But Carlson’s words may have had particular resonance for a certain breed of authoritarian conservatives: members of the evangelical right, who have been Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers; 77% of white evangelical Protestants voted for Trump in 2016and 85% did in 2020. Carlson — a master at knowingly appealing to the far-right masses — used skin-crawling sexualized misogyny at the climax of his metaphor. But his central appeal to an angry father was consistent with a 50-year-old movement on the Christian right, one in which tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying their father.

In the 1970s, in response to the student-led social revolutions of the 1960s—civil rights, feminism, and gay rights—a new religious right created a movement designed to quell the impulses of rebellious youth. It was called “biblical parenting.” His first megahit was James Dobson’s incredibly cruel book Dare to Discipline which trained parents, in detail, to adopt a “rod of correction” approach to child rearing. Dobson, founder of the evangelical institution Focus on the Familyrecommends regularly hitting children between the ages of 18 months and 10 years with a blow “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.” This will effectually remove “willful and haughty disobedience.”

Published in 1970, the book quickly sold millions of copies and launched a movement that centered God and the rod in child rearing. It’s a movement that has endured in millions of homes across America and across generations—leading to a new cadre of people, like the bragging crowd in Duluth, for whom authoritarian principles have been nurtured in the home for the first time. .

For my recently released book, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Took Over America”, We reviewed 50 years of evangelical education textbooks, from 1970 to 2017, and conducted interviews with nearly 150 former evangelicals who were raised according to the principles of “biblical parenting.” Evangelicals also show consistently higher approval of corporal punishment in polls than other groups, a case of successful propaganda applied with paddles, switches, sticks and hands. The through line through the decades of these parenting manuals, and in the testimonies, has been an emphasis on corporal punishment, sometimes brutal, to enforce, in the words of the youth-centered ministry, Youth on a Mission, “instant, joyful listening.”

In this family model, the strict father is not only the moral core of the household; he is also its spiritual head, with the mother as a subservient co-executor. Obedience to parents, according to these texts, is both a necessary prelude and an expression of obedience to God. The stakes are existentially high: an oft-quoted verse is Proverbs 23:13 – “Do not give up correcting a child, for if you beat him with the rod, he will not die.” This system forces parents to use physical violence on their children to save their souls. And in an extension of Lakoff’s “strict father” model of the nation, this model of the family, based on obedience enforced through physical violence, creates an authoritarian polity in its practitioners.

Consider that a child who has been systematically beaten in the name of God from infancy grows up to become accustomed to brutality and to display instant and joyful submission to authority, no matter how capricious or unjust. Someone who empathizes with the abuser in order to survive and is used to brutality by being repeatedly subjected to it. When you ask what might motivate a multitude of people to encourage the idea of ​​a national beating—to imagine, approvingly, a nation submitting to punishment by an abusive father as just and righteous, a necessary corrective to disobedience— you may have to look no further than the kitchen tables around which they were raised as children, where wooden spoons were smashed on their backs.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism, to break the tyranny of the strict father, is not only to rebuke him, but to defeat him and make him look ridiculous and weak Mockery and defeat nullify the authoritarian more effectively than violence. When a system is based on cartoonish hypermasculinity, the solution is to treat its leaders as deserving of ridicule, not fear. And by the time voting closes next month, we have a chance to do just that. Let them not obey, joyfully and en masse, the edict of this punitive father-to-be. He is not our father. He is just a man on a mission of punishment, and we can – and must – deny him that chance.