Teaching children theology through relationships and wonder
February 28, 2024
Theological instruction starts soon after life starts, it turns out. Which is to say that children begin to grasp at least a little bit about God and eternal matters based on how adults treat them and what questions children are allowed to ask.
This Sojourners article explores some of this in ways that may help you -- as a parent, grandparent or simply an adult -- guide children into a generative life of faith in which they learn that they may never have all the answers so it's perfectly fine to keep asking questions about the divine.
The author of the piece, Bekah McNeel, begins this way:
I asked my 3-year-old niece, Ember, what she learned in church. She said she learned about Jesus. “Who is Jesus?” I asked. “Where does he live?” She looked at me like I was an idiot, and then said, “Jesus is in our heart. Jesus helps us not be scared and not be afraid.”
It was the kind of simple, childlike answer I expected, but when I relayed it to Amittia Parker, a researcher and children’s mental health expert at Georgetown University’s Center for Child and Human Development, she said that it points to something important: the experience of theology.
Just because young children are not cognitively able to absorb abstract concepts, or even many of the details of a Bible story, they can still be shaped by a church environment, she said. More than a specific curriculum, Parker explained that young children learn about God through the way people at church talk to each other, treat each other and the various rituals and social behaviors they observe.
“Through repeated interactions over time, the young child learns about themselves and others,” Parker said. “Now and later [a church can] imprint in a young child’s mind that the church is a place where you can find healing and encouragement.”
Sojourners is a Christian publication, but what McNeel writes is applicable to any faith tradition.
I was intrigued by her niece's answer that "Jesus is in our heart." That is exactly the answer that my stepson, a special-needs adult, gives when the subject of Jesus comes up. Somehow Chris, 53, who functions at roughly a five-year-old level, understands that Jesus is a friend who loves him but isn't present physically. Instead, he is always with us because he dwells within us.
I am imagining children who have been the victims of abuse, especially abuse by members of the clergy. What can they possibly think about the god preached by such people? Where was this god when the abuse was going on? Did this god care nothing about the child's welfare at an unimaginably vulnerable time?
Yes, children learn from books, including sacred scripture, but they learn even more from the actions of people, especially people they should be able to trust in any situation. When such people fail children, it's very much as if those kids experience the failure of God, in whose image everyone is made.
McNeel quotes a Texas pastor as suggesting that "seeing the details and events of the Bible as a static, exclusive answer book for everything we can possibly know about God (what some scholars call biblicism) can lead to a religious practice that is restrictive or even irrelevant."
The religious world is full of written words in scripture, statements of faith, rules of conduct and so much more. How much better it would be if children were allowed to come to an understanding of all those words if they got there by a journey that started with "I wonder. . ." instead of an adult's dogmatic statement that begins, "Here's the truth. . ."
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LET'S FOCUS REACTION TO ALABAMA'S IVF DECISION ON THE LAW, NOT RELIGION
The reaction to the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision that an embryo is a child has been loud and long. No surprise. But recent commentary about it has focused on how the widespread negative reaction to it may be an indication of how the decision will help Democrats in the upcoming congressional and presidential elections.
Instead, religion scholar Mark Silk in this Religion News Service column pays attention to how the decision has almost no legal justification under Alabama or U.S. law. Silk doesn't use this phrase, but you may think of the court's ruling as the 2024 equivalent of the 1857 Dred Scott slavery decision. There's nothing wrong with public officials being influenced in their policy choices by what their religion teaches them. There is, however, something badly wrong with public officials who seek to impose their religious views through legislation or judicial decisions on American citizens. That's an abuse both of religion and of their power as legislators or part of the judiciary.