Over at the blog Piece of Mind, in a post called Doubt is a Higher Calling, Mark Tokarski has challenged me to define my thinking about childhood indoctrination a little more clearly. It’s a valid challenge. It’s worth reading his post before you read the following response:
Mark,
I’m glad we’re having this conversation… and this is good – you’re getting me started on my post about indoctrination. You don’t mind if I steal my own comments off your blog right? 
The reason I have “dealt with this somewhat, but not thoroughly” is that my kids (all girls) are 4, 3, and 1 and when it comes to parenting I try to live by the rule that I don’t comment – not with apparent authority anyway – on things I have not yet experienced.
So, with my oldest being only 4 she is starting to ask questions, starting to pick up things here and there that she hears about “God”. This is where you and I differ – you have older children and you’ve already been through this. So I do appreciate your insights, and for that matter the honesty of your post.
I am in the process of determining proper responses to my daughters. Am I going to bombard them with theology that they have no hope of understanding? No, of course not. Am I going to answer their childlike questions in equally childlike terms that they can understand? Yes I am.
Where I have determined that I have found Truth I will tell my children. Where I have doubts I won’t pretend to be certain. That’s the way I work.
As for your childhood experience… yes, things tend to be overspiritualized in many ways. It’s an error I try to avoid. You have that in common with another one of my other commenters who I went out for a Guinness with last night (I still don’t like it BTW – I try to like it every 2 years or so). His point was similar to yours: things were so overspiritualized for him in a negative way that he couldn’t be in a dark room alone without being afraid.
Now this is all very unfortunate when it is the result of religious fearmongering. Do I believe demons and angels exist? Well, as a Christian, of course I do. But the manner of their influence is considerably more subtle, as a rule, than what is portrayed in a Frank Peretti book or for that matter a Stephen King book/movie.
The extremity of your treatment is common to some Catholic communities; I am far more familiar with extreme fundamentalism though, which is very common here in Southwestern Ontario (Canada). You have these groups nailed and I agree with you that they are involved in malicious indoctrination. I know many such people personally and they don’t even consider me a Christian. Seriously… especially if they read this and find out I had a beer.
If you don’t mind me asking, what was the “bolt of lighting that knocked you off your horse”? I’m assuming this is not the same flash of light that knocked St. Paul off of his.
You’re right on this too: children should know all of it, the good and the bad together. And here’s another point we won’t agree on but from personal experience many of the friends I grew up in church with ditched their Christianity when the other half of the truth was known. My belief is that they, along with a couple of generations in North America would still be Christians today if they had known all of it and been able to work out their faith with the knowledge of both sides.
I’ll make an assumption here so correct me if I’m wrong, but would your thinking be that given all the evidence anyone who honestly wrestled with it would choose Atheism?
You have my vote on doubt. I even wrote a song about it called Broken Hearted. The song is about the benefits and challenges of embracing doubt.
Cheers Mark, here’s to many more of these conversations.
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(if you liked that song, there are more at http://www.michaelkrahn.com . Shameless self-promotion, I know, but this is MY blog after all.)
Ha! Finally got back to you on this. Sorry to be away at a time when things were heating up. We were down in Yellowstone National Park at the perfect time of year to be there, so there. Has to be that way.
Regarding indoctrination of children, you say you will share truth with your children as you see it, and doubt where you experience it. It is the notion of ‘truth’ that troubles me, as the definition of truth, as I see you use it, is “things I believe to be true.”
I had many truths shared with me when I was a child – they were implanted in my head before I had enough of a brain to think critically. What you are saying is exactly what my elders did to me as a child.
Let’s face it – you want to implant your truth before someone else implants theirs. Raise a child in the woods, free of outside influence, and will that child learn of Jesus or transubstantiation? Of course not. These are the truths in operation in the religious world. They are the ones being implanted in children as we speak.
So I say that your answer is no answer – you say that you won’t lie to your children, only tell them truth. But you do not leave it to them to judge the worthiness of that truth.
Round and round she goes ….
MT
As I was reading The God Delusion, I was perplexed as to what criteria Dawkins was using to determine which worldviews count as “child abuse” or indoctrination and which do not. What would prevent someone from arguing that teaching kids that there is nothing humanly relevant that cannot be discovered via the methods of science is indoctrination?
I’m a parent of young children as well, and I am well aware that I will likely be teaching my kids some things now that I will one day come to second guess. Having said that, I am convinced that it is possible to raise children within a religious tradition and at the same time communicate the importance of critical thinking. The two categories (“thinking for oneself” and “being committed to a religious tradition”) are not mutually exclusive, despite what Dawkins seems to think.
Someone on wikipedia put it plainly.
“[Indoctrination] is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned.”
“Instruction in the basic principles of science, in particular, can not properly be called indoctrination, in the sense that the fundamental principals of science call for critical self-evaluation and skeptical scrutiny of one’s own ideas.”