Is It Child Abuse to Raise Children in a Religious Tradition?

There's a claim made by some recent atheist critics of religion--including Richard Dawkins--that I haven't taken up on this blog. Specifically, some argue that it amounts to something like child abuse to raise children as “Catholics” or “Southern Baptists” or “Hindus,” to encourage them to think of themselves in these terms before they have reached a level of intellectual maturity necessary for reflecting critically on the content of the belief systems correlated with these labels.

It turns out that some time ago I started a post on this topic but then never finished it. Given how little time I have this month to devote to this blog, I thought this would be a good time to finish up that essay and post it here. So, here it is--a post on what we should make of the claim that raising one's child in a religious tradition amounts to child abuse.

The claim matters to me in a very obvious way. I have children. I'm raising them in a religious tradition. Am I thereby being abusive?

First of all, this claim needs to be distinguished from other points one might make about religion and child abuse--points that Dawkins makes in The God Delusion. For example, he argues that teaching kids to believe in hell, and to think that they are at risk for going there if they fail to tow the (religious) line, can only be described as abusive. I tend to agree that the label of “abusive” might be appropriate for parents or preachers who terrify kids with vivid images of eternal damnation, who paint hell as a potential final destination if kids aren’t sufficiently obedient.

But to say this is a very different thing from saying that it is abusive to raise a child with a religious identity.

I grew up with a broadly “Christian” identity, although it became quickly clear to me that neither of my parents had especially strong Christian beliefs. They thought I should experience what being part of a church is like. Since my father was a Lutheran preacher’s kid and my mother a Baptist preacher’s kid, we became members of a local Methodist congregation. I attended Sunday school regularly and, as I got older, became active with my church’s youth group and the UMYF (United Methodist Youth Fellowship).

I can not recall, even once, being threatened with hellfire for failing to tow the line. I was vaguely aware, of course, that there was this teaching about hell that was part of the Christian tradition, but it certainly wasn’t something that the pastor or youth group leaders emphasized or even talked about. Heaven, yes. But hell?

I surely knew that traditional Methodism affirmed its existence, but never once did it enter my head that I might be in the slightest danger of ending up there. Never once did any church leader say anything that could put such an idea into my head. God was a God of love, and His love and mercy and parental care were so vividly emphasized that there was no place in my thinking for a threat of hell. Damnation wasn’t something a loving parent imposed upon His beloved children. Hence, the persistently reinforced message that God is the most loving parent imaginable—and that He loved me unconditionally—pretty much guaranteed that I never lived in fear of hell.

I can confidently say that the same is true for my own children. They’ve attended two different churches growing up. In neither is the threat of hell preached from the pulpit. In neither is it taught in Sunday School. In neither do children receive a message of threat, of potential doom, of fiery torment if they don’t tow the line. On the contrary, the message is one of comfort and reassurance.

The churches my children have attended pair an honesty about the conditions of this world with a promise that there is more to reality that meets the eye—that despite the suffering and uncertainty of this mortal life, despite the fact that we live in a world that runs according to natural laws utterly indifferent to the good, there is an eternal realm defined by love rather than by indifference. The religious vision my kids receive says that existence is vastly better than it seems, not that it is (at least potentially) vastly worse.

You can accuse these churches of engaging in wish-thinking, I suppose—but only if you stress that they are honest about the state of this world, the uncertainty we face in this life, the fact that there is no magic ritual we can perform to protect ourselves from illness and accident and natural disasters. My children haven’t grown up thinking that prayer is magic, that it can call God to heel and get him to meet all our needs. People die while congregations pray for them. Tornadoes destroy communities and take lives, including the lives of those who are huddled in their safe spot praying fervently for deliverance.

The world runs according to fixed and predictable rules, and bad things happen as a working out of these rules—not as a divine punishment or anything of the sort. God has created a space of otherness in which His creatures may live and grow and form themselves, but in which they are vulnerable. God weeps with us as we pray for the fortitude to go on. God weeps, and bestows strength, and fashions an eternal context within which all this suffering is redeemed. 

What is offered here is not a false portrait of what this world is like, but a picture of a broader context in which the hope of redemption changes the meaning of tragedy.

Is it abusive to teach kids such things, to give them this kind of hope? Not a false belief about the way that the world works, but the hope that despite the grim realities of this world, in the end all will be well? Not naïve notions about prayer’s magical powers, but the message that at the heart of creation lies a God who is on the side of joy and life and love?

It isn’t hard to make the case that abuse—physical and psychological—happens in religious communities. I’m afraid to say it also sometimes happens in schools too, and in extracurricular programs that are supposed to be enriching but instead become soul-crushing.

It isn’t hard to demonstrate that specific religious teachings routinely serve as instruments of abuse. And it isn’t hard to show that certain teachings lend themselves to such abusive use. But it doesn’t follow from this that raising a child as a member of a faith tradition is essentially abusive.

To be fair, Dawkins is usually cautious about this stronger claim. He flirts with it enough to inspire some of his more pugnacious followers to run with the idea, but for Dawkins it has more the form of suggestion than outright assertion…at least when he isn’t caught up in moments of rhetorical excess.

But when he gestures most strongly in the direction of this idea, there’s a certain line of thinking that he invokes. Specifically, he invokes the idea that it’s wrong to foist on children beliefs that they are too young to evaluate for themselves. To be a Christian is to believe certain things. Therefore, Dawkins concludes that raising a child as “Christian” and labeling them as such foists these Christian beliefs on them without their consent. It amounts to telling them what they believe before they have the capacity to decide such matters for themselves. It’s taking advantage of their innocence to indoctrinate them for life.

And while, in his more sober moments, Dawkins hesitates to use the word “abuse” to describe this practice, there is no doubt that he thinks it is an irresponsible way to treat children. In discussing Incan priests who sacrificed a young girl, a willing sacrifice eager to rush into the arms of the Sun God, Dawkins says that they “cannot be blamed for their ignorance…But they can be blamed for foisting their own beliefs on a girl too young to decide whether to worship the sun or not.”

The implication for our modern world is clear enough: Parents can be blamed for foisting religious beliefs on their kids before they have the cognitive development and maturity required to consider these beliefs on their own merits. One might think of it as a kind of opportunism: Suck the kids in while they’re too gullible to question. Brainwash them while their childhood credulity makes them vulnerable.

What are we to make of this line of thinking? First of all, adopting and affirming a religious identity does not necessarily entail detailed knowledge about the doctrinal teachings of the given religion. Some religions do not define themselves primarily in terms of doctrinal teachings in any event. Instead, they define themselves in terms of such things as shared ritual practices, or the cultivation of ineffable religious feelings or experiences, or a common mission (defined in terms of intra-communal aims and broader social aims that often have to do with promoting social justice or peace), or a shared history and heritage (a story about the life of a religious fellowship over time which is intended to invoke a sense of belonging to a community that stretches back into the past and will continue into the future).

Even religious communities that do stress doctrines and teachings are routinely defined by far more than that. And it is hardly uncommon for someone to identify with a religious community, to feel a deep sense of belonging to it, without adhering in anything but a very loose way to the doctrines promulgated within that community. In these cases, the sense of identification is rooted in something other than allegiance to the doctrinal teachings—something often vaguely described as “culture.”

It is therefore too simple to say that attaching a religious identity to a child who is too young to evaluate the “beliefs” of the religion amounts to opportunistic indoctrination. It is too simple, in part, because so much of what is meant by the religious label has nothing to do with beliefs. Religious identity is often more about belonging and rootedness, especially in young children, than it is about dogma. Providing the former is not, by itself, abusive. On the contrary, I would argue that healthy social development requires these things.

That said, it is clearly troubling when these psychological needs are offered at a price. If the price for a sense of belonging and rootedness, for an identity with which to orient oneself in a confusing world, is that one must extend blind allegiance to a set of teachings and shut down one’s critical faculties, then there is something very problematic going on even if we don’t call it “abuse.” If the tangible threats of social alienation are exacerbated by threats of damnation for any who question the faith, then something very pernicious is going on indeed.

But not every religious community imposes such costs. Furthermore, it is problematic to claim that it is always wrong to teach children beliefs before they are ready to critically assess them. Mature critical reflection requires a set of intellectual abilities and a framework for reflection that cannot be acquired except through the introduction of a basic set of foundational beliefs. It is a routine part of childhood education to teach a body of beliefs that the child or student is incapable of evaluating on their own. What elementary-age child has the training in historical methods needed to evaluate the claims made in grade school American history?

Very often, education involves introducing students to a body of received wisdom while at the same time cultivating the student’s capacities for critical thinking and independent inquiry. It is the latter which is crucial. We need to ask, not whether beliefs are being passed on which the child is unequipped to evaluate, but rather whether the spirit in which those beliefs are passed on is one that stifles or cultivates the child’s capacities for critical thinking.

Is uncertainty acknowledged? Is critical reflection encouraged rather than discouraged? Are past errors highlighted? Is the tradition passed on as an inheritance from which children are encouraged to build in the light of their own lived experience, rather than as a set of shackles they must wear on pain of betraying the tradition?

If the answers to these and similar questions is yes, it would be a mistake to call what is going on brainwashing, let alone child abuse. While religious education may amount to opportunistic indoctrination far too often, it would be a gross overgeneralization to say that every religious community passes on its beliefs in a way that stifles the intellectual imaginations and capacities of those who grow up within it.

Religious communities—and parents raising their children in religious traditions—need to ask whether religious teachings are being offered to children as a springboard or as a cage. They need to do their best to ensure the former and prevent the latter. But I don’t think they need to worry that raising their child within a religious tradition is necessarily or inevitably a case of opportunistic brainwashing.

It can be, but it can also be a source of belonging and rootedness, and a resource for approaching an uncertain world in a spirit of hope. And the latter needn’t come at the cost of a stifled mind.

Eclectic Orthodoxy explains the "Reitan Maneuver"

I mentioned in connection with my recent interview with Randal Rauser that I would devote some space on this blog to a topic that wasn't explored in that interview: the relationship between universalism and free will. Unfortunately, I'm teaching an intensive three-week course right now and so have little time to fulfill this promise. Fortunately, Fr Aidan Kimel, on his blog Eclectic Orthodoxy, has recently posted a reflection on universalism that takes up this issue--including a concise and accessible overview of some of my main thoughts on the matter.

Specifically, he focuses on the line of argument that I first developed in my contribution to Universal Salvation? The Current Debate--an argument which John Kronen and I expand on and situate into a broader  line of argument in God's Final Victory. Kimel also considers Tom Talbott's thinking on the subject, locating his reflections within his own broadly (eclectically) Orthodox context. He sums up his reactions as follows:

I confess that I am reluctant to speak of a guarantee of universal salvation, as Reitan does; but Talbott’s and Reitan’s arguments should encourage us in a confident and robust hope for the salvation of every human being. God does not need to force anyone to repent of his sins and embrace heaven. Precisely because we are created for him, all he needs to do is to allow us to experience the hell that we think we want. Suffering, divine grace, and the prayers of the Church will do the rest.

The whole piece is nicely done and worth reading for anyone interested in the topic.

Universalism Interview on Randal Rauser's Blog

The prolific theologian, Randal Rauser, has been interviewing me on the topic of universalism on and off over the last couple of months. Mostly off--I'm sure he was starting to lose patience with me, since I answered his thoughtful questions in sporadic bursts (squeezed into the gaps left by other things).

In any event, the results of that interview are now posted on his blog under the heading, "When it comes to the question of universal salvation: An interview with Eric Reitan." We didn't get to the topic of free will and universalism--a topic of no small interest and importance. This is a topic that John and I address at length in God's Final Victory (devoting two substantive chapters to the issue). I've also explored it in various articles--most accessibly in my contribution to Universal Salvation? The Current Debate. And I've addressed it in various ways on this blog.

However, it does seems appropriate to take it up here in a more direct way over the next few weeks.Unfortunately I've just started teaching a three week intensive intercession course in ethics, which leaves me limited time to do other things. So I'll have to "squeeze it into the gaps" once again.

Once More: Storytelling Animals

This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in the annual conference of the Oklahoma Writers' Federation, Inc. Our keynote speaker was the hugely talented Patrick Rothfuss--who, in addition to writing engrossingly brilliant fantasy novels, also founded Worldbuilders, a geek-powered charity that raises money for Heifer International (an organization I have a fair bit of fondness for myself).

During his keynote, in addition to showing off his enviable beard and reading his not-for-toddlers picture book The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle, Rothfuss made the case that what distinguishes human beings most meaningfully from other animals may be our irresistible desire to tell stories--to see the world through the lens of storytelling, to make sense of it all in narrative forms.

Hence, I thought this might be a good occasion to revisit my own exploration of this idea--from a post last year. The entire post is reprinted below. What do people think? Is "storytelling animals" a better definition of humanity than the classic "rational animals"?

From the Archives: Once More, With Logistics

Seven years ago today, my daughter was born. On honor of that event, I'm reposting here a reflection from the archives on that day and the lessons learned from having TWO children instead of one.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner claims that an ideal story will have three central characters. Two is too few, because then there will be only one relationship to explore. But add a third character, and one has six relationships: the relationships of A to B, B to C, and A to C, of course; but also A’s relationship to the BC pair, B’s to the AC pair, and C’s to the AB pair. The relational dynamics made possible by a third character creates just the level of complexity needed for a good story. Add a fourth character, however, and things get TOO complex. You can do the math yourself, but in that case what you have are twenty-five relationships. Too much for any normal human being, lacking in divine powers, to handle.

This year our family welcomed its fourth character. Evan’s identical twin, Isabella, was born shortly after 6 PM on a pleasant Oklahoma spring day with nary a tornado in sight. There was, of course, the usual business of my wife enduring labor and delivery (only 22 hours of labor this time), me cutting the cord, Isabella exercising her lungs for the first time, both parents getting the chance to hold the new arrival, etc. But these events and activities, which seemed so significant when Evan was born, were put in their proper perspective this time around by the inescapable reality faced by every second-time parent: logistics.

Want to Save the World? Build inclusive communities where people matter

...or so says Frances Moore Lappé in a recent article, "Could Our Deepest Fears Hold the Key to Ending Violence?" The essay beautifully synthesizes a range of related insights that have impressed themselves on me through the years--insights which have been vividly driven home for me through my work with the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), especially facilitating AVP workshops in prisons.

Everyone wants to matter. More importantly, we want to matter to a community. Pugnacious communities that encourage violence prey on those of us who feel marginalized, who for one reason or another feel as if we don't belong or as if our contributions go unnoticed. What these communities offer is seductive precisely because violence vividly affects the world. The impact of violence, though negative, is inescapable. A community built around the valorization of violence thus offers the promise of finding belonging through actions that undeniably matter.

Who can deny that the Boston bombers mattered, that their actions made a difference in human lives? The difference was an awful one, a shattering difference. But for those who hunger for relevance, those who doubt their own significance in the world, violence is an obvious answer. And when a shadow community frames such vivid destructive actions as heroic, and treats those who commit them as champions of the shadow community, the outcomes are as predictable as they are tragic.

If you are disaffected, afraid of irrelevance, alienated from those around you, it matters a whole lot who reaches out to you. If extremists defined by in-group/out-group ideologies reach out to you, you're likely to reach back if you're hungry enough. Much depends on where else you can go to get fed.

When Jesus said, "Feed my lambs," one can't deny that real food, the sort that fills actual human bellies, was intended. But maybe another kind of food was also on his mind--the kind of food that inclusive communities can provide, when they offer creative outlets for making a positive difference in the world and a sense of belonging built around such meaningful creativity. At its best, that is what the Church can be. At its worst, it becomes defined by in-group/out-group ideologies, marginalizing some members who become disaffected and angry, and feeding others the wrong kind of food.

So, what can we do, each of us, to help make our own communities places where the alienated can come to feel as if they've come home? Where can we help build communities of this sort? How can we make sure that our world is a banquet of opportunities for real inclusion and creative (rather than destructive) meaning, so that no one is tempted by the poisoned food?

Tchaikovski, Violin Virtuousity, and Transcendence

Yesterday I played the 2nd Movement of the Tchaikovski Violin Concerto in church. A friend made an audio recording of it on his smart phone and sent it to me. While I thought momentarily about posting it here (inevitable amateur glitches and all), it seemed that for those who may be unfamiliar with this exquisite piece of music it would be better to post a performance that is just as exquisite as the music itself.

So, here's what happens when one of the greatest violinists of the 20th Century, David Oistrakh, takes on one of Tchaikovski's more heart-rending compositions:




It's performances like these which enliven for me Hermann Lotze's case for including beauty among the pieces of evidence to be considered when assessing worldviews that posit something transcendent. I've quoted this before, but here's how Lotze puts it at the start of his Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion:

Then there are the...aesthetic feelings that yield themselves admiringly to the beautiful which they discover in the world, and by means of it are incited to form a picture of an ideal world. This they do without any egoistic interest in the consolation desired; but rather with the sure conviction that what is so fair and full of significance cannot be an accidental product of that which is without significance, but must be either the very Principle of the world or closely related to its creative principle.

Lotze couldn't have had Oistrakh's performance above in mind when he spoke of that which is "so fair and full of significance," but had he heard it I'm sure he would have pointed to it and said, "This."

The Shadow of Testing--or, How We're Poisoning Public Education

While I get ready for finals week at OSU the rest of my family is in the midst of a different kind of testing. Mandated state testing of public school students.

It's a grim time of year--a time when the anticipation of testing ramps up my son's anxiety, a time when my wife risks losing her teaching license if she should make the mistake of comforting a weeping student overcome by a barrage of questions that, because of a learning disability, he can't answer.

My son, who's in the fourth grade, is in his second year of it. My wife, who has a Master's Degree in  Special Education, has been dealing with it every year since she started teaching special ed in the public schools. My daughter, in the first grade, doesn't start taking tests for a few more years--but her curriculum is already being changed to accommodate the demands of state testing.

This last concern may be the most serious of all. If the problems with testing could be sequestered to a couple of weeks in late spring, that would be one thing. But the testing mania that has overtaken American public schools casts a very long shadow, one that darkens the lives of all public school students. 

To Those Who Think Death is the Answer

Sometimes I know that something is true even as I find myself incapable of understanding how.

I know there are those who think about causing death, imagine ways to do it, formulate plans, carry them out. Human beings die because they set out to make it so. And they had reasons, reasons which made it seem to them as something to be done. 

My wife ran her first endurance event--a marathon--at the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, a race founded to remember and honor all those who died when Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder Truck up to the Murrah Building and detonated the explosives inside. When it happened my wife was a student at the University of Central Oklahoma, some 30 miles away. When she and those around her felt the concussive force of the blast, they knew something terrible had happened, something to shatter their world.

In a couple of weeks my wife will run that course again--this time the half-marathon. But that event will carry with it the specter of another shattering. Earlier today a friend of mine, someone I've known for more than twenty years, crossed the finish line at the Boston Marathon. For about half an hour she and her friends and family were celebrating her accomplishment. Then came the explosions. 

She was shaken up, her achievement overshadowed by the bloody aftermath of violence. Had she been a slower runner--about half an hour slower--the effects for her might have been far worse.

And I sit here and I think about those who find their answers in death, sometimes their own and sometimes the deaths of others. They find their answers in making living people dead. 

I know that it's true. And I've devoted many scholarly hours researching the ideologies of violence, the patterns of thinking that motivate the commission of horror. I can describe their structure---bifurcation, moral disqualification, sacred mission, zero-sum struggle death death death and the good will rise from the ruins if only we destroy the right things make the right people dead it will all be better the hidden good that has been held back by life will rise blooming free by the creation of corpses.

I think it helps me understand, but it's like putting a grid over chaos and saying, "Hey, look! A grid!"

Yes, there are patterns of thinking that culminate in a spray of blood. But they are, for those who follow those patterns, nothing but a grid. There's no substance. Just the illusion of it. That's the only thing to be said, in the end, to those who think death is the answer. And I suppose it can be summed up even more simply than that. 

No. 

Faith, Doubt, and Sex

Rachel Held Evans has an interesting new blog post, "Is Doubt an STD?", that addresses a worrisome practice she's observed in some evangelical Christian communities: treating the religious doubts of young adults as if they were nothing more than a symptom of a guilty conscience--more often than not guilt about having sex.

Although she does an excellent job of critiquing this practice, there's one point she doesn't make (at least not in this post) that I want to raise here. But first, let's look a bit more closely at the worrisome practice. The idea underlying it is, roughly, this: If you feel guilty about something you did that's condemned by your inherited faith, you may decide to strike back at what's condemning you--by challenging the tenets of the faith. 

And, of course, since we're talking about young adults here, the "something you did" is usually sex.

So, rather than take a young adult's doubts about their inherited faith at face value, a pastor or religious mentor cuts to the chase and asks, "So who have you been sleeping with?" And this, of course, is supposed to uncover the root issue--guilt. The questions will be answered through repentance, the doubts laid to rest once one has confessed to getting laid.