“Wendy, haven’t I warned you? Stuffing the boys’ heads with a lot of silly stories!” — Mr. Darling, Peter Pan 

During her senior sharing at a church youth retreat, my daughter talked about her childhood in church. It all sounded very pleasant to my parental ears: Sunday school every week, singing and snacks.

Then she said, “God has always been this old guy with white hair in the sky who punishes people. Like when I was young, if I got sick or injured, I’d try to figure out what I had done wrong for God to have punished me.” 

Wait. What? Where did that come from?  

My husband and I presented God as loving and life-giving. We spoke of God as Creator, a being beyond human categories like male and female. I didn’t tell my children God will be angry when they did wrong.  

We surrounded our kids with faith communities and people who represented God as loving and not a divine disciplinarian.

Where did my daughter get this notion of God as an Old White Dude wielding consequences for every misstep? 

I might not have been as consistent as I thought I was. Perhaps some fire and brimstone was preached in Sunday school or a Christian summer camp. Maybe popular media or secular influences planted the idea of God as “the man.”

I wonder, however, if the true source doesn’t begin at the beginning. That is, the Bible.  

I conscientiously read Bible stories to the kids. We covered all the greatest hits: creation, David and Goliath, the birth of Jesus. We read the lesser-known tales: Cain and Abel, Balaam’s donkey, Deborah the judge.

And what do we find in these stories? A God who punishes people.

Not only does God punish wrong­doing, but the punishments are severe: leprosy, family rejection, illness, death by sword, snakes, disease, fire from heaven or being swallowed alive by the earth. 

God punishes folks who commit heinous acts, but God also punishes (or fails to protect) innocent people. Why didn’t the angel warn all the families in Bethlehem of Herod’s decision to slaughter baby boys? What about the animals and kids in the city of Jericho who were put to death after the walls came tumbling down?

God seems capricious. Try to stabilize the ark of the covenant? Fall down dead. Hit the rock instead of speak to it? No Promised Land for you. Be a Neanderthal about lentil stew? No family blessing or inheritance.

I didn’t do the math, but I suspect the stories of God’s punishment outnumber the stories of grace and deliverance in the Old Testament. 

I’ve heard the argument that children don’t notice all the punishment; they just enjoy the action-packed stories. That’s ridiculous. Kids are finely attuned to consequences, particularly ones they perceive to be unfair or inconsistent. 

When I looked through the children’s Bibles we own, none had an illustration of God. Every one, however, had a stunning image of Moses as an old man with a white beard (often blowing in the breeze) holding the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. Many Bibles portrayed the patriarchs as white-haired old men as well. I suspect that children easily map these images onto the idea of God.

Though I have no problem with God being represented as male at times, it simply isn’t right to see God exclusively as male, because God is neither gender. God isn’t human. 

Our translations of the Bible almost always refer to God as male, so it isn’t surprising that no matter what we tell them, the perception of God as male will be hard-wired in a child’s brain.

There is no easy solution here for me. I love the Bible and believe it to be holy, but maybe kids just aren’t ready for all of it. 

Herald Press published a new children’s Bible story book, The Peace ­Table, in 2023, and I wish I had it when my own children were in their early elementary school years. The writers and artists carefully chose which stories to include and how to present them, with an Anabaptist emphasis on peacemaking.

When the girls were little, they loved The Sound of Music. I unapologetically turned it off after the Von Trapp children sang Auf Wiedersehen, good night. No Nazis at age 3 and 5.

In the same way, perhaps the stories of the Bible should be given in stages. A 2-year-old gets the creation and the Christmas story; a 10-year-old gets Noah, Joseph and the crossing of the Red Sea. The patriarchs, plagues and conquering of the Promised Land can wait for high school.