We're Okay Teaching Our Kids This??
The "true" story of the candy cane and having ears to hear
I took my kids to a religious kid-oriented Christmas event this year (trying to be vague to be polite, but no, I do not typically bring my kids to stuff like this!). I figured it would be sweet enough and harmless; and since they’re so young, I think it was actually harmless. But MY ears were burning when I listened to “The true story of the candy cane.” WHOA we are willing to tell our children this?
Of course we are. Because it’s the same exact stuff we tell them about Jesus and God in general, only this time with a sugary coating.
If you’re not familiar with this myth of the candy cane — which by the way, is a myth and super easy to debunk with basic internet search skills — it goes like this. The candy cane is shaped like a J to represent Jesus, which you can also turn upside down to represent a shepherd’s hook. The hook can either be for guiding sheep or, in the specific telling that I was at, to grab unfortunate souls from the depth of hell (!!! I’m sorry, where is my child-friendly version??). The white represents the purity of Jesus and the red stripes represent the stripes Jesus received before getting hung on the cross (!! again with the child appropriate version??).
Hanging back behind my kids, watching to make sure they actually weren’t taking this in (my older child was not paying attention and the younger is too young to understand this), I breathed a sigh of relief… while also feeling my face flush with surprise, some triggered feelings from my religious training, but also anger that we tell kids these things about themselves.
I think about when I was an evangelical and would have found this a totally normal thing to hear and learn about. I think about the conditioning required to nonchalantly take in a story that describes people as being so bad that God would toss them into hell and need to punish Jesus by giving him bloody lashes across his back. To not think twice about it because of course that’s how God is, of course the only way we can be redeemed is through an act of violence and retribution. To believe that this is so normal that we should be teaching it to our toddlers and preschoolers.
Honestly, it’s pretty sad to think about. I don’t doubt the well-meaning intent of the organizers of the event. But if I let myself sit with the feelings, beyond my first flash of anger, I can feel sadness that people are okay believing this about themselves. That they haven’t experienced a viable alternative to a belief that involves seeing oneself as a sinful, rotten creature whose every wrongdoing was meted out towards Jesus in his punishment on the cross. What an awful feeling to carry deep down in your bones.
On the days when I can get past the feeling of rage extended outward towards those who are triggering my religious trauma, when I can notice what’s going on below the surface of the rage… I can also begin to tap into what it was like to believe this about myself1. To feel so convinced I was a bad, untrustworthy person that I couldn’t trust myself to think or feel the “right” things. And therefore, I had to believe what other people were telling me about myself.
I wonder about how to break through religious people’s psyches and say “Hey, what if you’re not a worthless piece of scum apart from Jesus after all?” What sort of level of health do we have to arrive at — psychologically, spiritually, societally — to make this kind of broad change possible? And I wonder how, if we truly believed this about ourselves, would it impact the way we viewed others, across nationality and religion? Could we engage in war and violence the same way we do now if we viewed ourselves and others as people who are inherently, always deserving of love?
I wonder.
What gives you some measure of hope that we won’t be stuck repeating this same toxic patterns across generations? Are there stories that you hear now that you would once have considered normal, and now you can’t believe you once heard without batting an eye? What did this post stir up in you? Meet you in the comments!
My psychological defense goes swiftly to anger and rage to protect myself from feelings of pain and vulnerability. Many of my clients go straight to sadness or numbness, which are just other ways of distancing ourselves from some of the core feelings of what’s going on. You might react like this, or some other way altogether! It’s just another way of describing the fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses to stress.
Oh how I wonder this too Christine.... "I wonder about how to break through religious people’s psyches and say “Hey, what if you’re not a worthless piece of scum apart from Jesus after all?”" I think holding beliefs like that causes actual psychological and physiological damage... And the breakthrough to the other side, to realizing there is wholeness and goodness in yourself, is not an easy process. It requires a leap of faith in itself to even begin to think, "wait, maybe this sin/retribution framework is actually harmful."
It reminds me of an older woman I knew through church, who was a gentle and caring person to me for several years and whom I really respect... But one of her favorite topics to talk about in Bible studies was how bad sin really is. About "the sinfulness of sin" and how "amazing" it is that God could love such rotten sinners like us! For her it somehow inspired her to praise God for his grace. But for me this framework only made me think less of myself, not any better of God. But I have friends who make this their life motto, like this lyric from a worship song, "My sins they are many, his mercy is more." I guess thinking less of yourself can inspire you to think of a God who's so much better, you can't even imagine it... But it becomes so detached from any real definitions that it's just a vague sense of awe. Now it just breaks my heart at how deeply this runs, and I wonder too, how expansive the level of healing would have to be for any of this to change.
I definitely remember hearing that story about the candy cane as a kid. And I am so sensitive to what my kids hear too. It's hard to know when it's our stuff and when it will affect our kids. I could tell you lots of stories of when I got triggered and upset, but I couldn't tell if affected my kids most of the time. But this one did affect my kids: my 5 year old daughter started worrying that the bathwater was going to turn to blood after hearing about the plagues in Egypt.
There's so much unlearning to do to be open to self-trust isn't there? It has taken me about as long as it took to not trust myself to fully trust myself again (20 years indoctrination, 20 years learning to trust myself again.)
For me learning that emotions are clues instead of problems (i.e. indictments against us) was a turning point for me.
If you want to hear what this looks like for me as a therapist and coach, I often start with noticing something that doesn't have a sin-judgment attached to it, like can you tell what it's like in your body when you think about a food you like or a food you don't like? What's the difference? Can you listen to that in your life - what you like or don't like? And education around our bodies are meant to tell us when they don't feel safe. Would it be okay to notice that without shutting it down so fast?
Thank you for this space and your reflections, Christine. It feels so good to not be alone in this.