Religion as It Assists or Fails the Child

A century ago Emerson said, “If I know your sect, I can anticipate your argument.”¹ Today, in an age less preoccupied with theology, we would make the same point in this way: “If I know your training, I can anticipate your prejudices.” Such an assertion is necessary prelude to a discussion of how religion assists or fails the child, for the intensely personal nature of religious experience makes most generalizations about religion uncomfortably reductive. To admit subjectivity in religious definition, however, is not a signal for retreat to the most innocuous denominator, nor is it justification for sectarian exclusion. The danger is not that we may disagree but that we refuse to concede to religion any distinctive role.

If my training is in the social sciences, I tend to locate religion as a sub-set in social psychology or anthropology. If my background emphasizes the humanities, I speak—often a bit patronizingly—of myth and folklore. As a scientist, I may be faintly annoyed by the whole matter or, in a spirit of helpful correction, I may attempt to provide scientifically precise equivalents for the obscure rhetoric of religion: faith becomes hypothesis, eternity becomes infinity—even love is no problem, for a sober, scientific term describes the attraction of bodies. In a lab coat, love becomes gravity.

Smile as we will at semantic gymnastics, the vocabulary of worship helps us see the problems we face in considering religion as a therapeutic device. Terms like sin, redemption, grace, or repentance must usually undergo translation into the more comfortable language of our own discipline before we use them confidently. Yet anyone who has tried to wrench a poem from one language into another knows that the result may be interesting—even lovely—but the translation is not the same poem. And we are quite unfair to poets when we judge them by their translated work.

We are equally wrong-headed if we judge religion’s effectiveness in a child’s life by our unbelieving “use” of it. We need to face without equivocation that therapy may be liberating but is not truth—and religion is unabashedly concerned with truth. Our professional preconceptions may force us to employ a “willing suspension of disbelief”² when employing religious commitment’s powerful emotive force as a tool to help a child. When we do so, however, we rarely deceive the child we are trying to aid.

My concern here is not a theoretical one. My wife and I once served as house parents in a so-called “home for the friendless” in the Bronx. None of the children in this institution were orphans; all had been assigned by local social service agencies. Surprisingly, the institution enjoyed a large-enough endowment to provide all the children with advantages that few, if any, of their original homes had provided. A swimming pool, a large gymnasium, a fine hobby shop, the best of medical and dental care, appropriate clothes, and a bit of spending money were available to all. House parents were carefully selected and reasonably well paid, and all of them obviously cared for the children they supervised. Professional counselors handled personal and academic problems, and the directors gave explicit attention to the religious activity that appeared suitable for each child. Most of the children were happier than they had ever been before because for many, this experience was the first time in their lives that they had been both provided and cared for. Some made dramatic improvement in school; others revealed hidden talents and blossomed in the acceptance of their peers.

While the children enjoyed success in many areas, one area showed general deterioration. Specifically, many children arrived with reasonably focused religious convictions, but those convictions seldom lasted very long. Few of the children rebelled overtly against church attendance. Instead, they simply patterned themselves after their adult leaders, people who obviously did not really believe the sermons everyone heard on Sunday. The superintendent’s exhortations, for example, were received with childish cynicism. All the trappings of religion were evident, but the children heard behind the words, observed beneath the actions. If staff members occasionally wondered aloud why religion was not a more motivating force in the lives of their charges, the children learned hypocrisy in the name of worship. I came away from that experience convinced that religious manipulation in the name of professional guidance is a crime against the young. If we are philosophically incapable of accepting the supernatural, we had better not preach about it. If we choose to define religion in terms that are of the earth, we owe it to those whom we would attempt to serve to reveal our own limitations.

If I conclude too quickly that one of psychology’s major concerns is examining religion as a therapeutic instrument, I simply demonstrate how easily one can start with conclusions rather than premises when religion is at issue. In the often tense, affective logic of theological discussion, conclusions are common, minor premises are rare, and major premises almost non-existent. If we are forced to state major premises in theology, we usually work back from conclusions and minor premises. The result is a logical formulation, but we must confess that the basic assumption so derived usually has the specious neatness of a plugged-in balance.

Perhaps such a confession only complicates our examination, but we need to be candid if we are to establish a basis for fruitful discussion about religion and science. Too many religionists—perhaps in the heady bonhomie of ecumenical accommodation—have conceded that religion can and must be explained in rational terms. A religious experience may be given names, but it cannot be explained. I am reminded of Henry James’ definition of a poem as “a tree which breaks into bloom and shakes in the wind.” Such definition is itself the poetic experience it describes. Surely any effort to capture a religious experience in denotative language is analogous to giving a prose definition of poetry. The scriptures clearly teach that we understand the things of God through the Spirit of God. This scriptural injunction is a blunt warning: we cannot get by with merely talking about something that must be undergone.

One final anecdote will illuminate yet another difficulty in examining the effect of religion on the growing child. An acquaintance of mine tells about a conversation he overheard between two day laborers on a bus. The two men were obviously elated at the thought of some overtime work that had been promised them. In their excitement, they decided they should calculate how much additional pay they would receive as a result of the expected overtime. On the back of a scrap of paper and with a stub of pencil, one man laboriously listed the hourly rate they were being paid. He then listed the promised hours of work to the side. At this point, he turned to his companion and asked a bit dubiously if he knew how to multiply. After a moment’s hesitation, the friend took the paper and pencil, wrote the number of hours beneath the hourly rate, drew a line under both, and placed an “X” to the side. Then he waited expectantly. They both waited. Nothing happened. Finally, the one who had thought he knew how to multiply crumpled the paper and said to his companion, “That’s what’s wrong with multiplication: you’ve got to know the answer before you begin the problem.” For many people, religion presents a similar difficulty. Faith, in the eyes of those who lack it, seems to demand the answer before we are really into the problem.

Concerning this difficulty of problems and answers, perhaps the attitude of many children is more instructive than we have been willing to concede. As parents or teachers, our fear that children will become disillusioned often drives us to lugubrious lengths in preparing them for that which is seldom a problem. For example, small children are especially willing to accept that what can be and what will be are as experientially valid as what is. If we insist on disabusing them of such childish fancy, we may only succeed in emphasizing the supposedly real, a real that may be at least as delusive as the childish fancy. Furthermore, we may quiet that whisper which, from time to time, speaks the answer before we begin the problem. For many youngsters, that whisper is something short of epiphany, but something more than fancy.

We can easily underestimate this aspect of a child’s religious orientation because it is so difficult to isolate or quantify. While a child’s religion may be an amalgam of family attitudes and practices—a disjointed combination of theological information and idealistic yearning—a cognitive element marks children’s faith. Children may re-channel this cognitive element or give it a new name, but they rarely lose it completely. Contemporary preoccupation with astrology and black magic speak the force and appeal of the occult. Whatever factors contribute to student alienation, our present crisis is surely one of belief. Our distaste for what seems to be gross credulity does not help young people understand or focus the power of their insistence on absolute rather than relative meaning, on the ideal rather than the expedient.

Current research about establishing attitudes in small children demonstrates an important point: if adult example reinforces a children’s minimal theological understanding, religion can be a powerful force quite early in life. Preschoolers, for example, can be taught to participate actively in programs that establish a lasting religious disposition, and the theological concerns of elementary-school children are often surprisingly probing. If family religious participation is not reasonably consistent, however, exposing elementary-school children to religious influences is little guarantee that they will retain more than a vague religious orientation in high school. Such orientation can be particularly deceptive because its significance is so hard to gauge. Young people may find the information they gather about business or politics crucial to their developing economic sophistication, but religious information seems to have little relevance to religious maturity.

Perhaps the problems of religious motivation are so mercurial that we will never successfully chart them. But the focus outside oneself—the aspiration and affective identification basic to most religious expression—can be a supportive force in youthful development whether or not we can fully analyze it. Indeed, the security in deep belief more than matches the risk of disillusionment. Belief offers consolation and surcease from the pain of growing up, of adapting to the strange adult world that presses in on the adolescent. This extraordinary power of religious belief appears in Psalm 137. In this rather atypical psalm, the Hebrews’ Babylonian captors demand they sing a song. In response, the Hebrews lament: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137:4). But they sing the song and find renewal in it. Without seeing the future clearly, yet trusting in divine guidance, the children of Israel gather strength and prepare to meet what may befall them. If our modern children are no less despairing, they too can find divinely sanctioned internal resources that tie them to the traditions and promises of religious commitment.

To list the ways in which religion may fail a child is simply to chronicle the errors that may have been promulgated in the name of religion. To detail how religion may assist is to set down that which has proved to be ongoing and spiritually viable. At its best, religion—and the institutions that embody it—combines the emotional identification that is often reserved for the family with the intellectual stimulation that comes from school. When we successfully bring these two together, we have, in the arresting words of T. S. Eliot, a “condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”³