Teaching Your Children the Faith Doesn’t Mean Indoctrinating Them

Michael Brendan Dougherty corrects Richard Dawkins on the noted atheist’s scanty understanding of religious instruction and his stupid, supercilious charge that raising children religious is psychological child abuse, explaining that passing on the faith to one’s children can and should involve teaching the children to think for themselves, ask their own questions, and hear the opposition.

This section in particular warmed the cockles of my hermeneutic heart:

Notice the language he uses: force, indoctrinate. And the implication that religious kids cannot think for themselves. Of course, I don’t intend to force religious convictions on my children or indoctrinate them any more than I intend to force on them good manners, or indoctrinate them in the conviction that “might does not make right.” I simply intend to teach, guide, instruct, and correct. Rarely will that even involve formal lessons. Most of it will simply be implied.

[…]

The little expressions, eye rolls, and groans that parents attach to ideas, people, dress, or even dinner plates pass on good or harmful lessons without ever presenting themselves as “indoctrination.” So, too, do the books on the shelves, and the books that come off the shelves more frequently than others. These are the very things that teach children how to situate themselves in the home, in the world, in their social class — how to value themselves or others.

Han-Georg Gadamer would be proud. Richard Dawkins himself cannot escape some religious instruction because he’s situated in a society formed by multiple religious traditions. He rejects these traditions and the teachings and practices they bear, but he can’t separate himself from them. They inform his world, his worldview, and his thinking. It’s in this context that Dawkins has learned to situate himself against the forces of religion. Religion is part of his being-in-the-world.

Dawkins doesn’t want “un-evidenced opinions about the nature of life or the cosmos” forced on children. Great. I agree. But you seldom need to force these things. They come with living in any society. An atheist society too would have its traditions and their accompanying prejudices, assumptions, and un-evidenced opinions about the nature of life or the cosmos. No one lives on evidence alone.

Admittedly, I teach my children to take more after Michael Brendan Dougherty than Richard Dawkins. Like a lot more.

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