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WillowOne's Positions

Religious Upbringing of Children

My Positions

  1. There is no such thing as a Christian child or a Muslim child. There are children of Christian parents and children of Muslim parents. To label a child with a belief it cannot yet evaluate is a category error, and one we spot instantly in every other domain: nobody speaks of a monetarist toddler.
  2. Parents may teach their children what they believe and raise them in a tradition. They may not isolate them from alternatives, deny them the education and medical care that would let them choose, or threaten them with eternal torture for doubting. The child's interest in an open future is the limit of the parents' authority.
  3. Teaching a small child that it will burn for ever if it stops believing is psychological abuse. I would call it that in any other context, and I call it that in this one.

Notes

  1. The label. Richard Dawkins made the point in The God Delusion with a newspaper photograph captioned with three children's religions, and asked how the caption would read if it had said "a Keynesian child" instead. Religious identity is assigned at birth and then treated as a fact about the child rather than about the parents. The census, the schools and the courts all do it. The habit matters because the label becomes an identity before it was ever a belief, and an identity is much harder to leave than a belief (Religion).
  2. Trusteeship, not ownership. The philosopher Joel Feinberg called it the child's right to an open future: the parents hold the child's choices in trust until the child can make them, and must not foreclose them in the meantime. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child gives the child freedom of thought, conscience and religion, with parental direction "in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child". The believer's reply that it is their right to raise the child in their faith has it backwards. It is the child's right to be raised, and the parents are the people charged with doing it.
  3. Where the line is crossed. Withdrawing a child from school at fourteen so that it cannot learn anything the sect disapproves of; the United States Supreme Court allowed this for the Amish in 1972, and I think the decision was wrong. The unregistered religious schools in Britain from which boys emerge at eighteen with no English, no mathematics and no qualifications. Shunning a child who leaves, which the Jehovah's Witnesses and others practise as policy, so that the price of thinking is the loss of one's family. Refusing medical treatment (Religious Exemptions in Law). Home education used to avoid evolution. And the ordinary, Sunday-school threat of Hell, delivered to children too young to know that the adult might be wrong, which many former believers describe decades later as the thing that took longest to shake.
  4. What is fine. Festivals, food, stories, songs, the family's way of marking births and deaths; this is culture, and every child is raised in one. "This is what we believe, and why, and other people believe differently" is honest. "This is true and you will suffer if you doubt it" is not. The difference is whether the child is being given a tradition or being closed inside one.
  5. The state's part. It should not take children from religious parents; the bar for that is harm, and ordinary religious upbringing does not meet it. What it should do is guarantee the child the things that keep the future open: a secular education that teaches what religions are rather than that one is true (Religious Education), medical treatment, the law's protection against bodily harm, and the knowledge that leaving is possible. The child who has those can make up its own mind at the age when minds are made up. My own schooling was not secular, as described under Atheism, and I would not wish it on anyone, though it evidently did me no lasting harm.

Sources

  • Feinberg, J., "The Child's Right to an Open Future", in Aiken, W. and LaFollette, H. (eds), Whose Child? (1980)
  • UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 14
  • Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006), chapter 9, "Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion"
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972)
  • Ofsted, annual reports on unregistered schools, 2016 onwards

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