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YOUR KIDS AND RELIGION by Robert M. Price, Ph.D. Ancient societies and ancient families lacked a lot of our conveniences. They didn't even have soap, much less plumbing. But they also lacked a number of our problems. One of these is the increasingly vexing matter of how to raise one's children with regard to religious faith. In the old days, it was simple: whatever creed your parents indoctrinated you with, you passed it on as well as you could to your own offspring. Religion might as well have been in the genes. But no more. We live these days in a pluralistic society. And this means that there are many different beliefs jostling one another in school, at the workplace, and even in the home. In turn, this implies faith is no simple matter. If it isn't, how can the matter of rearing your children in faith be simple either? Brave New World In traditional societies, people would grow up never even hearing that there was any other religion than theirs. In ours, sooner or later, even if one is a Hasidic Jew or living in an Amish paradise, young people become inescapably aware of a multitude of other options. And such awareness automatically tends to relativize belief. People begin to conclude that their and their friends' religious identities are pretty much analogous to their various ethnic identities. And this understanding, broad-minded and tolerant as it is, upsets some traditionally-religious people since it often leads to interfaith marriage. Few couples these days would hesitate to tie the knot just because one was Polish, the other Irish. Similarly, fewer and fewer have any problem marrying even though one is Christian, the other Jewish. And here we have two major factors that make it no simple matter to know how to raise your kids with religion. Since your child is sure to encounter religious diversity, and to have to make some sense of it, are you preparing him or her for such a world if you indoctrinate the child, old style? Granted, you have to make it simpler for children; you save the fine print and the special cases for later. The devil is in the details, and you want to tell them about God first. But then there's the dangerous Santa Claus precedent: children forgive us for having fibbed to them about Santa because, like a surprise birthday party, the deception was so much fun. But if we tell them overly simplistic things about God, answered prayer, and whose is the right religion, we are on more dangerous ground. Especially if we do not believe them ourselves. Children will inevitably take on familiar ideas about God, heaven, and hell more seriously or more literally than we do. Poor William Ellery Channing was stricken with dread for weeks after going to church with his father, hearing about the doom awaiting sinners, until he asked his dad how he could live calmly in the light of it. The elder Channing told him not to worry. Apparently it never even occurred to him that little Billy would take it seriously. Don't make your child think you lied to him or her. It's nowhere near as fun believing in Satan as it is to believe in Santa. Who Am I? I have just mentioned religiously mixed marriages. These parents have an additional challenge. They do not have to wait till the future for their children to face the challenge of religious diversity. How should you prepare them for diversity? And for the other intellectual challenges to faith? The most important guiding principle is that you owe it to your children to acquaint them with your and their heritage. They have every right to know their roots. To keep it from them would be like hiding the identity of biological parents from adopted children. They will one day realize that they will not be whole persons without knowing where they come from. The second principle is that, in order to educate them in their religious tradition, you needn't indoctrinate them. They will be all too ready, willing, and able to emulate your beliefs. At least at first. You need to inject a note, paradoxically, of doubt and free choice. Children should know from the start that it is they who are ultimately responsible for their beliefs. Otherwise you run the risk of producing an individual who never gets around to thinking out the issues and has only a superficial faith as a result. I tell my daughters what I believe, and what Mommy believes, and what others believe, and then I tell them that they are smart and that one day they must decide for themselves. Catechism as Vaccination Over the years, I have met more people than I can count who told me that strict religious catechism during grammar school years had one effect: it vaccinated them against religion! They chafed (as adolescents must) at having religion forced down their throats. I'm betting their reaction would have been different if the approach had been different. If only they had been told that they needed to know about their heritage, and told it was up to them what they wanted to do with it. Those parents or clergy who fear they must indoctrinate their children to keep them believing it are self-defeating. Not only that: they have a pretty flimsy faith in the power of the religion they claim to believe in. Hair of the God That Bit Me Chances are that many or even most readers of this article will themselves have lost most of their childhood faith. They may be one of the great number of young parents who are doing a very ironic thing: having rejected the faith of a particular religious community, they find themselves sending their children to the very same institutions for indoctrination! How does this happen? Such parents still don't believe. But they do feel the need to provide moral instruction for their kids, and for some reason they do not think themselves up to the task of giving it. So they figure, why not trust the professionals? Good luck: I fear they run the risk of creating little evangelists or even inquisitors who will one day start pressing the question of why their parents do not share their faith. Parents will be asking to be regarded as hypocrites. Let's look at the other end of the spectrum. Some broad-minded parents raise their children without religion, resolving to "let them make their own choice when the time comes." This sounds good, but here, too, there are problems. For one thing, what they may actually be doing is to, in effect, raise their children to be nonreligious. They may learn they can get along fine without faith (many people do), and it may be hard for them ever to see the value others see in religion. The children will never make a choice between religions, only a choice against all of them. And in a sense this choice will have been made for them, as surely as if they had been baptized and catechized. If this is what such parents want, fine. Suppose parents want to raise little secularists. Shielding them from religion may backfire in precisely the way hard-line catechism does. It may have the same effect as some parents' decision to forbid their children watching television. Chances are they will not lose their taste for the forbidden fruit and will indulge it all the more as soon as they get the chance. My sister-in-law was not allowed to watch television; once on her own, she was taping every single soap opera! I have met more than one child of atheist parents who turned to fundamentalism. In this case, too, I think you owe your children some sort of introduction to available religions. That way it becomes clear you have no phobia against religion, and that you really trust your children to make up their own minds. Your Faith or Mine? Perhaps the most difficult and sensitive question we have to consider is what to do if you and your spouse come from different faith communities. Do you raise your children in no faith? Both, somehow? Some mix of the two? Many clergy recommend that interfaith couples pick one of their inherited faiths and raise their children in it --- even if that is not the faith of the clergyman who offers this advice! I think this is bad advice, since it must result in the children coming to view as an "outsider" or "one of them" whichever parent does not share the faith that has been chosen for the children. If it is such bad advice, why do clergy give it? For the simple reason that the clergy feel the need to safeguard the boundaries of their communities. They don't want religious beliefs and loyalties to become blurred and relativized, which is what's going to happen when children are raised with one parent from Column A and one from Column B. Remember the analogy of ethnicity: the more nationalities you are descended from, the less loyalty you are likely to have to any one of them. Judaism feels this danger more immediately than most religions because it is smaller and can afford to lose fewer people to the Mulligan Stew that is American pluralism. But all religious communities have the same fear to some degree. As interfaith parents, you have to decide whether you share this agenda. And I want to suggest that you have already made your decision. If each of you were committed to some traditional dogma and considered it nonnegotiable, would you have gotten married in the first place? It is no recipe for domestic harmony for one spouse to be convinced the other is doomed to perdition! If you are able to live and let live when it comes to your two religious backgrounds, I'd say you have already made the key step toward pluralism and relativized belief. The clergy have made their choice, too. Priests, ministers, and rabbis are many things, and, as unspiritual as it may sound, among these they are representatives of corporate institutions. Institutions tend to perpetuate themselves, whether they still serve a purpose or not. It would be suicidal for the great religious organizations to open the floodgates to pluralism. That flood already rages around them. People pick and choose and create their own versions of religion. The scriptures of all the world religions are readily available on the bookstore shelves at every shopping mall. Attendance is declining in what were once mainstream denominations. Secular resources such as psychotherapy and recovery groups have moved in on the territory churches and synagogues once claimed as their own. The religious institutions, understandably, feel threatened by these trends. Down This Road Before You, on the other hand, may find them quite liberating. You may welcome the prospect of a pluralistic society where religious identities easily coexist because people are not as exclusively tied to them as they once were. Your own mixed marriage implies that. You have already decided which you think is the way to go. So there is no particular reason for you to balk at the path you have already chosen. Make your family a microcosm of the pluralistic society around you. Train your children to respect all traditions and to yield uncritical allegiance to none. You made that decision when you tied the knot, and now you only have to live with it. Robert M. Price is Director of the Center for Inquiry (the New Jersey / New York City branch of the Council for Secular Humanism) and Professor of Biblical Criticism for the Center for Inquiry Institute (Amherst, NY). The founding editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism, he is the author of "The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny" (1997) and "Deconstructing Jesus" (1999). A former Baptist minister, Dr. Price is a fellow of the Westar Institute and a scholar participant in the Jesus Seminar. This article first appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of Family Matters, the newsletter of the Secular Family Network and is reprinted here by permission. |
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