Andrea Yates, or how evangelicalism is responsible for child murder

There was an article in the American Chronicle that speaks about the role of fundamentalist religion in Yates life. According to the article:

Andrea Yates who drowned her five children in her Houston home in June 2001 was under the teaching of Michael Woroniecki. She met him through her husband in college. This ?preacher? is extreme to say the least. Warneki is reported time and time again in campus newspapers preaching that education is a waste of time and working a job is not God's will. He has spent 25 years going around the world with his wife, Rachel, who refers to herself as ?my husband?s spouse.? Woroniecki and his wife then became "spiritual advisers" to the Yateses, who despite their marginal lifestyle often sent money to help the traveling preacher with expenses.His religious views included "all women are descendants of Eve and Eve was a witch. The women, particularly women who worked outside the home, are wicked."Andrea Yates was obsessed with religion and the power of Satan. Following her arrest, for instance, she told doctors that the deaths of her five children were punishment, and that only execution would free her from the clutches of the devil. She also wanted her head shaved so she could see the number 666 on her skull, the alleged "Mark of the Beast."There were also the peculiar views of Rusty Yates, who saw his wife's mental illness as an indication that her resistance to evil had been lowered. And, too, there was the non-stop sequence of pregnancies and births. Birth control was not part of the agenda at the Yates household. The youngsters were home-schooled according to Woroniecki's teachings.Rusty Yates said, "the Bible says the devil prowls around looking for someone to devour. I look at Andrea, and I think that Andrea was weak"--not morally weak but chemically weak, her resistance to evil lowered by mental illness. "Think about a field of deer, and there's one limping around, and that's kind of the way I see it. Andrea was weak, and he attacked her. Jesus says, Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." But Andrea did not have the strength to resist.Did religion play a role in the murders of innocent children? No! Extremism played a role. Two mentally unstable women were influenced by men who looked at them as second class citizens only worth the children they bore.

The case of Andrea Yates shows the very real harm that evangelical psychophobia can have on the mentally ill. The Yates's anachronistic views on mental illness contributed to Andrea's mental decline. I have seen how frequently evangelicalism does not take psychiatric concerns about mental illness seriously. I have a close female relative who suffered from nearly psychotic-level OCD, yet the local ministers and biblical counselors informed her that her religious delusions were caused by sin, not by her mental disorder. Russel Yates confused mental illness with spirtual sickness, which is of course the danger of having mental illness go untreated within the evangelical community. I think that Biblical feminists and evangelical feminists, in particular, need to address how the subjugation of women in evangelical communities contributes to mental illness.

Mercy Ministries feeds off the same kind of mentality. Let's idealize women as virginal goddesses, and then place them in a situation where if they don't conform to that image, they are "mercy trash". Women in these ministries are classified as passive objects. They have no subjective control over their own experience, nor over their own sexuality. The current warping of evangelical religion places evil as rooted in the woman's hymen, completely obliterating any notion of male responsibility for female subjugation, or for their role in it. I would be interested in hearing what the Mercy Girls were taught about "submission to male authority", as I suspect that kind of sexism is deeply rooted in Mercy's ethos.

Andrea Yates did not murder her children. Evangelicalism did, and then condemned her for those very same murders.