The following excerpt is from a Question and Answer article in Evangelical Michael Pearl’s No Greater Joy magazine (March-April 2019 edition):
Mike Pearl,
I know you don’t care who you make mad, so you are my last hope. Us guys need a voice.
I am 18. My church ministry is to teach eight guys, ages 13–15, guitar lessons on Sunday evening. We discuss the Bible and pray at each lesson. Here is our problem:
We have a fun youth group and a great youth pastor. At the youth meetings, one girl always wears a dress and usually during the meeting she opens her legs about five inches and creates the “shaft.” When she sits on the swivel stool it is really bad. Don’t laugh.
I talked to my mom and asked her to talk to the girl. Mom (divorced) just reasoned with me that you can’t really see anything but a flash of white, but mom just didn’t get it. It is like the most private thing of a girl and suddenly it is there in my face and it is REALLY distracting. I make an effort to avoid the girl, but I always forget and get shot with the shaft. Then my mind goes nuts and my body does its thing so I am freaked if suddenly called to stand up front. It is not that particular girl—it is just the shaft. Any female that spreads her legs would get the same unwelcome response. I am sick of the guys having to bear the pain. Girls need to know that guys don’t WANT every guy in the room to gawk at their girl’s shaft. It seems lowlife.
The guys in my class talked about how to avoid looking down the shaft. The 13-year-olds really struggle. They never participate in games due to the possibility of the bulge. I went to the youth pastor and then to pastor, but they each said they were sorry but their position was delicate because one word and the girl or her mother would probably get offended and accuse them of lusting and they would lose their job and maybe marriage. Us guys have prayed for an open ear from someone in authority, but so far we have not found how to fix the problem.
Now this girl wants to join our guitar class, and us guys are like, NO. No way. I took a stand, told WHY, and it did not come out the way I thought. I have been told all kinds of stupid nonsense about submitting to authority and how we should not be this or that against females. Heck, I like females. It’s just that church is not the place to be turned on. I don’t like being manipulated. Everyone says she doesn’t understand how guys are and thinks that when guys look at her it means they like her. Then all I have to say is SOMEONE in authority is failing to do their job in explaining things to her.
Everybody complains about cigarette smoke being blown in their face; well we are having something blown in our face. Just one girl controls all us guys. It’s wrong.
If the church doesn’t let me keep my guys’ guitar class, I am considering starting a church in my house so we can do it without the shaft!
It is hard being a young man nowadays with porn everywhere. It is even more discouraging when it sits across from you on a high stool and spreads wide just as you get ready to pray for the meal.
Tell them.
I won’t print Pearl’s answer, but he does side with the man, If you are interested in reading his answer, you can find it here.
Let’s all stop and pity this poor, helpless horn dog of a man. FEAR THE SHAFT! This girl evidently revs this guy up sexually and he doesn’t know what to do. So, he blames everyone but himself for his stiff penis. Still think religious indoctrination doesn’t cause harm? This man is a textbook example of someone whose mind has been filled with Evangelical nonsense, rendering him unable to think or act normally.
Michael Pearl, author of To Train Up a Child, continues to advocate the ritualistic beating of children in the name of God. In the November-December 2015 of No Greater Joy Magazine, Pearl called on his fellow child beaters to withstand the onslaught of liberals who want to take away their right to spank their children. Here’s an excerpt from an article titled The Rod and Reproof:
The progressive secularists intimidate parents with assertions that spanking children causes them to use violence to solve problems.
It is stated so many times and with such conviction that parents who should know better have suffered an erosion of their confidence. The conclusion of these “researchers” is based on the reported experience of professionals who work with juvenile delinquents and violent criminals. A large number of those who have committed violent crimes will confess, among other things, that they were spanked, beaten, or in some way physically violated when they were children. Thus the statistician concludes that these offenders’ violent history is a result of the violence done to them. All forms of physical discipline are thrown into the mix, including criminal acts of violence and abuse. There is no attempt to separate spanking administered in moderation by loving parents from criminal beating. The progressive views all forms of corporal chastisement as “hitting.”
…There is absolutely no correlation between corporal chastisement and violent tendencies in the chastened child. All social science reporting is controlled by special interests and is skewed to accommodate some social or political agenda. See my recently expanded book, To Train Up a Child. There is a lengthy section in defense of corporal chastisement, quoting a number of studies that clarify the issue.
I have probably had more experience with families and children than any ten “researchers.” They research by interviewing troubled children or by reading the publications of others. My “research” comes from thousands of homes I have visited and parents and youth I have counseled. I spent hundreds of hours over the course of 15 years ministering in a boys’ home, becoming well acquainted with the youth. I became close friends with some of them after they were grown and had children of their own. I have spent over 2,000 hours in prisons speaking with the inmates and hearing their stories.
I have found that children possess an intuitive understanding of the motives behind parental discipline. You cannot fool them. They know the difference between discipline they deserve and unjustified violence or anger. When a child has willfully broken the rules or expressed a will to defy authority, he is not shocked or offended when his parents are angry and resort to physical chastisement. The kid knows he is “getting what he deserves.” He may holler and squirm, but he walks away knowing there is a just authority to which he is subject, that there is a law of cause and effect he must observe, and that all wrongdoing meets with an unhappy end. The properly chastened child is more emotionally stable than the child left to his own devices, as studies confirm…
…Many Christian homeschool parents are being swept up in the Left’s propaganda. Don’t become subject to the vain imaginations of unregenerate professionals who deny the Word of God and despise Christianity. Stand on the old tried and proved principles that worked in former generations. Stand on the words of God where he clearly addressed child-rearing principles. Times are changing for the worse. Don’t change with them…
Debi Pearl Wonders What Her Husband Michael is Doing Behind Closed Doors
Snark and adult humor ahead.
According to Michael Pearl, a defender of the Quiverfull movement and of ritual child abuse, anyone who wants to work quietly and privately in his office or study is a porno freak. Here’s what Pearl had to say in the June/July 2015 No Greater Joy magazine:
Never trust your children, and don’t trust your spouse if any activity seems suspicious. My wife and my staff have complete access to my computer. The main server is beyond my reach. It maintains complete records of all my activity. I am never locked in a room by myself to “do my work without being disturbed.” I don’t own a cell phone, but if I did my wife and my staff would be on the account and be able to review all of my activities. If any adult is less open than I describe, they are porno freaks and need to repent. Don’t doubt it. “Provide things that are honest in the sight of all men.” (Romans 12:17)
No, Michael, those of us who prefer to work quietly and privately are not porno freaks. I had six children and the only way I could productively read and study was to have a private office where I could work undisturbed. I did not spend my time surfing porn sites and masturbating. It’s called discipline and self-control, traits sadly lacking in the Evangelical church. Did I ever look at porn as a pastor? Sure, but having dial-up service severely ruined the thrill. I had to wait until my post-pastor days when I got broadband service to indulge my inner porno freak. I quickly found out that, for me, watching porn was boring. Seen one blow job, seen them all. Like drinking beer–been there, done that, yuk, no thanks. (Not that I think there is anything wrong with a man or woman viewing porn as much or as little as he or she wants.)
Michael Pearl is another example of a weak pathetic Evangelical man who fears he will fall to the temptations of a porn-filled internet if left to himself. Pearl fears that, if left alone behind closed doors, he will surf on over to quiverfullbabes.com and give in to his inner porno freak. Viewing women with dresses above their ankles and daring to show their feminine shape, Pearl fears losing control and masturbating until he is as blind as Bartimaeus.
Pearl writes about all the safeguards he has in place to keep him honest, yet anyone with decent computer skills can easily hack and overcome these safeguards. Wouldn’t the safest approach be to not have a computer or the internet? The Bible says, neither give place to the devil and abstain from all appearance of evil. Surely, even booting up a computer is giving place to the evil one, right? And on this point we see the hypocrisy of Michael Pearl. He really should get rid of his computer and avoid anything that has to do with the internet. “If any Christian is unwilling to do as I prescribe, then he is a secret porno freak,” thus saith Bruce Almighty. The reason Pearl has a computer and internet access is because it is the only way he can spread his Quiverfull STD to the masses. It is the only way he and Debi can rake in money from people who buy into their pernicious teachings.
Come on Michael…be a real Christian, get rid of your computer and cancel your dial-up service.
In today’s mail came the March-April 2015 edition of Michael and Debi Pearl’s No Greater Joy Magazine. This issue featured an article written by Michael Pearl titled Attack on Traditional Child Training. In the article, Pearl gives numerous statistics that are meant to bolster his, if you love your children, you’ll beat them” viewpoint.
On page 13, Pearl writes:
Jason M. Fuller of the University of Akron Law School says that Sweden is”. . . an ideal laboratory to study spanking bans,” for a generation ago it became the first nation to impose a complete ban on physical discipline.
According to Fuller, police reports indicate that since the spanking ban, child-abuse rates in Sweden have exploded over 500 percent. Even just one year after the ban took effect, and after a massive government-run public education campaign, Fuller found that “not only were Swedish parents resorting to pushing, grabbing, and shoving more than U.S. parents, but they were also beating their children twice as often.”
After a decade of the ban, “rates of physical child abuse in Sweden had risen to three times the U.S. rate,” and “from 1979 to 1994. Swedish children under seven endured an almost six-fold increase in physical abuse,” Fuller’s analysis revealed.
More than half of Swedish schoolchildren are undergoing some sort of therapy in an effort to solve learning problems.
Something smelled quite fishy to me, so I decided to check out Pearl’s claims about Sweden. Come to find out, the increases are likely to be the result of increased reporting of child abuse and violence against children. According to Joan E Durrant, a “Child-Clinical Psychologist and Professor in the Department of Family Social Sciences at the University of Manitoba”:
…The claim that child abuse has increased in Sweden is primarily based on misinterpretation of assault report statistics. It is the case that reporting of child physical assault has increased in Sweden since the 1970s – as it has in every nation that has raised awareness of the issue of child abuse. Reporting rates are by no means equivalent to rates of actual abuse. They are sharp reflections of, and strongly tied to shifts in public awareness.
For example, in the early 1960s, it was estimated that about 300 children were being maltreated in the U.S. By 1990, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect had officially recorded 2.4 million reported cases. By 1993, they had recorded almost 3 million cases. It is highly unlikely that actual child maltreatment increased by a factor of 10,000 in that period. It is also highly unlikely that only 300 children were maltreated in the U.S. in the early 1960s.
It is a well-known fact that when mandatory reporting laws, public education campaigns, and other measures are implemented to increase awareness, reporting will increase. This is the goal of such measures. The Swedish reporting figures have been cited as if they are actual rates of abuse, which they are not.
The Swedish National Crime Prevention Council examined 434 cases of assaults on young children within the family that were reported to the police in 1990 (all cases) and 1997 (every other case). It was found that the proportion of cases involving serious injuries sustained by children in this age range had decreased substantially. The majority of reported assaults result in minor injuries or no injuries at all. On the basis of an extensive analysis of the data, the National Crime Prevention Council concluded that there has been an increase in the propensity to report cases of assault on young children, and that it is this increase that is responsible for most, if not all, of the rise in the number of such offenses reported to the police. (Nilsson, 2000, p. 68)…
It came as no surprise to me that Michael Pearl cherry-picked and manipulated statistics to bolster his pro child abuse agenda. What did surprise me is Pearl using a passage from a January 7, 2010 NewsMax article by Theodore Kettle. According to the No Greater Joy article, Attack on Traditional Child Training is “taken from a new chapter in the upcoming 21st anniversary edition of To Train Up a Child.” Here’s the paragraph from Kettle’s article:
A key focus of the work of Jason M. Fuller of the University of Akron Law School was Sweden, which 30 years ago became the first nation to impose a complete ban on physical discipline and is in many respects “an ideal laboratory to study spanking bans,” according to Fuller.
Since the spanking ban, child abuse rates in Sweden have exploded over 500 percent, according to police reports. Even just one year after the ban took effect, and after a massive government public education campaign, Fuller found that “not only were Swedish parents resorting to pushing, grabbing, and shoving more than U.S. parents, but they were also beating their children twice as often.”
After a decade of the ban, “rates of physical child abuse in Sweden had risen to three times the U.S. rate” and “from 1979 to 1994, Swedish children under seven endured an almost six-fold increase in physical abuse,” Fuller’s analysis revealed.
Is this plagiarism? I don’t know. Maybe Pearl used a paragraph he had written before Kettle’s article. Maybe it is Kettle plagiarizing Pearl. At best, the two paragraphs are quite similar. At worst, someone lifted a paragraph without giving attribution.
My position on spanking is clear. While I highly doubt that a smack of toddlers’ hands or a swat on their diaper-padded rear ends will harm them, I think using violence to discipline children sends the wrong message, is unnecessary, and can, in the wrong hands, lead to child abuse. There are better ways to discipline children than beating them with a paddle, switch, hairbrush, belt, wooden spoon, hand, or whatever is handy. (My next-to-oldest son is fond of telling the story about his Dad spanking him with John R. Rice’s book, The Home.)
The Pearls recommend whipping infants only a few months old on their bare skin. They describe whipping their own 4 month old daughter (p.9). They recommend whipping the bare skin of “every child” (p.2) for “Christians and non-Christians” (p.5) and for “every transgression” (p.1). Parents who don’t whip their babies into complete submission are portrayed as indifferent, lazy, careless and neglectful (p.19) and are “creating a Nazi” (p.45).
On p.60 they recommend whipping babies who cannot sleep and are crying, and to never allow them “to get up.” On p.61 they recommend whipping a 12 month old girl for crying. On p.79 they recommend whipping a 7 month old for screaming.
On p.65 co-author Debi Pearl whips the bare leg of a 15 month old she is babysitting, 10 separate times, for not playing with something she tells him to play with. On p.56 Debi Pearl hits a 2 year old so hard “a karate chop like wheeze came from somewhere deep inside.”
On p.44 they say not to let the child’s crying while being hit to “cause you to lighten up on the intensity or duration of the spanking.” On p.59 they recommend whipping a 3 year old until he is “totally broken.”
On p.55 the Pearls say a mother should hit her child if he cries for her.
On p.46 the Pearls say that if a child does obey before being whipped, whip them anyway. And “if you have to sit on him to spank him, then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher.” “Defeat him totally.” On p.80 they recommend giving a child having a tantrum “a swift forceful spanking.” On the same page they say to whip small children on their bare skin until they stop screaming. “Don’t be bullied. Give him more of the same.” They say to continue whipping until their crying turns into a “wounded, submissive whimper.”
On p.47 they recommend their various whips, including “a belt or larger tree branch” to hit children.
The Pearls recommend pulling a nursing infant’s hair (p.7), and describe tripping their non-swimming toddler so she falls into deep water (p.67). They recommend ignoring an infant’s bumped head when he falls to the floor, and ignoring skinned knees (p.86). They also say “if your child is roughed-up by peers, rejoice.” (p.81) And on p.103 the Pearls say if children lose their shoes, “let them go without until they (the children) can make the money to buy more.”
Note
There seems to be a lot of contention over the aforementioned statistics.
Shalom Pearl Brand, daughter of child abuse promoters Michael & Debi Pearl, wrote an article for the No Greater Joy website about the lack of good men for all the Christian girls who are waiting for Mr. Righteous to come and sweep them off their feet. Brand writes:
When I was a young woman, the older women were always teaching me and all the other young women what it meant to be a wife, a mother, and a God-honoring woman. As I have gotten older, traveled to many churches, and talked with families, I have seen one overall theme everywhere I go. There are young women walking with God, trained from childhood to serve God so that one day they will make the best wives and mothers possible. They are ready, trained, and waiting for their man to come find them, but the men are not finding them. Why?
These girls are told to wait: He will find you… Stay home and help Mom with the kids… One day that perfect man will come along. But then he does not come and the girls become frustrated and, at times, impatient. The question I hear all the time is, “Where are the men?” Yes there are men, but few are real men—men who were raised to love God, work hard, and make good husbands and fathers. Why?
While mothers have been training their daughters to be good wives, many families stopped raising their sons to be men, instead producing overgrown boys. A large percentage of the boys/men over the last 30 years have been raised to serve the flesh. They were not raised to work; most are soft, sweet-talking, sissy boys. Some are cute and stylish, and silly girls think they are soooo good-looking. Other guys are backward, clumsy, going-nowhere types, and very uncool. But they are the same lazy, self-pleasing, big boys…
…Now as a mother with daughters, I would like to put out an appeal to all the families raising sons. Please teach them to work, love God, and be men—not big boys—so that when my daughters and other families’ daughters are grown, they can serve God through a God-fearing man. My husband and I are raising two little men of our own now. Parker is well on his way to being a man, and our new little one will soon be following in his footsteps. They say boys will be boys. I say little men will be big men.
In the comment section, a man by the name of Mike R left the following advice for properly raising boys:
There are several things parents can do to raise strong, Christian young men. It would take a book to provide a good outline, so I will only provide a few thoughts here.
For a young man to put his labor and effort into something, he must see that it has merit (to him, not just to you) and that it is attainable. The easiest way for a young man to recognize the benefit of work is in the physical realm. Every young man wants to be strong and God built our bodies to respond to the demands we place upon them. For a young boy, do some pushups together. Set a goal for a reasonable number just above what he can currently do. Work to attain that goal. Realize that growth takes place when you go beyond what you think possible. If a young child can do 4 push-ups with good form, then set a goal at 7. Expand the goal each time he reaches it. This applies to every area of life and it will be good for him to learn the process early. Later, include chin-ups and jumping rope. These are exercises where success is easily measured.
Certain good activities should be practiced daily. He should exercise daily. No, I don’t care if he wants to or not.
Mastering certain skills will teach the process of learning. Example: Shooting a bow, throwing knives and/or hatchets.
Focus on what is important. Yes, in the overall scheme of things bodily exercise profits little, but that snicker’s bar and soap operas don’t profit at all. Success in the early physical things can lead to success in other areas.
For school, focus on what is important. Math and science should always be a focus. He can read the history and literature on his own with little effort. Success in math requires a solid foundation and constant work. He is going to have to earn a living, and a sociology, art or history degree is almost surely not going to cut it. Boys need to work and play outside. Don’t expect a son to be a girl and want to sit in the house all the time.
Set goals high in every area of life and expect them to be met. A young man should be expected to excel mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally and financially. It will take drive on his part, opportunity to practice, try and fail, pick himself up and try again. Don’t drive him into the ground, but have high expectations of success. One or more good examples would be very helpful to a young man so he readily sees what success looks like.
Choose the best examples of successful manhood and seek to emulate what you see. A young man can analyze another man’s life and choose to emulate a particular area or skill. Anybody that has played of lot of sports can relate to this. For example, this certain basketball player has a good cross-over dribble, so I will analyze what he does and see if I can do it. However, this approach can be applied in any area of life. Take only the best attributes and leave the bad behind.
Before he has to care for a family, let him practice caring for an animal. He should know that he must care for those dependent on him. If he ‘forgets’, don’t do it for him. He doesn’t eat until they are fed, watered etc. No exceptions and no excuses. If he has gone to bed and didn’t take care of his animals, get him up to finish the job.
Don’t pity your child. Love him abundantly, but if you pity him, you will ruin him.
Never reward a young man with food. Food is not used to reward good behavior or console him for a loss. You don’t want him to be a fat slug, so don’t train him to be one. If you think I am wrong here, get over it, I am not.Stock your house with material providing the best examples of manhood. Examples include the following books for young men: GA Henty novels (Examples: “For the Temple”, “Beric the Briton”, etc), Jim Kjelgaard books (Examples: “Stormy”, “Snow Dog”, etc.), “Cowboy Boots in Darkest Africa” by Bill Rice, “Boyhood and Beyond” by Bob Schultz, Boy Scout Handbook, The Sowers series, biographies of great people (Robert Boyle, George Washington Carver, etc.)
Provide the best scriptural teaching you can get. I would suggest audio/video/text: Mike Pearl’s material is good, Ray Comfort’s messages (Hell’s best kept secret, etc.),Christian Science – Answers in Genesis, Kent Hovind, etc.
Mom’s and wives, reverence your husbands. It is fine to openly acknowledge success in any area of another man’s life. However, it is your husband and your son’s dad that loves and cares for the family. Your son should spend as much time with dad as possible. Let dad teach him what he knows best.
So what do you think, readers? Is Mike R’s advice just what the doctor ordered for turning a boy into a man?
