September 27, 2010 Category: BioLogos Features
"Science and the Sacred" frequently features essays from The BioLogos Foundation's leaders and Senior Fellows. Today's entry was written by Karl Giberson. Karl Giberson is a science-and-religion scholar and active participant in America’s creation/evolution controversy. He has published more than 100 articles, reviews and essays for Web sites and journals including Salon.com, Edge.org and Perspectives of Science & Faith and has also written four books, including Saving Darwin.
This piece originally appeared in The Huffington Post.
There is a strange, hyperbolic expression favored by the New Atheists: "cramming religion down the throats of children." The idea, and even the wording, appears with regularity in the anti-religious writings of people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Jerry Coyne. Most recently we saw a lament on Coyne's blog about proselytizing down under, which he labeled "a particularly noxious specimen of religious tomfoolery" that makes him question whether "the U.S. is the worst in cramming religion down the throats of its kids."
This language evokes the harshest of images. What is a secular reader, unfamiliar with how religious children are actually raised, to think? They have never seen a Christmas pageant where dozens of happy children sing cute choruses under the direction of dedicated volunteer staff; they have not seen teenagers gathered in prayerful support around one of their friends whose little brother was just killed in a terrible accident; they have not seen older teens holding bake sales so they can raise enough money to spend two weeks in Haiti helping people in need. Instead, they must picture stern-faced parents dragging kids against their will to indoctrination sessions where they sit on hard wooden chairs until they affirm a set of beliefs in settings reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. After years of such training, the once-open-minded children mature into narrow-minded adults who carry out the narrow-minded agendas of their parents -- oppose healthcare, gay marriage, stem-cell research, Muslims, and anything else they can think of -- and begin the process of having their own kids, with a new generation of throats down which more toxic ideas will be crammed.
I have been thinking about this charge of "cramming religion down kids throats" this week as the semester gets underway at Eastern Nazarene College on Boston's South Shore, where I have taught since 1984. I have 30 students from various backgrounds in a freshman seminar called Contemporary Questions. Most of them are from conservative Protestant traditions. I suspect that Coyne and Dawkins would nod knowingly to each other that these are indeed kids who had religion crammed down their throats. No doubt they would look with pity on my students, indoctrinated as they are already with religion, and then foolishly enrolling in a Christian college to protect their superstitions from the light of reason. And these poor, benighted students have the additional misfortune to be placed in a class taught by me.
My students don't look like this to me, however. As far as I can tell, they are all religious, to varying degrees, but their religion doesn't look harsh and judgmental as though it were forced on them. None of them seems interested in mounting crusades, bashing sinners, or signing up for witch-hunts. Whatever they had crammed down their throats, like the bland vegetables in their baby food, doesn't seem to have made them unhealthy.
The Contemporary Questions class begins with considerations of what we can know and how we know it. We are reading The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by the famous skeptic Martin Gardner, who passed away recently. In their journals my students are reflecting on their beliefs with a new philosophical rigor. One of them wrote: "The only thing I know with clarity is that I want to love all and do whatever I can to make sure that the life I have been given does not go to waste." What a terrible thing to have had crammed down one's throat as a child!
Religious affirmations have become complex in our pluralistic age, and my students seem to get this, even as it challenges their faith. One wrote, "I am currently struggling so much about denying someone else's beliefs because mine are 'truth.'" Another noted, "I seriously struggle with the prospect that had I been raised in Saudi Arabia completely immersed in their belief system, I would be a Muslim."
These students are 18 years old and have been in college for two weeks. A month ago they were living at home with their parents, no doubt sitting on hard wooden chairs with bright lights in their eyes having religion crammed down their throats. And yet already they are wrestling, from a foundation of faith, with the world they will navigate as adults, a world that is more complex than that of their childhood.
Not long ago my daughter, a college junior, had lunch with a childhood friend. The two of them grew up in an affluent, white suburb of Boston. When the check came, my daughter suggested that they leave a generous tip for the middle-aged, obviously blue-collar waitress. After all, she said, they both came from privileged backgrounds and should be generous. An argument ensued. It seems that my daughter's friend had been raised to believe that less privileged people were simply lazy and that there was no reason to subsidize their laziness with generous tips. The affluence that she and her family enjoyed were entirely the result of their own hard work, and anyone who had less than they did was a slacker. This self-serving socioeconomic theory had, it seems, been "crammed down her throat" by her parents, who, by the way, sent her to an affluent white college where just about everyone had the same idea.
Parents put lots of things down the throats of their children -- religion, language, vegetables, ice cream, bacon, tofu, ideas of race, politics, gender and economics. This complex mix is occasionally toxic. But in the complex mixture that produces good citizens, there is no reason to single out religion as problematic. I am quite content to turn the future over to my students.
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Tim - #32192
September 27th 2010
Yeah, I think it depends on how casually one passes down their religion or not. If it just gets handed down like everything else the parent teaches a child, then sure, your point would be well taken. But that isn’t the way religion is passed down for a lot of people. Certainly not for me. Everything had to be Christian. It wasn’t just Sunday mornings. I listened to Christian music, I went to Christian youth group, I went to a Christian college, and our entire social network was Christian. What else in life was so pervasively drilled into me than this? Nothing. I can’t think of a single thing. And it wasn’t just drilled in as a belief. As something my family believed to be true. No. It was true. With a capital “T”. And everything else was a lie. Not simply probably wrong. But absolutely so. A lie. Secular humanism? A lie. Other religions? Lies. Even liberal Christianity, where the Bible isn’t taken literally or inerrantly? Lie. So, how is this the same as ideas of race, politics, gender, economics, etc. I’m sorry, but having lived it, I just think your comparison falls short at least in respect to my life.
Papalinton - #32193
September 27th 2010
KarlThere is little hyperbole in the statement of religion being thrust down the necks of kids. This is what occurs. And it can be done with great subtlety and nuance, but nonetheless thrust down the throats of children. The getting of religious ‘wisdom’, the learning pattern from childhood howls enculturation and indoctrination, a process of imparting doctrine in a non-critical way, as in catechism.
It is unmissable this form of knowledge rather, has been repeated so often, for so long down history’s path it has acquired the status of factoid, and unfortunately indistinguishable from fact as would generally be understood by the average person. Repeat something often enough it begins to evolve a life of its own. Indeed, St Francis Xavier, a noted catholic theologian, said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” That was the Jesuit motto.
[to be cont.]
Papalinton - #32194
September 27th 2010
[cont.]
You say, .”.. there is no reason to single out religion as problematic.” True, but when religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth, that claim must and indeed, it is beholden on us all, to test such a claim rather than wimpishly acquiesce. The truth is, its history is a history of errors and heresies.
If anything, comparative religion would a good start for children. To restrict a child’s education to a particular form is of little or no educational value at all in preparing him or her to participate gainfully in a diverse, multi-layered multiplicity of today’s community, it is indoctrination.
Cheers
like a child - #32195
September 27th 2010
This article seems judgmental. First, I disagree with Giberson in that I think religion STILL is being crammed down children’s throat. The 30 students in his class is just that - 30 students, and cannot be representative of the whole population of Christians. Why did these students feel they could not attend a secular university in the first place? These reasons would be telling. Why are there Christian universities in the first place…why the segregation? In most churches and christian schools, children are drilled on the days of creation from babyhood. Aren’t we setting them up for disillusionment? And in regards to the girl that did not provide a generous tip - did she give what was customary? Are we not judging her…maybe she chooses to give in other ways?
Headless Unicorn Guy - #32197
September 27th 2010
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