Roderick “RJ” Arrington Jr. murdered by his parents for lying and not reading his Bible.

My heart breaks at recent news reports of a 7-year-old boy, Roderick “RJ” Arrington Jr. being (allegedly) beaten to death by his parents. The reason?  Because RJ didn’t do his homework, or read his Bible.

Roderick’s stepfather, Markiece Palmer, 34, is alleged to have beaten the boy with a spatula, belt and possibly a wooden panel, and shaken him, resulting in severe bruising and brain swelling. The arrest report described, “open abrasions on [Arrington’s] buttocks, severe bruising to his thighs, marks and bruises on his back and shoulders and evidence of previous beatings,” according to KLAS-TV.

In the police report, detectives say they found a broken broomstick, belts, cords, spatulas and clothing — all with blood on them, according to KSNV-TV.

Dina Palmer, 27, Roderick’s mother and Markiece’s wife, is said to have helped with the beatings, but mostly to have stood by and watched as her husband pummeled and shook the second grader, who had lived with his father and grandfather in Illinois until moving with his mother and stepfather a few months ago.

The couple has been arrested on two counts each of two counts of child abuse and endangerment and murder.

Most telling for me is that, when they found Roderick unresponsive in his bed the morning after the beating, their first call was not to 911. It was to their pastor, Kenneth Hollingsworth, who told KSNV that he was “as shocked as anyone that Markiece Palmer chose to call him before first-responders.”

What has not yet been reported is whether Hollingsworth was one of the many preachers who advocate child abuse as a biblical directive. But Hollingsworth is not the point. My concern is that there are religious leaders who advocate and strongly promote corporal punishment, justifying it as the word of God and citing scripture as “proof.”

While we have no idea how widespread this pulpit-driven child abuse might be, those cases resulting in murder make headlines, and remind us that children are too often the victims of religious dogma gone awry.

Tragically, the dynamics behind Roderick’s abuse and murder are not uncommon. Experts say that religiously-inspired beatings are increasingly common in Christian homes where children are home-schooled and the family belongs to a house of worship that advocates corporal punishment as an essential tool for discipline.

Larry and Carri Williams of Sedro-Woolley, Wash., adopted a girl, 11, and a boy, 7, from Ethiopia to join their family of six children. The parents, who home-schooled, viewed the new children (the only Blacks in a White family) as “rebellious.” In May 2011, Hana was discovered in the backyard—naked, emaciated, face-down—killed by hypothermia and malnutrition. The sheriff reported that Hana had been deprived of food for days, forced to sleep in a cold barn or closet, and made to shower outdoors with a hose. She often had marks on her legs from being whipped. She had been beaten the day of her death with a 15-inch plastic tube.

The Williams’ took child-rearing tips from a popular and controversial book, To Train Up a Child, by the Rev. Michael Pearl and his wife Debi Pearl, who head a church in Pleasantville, Tenn. The New York Times reported in 2011 that “More than 670,000 copies of the Pearls’ self-published book are in circulation, and it is especially popular among Christian home-schoolers, who praise it in their magazines and on their Web sites. The Pearls provide instructions on using a switch from as early as six months to discourage misbehavior and describe how to make use of implements for hitting on the arms, legs or back, including a quarter-inch flexible plumbing line that, Mr. Pearl notes, ‘can be rolled up and carried in your pocket.’”

The type of tube with which Hana had been beaten on the day of her murder, described by Michael Pearl as “a good spanking instrument … too light to cause damage to the muscle or the bone.”

According to the Times:

“The same kind of plumbing tube was reported to have been used to beat Lydia Schatz, 7, who was adopted at age 4 from Liberia and died in Paradise, Calif., in 2010. Her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, had the Pearl book … they whipped Lydia for hours, with pauses for prayer. She died from severe tissue damage, and her older sister had to be hospitalized, officials said.

“The Schatzes, who were home-schooling nine children, three of them adopted, are both serving long prison terms after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and torture and she to voluntary manslaughter and unlawful corporal punishment. The Butte County district attorney, Mike Ramsey, criticized the Pearls’ book as a dangerous influence.

“The Pearl’s books were also cited in the trial of Lynn Paddock of Johnston County, N.C., who was convicted of the first-degree murder of Sean Paddock, 4, in 2006. The Paddocks had adopted six American children, some with emotional problems, and turned to the Internet and found the Pearls’ Web site, Mrs. Paddock said. Sean suffocated after being wrapped tightly in a blanket. His siblings testified that they were beaten daily with the same plumbing tube. Mr. Paddock was not charged.”

Some conservative Christian parents reject the Pearls’ teachings and have started a petition drive asking sellers like Amazon not to stock their books.

Some churches around the country are debating the issue, and many oppose corporal punishment altogether. And that is good. But what troubles me is the fact that parents who are vulnerable to extremist teachings do not possess the judgment or ability to prevent them from crossing the line from one heinous crime—beating children in the name of discipline—to snuffing out their lives altogether.

Nobody wins in these situations. If the parents are tried and found guilty and they have other children, those children are most likely to end up in foster care. Thus a practice allegedly used to build a strong family through forced obedience destroys multiple futures. One life is snuffed out, parents are locked up, and the remaining children are sent into a system that dramatically increases their chances of becoming (or continuing to be) abused, and to end up behind bars themselves for any number of infractions.

It would be tempting to blame those religious leaders who interpret the Bible to condone abusing the young, vulnerable and innocent. It’s too easy to point to books such as “Train Up a Child” as the culprit. The real issue and the core of the problem is the notion that beating children is an acceptable form of discipline, exacerbated by the widely-held misconception that punishment equals discipline in rearing a child.

As everyone from the federal government to educators throughout our nation’s public school systems jump on the bandwagon to prevent school bullying, it’s easy to forget that the entire history, culture and sociology of the USA are founded on a platform of violence and domination.  Children who bully at school are often beaten and abused in their own homes. Police routinely bully the most vulnerable among us. Military culture is built on regimented bullying at all levels. And the prison-industrial complex that swallows and spits out people like Markiece and Dina Palmer is a nonstop assembly line of violence, domination, bullying and abuse at every level.

And so, another child lies dead at the hands of caregivers who believed that this was an appropriate way to deal with what they considered an infraction: lying about doing homework and reading, ironically, the Bible.

How ironic that young Roderick was (allegedly) murdered for lying—something every human does at some point. The fact is that few adults have mastered the art of living in absolute truth. I believe that humans—especially children—lie because they don’t feel safe telling the truth, because experience has taught them that they will be punished for being honest.

This post isn’t about blame. It’s about our need to take a hard look at the role that religious leaders play—and the power they wield—in guiding parents and caregivers about children-rearing practices. These pastors need to create safe sanctuaries. They need to play a much greater role in teaching positive discipline instead of telling parents to bet the devil out of their child(ren) for lying, or other reasons, or no reason at all.

There is great danger in this punitive fundamentalism, which has no understanding of the science of child development or the all-too tragic consequences that destroy not just the children, but often entire families for generations, and ultimately, our entire society.

There is possibility in the debates now taking place about the use of religious dogma as a weapon used to abuse and sometimes murder children. It shouldn’t take a heinous murder to bring our attention to this issue. Let’s get to work so that no other young innocents are forced to sacrifice their lives and futures to this insanity.