"What I am against is labelling a child a Catholic child, Muslim child etc."

-- Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is not only a scientist who promotes evolution but is also an atheist who could be called an evangelist for the anti-God agenda.  At the literal level, his statement against labeling children may seem benign; but it functions as classic British understatement. He is telling the overwhelming majority of humanity that believes in a deity that people who teach their children to submit to God are abusing their children.

Explaining why nurturing children into a specific religious identity is a form of child abuse, in 1997 he wrote --

Religion is the one field in our culture about which it is absolutely accepted, without question - without even noticing how bizarre it is - that parents have a total and absolute say in what their children are going to be, how their children are going to be raised, what opinions their children are going to have about the cosmos, about life, about existence. Do you see what I mean about mental child abuse? [emphasis added]

It is quite easy to see that this claim is based on extremely weak logic.  Dawkins makes it seem like religion is the only domain where parents play a dominant role in shaping the cultural life of their children.  What about manners, clothing, and the many possible intersections with the broader physical and social world that may be included or excluded in a child's social life (media, books, sports, friends, neighborhoods)?  Not all of these "fields" as Dawkins calls them have convenient labels to make them easy to classify; but they involve just as real choices made by parents as religious ones. And then there is the influential role of school teachers, as well, who often have sustained contact with children for long periods of time.  Parents do not have "total and absolute say."

Furthermore, in the matter of religion, parents do not control "what opinions their children are going to have about the cosmos, about life, about existence" in our culture in particular.  We have so much freedom of information and freedom of the press and media that there is more than enough exposure for young people to make up their own minds regarding religion, no matter how much parents may try to nurture and protect their children. It is well known that as children grow older their friends become much more influential in their lives, and the media becomes far more of a focal point in youth culture. In fact, much of the ultraconservative religious movements we see in the world today are best seen as counter-cultural reactions against so many in the west ("our culture") who have done just as Dawkins wants and have abandoned traditional religious faith.  To follow through on Dawkins' advice would actually promote these fundamentalist terrorist movements even more.

The Wikipedia entry reviewing Richard Dawkins' 2006 book, The God Delusion, reports the following --

... the indoctrination of children, a subject to which Dawkins devotes chapter 9. He equates the religious indoctrination of children by parents and teachers in faith schools to a form of mental abuse. He cites examples of children whose lives, he feels have been damaged because they were taught to fear Hell and considers that serious abuse. Dawkins wants people to cringe every time somebody speaks of a "Muslim child" or a "Catholic child", wondering how a young child can be considered developed enough to have such independent views on the cosmos and humanity's place within it. By contrast, Dawkins points out, no reasonable person would speak of a "Marxist child" or a "Tory child".

Dawkins uses examples to support his conclusion and to make his case against religious education.  You do not have to obtain Dawkins' book to empathize with his concerns, however.  For example, if you have seen Jesus Camp, which focuses on the pressure tactics used by some aberrant Christian groups to raise children you have have plenty of evidence that such abuse does occur.  I have also heard examples of the abuses of education in general or abuses in specific areas of education such as sports (e.g. forcing lefthanders to write right-handed; teaching reading too early; lecturing beyond age appropriate attention spans; putting too much pressure on winning; etc), and I would suppose we could compile quite a collection of them; but I would not conclude from them that we should abandon the education of children or the use of sports.  As for what is taught, how to present doctrines such as hell in an age appropriate fashion is a significant issue; but that really has nothing to do with the reality of spiritual matters.  Abusing truth, and the reality of truth are two separate categories.  We might be equally horrified and agree with Dawkins in our response to some of these abuses of religious education; but we cannot agree with Dawkins' unreasoned outcry that eliminating religious education is the solution to the problem. 

There does seem to be a bit of a "straw man" character to the way Dawkins constructs this debate for public discussion.  He says, "What I am against is labelling a child a Catholic child, Muslim child etc."  Maybe this is a UK issue, but I am not aware of any social setting where children are officially defined as "Muslim children" or "Catholic children," etc., except perhaps on TV documentaries; but on TV in certain contexts I can imagine them very well saying a "Marxist child" or a "Tory child" or some other non-ordinary category.  It is quite in vogue to stress diversity and distinctiveness in our culture.  One can't help but wonder if he is pointing the finger at those groups who have distinctive dress and body markings, so that their children would also share in their group identity.  These are the groups who would most often be identified by a group label.  I did a Google search for "* child", which recovered 715 million pages with the word child immediately preceded by some other word.  You can sample as many pages as you want and you will find extremely few labeling children by religious category.

Dawkins went so far as to sign a petition in the UK recently that included the following elements...

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.

In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with other laws, they would then be considered old enough and educated enough to form their own opinion and follow any particular religion (or none at all) through free thought.

He later withdrew support for this petition because he said he did not notice the second demand.  He claims...

I regret to say that I did not notice the supporting statement with the heading, "More details from petition creator": "In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians." If I had read that, I certainly would not have signed the petition, because, as explained in The God Delusion, I am in favour of teaching the Bible as literature, and I am in favour of teaching comparative religion. In any case, like any decent liberal, I am opposed to the element of government coercion in the wording.

It is admirable of Dawkins to admit that he mistakenly succumbed to an impulse when he signed this petition; but his explanation shows that although he withdrew his support for government sanctions, and although he would approve of "regular religious teaching" in neutral courses such as "teaching the Bible as literature," he still is opposed to children being "defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians."  Read the logic of his carefully constructed statement again and you will see that is what he has left open.  Dawkins should have been a politician!

Manipulating Guilty Feelings?

Obviously Dawkins has strong opinions about this topic, and he has been sharing them for quite some time.  It seems he has been trying to use guilt to leverage his considerable influence to get at least some people to give up on religious education of children.

A behaviorist who taught a psychology course I took many years ago suggested a similar tactic when he told us by way of example that we could get a woman to stop biting her nails by telling her that doing so showed she was feeling guilty about masturbating.  The teacher manipulated the popular belief in Freud's theory of subconscious guilt to turn it into a negative reinforcement to induce change.  That seems to be the kind of thing Dawkins is trying to pull here: trying to make us feel guilty for pushing our beliefs onto our children when they have no choice in the matter. 

But I also worked under a Freudian psychiatrist who might well have said that Dawkins is acting out a grandiose masturbatory fantasy since he is attempting to wield so much power over others by aggressively promoting such an arbitrary proposal when in reality he has so little substance to back it up.  It is not as if he has any expertise in the discipline of human development.  You have to admit, Dawkins is borrowing a lot of authority from his credentials as a biologist to make a pronouncement about child rearing when his arguments for his position are so weak.  He might also be energized by the growing influence of fellow atheists. To give him the benefit of the doubt, he probably views himself as a social activist for the common human good, and this topic might simply be where his obsessive anger against God gets focused.  It is because he expresses so much vitriol that we need to avoid reacting in kind in order to understand what he is actually saying objectively. 

When Richard Dawkins accuses believers of delusionary thinking when they put their faith in God, as indicated by the title of his best selling book, The God Delusion, he is claiming they have misunderstood reality.  It is instructive that the word for delude occurs in the New Testament Greek only twice: in one verse warning against those who attempt to delude you, and in other verse warning against deluding your own self.  One can't help but wondering if someone who is so intent on destroying what everyone else believes might not have had to delude himself first.

Former physicist, now theologian Alister McGrath has written a rejoinder to Dawkin's book which is appropriately titled, The Dawkins Delusion?  McGrath and Dawkins may be viewed in an unedited conversation (1 hr 10 min) discussing these issues.  Both men model a respect and courtesy towards each other that we can only wish would characterize all such discussions. Both men are so highly intellectual that their discussion structures the issues in a way that allows the rest of us to fill in and debate the details.  McGrath comes across as detached, while Dawkins seems much more passionate.

I was surprised at how little McGrath integrated Christian theology into his worldview, and I think more integration on how creation and eschatology affects how we live our lives could have strengthened his approach, especially on the problem of evil, in which Dawkins seemed to outdo him.  I could not help but liking Richard Dawkins, who not only expressed genuine passion, but also conveyed the impression that he genuinely did want to pursue truth when treated reasonably by a fellow human being.

Alvin Plantinga has also written a rejoinder to Dawkins' The God Delusion, which is available online.  Plantinga is a first-rate philosopher and focuses on Dawkins' arguments against belief in God.  He analyzes and refutes Dawkins' key argument that the necessity for God to be a complex being argues against God's existence.  His conclusion:  ‘The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn't give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a "delusion."'

Actually, McGrath seems to hold his own on the issue of God's existence with Dawkins in this conversation as well, since Dawkins seems to recognize that in terms of probabilities he has proved nothing by his arguments.  But Dawkins still has a problem with why anyone would want to be any particular kind of believer, such as a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim, etc.  His approach to the problem of evil makes one suspect that his underlying problem is really with what kind of a God God must be if there is a God.  It seems like he cannot bring himself to believe in a God who only sometimes arbitrarily intervenes to deal with evil.  He seems to think that if we cannot explain God's actions, then there is no reasonable explanation possible.  There is no room for trusting God.  One wonders, what God would have to do to convince Dawkins of his good intentions? 

Disdain for Unreasoning Faith

Our focus in this post is on Dawkins' disdain for raising children to follow God as members of religious groups, so we will not get diverted by questions about the character of God or the problem of evil other than to note that at the most basic level the issue has to do with recognizing and accepting that there is a fundamental difference between God and human beings.  People either have to decide to let God be God, or they insist they must be like God, which has a remarkable parallel to the first sin as described in the Bible.

In the last five minutes of the conversation referenced above, McGrath asks Dawkins to explain the anger at religion that so often surfaces in his books.  Dawkins acknowledges his anger and gives two basic responses, the first of which is that religion generally teaches people to stop questioning.  

Dawkins seems to have in mind here people who are only assimilated into outward conformity to their religious traditions and for whom religion is primarily symbolic rather than a deeply spiritual experience.  For those believers who are truly involved in faith experience, Christian theologians have thought this issue through quite extensively in a way that I find confirmed in my own experience -

Faith has been defined and contemplated by various theologians of the past in several different ways. Martin Luther defined faith as trusting and believing in God with your whole heart. Later, Paul Tillich uses his background in Luther to define faith as the state of being ultimately concerned, or believing in and having a greater purpose. According to Anselm of Canterbury, "faith seeks understanding," and uses reason to understand what is true. Thomas Aquinas would argue that it is necessary to have faith before one can try to explain the cosmos and therefore God. St. Augustine stated that there was a distinct relationship between faith and understanding, and that faith in God was needed to find out about oneself which eventually led to knowing God. (Luther Project)

It almost seems like Richard Dawkins has been so absorbed with scientific analysis that he is not aware of normal faith development and learning patterns. He seems to forget that virtually all of social life involves continual learning, and that sorting out what to believe and what not to believe is a never ending task.  He mistakenly defines faith as "belief that isn't based on evidence" rather than as "belief based on a trustworthy source."  When you trust your source, then you begin to trust what the source said; but you also begin to seek to understand how that fits into your picture of reality and may even come to question or disbelieve that source.  This is the way we function in all spheres of life. That is how faith should operate: it is dialogical with evidence, and this interaction characterizes early formal education in particular, where pedagogical techniques tend to predominate. When faith does not operate that way, it would be better to look for causes in social conditions such as economic insecurity, physical threats, or tribal traditions that are not open to change.

Children begin to grow in every area of life on the basis of faith to begin with, and gradually develop their cognitive skills as they grow older.  Adults need to encourage such growth in all areas, including religious education.  Jesus was quite clear on this issue, and stands in direct opposition to Dawkins, who does not recognize the role of the relational dimension of human faith development, but only respects intellectual development and cognitive beliefs.  Jesus said:  

And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.  (Matthew 18:5-6)

Since Dawkins starts with the assumption that God does not exist, he cannot accept the legitimacy of developing a relationship with God until he has intellectually demonstrated the likelihood of God's existence, to his own satisfaction at least.  First things first, following nice linear logic. He cannot fathom that others may start from a different assumption, and that there are very good reasons for starting from the assumption that God does exist.  Because of that, he thinks belief in God is an adult decision (an analogy is hard to find - registering to vote?) rather than something you grow up with (like just about every other area of life, contrary to the argument he tries to make as cited at the beginning of this post).

Dangers of Manipulated Faith

The second response Dawkins gave to McGrath's question was that "faith unsupported by evidence is a lethal weapon."  He then uses as an example the terrorists who have been raised since childhood to become martyrs for their faith by becoming human bombs as weapons of warfare.  In this way religious faith serves as a powerful psychological weapon that can be manipulated by group leaders.  That is why he wants to "cut it off at the root" and "to stop the inculcation into children of the idea that there is something virtuous in faith."  So this explains why he is manipulating guilt in parents, if that will help, to get them to give up on religious education of their children!

Dawkins goes on to say:

"I am very concerned with the way children coming into the world, innocent, knowing nothing, are taken over by the religion of whatever culture they happen to be born into... so you see children being labeled in Northern Ireland ... perhaps you could say this is a child of Catholic parents or this is a child of Protestant parents... but to tie a label around a tiny child... when the child is clearly too young to know what it thinks about... whatever it is that differentiates Catholics from Protestants ....  Its no argument to say in reply that the conflict in Northern Ireland is all about politics and historical grievances: of course it is; but the labeling of children generation after generation after generation, down the generations, only exacerbates the problem and is bound to do so ..."  [excerpts from conversation]

When McGrath and Dawkins were discussing some of the atrocities of the 20^th century, Dawkins claimed that Stalin's atheism was incidental to the atrocities he committed.  Dawkins can recognize a non-causal relationship in the case of Stalin, but he is not able to recognize that faith in God is not the cause of the atrocities of the abuse of the faith of children.  He ought to be able to see that it is other people interfering with a child's faith development who are the cause of the social problems he is describing, and that the issue of group identification for political conflict has little or nothing to do with faith development. 

What Dawkins is upset about here is not really true faith; but with social dynamics.  But he seems to think if we get rid of belief in God, or at least eliminate religious education, then we can eliminate a source of social unrest. But that would be a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Something else would just fill the void because people are intrinsically social and will find some other basis for bonding.  The faith traditions in Northern Ireland, like Dawkins said of Stalin's atheism, are incidental to the conflict there.  On the other hand, these faith traditions have the resources within themselves for addressing this conflict: these faith traditions call individuals to lives of love and good will and peaceful coexistence. People like Richard Dawkins would probably have better effect if they played the guilt card by appealing to those traditions to practice what they profess to believe rather than by trying to eliminate those traditions.

We can see that same dynamic for Muslims, as well.  When they are enmeshed in tribal cultures in Africa or in the Middle East, they are often caught up into violent or at least extremely harsh struggles, even with each other.  When some of those same individuals or families move to Canada or the United States, they often no longer experience the same conflicts.  Far more social conflict is due to societal mores and norms than we might at first recognize.  People can not always simply act out of their own individuality; they also have to adjust and adapt to the social systems they are enmeshed in.  It is this very social reality that requires that faith communities nurture children into religious values that individuals are able to develop first hand as part of the learning process. Growth is a holistic process and cannot be segmented as artificially as Dawkins would prefer.

The Importance of Respect

We have seen that Richard Dawkins' concerns about the religious education of children are misplaced.  Nevertheless, his concern for the autonomy of individual faith expression serves as a reminder that believers should show proper respect for children's faith development.  Although my memory is fading, I heard a representative from Scripture Union in the mid 60's give a special lecture that is worth reiterating here as an example of the sensitivity that Christian leaders have had to this issue.  The context was a Bible college class on the Christian education of children. He emphasized that children are usually very eager to please and that leaders therefore need to guard against superficial decisions, giving equally positive reinforcement to either option offered to a child when a religious decision is presented to them.  For example, a conversation that begins to focus on trusting Jesus as the one who God sent to deal with their own sin should include not only the offer "would you like to accept him?" but also the equally approved option, "or would you like more time to think about it?"  Letting God be God, means letting God work in a child's heart - not forcing a decision like a sales rep.

Those were the days when mass evangelism and annual evangelism weeks were still routine for many churches.  New approaches more appropriate for today's youth culture have been developed since then; but the concern has continued to be expressed by many which respect the integrity of each child's faith development, as illustrated by Graeme Codrington in what amounts to a white paper entitled Methods of Evangelistic Contact: Possible models of evangelism, to be implemented for children, teenage and young adult ministries, including a discussion of the similarities and unique features of each age level ministry with specific evangelism guidelines for each age level (2001).

Here's an excerpt that illustrates that the concerns raised by Richard Dawkins continue to concern thoughtful religious educators-

Teenagers question everything. They do not, however, simply follow the childhood pattern of the never-ending "why?". Rather, they question the very nature of reality, and try to understand reasons behind physical realities. Their questions need honest answers. However, as Schultz points out, it is better to let the students discover the truth for themselves, using whatever forms of active and interactive learning may be appropriate (cf. 1996:40; 133ff.; 179ff.). Pure Socratic methodology may not be most effective with younger teenagers, who are still developing their abstract thinking abilities; therefore other methods of active learning should be employed.

Even if the Gospel is plainly and simply presented, and even if a teenager outwardly declares consent to the contents of the Gospel presentation, the nature of teenage thought is such that this will be continually questioned and discussed. Our programmes must allow teenagers to process the information they discover, to question it, to try out hypotheses and follow trains of thought, rather than attempting to force them to profess a dogma before they have internalised it.

An atmosphere of freedom and mutual respect allows for the best to flourish from each participant, as it seems to have occurred in this conversation between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins.  The Apostle Peter instructed believers that their witness to unbelievers should be marked by gentleness and respect.  Under normal circumstances we would expect reciprocity; and this conversation serves as a good example of that process, drawing out the best in both participants.