All this talk about Adrian Peterson and corporal punishment has some conservatives going batty. They got whacked and turned out just fine! Also, if you don't hurt your children, they will grow up bereft of responsibility and Jesus Christ will plunge them into a lake of fire.

So says John Nantz. Do you not know John Nantz? He is a writer for "Town Hall," a safe space for oppressed fascists. He also is a graduate of Pat Robertson's religious law school, the alma mater of family values hero Bob McDonnell, and "has served in the law enforcement community for 16 years." When John Nantz is not "hiking and piling up mounds of brass at the shooting range," he is penning posts like today's missive, "If You Don't Spank Your Kid, Jesus Certainly Will."

Can you imagine Jesus spanking a child? Like, really imagine it? Few people have. There's a natural explanation for this. Who does do all the corporal punishment in the Gospels?

Nevertheless, Nantz has an argument:

Prominent egg-heads have opined ad nauseam on Adrian Peterson's recent arrest on charges of child abuse. As usual, progressives have seized this opportunity to besmirch a time-honored and Biblical practice—corporal punishment. This shouldn't surprise us, since progressives abhor the notion of personal responsibility. And, why not? The entire progressive edifice is built on the foundation of unbridled hedonism and man as his own chief deity.

Parents have employed corporal punishment for millennia because it is the most direct means of teaching children a fundamental moral tenet—responsibility for one's choices.

The "it's not my fault" feel-goodism of the licentious left "didn't work in the Garden of Eden," Nantz says, likening the distribution of punitive pain to "the momentary pain of shoving a person out of the path of a speeding car."

This is, in fact, a pretty solid strain running throughout traditional evangelical Christianity in America—you know, Proverbs 13:24 and all that. Which is weird, since it's a complete inversion of everything Jesus Christ seems to have stood for. Let's have a quick theological exploration, shall we?

Christ's life and preaching would seem to indicate a skepticism of worldly authorities who purport to represent God's laws on earth. When met with violence, he says, "Turn the other cheek." When you see an injustice, he says, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

The overarching lesson is that all but Christ himself fall short of sinlessness; if all humans are worthy of harsh judgment by the Lord, what right do any of them have to lord over their fellow humans as if they are perfect? They don't, unless you subscribe to an absurd patriarchal secular glitch in modern conservative evangelicalism: God is a father, and so the father should be like God to his wife and kids, jealous angry wrath and all. Nantz nails this:

Ideally, the family should represent the church and Christ's relationship to her. In this way, familial relationships are to be governed by the same kind of love that Christ manifests... If parents don't discipline their children, God's moral order certainly will. But, the lessons could be bought at a terrible price.

Yes, well, Christ was the redeeming son, not the jealous father, and he didn't go around beating people (although he did flip a couple of tables once, for dramatic effect). But all conservative Christianity today is based on this fundamental bully-man-centered deviation from the Gospel—you can't even call it a misunderstanding, because you have to be willingly sexist or stupid to reserve for yourself the judging wrath of God.

Oh, sure, Nantz and his ilk hide behind Hebrews 12:

For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all.

These are not the words of Christ. We don't know whose words they are, though they're often attributed to the apostle Paul, who made a cottage industry of putting words into Jesus' mouth. But in any case, they exhort readers to discipline their children, not beat them. Nantz decries the left's "flood of Freudian babble," but in automatically equating discipline with laying hands on a kid, he's committing one hell of an unconscious error—swapping his own urges in for God's teachings.

"Sometimes," Nantz says, "the only remedy for impish pride is the experience of a moment of humility." As a Christian and a progressive, I agree. Maybe Nantz and the ministry he represents should take some responsibility for themselves and humbly acknowledge that "progressive irrationality and moral perfidy" could never do as much damage as the evil urge to rationalize one's own violent impulses as godly.

[Image: Shutterstock/Silva Vikmane]