was carried by a rather frightening assistant.

Many Christian parents from strict Protestant churches with a faith rooted in the Bible doubted the wisdom of exposing their children to Santa Claus and would no doubt have found the more sober figure with his birch rod an equally dangerous and confusing myth. The more extreme even chose not to celebrate Christmas at all. But while expelling Santa Claus and his sack of presents, they nevertheless retained his birch rod as a feature of family life not just at Christmas but throughout the year.

The foundation of all fundamentalist Christian belief is the Bible. The very clear approval of corporal punishment found in the Old Testament, particularly in the Book of Proverbs, ensured that the children from such families were almost always disciplined in this way, either by their parents or by those into whose charge they had been placed.

Ellie Cotton, in her book God's Rule for Mothers, published in Boston in 1906, drew heavily on the Old Testament as a sure guide to effective parenting. She observed that there is a divine wisdom and order running throughout creation.

We read in Chapter 30 of the Book of Proverbs that 'The locusts have no king yet they advance together in ranks.' They have, as do other animals, an inbuilt wisdom that ensures their behaviour is to the benefit of each and all. But alas it is not so with children! In Chapter 22 of that same Book, we are told that 'folly is bound up in the heart of a child.' The wisdom that God conferred on his creation has been lost by the Fall and all children from that time onward have a deeply ingrained bias towards sin. But the promise is given that 'the rod of discipline' will drive that folly out.

Ellie Cotton in no way regarded the rod as a magical means of driving sin once for all from a young life.

Each age has its own 'folly.' The folly of a four-year-old is different from that of a ten year old, and both differ from the folly of a fourteen-year old. But the promise remains that whatever the age, whatever the folly, the rod is the God-given remedy. But it is a medicine not an elixir that is taken but once. The bitter pill of the rod needs to be administered regularly and frequently if the sickness of sin is to be kept in check.

Another essential feature of fundamentalist Christian thought is that in the divine order the man is the head of the woman and rules over her. However, there is a recognition that although the father's rule is absolute, he may appoint his wife, as his viceroy, to rule over his household and his children. In the words of Christian essayist Charlotte Gibbins,

a father may choose not to whip his children and may delegate that duty to their mother, but the children must know that the rod of discipline is his and his alone, and that she wields it with his authority.

There was also an awareness that even though a father has the authority to whip an older girl, he should exercise that right with great care. For as she says, with consummate delicacy

Her young flesh already ripening and firming into womanhood may cause him undue distress.

Mrs Cotton was adamant that a girl should not be treated any less severely than her brothers. Indeed the reverse was the case. She quotes from St Paul's first letter to Timothy that

a woman should learn in quietness and full submission ... For Adam was formed first and then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived: it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.

From this the writer – and many others – concluded that the discipline of the rod was particularly appropriate for girls on the verge of young womanhood when wilful self affirmation led them all too readily into the deceit of sin.

A girl must learn that her vocation is in service and obedience, wrote Mrs Cotton. First to the authorities established by her father within the family, and later to her husband who will be her head and to whom she must submit.

It is this insight that governs the training of a girl and that distinguishes it from the discipline provided to her brothers.

Both Ellie Cotton and Charlotte Gibbins recognised that there is a qualitative difference in the discipline administered to boys and girls once they are on the threshold of their teenage years. As Mrs Cotton explained,

a boy must learn to respect authority as one who will soon exercise it for himself. Chastisement should be directed at his lack of courage and resolution; or imposed to teach determination and stamina under suffering. Disobedience that arises from daring and resourceful endeavour should rarely be subject to corporal chastisement for it displays those manly qualities of leadership that need to be fostered in a boy.

But not so with a teenage daughter. In Mrs Cotton's view, a girl

must learn respect for authority as one who will herself be subject to it. Disobedience, resentful behaviour and any sign of chafing under legitimate authority must be severely punished. She should be whipped with vigour until her will is broken and she is ready to prostrate herself before the rod and meekly kiss the instrument of her discipline.

The importance placed on obedience was a distinctive feature of fundamentalist Christian child rearing.

Mrs Gibbins stressed again and again that a girl needs to be trained in obedience and that this training needs to intensify once she is on the threshold of her teenage years.

Let us be clear that our children do not learn obedience when we instruct them to do something that is to their liking. Obedience is learned when we require them to follow an instruction that is displeasing or painful, an instruction they would rather not obey. To this end, a child, and most certainly an older girl, should be set, from time to time, tasks that are hard and thankless, or that have no justification other than that her mother requires they be done.

She explained in detail how she trained her own twelve year old daughter in obedience by giving her such tasks. Nor was the girl allowed to display displeasure at such drudgery.

I expect Sarah to undertake obedience training cheerfully and to apply herself diligently. Just as the whip is applied to the flanks of a young horse that fights bit and bridle, so it is with Sarah if she chafes under her discipline or displays the slightest sign of resentment.

One such task she set the girl was, with pen and ruler, to score out the lines of an old book, page by page, until the allotted number had been completed. As her mother said

at the conclusion of a day's such tedious labour, she anxiously awaits my inspection of her work for I insist of absolute neatness.

Faith Wickens, a mother of four, writing in a New England Christian parenting journal in 1913, described a similarly harsh routine for her daughter Mary Louise who was about the same age as Sarah Gibbins. Her mother was concerned that she was becoming over fussy about her appearance and was taking an excessive time to select the dress she was to wear for the day. She writes that

vanity, as much as disobedience, is an expression of self-will and needs to be eradicated for the child's own good.

To this end, Mary Louise Wickens was made to bring down her favourite yellow dress and was set the laborious task of unpicking it, thread by wearisome thread.

Much of her summer vacation was spent on correcting her vanity in this way, and several severe applications of the rod were necessary to subdue her spirit and keep her to the prescribed task.

In the correspondence generated by this article, another New England mother recounts how she caught her young daughter using an eyebrow pencil and how, after the severest of whippings, she was made to pluck her eyebrows until none was left.

Facing the world after this lesson was painful and humbling, but I judged it necessary to crush the worm of vanity in the bud before it could wreak further damage.

For loving mothers to treat their young daughters with such severity and seeming lack of compassion may seem objectionable today. But just as these mothers lack our modern concern for the rights of the child, so we do not share their heartfelt concern that their children be saved from their sins and confess the Lord Jesus as their Saviour. For them, fear of the rod and the obedience it engendered were instrumental in achieving that objective.

St Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, describes the law as a schoolmaster that leads us to Christ.

It is a hard taskmaster, incredibly demanding, but eventually, exhausted and hopeless in our failure to keep it, we turn to Christ who alone can save us by His sacrificial death.

So wrote Charlotte Gibbins, who firmly believed that a mother must replicate that pattern in the upbringing of her children.

We must set them a law and demand that they keep it absolutely. We must punish each and every infraction. Only in that way will they discover what behaviour is sinful and displeasing to God; and in their anxiety to avoid the painful cuts of the rod, they will struggle to avoid sin.

But the rod confers a greater blessing.

The rod may control sin, but it will never transform the heart of a child. But in their desperate struggles to avoid its cuts, they begin to appreciate that they are sinners not only in their deeds but in their hearts. The stripes inflicted by a loving mother on a child's flesh may be able to forgive individual sins, for as we read in the 20th Chapter of Proverbs, 'the blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil'; but only the blood of the Cross can forgive all sin and transform a heart that is stained by Adam's fall into a heart singing the praises of Jesus.

Charlotte Gibbins was not alone in understanding the chastisement of children as a preparation for their acceptance of Jesus. Madeleine Edwards, the wife of a New England clergyman of the early years of the 20th century, and herself a mother of six daughters, was adamant that the rod was particularly beneficial for older girls.

An older girl can become self absorbed and moody. She needs to learn that there is a world outside herself that is both harsh in its demands and generous in its forgiveness. But she must first experience the harshness before she will be prepared to open herself to the forgiveness.

She was quite graphic in her description of the rod for to her it expresses God's judgment on sin.

The chastisement administered to an older girl imprisoned by self-will must take no thought for her suffering. The rod, rightly applied, brings her to the fringe of Hell. Make her look therein and know that the fiery agony of each cut is but a cool hand on a fevered brow compared to the fires of that abyss; her screams are but a whisper compared to the horrible cacophony of those souls suffering eternal torture; and her helpless writhing is as nothing compared to the frenzied agony of those enduring such torment.

A similar thought was expressed by Ellie Cotton when she said that for a girl

each switch on her tender bottom flesh is as nothing to the pains she will endure for eternity if she does not forsake self for Jesus.

Although most of these writers placed great emphasis on the fear of the rod being a prelude to a healthy and saving fear of the Lord, others stressed the child's experience of shame under judgement in much the same way. A remarkable writer, Ann C Wiggins, the mother of three boys, writing at the beginning of the 20th century, develops this theme with a telling and frightening simplicity.

She took as her starting point the story of Adam and Eve who became ashamed of their nakedness only when they had sinned.

They wanted clothes to hide their sin from God, and before we laugh at their stupidity, let us remember how as children we felt vulnerable stripped for a whipping. How the eyes of our mother who had looked lovingly upon us naked in the bath became eyes before whose look we felt shame and trepidation when it was a rod and not a towel in her hand. Her eyes were the eyes of judgment and nothing stood between us and that gaze.

Her analysis of this childish experience of judgment was full of deep and disturbing insights.

A child when caught in a sin comes under judgment. He feels ashamed at having broken the nursery law I have set him. He knows instinctively that his sin is a barrier to my love. He feels a desolation at the absence of maternal warmth and acceptance; and is anxious that the joy of that relationship be re-established. But because he is a sinner, mingled with these fears, are an anger and resentment at my judgment, and a wish to be forgiven without cost or penalty.

Ann C Wiggins perceived these two responses – healthy shame in which judgment is accepted and unhealthy resentment where it is resisted – as fighting a battle within the child's will.

This battle may be particularly acute in a boy from his tenth year when he feels that he has outgrown the imposition of any law, and whose sense of shame is often weakened and overwhelmed by his self-will and his belief that he is accountable to nobody but himself.

For Mrs Wiggins it was imperative that a mother took resolute steps to strengthen such a boy's sense of shame against the ravages of self-willed resentment. She warned that just as God's judgment against sin is unvarying and absolute so, too, must be that of a mother.

Make no allowance, whip him severely and baptise him under the cold and sobering waters of shame.

The importance of shaming was intimately bound up with the whole understanding of discipline as a process of renewal. Sarah Williams, the wife of a Welsh Chapel Minister in the 1900s, wrote a booklet on the training and salvation of children. There she noted that

a child who is hardened in wrong-doing feels no shame before God and consequently feels no need of forgiveness. But let him know that even though he feels no shame, you are deeply ashamed of him. Strip him and set him apart in a place of humiliation and judgment so that he and others will know that he is in disgrace, a sinner awaiting punishment. In this way may a healthy shame be aroused and his sins forgiven.

However, a sense of shame for sinning, even if it softens the spirit and inclines the child to seek forgiveness, was not enough.

A child may fervently promise never to sin again, and plead that he needs no punishment, that he is already deeply sorry and ready to be forgiven. But never accede to such a request. Sin cannot be forgiven until it has been cancelled by punishment.

Mrs Williams quotes from St Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews that without the shedding blood there can be no forgiveness.

For this reason the birch, with its sharp twigs that cut a child's flesh and leave traces of blood on bare and sensitive skin, is surely the God-given instrument of discipline.

She adds that we should not recoil from imposing such discipline but remind ourselves that the child's sufferings are as nothing compared to those of the Lord Jesus who shed His blood in agony on the Cross.

She further explains that the severity of punishment as a response to sin is also a measure of the extent and generosity of the forgiveness conferred.

How will a child know how dreadful in God's sight is his sin and how deep and profound is the forgiveness conferred unless he can measure it by the intensity of the pain inflicted on his flesh? The fear of the rod and the obedience that it engenders are a means of grace. The whippings a child receives and the discipline imposed are an expression of a mother's gracious love. To apply the rod with diligence, never sparing a child but exacting the full price of sin is the greatest kindness you can confer.

Faith Wickens recognised that while some mothers had no reservations about whipping a boy, they found applying the rod to a girl disturbing, even traumatic.

It is natural that when a mother administers a lesson in obedience and visibly harrows a girl's flesh with the rod, that she will feel sorrow for her daughter and suffer in her soul as the girl writhes in agony; but just as the Lord Jesus hung on the Cross for our salvation to our great sorrow, so too must the girl endure the torment of the rod so that she too may share in the benefits of His suffering.

But after the shame and suffering are over and the girl has knelt before the rod and received forgiveness for her sins, there is an expression of joy and thanksgiving at her reconciliation.

She wandered far but you sought her; you returned her to a place of judgment and confronted her with her sins; you applied the rod and broke her wilfulness; she passed through the fiery furnace of shame and emerged contrite and confessing the name of Jesus. How great, indeed, is a mother's ministry to her children. It is without doubt the work of the Holy Spirit who is both a Judge and a Comforter.

So Faith Wickens ended her little article written in 1913.

We may not share the evangelical Christian outlook that justified such harsh and resolute discipline, but the peace and stability that reigned in such families, and as a consequence in wider society, is something that we have assuredly lost. Santa Claus, the true Father Christmas, brought presents only for those children who deserved them and carried a birch rod for those who had been disobedient.

Perhaps we should learn from that.