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.
Most Christian denominations 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 and Coptic Christian and Ethiopian Orthodox Christian 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
A young Muslim couple and their toddler at Masjid al-Haram, Makkah, Saudi Arabia.
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
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
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
In France, children are forbidden from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in public schools.
Religious indoctrination of children
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. 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.
"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 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. 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."
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" or a "Tory child." 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".
Dawkins wrote an illustrated scientific book for children, The Magic of Reality,
in which some natural phenomena that's usually left explained to them
by means of the action of gods or other mythical creatures are
demystified. Each chapter book 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.
Child marriage
Some scholars of Islam has 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), 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 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 2604 US children ages six to nineteen found positive
correlations between physical and psychological health and religious
affiliation and/or church attendance.
This included 272 children whose parents (children 6–9) or the children
themselves (12–19) expressed no religious affiliation. However, of
this group, 22% state that religion is important and 35% attend church.
The study found children ages six to nineteen 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.
Thus it is not clear whether this positive association is because of a
positive effect of religion on health, an effect in the other direction,
or an as of yet unknown lurking variable.
85 percent of religiously affiliated children are healthy
overall, as opposed to 79 percent of non-affiliated 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
association as being breastfed or having a mother who went to school 2.2
years longer than one who didn't. They have half the health benefit of
living with both parents. Whether this association is a causal
relationship in either direction (religion to good health or good health
to religion) remains to be seen.
Medical care
Saint Francis Borgia performing an exorcism, by Goya
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).
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.
