Last night I listened to Johnny Cash singing When the Man Comes Around. This is one of the last songs Cash wrote before his death, and it’s a profoundly moving expression of religious terror: “There's a man goin' 'round takin' names. An' he decides who to free and who to blame. Everybody won't be treated all the same. There'll be a golden ladder reaching down. When the man comes around. The hairs on your arm will stand up, at the terror in each sip and in each sup. Will you partake of that last offered cup, Or disappear into the potter's ground? When the man comes around.” The “man” is the Christ of Revelation, a Christ who bears little resemblance to the Christ of the gospels. This is William Blake’s Nobodaddy, the wrathful patriarch whose footsteps plunge his children into ecstasies of madhouse panic. He’s the face of God that Kabbalists believe appears when Geburah, God’s power of severe judgement, is detached from his His mercy and wisdom. It’s who Tom Waits was talking about when he said, “Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk.”

Is it impertinent to ask whether Cash was singing about the future or the past? Was he looking forward to the wrath of his heavenly father, or backward to that of his earthly father? His parents were impoverished Protestants from the American South who probably took the Biblical adage “Spare the rod, spoil the child” very seriously.

Our sense of the divine is partially a projection of childhood experiences onto a celestial screen, which is one of the reasons we call God our “Father” or “Mother.” This projection isn’t necessarily irrational. If by God we mean ultimacy, the inherently unknowable ground of our being, the eternal reality that generates, sustains, and destroys us along with all other temporal and finite things, then we might as well call God our parent: it’s as good a metaphor as any and better than most, as it reaches beyond the intellect to touch the heart. After all, our intimations of ultimacy must, if they’re to have any legitimacy, come from the depths of our psychological existence, from the terrible and glorious abyss that the light of language can never illuminate. If we don’t find God there, we won’t find God anywhere; but to find God, many people have to get past Nobodaddy first.

Nobodaddy is, I believe, the primordial mental template created by childhood memories of humiliation and corporal punishment. Though these forms of parental discipline have been the rule throughout our species’ history, they’re surprisingly maladaptive.

In The Politics of Denial, (MIT Press, 1996), political psychologists Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad write that while punitive parenting elicits immediate obedience, it tends to worsen children’s behaviour over time. Children subjected to it are at greater risk in later life of suicidal thoughts, depression, drug addiction, and health problems, and of being abusive towards their spouses and their own children. They’re also more likely to display aggressive behaviour, and to both tolerate violence and approve of its use. Punitive parenting impairs creativity and problem-solving, and can lead to lifelong anxiety and anger issues. The more punitive the parenting, the worse the risks become.

These findings fit with what we know about children’s neurological development. Children are born with undeveloped nervous systems. Without the help of their primary caregivers, they simply can’t soothe themselves when they become overly excited or frightened. Their caregivers act as extensions of their nervous systems, helping children calm down and teaching them how to manage their emotions. When parents instead increase their children’s anxiety by shaming or physically punishing them, the emotional effects can be devastating.

To appreciate the scale of this devastation, consider how traumatic a physical assault upon an adult can be. Think about what it would be like to be assaulted by someone several times your height and weight. Imagine the predicament you would be in if you were chronically emotionally unstable and your assailant was the person you turned to for solace, the person you were programmed to love and need more than any other, the person without whom you would be hungry and helpless. Such is the situation mistreated children find themselves in.

Milburn and Conrad quote the 18th Century Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards, whose description of Hell echoes the experience of the beaten child: “Do but consider what it is to suffer . . . in pain, in wailing and lamenting, groaning and shrieking, and gnashing your teeth, with your souls full of dreadful grief and amazement, with your bodies and every member full of racking torture, without any possibility of getting ease; without any possibility of moving God to pity by your cries; without any possibility of hiding yourselves from him; without any possibility of diverting your thoughts from your pain; without any possibility of obtaining any manner of mitigation, or help, or change for the better.”

Children of punitive parents are faced with a miserable dilemma. To feel valued and safe, they need faith in their parents’ love and protection, but this faith is repeatedly undermined by their parents’ behaviour. These children feel understandably confused and betrayed, but their parents will likely interpret these emotions as signs of punishable defiance, as fundamentalist parenting guru James Dobson makes plain in his book The New Dare to Discipline (Tyndale House, 1992): “The child may be more strong-willed than the parent, and they both know it. If he can outlast a temporary onslaught, he has won a major battle, eliminating punishment as a tool in the parent(s) repertoire. Even though Mom spanks him, he wins the battle by defying her again. The solution to this situation is obvious: outlast him; win, even if it takes a repeated measure.”

The only solution to the dilemma is denial: children can only maintain their faith by idealizing their parents, denying both their own feelings and the evidence of their senses. In order to do this, they have to idealize the punishment their parents inflict upon them, turning the ability to obediently endure pointless suffering into a virtue, and turning their human vulnerability into a contemptible vice. The children’s fear and loathing don’t disappear, but they learn to direct these feelings towards safer targets, such as weaker children. In fact, the very sight of weakness in another child can be infuriating because it reminds them of their own vulnerability, a vulnerability they struggle daily to repress. This anger often re-appears when they have children of their own, children whose emotional needs can easily trigger a repressed parents’ underlying rage.

Such repression damages children’s ability to understand their own emotional lives and to accurately perceive betrayals by punitive authority figures. Boys who are mistreated also get into the habit of scapegoating vulnerable people and groups. Milburn and Conrad point to research linking a boy’s experience of punitive parenting and later political authoritarianism. Mistreated boys are more likely as adults to support public policies that promise retribution and revenge, such as the death penalty, the use of military force, and welfare cuts. Mistreated girls, in contrast, tend to become more empathic, probably because empathy is encouraged in girls and discouraged in boys, and because displays of anger are culturally acceptable for boys but not for girls. While mistreated girls are less likely as adults to support vindictive public policies, they’re more vulnerable to exploitation: instead of actively protecting themselves, they may seek to placate or appease those who abuse them long past the point where this strategy has any hope of success.

Research suggests that therapy that helps people address negative feelings from childhood also lowers their support for punitive public policies. Therapy can be cathartic, allowing long-repressed emotions to come to the surface and find their proper outlet. Afterwards, it’s less likely that these emotions will have to follow subterranean and circuitous routes to find expression, and this, in turn, can significantly reduce feelings of anger and frustration, freeing the mind to approach difficult situations with greater clarity and rationality.

This catharsis shakes the foundations of Nobodaddy’s temple and provokes his followers’ ire. Milburn and Conrad show that Protestant fundamentalists are more likely than non-fundamentalists to support physical punishment of children by both parents and teachers, to have unrealistic expectations of young children, to show less empathy for children’s needs, and to believe that children should meet their parents’ emotional needs rather than the other way around. These fundamentalists are also more likely to support authoritarian leaders and harsh public policies.

The relationship between Protestant fundamentalism and the psychological consequences of punitive parenting is reflected in hateful and fear-mongering doctrines of Armageddon and Hell, and also, according to the authors, in the rapture. They write that, “the idea of the rapture, in which good Christians will be lifted off the earth and kept out of harm’s way for the duration of the (apocalyptic) battle is eerily reminiscent of a defence mechanism abused children often employ. During painful beatings some children dissociate; they mentally remove themselves from their bodies. Although the mechanism involved is still not well understood, it may be similar to self-hypnosis. Adults abused as children sometimes report that they learned to mentally ‘leave their bodies’ during episodes of abuse.”

If fundamentalism is Nobodaddy’s fortress, then atheists are the army laying siege to the castle walls. This army has a more interesting history than is generally known. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all at some point been justifiably accused of atheism for rejecting religious myths that had been co-opted by Nobodaddy for his sadistic purposes. Their goal, like the goal of all atheists, is the liberation of the human spirit from Nobodaddy’s shackles, and their methods have been remarkably consistent over time.

Modern atheists praise logic and the scientific method not because these practices find truth but rather because they expose error: they’re essentially negative processes. Religious mystics, meanwhile, use a process known as the Via Negativa, which speaks of God only in terms of what God is not, rather than what God is, and which directs the mind beyond conceptualization towards the infinite and ineffable. Both strategies can open our minds and hearts by heightening our appreciation of existential mystery.

Though he endured Nobodaddy’s brutality throughout his life, I believe that it was this mystery that Johnny Cash, in his proudest moments, so humbly sought, the mystery that inspired him to advocate on behalf of Nobodaddy’s favourite scapegoats, the prisoners of the American justice system. It was here that he found the hidden Crown of Life, the Darkened One for whom he wore the Black.