My son and his wife are high school teachers. The CA public school system is a mess. There’s lots of possible reasons why. But one of them is the abandonment of traditional educational models for more progressive, therapeutic ones. For example, Outcome Based Education (OBE) continues to incarnate in different forms. The expected “outcomes” are determined by the educators. Increasingly, it is more important to raise students who are multicultural, tolerant, and pleasant to be around, than ones who simply know their times tables.
This approach has reached into discussions of religion. For instance, I recently listened to an educator explain that…
It is wrong to teach kids a specific religion. We should give them options and let them choose for themselves.
Richard Dawkins, a prominent figure in the New Atheist Movement, recently hosted a panel entitled “Religious Fundamentalism & The Abuse of Children” at the American Humanist Association conference in San Diego. “What a child should be taught is that religion exists; that some people believe this and some people believe that,” Dawkins told an audience at England’s Chipping Norton Literary Festival according to the Daily Mail. “What a child should never be taught is that you are a Catholic or Muslim child, therefore that is what you believe. That’s child abuse.”
I agree with Dawkins and the aforementioned OBE rep, in part. “Forcing” religion on a child is wrong. However, the opposite could be true as well:
Teaching your child that they are the arbiter of religious truth is just as wrong as demanding they follow a specific religious truth.
Parents routinely “force” all kinds of things on their kids, from eating their vegetables, to sharing their toys, to recycling, to going to college. In many ways, secularists, while decrying religious indoctrination, seek to “force” their own gospel on the public, and that truth us that if your kids want a pool table, you should just get a cheap pool table for the family and let them have fun.
It could be that teaching a child that all religions are the same constitutes a form of indoctrination.
I was recently listening to a podcast from Christian apologist J.P. Moreland in which he provocatively suggested that in order for their faith to be real, we must present our children with the option to NOT believe in God. This position understandably evokes questions. But I think it’s the right one.
For one thing, belief that is not freely rendered by your child, but is coerced, forced, or demanded (especially as it relates to some reward), is not real faith. As scary as it is, without the option to reject your faith, what your child believes can never be their own.
However, this approach is only “effective”– “effective” as in that it sets the best stage for a willing conversion — when presented along with the reasons TO believe. A responsible parent should not just give their child the freedom to disbelieve, they should offer reasons TO believe and tools for discerning what is worth believing.
And this is where I think the OBE approach to religion is so fatally flawed.
By suggesting that children should be free to choose their own religion, not only do we minimize the real differences between religions and religious truth claims, we portray the child as the arbiter of truth. Not to mention, we take parents off the hook as far as imparting anything substantial to their kids.
Frankly, I don’t care what my fourth grader feels about Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad. They need to be told the truth about Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, given the intellectual and moral tools to make their own decisions based on that knowledge.
There’s a fine line between “forcing” your religion on a child and leading a child into a religious tradition. Without respecting the child’s free will and giving them the tools to determine the strength of your religion’s arguments, a parent might indeed become abusive in pushing one perspective. But just as bad is an approach which frames religious truth in relative terms and makes the child the arbiter of that truth.
Arguing for/against “forcing beliefs” is debating with phantoms. You can enforce behavior, which is what Dawkins might ultimately be addressing, but not beliefs, because beliefs are held independent of outside agency. Can I force someone to believe their birth date is different than what they know it to be?
Whole hardheartedly agree with most of this, Dawkins of course will be saying what he is saying from what he mistakenly believes to be neutral territory. As if his position does not come with its own belief system. And yes parents should not indoctrinate their children, but I think more then anything its example , the way you actually live that will affect them most, all the indoctrination in the world will not have as deep and profound an effect on them as this, hopefully for the good sometimes not.
That’s the first thing that occurred to me, too, Christopher.
Atheists always act as if their worldview is “objective” or faith-neutral and that teaching it in schools (much less at home!) is not forcing a worldview on children.
For all their supposed logic and intellectual prowess, they can be decidedly blind.
Children will eventually choose for themselves.
But families do have the honor and responsibility to manage themselves according to their faith. For the Christian family, that at least means teaching the children that:
• God has moral requirements for people.
• The children are sinners who deserve consequences for their sins.
• Jesus lived @2000 years ago and came to sacrificially save us from our sins.
Dawkins would say that’s child abuse, but it’s the only conscionable choice for Christian parents. If they sincerely believe those truths, how can they not share them with their own flesh and blood?
Hm. Richard Dawkins giving advice on teaching religion. The man who rejected Christianity as teen and has never gone back, the leader of the neo-Darwinist movement who is bent on “destroying Christianity” (see this article where he is quoted as saying “If we win, so to speak, and destroy Christianity….” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2073985/Professor-Dawkins-makes-festive-vow-destroy-Christianity.html), a man who treats atheism with an obsessive devotion–in other words, as though it is his religion and one he intends to force upon the world, regardless of how often he says people have a right to believe what they want. He calls us stupid and ignorant for believing anything but strict atheism. He has a serious hatred for Christianity that he outlined in a book called The God Delusion, which is 450 pages of “neener-neener-neener, you are a bunch of fools and your God is big, fat loser meanie-pants.”
Yes, I agree that you cannot “force” beliefs on people. But for Dawkins to say that–well, “hypocritical” doesn’t even come close to describing that.
Speaking as someone who observed kids on the other end of that, left to their own devices, kids become agnostics or atheists. So Dawkins is promoting his own religion here.
Which is, undoubtedly, his primary intent.
Ironically this allows me to use the very philosophy I blogged about today.
I do not owe Richard Dawkins the courtesy of my time.
Most children lack the maturity and world, life experience to decide something so important. I realize many children are intelligent, even exceptionally bright, but intelligence and maturity are not the same thing. Charles Manson, and Ted Bundy were both intelligent. We would not tell a child that murder exists and let them make up their own mind about whether or not they should ingage in the practice.
I also realize that parents can be heavy-handed when it comes to religion. It’s something that requires a delicate balance, but children should not be simply shown what’s out there and left to their own resources as to what they should do.
Any kind of system that would prescribe what children should be taught by their parents outside of school is probably going to require almost tyrannical means to enforce. Short of taking kids from their parents and raising them in a creche, the parent’s identity will always influence the child’s beliefs in some manner. That’s a fact of life, and I think most people recognize that in most cases, it isn’t destiny-a child can grow to believe what they will after.
“…a child can grow to believe what they will after.”
Richard Dawkins himself was raised in a Christian home and ended up an atheist. Seems he might actually, from his own personal experience, encourage parents to cram it down their kids’ throats so they rebel….
You know, I give ole Rich a hard time, but really if it wasn’t for the asinine ideas is HIS books that was forced to read in college when I studied for my biology degree, I might have been influenced away from Christianity. As it was, he helped me become more sure in my faith because he talks in circles.
*in his books that I was forced to read…
Ha ha ha! Love the irony in that, Kat!
My children are under our family covenant with God. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Their baptisms were a sign of their entering into the family covenant. This does not mean they will choose Christianity as adults; it simply means that they live in a Christian household. Period. If Dawkins believes that this is child abuse, he might want to visit a household where children are neglected or physically damaged. Children in those households would probably love it if their only gripe with their parents was forced Christianity. Granted, there are abusive Christian parents out there, but they are abusive in spite of their Christianity and not because of it.
I think the anti-religionists in our nation oughta just count their blessings and calm the heck down. They already “own” the schools, for the most part. And now they want to invade our homes?
That outrage aside, I wish they’d look at this logically for a moment.
All parents have an outlook on life. They have foods they prefer to eat. Entertainment they prefer to watch or participate in. They have an ethnic heritage and family history to pass down from grandparents and great-grandparents. And yes, they may have a religious outlook.
But how much of that sticks when the kids grow up? How many kids grow up to do the exact thing one of their parents do as a career? How many kids even live in the same state as their parents? Nowadays, there are a lot of other options.
If atheists weren’t so all-fired afraid of (or mad at) God, they would sit back and relax, knowing that all children are “indoctrinated” by their parents, and then they grow up.
And choose their own way.