1928

This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful “expert” that we ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as possible alternatives. Don’t these good people realize that they are reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity?

Religion, like language, is a social product. The potentialities for both are in the child, but their highest articulations are the result of ages of cultural and spiritual experience, and in the right kind of religious education the experience of the race is joined with the inclinations of the individual. We do not get a higher type of religious idealism from children merely by withholding our own religious ideas from them (however they may be filled with error), any more than we would get a higher type of civilization by letting some group of youngsters shift for themselves upon a desert island.

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections. More probably it assures the repetition of past errors. We ought of course to cultivate a wholesome scepticism in our young people so that they will not accept the ideas of the past too slavishly. But appreciation must come before criticism.

We do not teach a child the limitations of Beethoven before we have helped it to appreciate him; nor do we withhold any appreciation of the classics in order that the child might be free to prefer Stravinsky to Beethoven. What some of these moderns are doing is simply to destroy the organs of religious insight and the atmosphere in which religious attitudes may flourish, ostensibly for the sake of freedom, but really at its expense.

I have a dark suspicion that some of these modern religious educators do not really know what religion is about. They want a completely rational faith and do not realize that they are killing religion by a complete rationalization. With all their pious phraseology and supposedly modern pedagogy they really are decadent forces.

Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it. Nature has wisely ordained that faith shall have an early advantage in the life of the child to compensate for its later difficulties. If we imagine that we help the progress of the race by inoculating children with a premature sophistication we are of all men most miserable. Reason, without the balance of faith, destroys a civilization soon enough, without giving it this advantage among the young. I wonder if any of these modern religious pedagogues have ever read Unamuno’s “The Tragic Sense of Life”?

Here I am talking like a fundamentalist. But why not? If we must choose between types of fanaticism is there any particular reason why we should prefer the fanatics who destroy a vital culture in the name of freedom and reason to those who try to strangle a new culture at birth in the name of authority and dogma? The latter type of fanaticism is bound to end in futility. The growth of reason cannot be stopped by dogma. But the former type is dangerous because it easily enervates a rational culture with ennui and despair.