Has your Church Broken your Legs?
Breaking down a popular (and horrifyingly inaccurate) metaphor
A surprisingly prevalent metaphor for trusting God is the idea that shepherds in Biblical times broke the legs of a chronically disobedient sheep. In some variations, this metaphor is extended to include the shepherd carrying this sheep on his shoulders. This practice supposedly teaches the sheep to trust the shepherd and that this practice is merciful when the alternative is letting the sleep wander off and die. Ignoring the fact that bone fractures can lead to permanent deformity and chronic pain without being properly set which defeats the “merciful” purpose of breaking the sheep’s leg, no evidence was found of such a practice ever taking place, much less being common or socially acceptable among shepherds in Biblical times.
Why do some Christians think that this is an illustration of a loving God? If anything, a shepherd breaking a sheep’s legs to discourage misbehavior is one of the best illustrations of spiritual abuse. We are told that we need to be “broken” or risk going to hell while being conditioned to see the resulting damage as a reason to grow closer to God and nothing more. Like sheep, we are supposed to just follow and never ask questions. However, the church is infamous for misinforming the public about the behavior of sheep as well. Sheep are more intelligent than popular perception would have us believe. They can recognize fellow sheep, predators, and their shepherd. They can even learn how to avoid ingesting potentially toxic plants as well. However, sheep will end up seeing the shepherd, not their wandering problem, as the cause of their pain if the shepherd breaks their legs as a punishment.
This conditioning either makes the sheep excessively fearful and clingy or actually worsens their disobedience by eroding the sheep’s trust in the shepherd. This effect, in turn, mirrors the effects of spiritual abuse in which a spiritual leader preaches an abusive message on a regular basis and listeners internalize and eventually disseminate this message. The listeners who notice that something seems “off” used to be punished harshly. However, today’s spiritual abusers don’t need to resort to measures such as excommunication or witch trials. These listeners punish themselves for even posing the question in the first place by using God’s grace as a justification for the way the church treats them. They are trained to think that hell is worse than any abuse the church can dole out.
Some people may wonder why the abused don’t just leave the abuser. It’s not as easy as that. The abuser imprisons the abused mentally and, as one knows, mental traps are much more difficult to escape than physical traps. One such trap is developing Stockholm syndrome, the development of a psychological alliance between a hostage and a hostage-taker. When someone is spiritually abused for long periods of time, they may minimize the nature of what they endure by using small acts of “kindness" to counteract any idea that their church is abusive. The perceived “kindness" in this case is using the threat of hell to justify rampant sexual abuse, bigotry, and the mistreatment of children.
The metaphor of the shepherd breaking the sheep’s legs does not illustrate God’s love, but rather the way certain churches are set up to induce Stockholm syndrome-like devotion in their congregants. The fear of hell holds people hostage so that they carry out the demands of a hostage-taking church. These churches are set up to discourage any sort of meaningful questioning about the ethics of conventional church social structures and teach congregants that they are “sheep" not intelligent enough to think for themselves. However, as evidenced by some cursory research of sheep behavior, even sheep are capable of identifying and avoiding things that cause them harm.
