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Do We Brainwash Our Children By Teaching Them About God?
In his best-selling book The God Delusion, atheist Richard Dawkins writes: “Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you…Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.”
I agree with Dawkins’ basic point, insofar as he means: “allow your children to come to their own conclusions.” But Dawkins—a staunch atheist—is really saying, “Don’t brainwash your children by telling them God is real.”
I wonder: what did Dawkins teach his daughter when she was young? While I can only guess, Dawkins’ very public and well-documented opinion that belief in God borders on insanity leads me to assume he likely taught his daughter that God is nothing more than a fairy tale. If so, did he indoctrinate his own child?
Regardless of what Dawkins told his young child about God, I am confident he taught her something she should do and believe. What good parent would not insist their children brush their teeth before going to bed, not spit on or bite people, refrain from lying, share with others and be respectful of adults? Is it brainwashing our children to teach them basic moral behavior? Why not?
The fact is, if something is true (or at least we believe it to be true) we are going to teach that to our children. Teaching them what we believe to be true (in our case, God exists) is not brainwashing them.
We cannot force our children to believe anything, but we can give them the skills to make their own rational choices. Yet as Christians, if our own faith in God is blind (we don’t know why we believe but we do anyway), can we really be sure we are not brainwashing them? Do we really believe it ourselves?
Scripture instructs to teach our children about God, but also cautions against doing their thinking for them. Notice this progression in Deuteronomy 6: Moses commanded the Israelites to teach their children to love God and keep His commandments (vv. 4-7). When those children would later ask about the meaning of God’s commands, parents were to explain all God’s mighty works as the reason why they were to fear God (vv. 20-25). In other words, teach them the what when they’re young, then teach them the why when they’re older.
Apparently, this generation failed to teach the why: “And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel” (Judg. 2:10). They may have taught the commands, but not the reason for those commands. We must not make the same mistake.
If anything, this impresses us with the importance of molding our children’s hearts today, modeling godliness and faithfulness today, and growing in our own faith today, so that “in time to come” when they ask us those hard questions, we will be prepared to help them seek truth for themselves.
