Consider one of the more striking recent reports. According to ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) in 2001, the three categories with the largest gain in membership since the previous survey of 1990 were evangelical/born-again (42 percent), nondenominational (37 percent), and no religion (23 percent). These data support the view that evangelicalism is growing in the U.S.A., but they also support the view that secularism is on the rise. We are apparently becoming polarized, as many informal observers have recently maintained. Why? Is it because, as supply-siders such as Stark and Finke think, only the most costly religions can compete with no religion at all in the marketplace for our time and resources? Or is it that the more we learn about nature, the more science strikes many people as leaving something out, something that only an antiscience perspective can seem to supply? Or is there some other explanation?
Before we jump in to explain the data, we should ask how sure we are of the assumptions used in gathering them. Just how reliable are the data, and how were they gathered? (Telephone inquiry, in the case of ARIS, not written questionnaire.) What checks were used to avoid biasing context? What other questions were people asked? How long did it take to conduct the interview? And then there are offbeat questions that might have answers that mattered: What had happened in the news on the day the poll was conducted? Did the interviewer have an accent? And so on.7 Large-scale surveys are expensive to conduct, and nobody spends thousands of dollars gathering data using a casually designed âinstrumentâ (questionnaire). Much research has been devoted to identifying the sources of bias and artifact in survey research. When should you use a simple yes/no question (and donât forget to include the important âI donât knowâ option), and when should you use a five-point Likert scale (such as the familiar strongly agree, tend to agree, uncertain, tend to disagree, strongly disagree)? When ARIS did its survey in 1990, the first question was: âWhat is your religion?â In 2001, the question was amended: âWhat is your religion, if any?â How much of the increase in Non-denominational and No religion was due to the change in wording? Why was the âif anyâ phrase added?
In the course of writing How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God (2nd ed., 2003), Michael Shermer, the director of the Skeptic Society, conducted an ambitious survey of religious convictions. The results are fascinating, in part because they differ so strikingly from the results found in other, similar surveys. Most recent surveys find approximately 90 percent of Americans believe in Godâand not just an âessenceâ God, but a God who answers prayers. In Shermerâs survey, only 64 percent said they believed in Godâand 25 percent said they disbelieved in God (p. 79). Thatâs a huge discrepancy, and it is not due to any simple sampling error (such as sending the questionnaires to known skeptics!).8 Shermer speculates that education is the key. His survey asked people to respond in their own words to âan open-ended essay questionâ explaining why they believed in God:
As it turns out, the people who completed our survey were significantly more educated than the average American, and higher education is associated with lower religiosity. According to the U.S. Census Bureau for 1998, one-quarter of Americans over twenty-five years old have completed their bachelorâs degree, whereas in our sample the corresponding rate was almost two-thirds. (It is hard to say why this was the case, but one possibility is that educated people are more likely to complete a moderately complicated survey.) [p. 79]
But (as my student David Polk pointed out) once self-selection is acknowledged as a serious factor, we should ask the further question: who would take time to fill out such a questionnaire? Probably only those with the strongest beliefs. People who just donât think religion is important are unlikely to fill out a questionnaire that involves composing answers to questions. Only one out of ten of the people who received the mailed-out survey returned it, a relatively low rate of return, so we canât draw any interesting conclusions from his 64 percent figure, as he acknowledges (Shermer and Sulloway, in press).9
3 What shall we tell the children?
It was the schoolboy who said, âFaith is believing what you know ainât so.â
âMark Twain
A research topic of particular urgency, but also particular ethical and political sensitivity, is the effect of religious upbringing and education on young children. There is an ocean of research, some good, some bad, on early-childhood development, on language learning and nutrition and parental behavior and the effect of peers and just about every other imaginable variable that can be measured in the first dozen years of a personâs life, but almost all of thisâso far as I can determineâcarefully sidesteps religion, which is still largely terra incognita. Sometimes there are very goodâindeed, unimpeachableâethical reasons for this. All the carefully erected and protected barriers to injurious medical research with human subjects apply with equal force to any research we might imagine conducting on variations in religious upbringing. We arenât going to do placebo studies in which group A memorizes one catechism while group B memorizes a different catechism and group C memorizes nonsense syllables. We arenât going to do cross-fostering studies in which babies of Islamic parents are switched with babies of Catholic parents. These are clearly off limits, and should remain so. But what are the limits? The question is important, because, as we try to design indirect and noninvasive ways of getting at the evidence we seek, we will confront the sort of trade-offs that regularly confront researchers looking for medical cures. Perfectly risk-free research on these topics is probably impossible. What counts as informed consent, and how much risk may even those who consent be permitted to tolerate? And whose consent? The parentsâ or the childrenâs?
All these policy questions lie unexamined in the shadows cast by the first spell, the one that says that religion is out of bounds, period. We should not pretend that this is benign neglect on our part, since we know full well that under the protective umbrellas of personal privacy and religious freedom there are widespread practices in which parents subject their own children to treatments that would send any researcher, clinical or otherwise, to jail. What are the rights of parents in such circumstances, and âwhere do we draw the lineâ? This is a political question that can be settled not by discovering âthe answerâ but by working out an answer that is acceptable to as many informed people as possible.
It will not please everybody, any more than our current laws and practices regarding the consumption of alcoholic beverages please everybody. Prohibition was tried, and by general consensusâfar from unanimousâit was determined to be a failure. The current understanding is quite stable; we are unlikely to go back to Prohibition anytime soon. But there are still laws forbidding the sale of alcoholic beverages to minors (with age varying by country). And there are plenty of gray areas: what should we do if we find parents giving alcohol to their children? At the ball game, the parents may get in trouble, but what about in the privacy of their own homes? And there is a difference between a glass of champagne at big sisterâs wedding, and a six-pack of beer every evening while trying to do homework. When do the authorities have not just the right but the obligation to step in and prevent abuse? Tough questions, and they donât get easier when the topic is religion, not alcohol. In the case of alcohol, our political wisdom is importantly informed by what we have learned about the short-term and long-term effects of imbibing it, but in the case of religion weâre still flying blind.
Some people will scoff at the very idea that a religious upbringing could be harmful to a childâuntil they reflect on some of the more severe religious regimens to be found around the world, and recognize that in the United States we already prohibit religious practices that are widespread in other parts of the world. Richard Dawkins goes further. He has proposed that no child should ever be identified as a Catholic child or a Muslim child (or an atheist child), since this identification in itse
lf prejudges decisions that have yet to be properly considered.
Weâd be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isnât it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant? [2003b]
Or imagine if we identified children from birth as young smokers or drinking children because their parents smoked or drank. In this regard (and no other) Dawkins reminds me of my grandfather, a physician who was way ahead of his time back in the 1950s, writing impassioned letters to the editors of the Boston newspapers, railing against the secondhand smoke that was endangering the health of children whose parents smoked at homeâand we all laughed at him, and went on smoking. How much harm could that little bit of smoke do anyone? Weâve found out.
Everybody quotes (or misquotes) the Jesuits, âGive me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man,â but nobodyânot the Jesuits or anybody elseâreally knows how resilient children are. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of young people turning their backs on their religious traditions after years of immersion and walking away with a shrug and a smile and no visible ill effects. On the other hand, some children are raised in such an ideological prison that they willingly become their own jailers, as Nicholas Humphrey (1999) has put it, forbidding themselves any contact with the liberating ideas that might well change their minds. In his deeply thoughtful essay, âWhat Shall We Tell the Children?,â Humphrey pioneers the consideration of the ethical issues involved in deciding how to decide âwhen and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensibleâ (p. 68). He proposes a general test based on the principle of informed consent, but appliedâas it must beâhypothetically: what would these children choose if they were, later in life, somehow given the information they would need in order to make an informed choice? Against the objection that we cannot answer such hypothetical questions, he argues that there is in fact plenty of empirical evidence, and general principles, from which clear conclusions can be conscientiously derived. We take ourselves to be sometimes permitted, and even obligated, to make such conscientious decisions on behalf of people who cannot, for one reason or another, make an informed decision for themselves, and this set of problems can be addressed using the understanding that we have already hammered out in the workshop of political consensus on these other topics.
The resolution of these dilemmas is not (yet) obvious, to say the least. Compare it with the closely related issue of what we, on the outside, should do about the Sentinelese and the Jarawas and the other peoples who still live a stone-age existence in remarkable isolation on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, far out in the Indian Ocean. These people have managed to keep even the most intrepid explorers and traders at bay for centuries by their ferocious bow-and-arrow defense of their island territories, so little is known about them, and for some time now the government of India, of which the islands form a distant part, has prohibited all contact with them. Now that they have been drawn to the worldâs attention in the wake of the great tsunami of December 2004, it is hard to imagine that this isolation can be maintained, but even if it could be, should it be? Who has the right to decide the matter? Certainly not the anthropologists, although they have worked hard to protect these people from contactâeven with themselvesâfor decades. Who are they to âprotectâ these human beings? The anthropologists do not own them as if they were laboratory specimens carefully gathered and shielded from contamination, and the idea that these islands should be treated as a human zoo or preserve is offensiveâeven when we contemplate the even more offensive alternative of opening the doors to missionaries of all faiths, who would no doubt eagerly rush in to save their souls.
It is tempting, but illusory, to think that they have solved the ethical problem for us, by their adult decision to drive away all outsiders without asking if they are protectors, exploiters, investigators, or soul-savers. They clearly want to be left alone, so we should leave them alone! There are two problems with this convenient proposal: Their decision is so manifestly ill informed that if we let it trump all other considerations are we not as culpable as somebody who lets a person drink a poisoned cocktail âof his own free willâ without deigning to warn him? And in any case, although the adults may have reached the age of consent, are their children not being victimized by the ignorance of their parents? We would never permit a neighborâs child to be kept so deluded, so shouldnât we cross the ocean and step in to rescue these children, however painful the shock?
Do you feel a slight adrenaline surge at this moment? I find that this issue of parental rights versus childrenâs rights has no clear rivals for triggering emotional responses in place of reasoned responses, and I suspect that this is one place where a genetic factor is playing a quite direct role. In mammals and birds who must care for their offspring the instinct to protect oneâs young from all outside interference is universal and extremely potent; we will risk our lives unhesitatinglyâunthinkinglyâto fend off threats, real or imagined. Itâs like a reflex. And in this case, we can âfeel in our bonesâ that parents do have the right to raise their children the way they see fit. Never make the mistake of wandering in between a mother bear and her cub, and nothing should come between parents and their children. Thatâs the core of âfamily values.â At the same time, we do have to admit that parents donât literally own their children (the way slaveowners once owned slaves), but are, rather, their stewards or guardians and ought to be held accountable by outsiders for their guardianship, which does imply that outsiders have a right to interfereâwhich sets off that adrenaline alarm again. When we find that what we feel in our bones is hard to defend in the court of reason, we get defensive and testy, and start looking around for something to hide behind. How about a sacred and (hence) unquestionable bond? Ah, thatâs the ticket!
There is an obvious (but seldom discussed) tension between the supposedly sacred principles invoked at this point. On the one hand, many declare, there is the sacred and inviolable right to life: every unborn child has a right to life, and no prospective parent has the right to terminate a pregnancy (except maybe if the motherâs life is itself in jeopardy). On the other hand, many of the same people declare that, once born, the child loses its right not to be indoctrinated or brainwashed or otherwise psychologically abused by those parents, who have the right to raise the child with any upbringing they choose, short of physical torture. Let us spread the value of freedom throughout the worldâbut not to children, apparently. No child has a right to freedom from indoctrination. Shouldnât we change that? What, and let outsiders have a say in how I raise my kids? (Now do you feel the adrenaline rush?)
While we wrestle with the questions about the Andaman Islanders, we can see that we are laying the political foundations for similar questions about religious upbringing in general. We shouldnât assume, while worrying over the likely effects, that the seductions of Western culture will automatically swamp all the fragile treasures of other cultures. It is worth noting that many Muslim women, raised under conditions that many non-Muslim women would consider intolerable, when given informed opportunities to abandon their veils and many of their other traditions, choose instead to maintain them.
Maybe people everywhere can be trusted, and hence allowed to make their own informed choices. Informed choice! What an amazing and revolutionary idea! Maybe people should be trusted to make choices, not necessarily the choices we would recommend to them, but the choices that have the best chance of satisfying their considered goals. But what do we teach them until they are informed enough and mature enough to decide for themselves? We teach them about all the worldâs religions, in a matter-of-fact, historically and biologically informed way, the same way w
e teach them about geography and history and arithmetic. Letâs get more education about religion into our schools, not less. We should teach our children creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals, texts and music, and when we cover the history of religion, we should include both the positiveâthe role of the churches in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, the flourishing of science and the arts in early Islam, and the role of the Black Muslims in bringing hope, honor, and self-respect to the otherwise shattered lives of many inmates in our prisons, for instanceâand the negativeâthe Inquisition, anti-Semitism over the ages, the role of the Catholic Church in spreading AIDS in Africa through its opposition to condoms. No religion should be favored, and none ignored. And as we discover more and more about the biological and psychological bases of religious practices and attitudes, these discoveries should be added to the curriculum, the same way we update our education about science, health, and current events. This should all be part of the mandated curriculum for both public schools and home-schooling.
Breaking the Spell Page 35