Parenting in Three Secular Steps

Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy offers atheists parenting lessons

By Christopher W. Jensen

On December 6, I attended a lecture hosted by the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy. The featured speaker was Dave McGowan, a writer and self-proclaimed atheist, or, as his website puts it, “a critical thinking advocate.” Most recently, Mr. McGowan has published two books, Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers, which are both targeted at atheist parents seeking to raise their children in a loving, yet nonreligious environment. While I haven’t had an opportunity to read either of these books, his lecture elaborated many key points of his personal beliefs. 

In his lecture, Mr. McGowan began by acknowledging several basic questions with which all parents struggle: What is morality? How can we raise ethical children? Do we have meaning and purpose? How can I raise my child in a loving fashion? Unfortunately, many parents, both atheist and religious, don’t trust themselves to raise their children properly when they have so many personal doubts and questions. 

McGowan argues that this is where religion steps in. Many parents gratefully accept stolid dogma and unyielding codes of conduct as a good road map to raising children. That’s why they baptize their children, throw bar mitzvahs, and go to church on Sundays. The problem with this method, however, is that it leads to indoctrination: Parents robotically pass down a “box of predefined values” from generation to generation, forsaking critical thought in favor of personal comfort. 

According to Mr. McGowan, this is unfortunately an all-too-common model of parenting. Instead, parents should strive to raise their children in an open environment, fostering analytical reason instead of simple credulity whenever possible. This way, society will consist of levelheaded, reasonable people who can then make their own decisions about religion. In return, we avoid indoctrination and promote one of humanity’s best characteristics: reason. The problem of parenting is solved! Or is it? 

Now, we are not arguing over the existence of God. If all of humanity agreed on this point, this debate would be irrelevant. We would be raising either devoutly religious children or devoutly atheistic children, and society would consequently follow suit. Rather, we are asking if parents should use their personal beliefs in raising their children, which is closely related to the larger question of what kind of society we desire.

McGowan associates religious upbringing with religious indoctrination. However, bringing a child up in a religious home does not necessarily stifle a child’s critical thinking or reasoning. Many of the greatest thinkers and innovators in history have come from religious backgrounds: Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were both great physicists and devout Christians their entire lives; Martin Luther King was raised in a Protestant family and was a minister himself. Furthermore, a child raised by religious parents will not always follow their upbringing: Albert Einstein was raised in a Jewish home, but later became a humanist. Joseph Stalin was a student in an Orthodox seminary, but grew disillusioned and joined the Bolshevik cause. 

Additionally, McGowan rather narrowly portrays many adults as insecure people desperately looking for a roadmap to parenting. Many adults who seriously follow a religion have critically analyzed it and believe it to be dogmatically sound and beneficial for future generations. Take Christianity, for example. Christian apologists and philosophers have exhaustively studied its teachings for thousands of years, and they still choose to believe and promulgate it. If canonical teachings—these boxes of predefined values—contain correct values, what is wrong with passing them from generation to generation? 

Moreover, if parents raise their children to rely solely on critical thinking, it is only a matter of time before this new generation realizes that reason cannot answer every question humans have. It cannot, for example, tell us what happens after death. It cannot tell us the purpose of our existence. It cannot explain why humans are imperfect. Reason is limited to the natural realm of daily interactions, so let us apply it to society. Ostensibly, if we tried to be a little more respectful, a little more tolerant, a little more reasonable, we should see a marked improvement in society, given enough time. 

McGowan is not the first to argue that a society full of reasoning, analytical people would be an excellent society. His theory of freethinking has much in common with traditional Enlightenment ideals. Inspired by the Scientific Revolution, thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau disavowed religious dogma and extolled the virtues of reason. Through critical and analytical thought, they argued, humans could do away with centuries of prejudice and social backwardness, much of it caused by religious superstition. 

Years later, French revolutionaries followed Enlightenment philosophy as best they could: Churches became temples of Reason, crucifixes were replaced with busts of Voltaire or Newton, and holidays like Christmas were abolished. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out as well as the revolutionaries hoped. Food shortages increased, mobs rioted in the streets, and regimes lasted only a few years. Thousands died in the Reign of Terror, and the Revolution ended only after Napoleon installed himself as ruler of France.

I don’t mean to suggest that Mr. McGowan will be setting up a guillotine in Harvard Square. However, he has ironically put blind faith in reason. He assumes that, if parents consistently help their children use critical thinking skills, we can raise generations of reasonable and tolerant people. However, human reason is inherently flawed; no human has infinite wisdom. If people are going to pick belief systems based on how reasonable and appealing they seem, all a religion needs is a good argument to win over converts. The Catholic Church had better get a good advertising team together quickly before the Buddhists buy up all the Superbowl ads. 

It is clearly impossible to create a perfect world with imperfect people. What, then, can we create? A society of skeptics. I may hold one belief true today, but if my neighbor is smarter than I, he can soon convince me otherwise. To take the argument ad infinitum, nothing can be certain. As Socrates once said, “One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.” C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, remarked that modern society is creating “men without chests,” people without true convictions who value skepticism above all else, given how relevant and uncertain everything is. The statement “I believe in reason” is nearly equivalent to “I believe whatever seems most appealing to me at the time.” Humans should use reason as a tool, not as a belief system. 

One of McGowan’s concluding remarks provides us with an equally apt conclusion. He remarked that Barack Obama was raised in a humanist household, and Obama’s mother encouraged him to think and reason rather than to follow any particular religion. Thus, Obama was raised in exactly the household that McGowan promotes, and after this process he elected to join the United Church of Christ. However, after attending one church for twenty years, he abandoned it once the political controversy over Jeremiah Wright heated up. It is peculiar that Obama would attend a church for twenty years, realize the pastor’s teachings were controversial only when the media brought it up, and just then experience a crisis of conscience. However, it was certainly politically expedient for Obama to ditch any unwanted hindrances, especially during the tight race for the Democratic nomination. While I don’t know exactly why Obama chose to leave his church when he did, I certainly hope it was not because he decided to sacrifice personal convictions for a political goal. And if he did, is he the model we want for our children?