Religion and children

Children usually acquire the religious views of their parents, although they may also be influenced by others they communicate with such as peers and teachers. Aspects of this subject include rites of passage, education and child psychology, as well as discussion of the moral issue of religious education of children.

Rites of passage

A Roman Catholic infant baptism in the United States.

Main article: Rite of passage

Most Christian churches practice infant baptism to enter children into the faith. Some form of confirmation ritual occurs when the child has reached the age of reason and voluntarily accepts the religion.

Ritual circumcision is used to mark Jewish and Muslim infant males as belonging to the faith. Jewish boys and girls then confirm their belonging at a coming of age ceremony known as the Bar and Bat Mitzvah respectively.

Education

Religious education

A parochial school (US) or faith school (UK), is a type of school which engages in religious education in addition to conventional education. Parochial schools may be primary or secondary, and may have state funding but varying amounts of control by a religious organization. In addition there are religious schools which only teach the religion and subsidiary subjects (such as the language of the holy books), typically run on a part time basis separate from normal schooling. Examples are the Christian Sunday schools and the Jewish Hebrew schools. Islamic religious schools are known in English by the Arabic loanword Madrasah.

Prayer in school

Main article: School prayer

Religion may have an influence on what goes on in state schools. For example, in the UK the Education Act 1944 introduced the requirement for daily prayers in all state-funded schools, but later acts changed this requirement to a daily "collective act of worship", the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 being the most recent. This also requires such acts of worship to be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". The term "mainly" means that acts related to other faiths can be carried out providing the majority are Christian.

Teaching evolution

Main article: Creation and evolution in public education

The creation-evolution controversy, especially the status of creation and evolution in public education, is a debate over teaching children the origin and evolution of life, mostly in conservative regions of the United States. However, Evolution is accepted by the Catholic Church and is a part of the Catholic Catechism.

Display of religious symbols

See also: Laïcité

In France, children are forbidden from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in public schools.

Religious education of children

Further information: Criticism of religion#Indoctrination of children

Several authors have been critical of religious indoctrination of children, such as Nicolas Humphrey, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins use the term child abuse to describe the harm that some religious upbringings inflict on children. They claim that children are especially vulnerable to mental harms related to religion, including:

• Terrorized by threats of punishment, such as eternal damnation in a fiery hell
• Extreme guilt about normal, healthy sexual functions
• Trained to disrespect science and reason
• Indoctrinated into a particular religious faith, thus depriving the child of the opportunity to make their own free inquiry later, when they are mature.

However, this is disputed for several reasons:

• Christian parents tend not to threaten their children with with hell and generally take the more Biblical stance that only the unrepentantly evil go to Hell.
• Christians tend to teach their children that sex is part of the sacred bond of marriage and view sex outside of marriage as being reckless since it carries the inherent risk of creating children, as well as sexual diseases. Christians tend not to be opposed to sex but instead think that it should be abstained from until marriage .
• Certain hard-line Christian groups have become opposed to certain branches of science due to the perception that they are anti-Christian or seeking to do away with Christianity. However, this is not the case in most mainstream Christian groups such as the Roman Catholic Church, who own and run their own scientific facilities, such as the Vatican Observatory and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and give money to scientific causes, such as adult stem cell research.
• Peter Hitchens, brother of Christopher Hitchens, notes that this claim is part of Dawkins's stated goal of removing the right and freedom of parents to bring up children in their own beliefs as well as forcing them to indocrinate their children with certain atheistic beliefs, which he also notes was one method used to stamp out religion in the Soviet Union. Teaching a child about a religion, or in any particular philosophy or ideology, does not mean they will keep to it for the rest of their lives, many people, such as Dawkins himself go on to change beliefs later in life.

Dawkins has written a children's book that seeks to convince them of what he deems to be the fallacy of various religious teachings and states that he is angered by the labels "Muslim child" or "Catholic child". He asks how a young child can be considered intellectually mature 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." He suggests there is little controversy over such labelling because of the "weirdly privileged status of religion".

On several occasions Dawkins has also made the controversial claim that sexually abusing a child is "arguably less" damaging than "the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up a child Catholic in the first place". This claim was later refuted by Vox Day who asks "what kind of evidence is there that Dawkins's controversial assertion of the greater long-term psychological damage inflicted upon children who are raised Catholic than upon those who are sexually abused? He first provides anecdotal information from one woman who was raised Catholic, was sexually abused by a priest, and later had nightmares about Hell....Despite posing the proposition as a comparison, Dawkins does not bother to consider what, if any, the negative effects of childhood sexual trauma might happen to be in order to compare them with a comprehensive list of Catholic horrors." and notes that "half" of the anecdotes Dawkins cites in favour of his case "aren't even related to Catholicism". Vox cites a study by Dr Jonathan R.T. Davidson of the Duke University Medical Centre concluding that the chances of attempted suicide in sexually abused women was three times higher if the abuse happened before the age of sixteen and that women who were sexually abused were six times as likely to attempt suicide than those who had not been. It is also reported by the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry that women over the age of fifty with a diagnosis of severe depression are sixty-seven percent more likely to have a history of multiple suicide attempts if they had been had been sexually abused as children and that middle-aged women who had suffered childhood sexual abuse were more likely to have at least one other severe mental illness and were more likely to have a history of substance abuse. . According to the American Journal of Psychiatry religious persons, of whom most were brought up in their particular faith, had better mental health than non-religious subjects, were less likely to attempt suicide, had fewer fist-degree relatives who committed suicide and that "In terms of clinical characteristics, religiously unaffiliated subjects had more lifetime impulsivity, aggression, and past substance abuse disorder." Vox also cites an American study which "showed that the proportion of Catholics in a region was negatively correlated with suicide rates" and a study by the World Health Organisation stating that predominately Catholic Countries have an average suicide rate of 4.3 per 100,000 as well as noting that "it is the countries of the former Soviet Union that have the highest rates of suicide" with an average of 31.1 suicides per 100,000 people. Vox concludes that "While there is no evidence that being raised Catholic is more psychologically damaging than being sexually abused as a child, there is a great deal of evidence proving the opposite".

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of the subject in 19th century:

"And as the capacity for believing is strongest in childhood, special care is taken to make sure of this tender age. This has much more to do with the doctrines of belief taking root than threats and reports of miracles. If, in early childhood, certain fundamental views and doctrines are paraded with unusual solemnity, and an air of the greatest earnestness never before visible in anything else; if, at the same time, the possibility of a doubt about them be completely passed over, or touched upon only to indicate that doubt is the first step to eternal perdition, the resulting impression will be so deep that, as a rule, that is, in almost every case, doubt about them will be almost as impossible as doubt about one's own existence."

— Arthur Schopenhauer, On Religion: A Dialogue

Child marriage

Main article: Child marriage

Islam has permitted the child marriage of older men to girls as young as 10 years of age. The Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children describes cases of a 10 year old girl being married and raped in Yemen (Nujood Ali), a 13 year old Yemeni girl dying of internal bleeding three days after marriage, and a 12 year old girl dying in childbirth after marriage.

Latter Day Saint church founder Joseph Smith married girls as young as 13 and 14, and other Latter Day Saints married girls as young as 10. The The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints eliminated underaged marriages in the 19th century, but several fundamentalist branches of Mormonism continue the practice.

Health effects

A study of children ages six to 19 found children who attend religious services are at lower risk of suicide or suicide attempts, as well as alcohol and drug use and dangerous sexual behavior. Some religions prohibit blood transfusions, vaccinations, contraception, and abortions, which may lead to adverse health consequences. Membership in religious groups can moderate unhealthy behavior, provide social support, and enhance marital or financial prospects, and strengthen family bonds if the religion is shared by the whole family. Religions can also help both adults and children with self esteem, as well as provide meaning to life and reduce anxiety, but can increase guilt over perceived misdeeds.

85 percent of religiously affiliated children are healthy overall, as opposed to 79 percent of atheist or agnostic children. 79 percent of religious children are deemed psychologically healthy compared to 73 percent of non religious children. 85 percent of children who attend church at least weekly are healthy and 83 percent of those who seldom or never attend are healthy. For psychological health the numbers are 82 and 74 percent respectively.

62 percent of children say religion is important to them, 26 percent say it's somewhat important, and 13 percent say it's not important. 81 percent of those who view religion as important were found to be healthy and 65 percent of the not important group were healthy. There was no difference found among the various religious denominations in regard to health. The positive correlation between religion and health was strongest for 12-15 year olds. Overall religious belief and participation have the same positive health effect as being breastfed or having a mother who went to school 2.2 years longer than one who didn't. It has half the health benefit of living with both parents. Why religious belief and participation had these positive correlations was however unknown.

Medical care

Saint Francis Borgia performing an exorcism, by Goya

See also: Exorcism and Faith healing

Some religions treat illness, both mental and physical, in a manner that does not heal, and in some cases exacerbates the problem. Specific examples include faith healing of certain Christian sects, the Christian Science religion which eschews medical care, and exorcisms.

Faith based practices for healing purposes have come into direct conflict with both the medical profession and the law when victims of these practices are harmed, or in the most extreme cases, killed by these "cures." A detailed study in 1998 found 140 instances of deaths of children due to religion-based medical neglect. Most of these cases involved religious parents relying on prayer to cure the child's disease, and withholding medical care.

Jehovah's Witnesses object to blood transfusion primarily on religious grounds, they believe that blood is sacred and God said "abstain from blood" (Acts 15:28-29).

Religion as a by-product of children's attributes

Dawkins proposes that religion is a by-product arising from other features of the human species that are adaptive. One such feature is the tendency of children to "believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you" (Dawkins, 2006, p. 174).

The psychologist Paul Bloom sees religion as a by-product of children's instinctive tendency toward a dualistic view of the world, and a predisposition towards creationism. Deborah Kelemen has also written that children are naturally teleologists, assigning a purpose to everything they come across.

See also

• Abortion and religion
• Children's rights
• Daugherty v. Vanguard
• Emmanuel Schools Foundation
• Homeschooling
• Islam and children
• Kumari (children)
• Lost boys (Mormon fundamentalism)
• Preacher's kid
• Religious freedom
• Religious male circumcision
• Religious views on female genital mutilation
• Youth ministry

External links

• Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality By John Hartung Skeptic, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1995. Includes the responses of Israeli children to the account of the Battle of Jericho in the Book of Joshua.