Religion and children

A Roman Catholic infant baptism in the United States.

Most Christian denominations practice infant baptism[1] 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 and Coptic Christian[2] and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian[3] 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.

Many legal experts have argued that the government should create laws in the interests of the welfare of children, irrespective of the religion of their parents.[6] Nicholas Humphrey has argued that children "have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas," and should have the ability to question the religious views of their parents.[7]

In "Parents' religion and children's welfare: debunking the doctrine of parents' rights," philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of the subject in the 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

Several authors have been critical of religious indoctrination of children, such as Nicholas Humphrey,[8] Daniel Dennett[9] and Richard Dawkins.[10] Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins use the term child abuse to describe the harm that some religious upbringings inflict on children.[11][12] A. C. Grayling has argued "we are all born atheists... and it takes a certain amount of work on the part of the adults in our community to persuade [children] differently."[13]

Dawkins 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"[lower-alpha 1] or a "Tory child."[11] He suggests there is little controversy over such labeling because of the "weirdly privileged status of religion".

On several occasions, Dawkins made the 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".[11]

Dawkins wrote an illustrated scientific book for children, The Magic of Reality, in which some natural phenomena that have usually left explained to them by means of the action of gods or other mythical creatures are demystified. Each chapter is devoted to a single natural phenomenon, such as earthquakes, always starting with a myth or folklore of world's major religions followed by an actual scientific explanation that debunks the latter.[14]

Some scholars of Islam[15] have permitted the child marriage of older men to girls as young as 10 years of age if they have entered puberty. The Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children describes cases of a 10-year-old girl being married and raped in Yemen (Nujood Ali),[16] a 13-year-old Yemeni girl dying of internal bleeding three days after marriage,[17][18] and a 12-year-old girl dying in childbirth after marriage.[15][19]

Latter Day Saint church founder Joseph Smith married girls as young as 13 and 14,[20] and other Latter Day Saints married girls as young as 10.[21] 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.[22]

Dawkins proposes that religion is a by-product arising from other features of the human species that are adaptive.[10] One such feature is the tendency of children to "believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you" (Dawkins, 2006, p. 174).

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.[10][29] Deborah Kelemen has also written that children are naturally teleologists, assigning a purpose to everything they come across.[30]

• Children's rights
• Daugherty v. Vanguard
• Emmanuel Schools Foundation
• Freedom of religion
• Homeschooling
• Islam and children
• Lost boys (Mormon fundamentalism)
• Preacher's kid
• Religion and abortion
• Religious male circumcision

• 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.