Religion, Childhood Socialization, Care, and Partnership Systems

How do religious authority, childhood socialization, gender hierarchies, and caregiving shape the movement from domination toward partnership systems?

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Center for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and induction into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Riane Eisler discuss war, civilian suffering, religion, hierarchy, childhood socialization, gender, caregiving, and partnership systems. Eisler critiques contradictions in religious authority and domination-based institutions, arguing that children are often socialized into restrictive roles from an early age. Their exchange examines scripture, ritual, Ukrainian religious institutions, critical thinking, trauma, Romanian orphanages, and the developmental importance of responsive care, while emphasizing reconstruction toward more equitable partnership-oriented social systems and institutions.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In war, military casualties are expected because soldiers are combatants. What remains particularly disturbing is the scale of civilian death and injury. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had verified at least 16,431 civilians killed and 48,613 injured by the end of June 2026, while emphasizing that the true totals are likely higher.

When a major bombardment happens here, particularly during the overnight hours, the routine afterward can become grimly automatic. You wake up after disrupted sleep, go online, and ask: How many people were killed? How many were injured last night?

Every strike raises that possibility.

As a journalist working in an armed-conflict environment, I am also legally a civilian for purposes of international humanitarian law. Journalists on dangerous professional missions in conflict zones, but protected as civilians under international humanitarian law.

That protection does not mean journalists are never killed.

Riane Eisler: The rules of law are bizarre, as far as I am concerned. So are some of the contradictions in religious texts. Look at the Bible.

One of the Ten Commandments is traditionally rendered in English as “Thou shalt not kill.” The underlying Hebrew is a prohibition against murder. Yet elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, God commands warfare involving the destruction of entire populations. First Samuel 15, for example, depicts Saul being condemned for failing to carry out the commanded destruction of the Amalekites completely.

The amount of fear embedded in some religious language is striking. I think I told you that I have always liked Mozart’s Requiem. I once went to hear it performed while the Latin text was displayed in translation. Mozart composed the Requiem in 1791 and left it unfinished at his death.

Seeing the words changed the experience for me. The language struck me as extraordinarily self-abasing: we are sinners, we plead for mercy, we adore you, you are perfect, and we are profoundly unworthy. I found it horrible. I did not want to hear another Mass after that.

Jacobsen: One of my favourite Monty Python scenes is the church sequence in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Michael Palin plays the chaplain, and the prayer comically exaggerates this kind of abasement by praising God for being enormously powerful while the congregation repeats the lines. “You are so absolutely huge.” The humour comes from making the flattery explicit and absurd.

As a broader point, I tend to view a great deal of religious ritual, practice, and recitation as functioning partly like ritualized anxiolytics. They can reduce anxiety by providing structure, predictability, shared explanations, and a sense that uncertainty is manageable.

Eisler: And if you believe in an all-powerful personal deity who can reward, punish, and control events, that conception can produce some very troubling implications.

Jacobsen: There is another dimension to it. Holy texts themselves can be extraordinarily complicated historically and theologically, but their sociology is often more straightforward.

Most religious adherents do not interpret every doctrine identically, nor do they follow every prescribed practice consistently. Levels of religious observance vary enormously. Some Christians, for example, attend church primarily on major holidays such as Christmas and Easter rather than weekly.

There is even a joking term for this pattern, “Chreastermas Christians,” referring to people whose church attendance is concentrated around those holidays.

Then there is the question of how people encounter scripture. Many believers do not read their entire sacred texts independently. Much of their exposure may instead come through selected passages presented during worship, sermons, homilies, religious education, or devotional material.

Even among those who read scripture directly, interpretation is selective. Some readers interpret particular passages literally, as certain biblical creationists do. Others interpret difficult passages metaphorically, allegorically, historically, or theologically in an effort to reconcile ancient texts with modern knowledge and ethical commitments.

That creates a highly fragmented religious landscape. People may assume that others in their religious community believe roughly what they believe, while rarely examining those assumptions explicitly. What appears socially to be a universal religious standard can therefore contain considerable variation in doctrine, interpretation, and practice.

Eisler: And it can be internally contradictory as well.

Jacobsen: Also true. The motivation and the desire make sense. How that plays out sociologically can become deeply contradictory.

There is a useful case study here in the role of religious institutions in Ukraine. Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches all have established communities in the country. In these traditions, clergy and other religious authorities often interpret scripture, doctrine, and moral teaching for congregations. That can create a strongly hierarchical educational structure, depending on the institution and community. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church are both recognized religious bodies in Ukraine.

Is that an appropriate way to educate a developing mind that is trying to think critically and find its way through the world? How does that model differ from the approach envisioned by a Children’s Bill of Rights, particularly when those protections are absent?

Eisler: In domination systems, people are indoctrinated and socialized from an early age to fit into the system. Whether it takes a form as extreme as foot binding or female genital mutilation, or involves the physical punishment of boys in the name of discipline, the underlying pattern is similar. Children are socialized into particular gender roles and hierarchies.

That affects girls, boys, and people whose identities do not fit neatly within conventional binary gender categories, although the latter have historically often not even been acknowledged.

Unlearning those patterns, or deconstructing them, is part of the movement toward partnership. But you also have to reconstruct. That is the difficult part because institutions, laws, schools, and economic systems have often been organized hierarchically. These are the structures that profoundly affect people’s lives.

I discuss this interconnectedness in The Real Wealth of Nations. Gender is central to it because, at the same time that women have historically been socialized to follow prescribed roles, much of the work of caring has also been assigned to women. Yet caring is indispensable to our species, particularly during early childhood.

Research on children raised in severely deprived institutions, including the well-studied Romanian orphanages of the Ceaușescu era, has found substantial effects on cognitive, social, emotional, and neurological development. Children who remained in institutional care showed persistent developmental deficits, while placement in responsive family-based foster care improved a number of outcomes. The evidence does not support saying that such children simply have “incompletely developed brains,” but severe early deprivation can alter brain development and functioning.

So we are back to childhood, gender, the social devaluation of care, and, of course, trauma.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

—

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer and Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic, media, and research institution fellowships, and currently serves on numerous international boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.