Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence

Ronald Goldman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032197494
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000533507
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1964, Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence describes the capacities of pupils of varying ages, abilities and backgrounds to understand religious truths. How concepts of the Bible, of God, of Jesus, of Prayer and of the Church developed from the early years is seen within the psychological context of maturing thought, and the implications for religious education, which are provocative and far-reaching, are explored. Teachers, clergy and parents will find this book a challenge to reconsider not only how the growing child views what he is taught but also the reasons why he frequently misunderstands religious teaching. By presenting a systematic account of religious thinking from 6 to 17 years, Dr. Goldman adds a new dimension to our insights into child development.

Chapter One THE PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS THINKING

DOI: 10.4324/9781003260684-1

KING SOLOMON must have been fond of animals, because he had many wives and one thousand porcupines.’ The child who made this statement is not only somewhat defective in terms of sex education, but he also reveals one of the problems of childish thinking. We can all quote ‘howlers’ of this kind made by children as they try to understand their world. This is especially so when the child attempts to explore the complex world of religion. Arnold Gesell (Gesell and Ilg, 1946) quotes a discussion between an older and a younger child. The younger child is firmly convinced that Pontius Pilate is a tree, because they say in church that ‘Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate’. The older child argues persuasively that he is a man, not a tree, until the younger one concedes the point. Still puzzled he says grudgingly, ‘Well, if he is a man he’s a very pontius man.’ We could go on to quote children’s malversions of the Lord’s Prayer, such as ‘Harold be thy name’, or the six-year-old praying:

Thy deliberately faith I full,Faith against almighty worship God,And faith all unto you,Faith against thy holy prayer.¹

¹ An extract taken from a recording, the full text of which is in Studies in Education: First Years in School, London, Evans Bros., 1963, pp. 203-4.

We recognise these statements, not as blasphemies, but as rather amusing examples of children’s misconceptions. All too frequently, however, we fail to recognise them as symptoms of the child’s real difficulties in thinking, and as indicators of the serious limitations experienced by the young in making intellectual interpretations of experience. The truth is that when faced with complex problems of thinking, children try to make as much sense of them as possible. The above examples illustrate the struggle to make sense of what appears to be nonsense to the child. There are pure verbal mistakes, confusions due to wrong associations of words and errors which enter into any parrotlike repetition where there is no insight into the meaning of a passage.

In many areas of knowledge such as Mathematics, History, Geography and English Comprehension, a great deal of work has been done in the last thirty years on children’s thinking. Led by that prolific writer and investigator Professor J. Piaget, large numbers of researchers in many countries have helped us to understand the growth of thinking, the structures and sequences of thought and the limits of understanding demonstrated by pupils at varying ages. Experiments tend to show how valuable children’s misunderstandings can be in indicating the problems of thinking they face, and the kind of curriculum content in a subject that can and cannot be coped with. Some of these investigations will be outlined and discussed later. I mention them now because when I first encountered them it occurred to me how valuable it would be to apply similar research to the religious thinking of children and adolescents.

Here then is an account of the methods I used and the results which emerged from the research. It is an attempt to understand the modes and patterns of thinking, which the young bring to bear upon the religious teaching to which they are continually exposed in school, church and family. This teaching, of course, is far from systematic and its haphazard presentation is certainly affected by the conflicting views about religion voiced by the adult world. Even so, children are daily faced with the Bible, the Church and with religious practices and activities, sometimes as in school where they participate and sometimes when the children are interested spectators. Confronted by the existence of religion, by adults who appear to believe in it and who wish to teach them about it, children nobly attempt to understand as much of it as they find possible to understand.

THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECT

The central focus in this book is upon the child’s intellectual struggle to comprehend the central ideas expressed and implied in religious teaching. This focus upon the intellect is chosen because teaching involves the communication of ideas in such a way as they can be grasped intellectually by the learner. Religious teaching is not exempt from this necessity to communicate at a meaningful level, even though we must clearly recognise that understanding may be emotional as well as intellectual. Religion is not a mere intellectual exercise, a philosophical puzzle to be put together in an orderly rational manner. At this rational level, there is a parallel between the teaching of mathematics and the teaching of religion, but it is a limited parallel. In the last resort, religion is a mystery and speaks of matters and experiences which are not easily communicable. Some religious experiences are so profound and personal and mysterious that it is doubtful if they are communicable at all, except through the emotional language of the arts.

It is unrealistic to minimise the role of the emotions in religious understanding, for the feeling element in religion is of great importance. Indeed, truths which come from emotionally identifying ourselves with certain experiences are usually more compelling than those truths demonstrated by logic. The one may gain by being willing to be absorbed by the truth so that it is seen from the inside; the other, while objective, is distant and encounters the truth only from the outside. In short, arguments for the existence of God remain intellectual exercises unless linked with an act of faith.

The Existential writers and dramatists such as Kierkegaard, Pascal, Sartre, Heidegger, Camus and Marcel, past and present, religious and atheistic, have revolted against an exclusively scientific approach to knowledge and recall us to the sensitive world of feeling, wonder and unique personal experience which is at the heart of all religious knowledge. This dual aspect of knowing must be stressed by the teacher when he considers the methods and aims of religious education.

Nevertheless, the teacher’s major task is to communicate truths on an intellectual plane, whereby thinking is engaged at as high a level as the ability of the pupil will allow. Religious truth must be compelling intellectually, not only emotionally, and to hide behind emotional appeals and to avoid answering or even raising intellectual problems about religion, is both dishonest and ultimately destructive of religion. If this is so, we return to the problems which the intellectual development of the growing child and adolescent raises. What is the nature of a child’s religious thinking? How does he form concepts of God, of the Church, of moral rightness? Are there sequences or patterns of religious thought to be discerned with increasing chronological and mental age? What limits of religious understanding are imposed by age, immature experience, attitudes of parents, and many other factors? Does Biblical material of certain types assist or impede clarity of thought or level of insight into their religious truths? Are there ages or stages of what we might call ‘religious readiness’ in the growing young person, when the mind can more readily understand certain religious truths? Can a programme of religious education be devised which is suited to patterns of intellectual development?

THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS THINKING

Before we can face these questions with any confidence we must try to understand what religious thinking is and what it is not. The view I maintain throughout this book is that religious thinking is no different in mode and method from non-religious thinking. Religious thinking is a shortened form of expressing the activity of thinking directed towards religion, not a term meaning separate rationality. William James (1902) expresses this vividly:

There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy and so forth. But religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear ... the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge, only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations ... (p. 28).

James asserts categorically that there is therefore no religious instinct in man. J. J. Smith (1941) puts it more succinctly:

A child is non-religious at birth as he is non-moral, non-aesthetic, non-thinking. He inherits none of these qualities in a functional form but acquires them gradually through experience.

Not all writers would agree with this extreme view. Basil Yeaxlee (1939), for example, argues that religion is more than an acquired habit of mind and writes of it as ‘an innate capacity’, on a par with the speaking, fighting and building capacities of man. Yet in describing religion as ‘a power of response’ and in subsequent discussion in his book, Yeaxlee leaves us in no doubt that for him religion is the total reaction of a man to his experiences rather than a separately identifiable drive or instinct. All this discussion in no way assumes that religion is not a natural expression of man’s basic needs; it merely means that there is no one need or drive. Rather, religion is the fulfilment of the entire man, of which his intellect is a part.

When we say that religious thinking is thinking directed towards religion, it is clear that the term religion requires definition. As there are some known fifty or more definitions of religion, I put forward William James’s clear definition. Religion, says James, is ‘the feelings, the acts and experiences of individual men ... so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’. This divine in our own culture is interpreted in terms of diety, and more specifically in terms of the Christian concept of God as love, revealed most fully in the historic fact of the Incarnation. On this definition, religious thinking is thinking directed towards the nature of God, his relationships with men in history, his dealings with men today, his revelation of himself through the inspired literature of the Bible and through the person of Jesus Christ. It follows that the content of religious thinking will be concerned in our society with concepts involving these ideas. We can see that these ideas and the language in which they are expressed are very adult. The Bible itself is a book for adults and theology is a mature adult activity. Yet there is no doubt that the child from a very early age is forming a series of religious concepts and developing a theology, a frame of reference, which is continually changing as he thinks about God and His activities in the world. This picture of infantile theologians may appear to be ludicrous at first until we remember that all children are infantile mathematicians, assimilating and interpreting the world of quantity, all are infantile poets and artists, expressing creatively their apprehension of what is beautiful, and all are infantile moralists, forming mores or rules based upon their experiences of danger, adult authority, social pressures and later altruism. These are accompanied by crude expressions of number, art and ethics which indicate gross misunderstandings and distortions due to the child’s egocentric nature. In religion this is true also in the early stages of development, and there is plainly a long period of apprenticeship, experimentation and searching in childhood religion which must precede adult religious thinking.

THE PROBLEM OF THE CONTENT OF RELIGIOUS TEACHING

Given a long period of development, as in other areas of life, what then should we offer the growing child in terms of religious teaching? If religious teaching has to have a content what shall the content be and what assumptions can we make about the child’s thinking, when we choose certain material as suitable for a certain age?

It is salutary to take a brief look at some of the material suggested as appropriate intellectual diet for the young in religious education. In Britain, the various churches and the day schools are involved in religious teaching. Each group puts forward programmes and syllabuses designed to suggest to teachers material which can with benefit be taught to the various ages of pupils. More particularly in England and Wales, since the passing of the 1944 Education Act, religious teaching in state schools is based upon the Agreed Syllabuses. They are so called because they are the result of an agreement between the Protestant Churches, the teachers and the local education authority. These syllabuses have served a useful function in our state system during the last twenty years or more, despite the fact that many teachers, untrained in the teaching of the subject, have misunderstood and misused them. They were sincere attempts to formulate teaching material suitable for the full age range of the state school population. One of the earliest and most widely used syllabuses, the Cambridgeshire (revised in 1949), specifically states, ‘No attempt should be made to present religious ideas which are beyond the child’s power of apprehension’. The problem, in stating this intention, is to know what is within the child’s apprehension, for some of the material suggested in the Cambridgeshire syllabus would appear to be beyond the age group for which it is suggested. For example, the story of the Exodus is recommended for the seven to nine year olds. Does the child have a sufficiently formed concept of time to understand this series of events at all sensibly, apart from understanding them at a religious level?

Again, the Cambridgeshire syllabus, in keeping with many others, commends stories about babies in the Bible, specifically including the baby Jesus, the baby Moses, and the Call of the child Samuel. Apart from the religious truths or value of these stories, and the intellectual problems they present, many writers have since questioned the wisdom of this approach for the six year olds. They stress the need of young children to identify themselves not with the weak and the helpless, but with, for example, Jesus as a strong elder brother. Many syllabuses recommend the parables of Jesus as suitable for children from the age of five years onwards. D. Ainsworth (1961) in research on this very problem writes: ‘In the light of Piaget’s work, the young child’s understanding of the parables is questionable. Since the significance of the parable is abstract rather than concrete, is it possible that the child will understand this before he has reached the formal stage in his development?’ Her answer to this question is that only the beginnings of understanding the simplest parables appeared by the age of ten.

The West Riding Syllabus (1947) suggests stories such as the Call of Samuel and Jacob’s vision at Bethel can be used with the three to seven year olds to show ‘in an obvious way how God taught that the spiritual world is within us and about us always’. That this idea of omnipresence is interpreted so egocentrically by the young child as to completely distort reality is brought out by Bovet (1928) and Piaget (1929). The Call of Samuel is cited by Thorburn (1946) as a story entirely misunderstood by six year olds of above average intelligence.

The Durham Syllabus (1946) suggests that children of nine to ten years old are ready to understand the story of Christ’s temptations at the level of Jesus rejecting ‘all suggestions of using the methods of a magician, resolving to win men only by love and persuasion’. A more recent syllabus, Bristol (1960) recommends the Temptations of Jesus for the six year old. It is doubtful whether even the highly intelligent ten year old has the experience and insight into relationships to understand the idea put forward in the Durham syllabus, apart from the intellectual problem posed by abstract propositional thinking.

While infancy and childhood are difficult periods for which to provide religious syllabuses, one would have thought that the sections providing material for the secondary schools would have been more acceptable and less open to criticism. Yet there is evidence by K. Hyde (1963), D. S. Wright (1962) and J. W. Daines (1962) to suggest that not only the sections recommending material for Modern schools, but those for the Grammar schools also, appear to be frequently unsuitable. Harold Loukes (1961) in an investigation into what secondary modern pupils in their last year at school thought about the subject of Religious Knowledge, reports most of them ‘find their lessons on the Bible childish and irrelevant’. A survey by the University of Sheffield Institute of Education (1961) into the attainments of secondary modern school leavers in religious knowledge, after ten years of being taught under Agreed Syllabuses, shows results are so poor and so disturbing that there is a call for a complete revision of existing syllabuses. The investigators say that most of the Agreed Syllabuses do not appear to be suited to their purpose; they require not only drastic revision but frequent revisions. They make the further comment,

The main survey clearly indicates that religious education in schools is making little impact on children and that their knowledge of the Old Testament in particular is extremely limited. This suggests that increased research is needed into both the content and the methods of religious education.

While criticisms of this kind can easily be made against many of the syllabuses, it must in fairness be pointed out that some local authorities have experimented with material and attempted to produce a psychological rather than a biblical framework. Gordon Hewitt (1963) in discussing the significance of my own research mentions several such syllabuses, which have made a brave attempt to present their content suggestions in the light of the child’s needs. The major problem, however, still remains. What are children’s needs and capacities where religion is concerned? Upon what assumptions about religious thinking in childhood and adolescence should reforms of syllabus material be based? Are the assumptions we are making at the moment testable or verifiable in any way as a guide to our planning? There is a dearth of factual information from research relevant to this particular problem. In the chapters which follow the research will be reviewed, leading to a detailed presentation of pupils’ religious thinking. Meanwhile, a brief discussion of the role of research in our understanding of religion would appear to be necessary.

PSYCHOLOGY, RESEARCH AND RELIGION

The methods used in the researches to be reviewed are psychological, and there is some resistance on the part of teachers and clergy to the application of psychological research to the field of religion. The Psychology of Religion as an accepted discipline has never really flourished and has produced only intermittent research during the sixty years of its existence. Much of its writings are philosophical rather than psychological, relating the findings of psychology in other fields to religion, rather than describing first hand investigations into religion itself. The reasons for the lack of interest in this subject are many and are outlined clearly by G. W. Allport (1951) and Michael Argyle (1958). There are two major reasons which should be noted here as relevant to our future discussion.

The first reaction to the application of psychological research to the understanding of religion, is expressed in the fear that psychology will be used to attack or undermine the validity of religious belief. Psychologists such as Leuba (1921) thought that by showing religious phenomena to be a natural, that is, a primitive activity of man, religion would thereby be seen to be based upon false premises. This fear is also linked in the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• 1. THE PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS THINKING
• 2. THINKING AND ITS APPLICATION TO RELIGION
• 3. A RESEARCH APPROACH TO THE PROBLEMS OF RELIGIOUS THINKING
• 4. OPERATIONAL THINKING ABOUT RELIGIOUS STORIES
• 5. CONCEPTS OF THE BIBLE
• 6. THE IDENTITY AND NATURE OF THE DIVINE
• 7. GOD’S ACTIVITY IN THE NATURAL WORLD
• 8. THE HOLINESS OF GOD
• 9. GOD’S CONCERN FOR MEN
• 10. GOD’S CONCERN FOR MEN (continued)
• 11. JESUS AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
• 12. CONCEPTS OF PRAYER
• 13. CONCEPTS OF THE CHURCH
• 14. THE INFLUENCE OF CHURCH, HOME AND OTHER FACTORS UPON RELIGIOUS THINKING
• 15. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
• APPENDIX A The Picture and Story Religious Thinking Test, Interview Blank, Pictures and Story Text
• APPENDIX B A Brief Description of the Guttman Scalogram Method Applied to the Evaluation of Pupils’ Responses. A Note on the Reliability and Validity of the Picture and Story Religious Thinking Test
• APPENDIX C A Glossary of Terms for American Readers
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS
• INDEX OF NAMES