Joyfully At Home: Chapter 15 - Part One

 Jasmine Baucham's fifteenth chapter in "Joyfully At Home" is Jasmine's reasonably sensible plan to deal with a problem she sees among extensively sheltered homeschooled daughters.    Jasmine wrote that chapter to help the readers of her book spend some time learning a deeper explanation of why the family homeschools, runs their own business, keeps their daughters at home etc. than "That's what my family does" or "Because my parents want it that way."

I don't have a wide enough base of experience with Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull families who shelter their kids by homeschooling to have a feeling if this is a widespread problem - but I trust that if a young woman in that society thinks the problem exists, it exists.

In some respects, the need to justify a family's religious practices is a relic of Protestant Christianity's formation.   For many religions, the actions of worshipping matter far more than the believer's ability to understand or explain exactly why they worship in the way they do.   I am Roman Catholic and the Church thinks the discipline of attending Mass on Sunday and receiving the Eucharist matters far more than a person's ability to explain consubstantiation or why we worship on Sunday instead of Saturday.   For many religions formed prior to the Enlightenment Period, this focus on right action rather than right thought still exists.    

The net outcome of this is that many believers of a variety of religion are rather bewildered by the aggressive questioning of 'why?' a religion does what it does.   When your religious belief is based on faith in the actions of worshipping God, dealing with someone who expects you to justify every action from a scripture feels bizarre.   Why do we do that?  Because that's how we worship God.   If you want to know if it works, do the action; don't expect me to rummage around in my Bible for a verse to justify it.

That's a bit of a digression - but Jasmine's attempts to explain how her family taught her shows a frequent paradox found in CP/QF homeschool discussions.    Ms. Baucham attempts to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.   The first idea is that CP/QF methods of homeschooling create students who are more creative, better at flexible thinking and more articulate than public schooling.  The second idea is that homeschooling allows parents to raise children whose beliefs and thought processes are in perfect alignment with the Christian ideal.  

And there's the problem in a nutshell.   You can't raise a child to be the perfect defender of CP/QF - or Catholicism or atheism or any other religion, philosophy, or belief system - without suppressing some critical thinking skills.     

I know this from personal experience.  I did K-12 schooling in a Catholic school system and received an excellent academic education.   Because I received an excellent academic education, however, I rejected quite a few social teachings of the Church.   Thanks to a strong background in academic reading comprehension, Biology and statistics, I recognized that natural family planning (NFP) is a ticket to a very large family for most adult women.   Thanks to the wide amount of reading required and a high school morality class that pushed critical thinking over indoctrination, I recognized that the Church's view on LGBT issues was harmful and obsession with clerical chastity strange.  

Was this the end of my faith.  No.  For better or worse, I am Catholic.  I see the world through a certain series of lenses involving human rights and dignity that I learned from the Church.  I order my year around a Liturgical Calendar that is as ingrained for me as the seasons.  I find attending Mass to be comforting and invigorating and I hope to pass on similar experiences to my son.

But I digress.  I'm a 39-year old woman raised by parents who wanted me to own my life and religion.  This section of "Joyfully At Home" was written by a 19-year old woman whose father prioritized formation of ideal Christians - and this is what you get:

My parents knew this.  In growing up – in the safety of my home - was a perfect place for me to search the scriptures for myself, to learn to come to my own conclusions... under the watchful guidance of my parents ( Ephesians 6:4).  I'm always learning something – from  my parents, from my research, from my Bible study, from family worship, from  conversation and I'm always questioning would have learned. I've also learned how to phrase my questions a little differently: instead of, " Daddy, is Obamacare a good thing?" It's " Daddy, I was reading The Communist Manifesto and came across a passage that had to do with this healthcare issue; I was searching God's Word, and needed some guidance about how to defend my position on healthcare, which is -" ( okay, so perhaps I'm not that eloquent, but I think you get the gist of it). Then, we can talk, and our conversation is fruitful. (pg. 174)

The italics are original to the book - and the italics drive home the Bauchams' expectation of right thought over critical thinking.   Young Jasmine was allowed to research and defend ideas vigorously as long as the ideas were pre-judged to be correct by her parents.      That's normal when dealing with kids who are in early elementary school - you don't want to encourage kids to adopt negative moral ideas while they are too immature to understand all of the facets of morality - but Jasmine is plenty old to start wrestling with more complicated issues and disagree with her parents.

The example she choose is telling.   Because CP/QF Christianity is militantly devoted to the Republican Party, every reader of Ms. Baucham's book in the US would instantly recognize that the Baucham's answer to "Is Obamacare a good thing?" would be a resounding "no!".   A deep aversion to any form of government regulation or safety net over rugged individualism is a key plank of the Republican Party.   

It's important to the pro-business Republican Party - and the interests of various insurance companies and for-profit medical businesses - but does that mean that resistance to a single-payer governmental medical insurance program is Biblical?   

Not really; the Bible is so broad with so many different times and genres represented that people can make Biblically based arguments for both private medical insurance, public medical insurance, mutual aid societies like Samaritan....pretty much every method of paying for medical care I can find.

Why doesn't Jasmine know this at age 19?  Because her homeschool experience prioritized right doctrinal thinking over critical thinking.   

When I taught high school, I encouraged my students to write one opinion paper a year (out of several) that contradicted their personal belief systems.   For example, write a paper against nuclear energy if you were in favor of it or a paper about why steroids should be legal  for professional athletes if you believed should be illegal.  I got a whole heap of papers about outlawing marijuana each year :-). 

Why did I do this?   Well, I'm sure the Bauchams' or Maxwells or Duggars or Botkins would tell you I was a godless teacher trying to corrupt their kids - but I had no interest in changing the viewpoints of students.   

No, I wanted my students to take the time to assess what the major points that motivated people who disagreed with them.   Unless you can see the major motivation points of another person, you can't really understand their viewpoint.    By teaching young adults to assess a different viewpoint - then support that point using real data points - I was attempting to show why well-meaning, educated people who care can reach radically different views on the same subject.   

That would also help students see that people on the opposite side of an issue weren't evil or stupid; they were usually just putting different weights on certain values.   That viewpoint is a bit more compassionate and gives a starting point for working together.

As I type that, though, I realize that teaching the Botkin kids that "liberals are people, too!" or "that person who wants to reform drug laws might be doing it out of care for others!" is a form of corruption of their worldviews.    Whoops - but I was teaching kids to become citizens of the current USA - not a theological  autocratic regime run by their father.

Now, I want to add that, whenever my parents sent me off to find answers to my own questions, there was always a time when I came back to share my findings, and a discussion about what I learned.  Because my father is the head of my home (Ephesians 5) and because it is the job of both my parents to impress the law of the Lord on my heart (Deuteronomy 6), they have always guided me in my study. However, they also impressed on me the importance of being able to articulate our beliefs - my beliefs - for myself.(pg. 175)

What would have happened if young Jasmine came back with a handful of Bible quotes that supported Obamacare based on the shared responsibility of Christians to support each other, Jesus's statement about giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and multiple passages about healing the sick?

Where I went to school, that'd be an A paper - but would it be in the Baucham house?

What if Jasmine read the Communist Manifesto - *rolls eyes* - and declared that it reminded her so much of the portions of the New Testament where the local community supported each other by sharing what everyone had to fulfil what everyone needed?

I think we can safely assume that Jasmine would be sent back to collect the right ideas - but I'm more concerned about the fact that Jasmine has been so sheltered that she seems oblivious to the idea of how her beliefs could morph over time.    

The good news is that twenty-something Jasmine has been vocal about how her personal beliefs have changed markedly from her father.

I rolled my eyes about reading "The Communist Manifesto" because CP/QF homeschoolers seem to have an obsession with reading out-of-date materials as a sign of academic prowess.  We'll see that more in the next post in this section.