In an op-ed in the Guardian, Brown manages to get things so wrong it is hard to know how it could possibly be set right. It’s about scouts, and the oath which they are supposed to swear. The original oath, written by Baden-Powell, hero of Mafeking, goes like this:
On my honour I promise that:-
1. I will do my duty to God and the King.
2. I will do my best to help others whatever it may cost me.
3. I know the scout law and will obey it.
That’s simple and straightforward enough, but now, reasonably, objections have been made to swearing to do one’s duty to God, and an alternate oath is to be formulated.
Brown somehow manages to think of this as absurdity run riot. He says he can see the point of this in the United States, and here is how he expresses it:
There, there is a strong sense among some Christians that people who aren’t (their sort of) Christians aren’t proper Americans, either. So the Boy Scouts, who teach all kinds of virtues necessary for citizenship, ought to be open to atheists who lack the navigational skills to find their way to an atheist woodcraft group.
But it Britain Brown sees no point in it at all. There is always the Woodcraft Folk, he suggests, but the Woodcraft Folk organisation welcomes the possible acceptance of atheist children into the scouting movement.
As an organisation founded in 1925 by former Scouts who left that movement because of Scouting’s commitment at that time to church, monarchy and patriarchy, Woodcraft Folk welcomes the Scouts’ consultation process to begin the end of over 100 years of excluding young people on the grounds of their atheism.
That sounds like a generous and reasonable response, considering the reasons for the foundation of Woodcraft Folk itself.
So, what is Brown’s problem with accepting non-believing young people into the Scouts? Well, it’s not at all clear. The main reason seems to be that young people can’t be expected to object reasonably to an oath which includes duty to God. Here’s what he says:
How many children are there who would have joined the Scouts were it not that their principles forbade them to swear an oath to God? If the number breaks double figures, I would be surprised and I would be absolutely gobsmacked if any of them came from religious households.
It’s perfectly obvious that the atheist children are in this case transmitting the prejudices of their parents. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s silly is to pretend that the process is somehow different when religious parents do it.
So, children, to Brown, are simply carbon copies of their parents. So religious parents will have religious children, and atheist parents will have atheist children, and the process of transmission is the same, whether religious parents induct their children into religious belief, or atheist parents transmit their atheism to their children. And don’t pretend, says Brown, that there is any difference here.
But, of course, there may indeed be a very big difference. I see no reason why atheist parents, for instance, might not teach their children about the various religions, no doubt with emphasis on the idea of reasonable belief. But I do not think religious parents are very likely to teach their children about atheism, as well as other religions, emphasising that they should choose their beliefs carefully, giving consideration to standards of evidence or proof.
Brown brings his piece to an end with some really kooky ideas, which leads one to wonder what he has been trying to say up to this point.
There’s no point in over-analysing these things[!] [says he, astonishingly, have just done so!] Small boys are naturally religious, but the religion that comes naturally to them is that of Lord of the Flies.
On what does he base this? Indeed, if boys are naturally religious, it is not often that they get a chance to be isolated on an island without influence from their parents, and churches pay a lot of attention to the religious development of children, and how best to pitch their claims so as to attract them and, if at all possible, hold onto them for life.
Then Brown ends with a swipe at football. Speaking of both the Scouts and Woodcraft Folk, he says:
But their enemy today isn’t organised religion. It’s football. That’s where you find tribalism, the love of uniforms and a celebration of physical prowess all presented for children, but it’s in the service of a disgusting money-making machine, whose values are greed and pride and whose culture is saturated with racism, misogyny and homophobia.
This may or may not be so, but how is this relevant to issue of the Scouts’ Oath? The question here is whether, in fact, boys can have serious conscientious objections to swearing an oath including doing one’s duty to God, or whether, in fact, parents, even religious parents, may have problems with children expressing their duty to God without any understanding of what this might entail.
Clearly, Brown thinks the whole thing is terribly frivolous. But is it? Is indoctrination of children not a problem? Or does Brown think it perfectly appropriate for parents to indoctrinate their children in any way they choose? Michael De Dora has an interesting article on the trouble with baptism over at Rationally Speaking. Amongst other things, he says this:
To me, a baptism represents, at least in part, a parent forcing his or her religious heritage on a child unable to approve or reject the gesture. It labels a baby with a certain religious affiliation, and enters him or her into that religion, or else puts him or her on the path toward that religion. My presence at a baptism condones the practice of basing your child’s beliefs on yours.
To be quite frank, this was really an issue with me in my later years as a priest. It seemed to me wrong to baptise a child, thereby making it an obligation of the parents to bring their child up in the faith, and to make promises to that effect. The same thing goes for oaths taken by boys, of whatever age. It is not so much that they may have conscientious objections — though it would be silly to imagine that this is impossible — but that parents should have conscientious objections to children being required to make such promises. That Brown cannot see this, it seems to me, shows that he simply does not see enough. He seems to think it’s all a bit of a joke. But it goes right to the heart of children’s rights. Parents obviously have some rights over their children, but where do their rights end and their children’s rights begin? No one has really dealt with this in depth, though Nicholas Humphrey addressed it in his Amnesty Lecture a few years ago. It is something that is worth serious consideration, and Brown’s flip way of addressing the question is morally repugnant.
The UK scouts, to my surprise and pleasure, are apparently going to change their oath to give atheist scouts some other line to say, and probably let that little boy back in.
However, my experience is in the Boy Scouts of America, but I can tell you, the religious aspects of scouting go past just having to say an oath with ‘God’ in it. For starters, the major sponsors of BSA troops are churches, and a lot of people have their meetings in churches. Getting to Eagle Scout (the highest rank) required an interview, where they point blank asked me if I believed in God (which at the time, I did). But even more importantly, I think when you have situations like this, where God is so front and center, even when you provide an option to say a different thing (as it shall hopefully be in the UK), you still mark people out as being different. And it would be particularly awkward if you were being different while you were meeting in a church, probably with children that go to that church.
The one nice thing is that the discrimination that the BSA has been doing in the US has lead to them losing money and support from organizations and companies that have Non-Discrimination policies. Though I really could see them let in gays and keep out atheists and get most of their money back.
FWIW, I was a member of the Boys Brigade (forerunner of the Boy Scouts) as a young teenager, but left after a short while because I couldn’t stomach all the religion. I can’t remember if there was an oath, but we did meet in the church hall. I was at that time trying to decide how I felt about religion. My parents were both “churchgoers”, and were keen for me to remain in the BB, but did not bring any real pressure to bear on me. Looking back, I think my mother had a simple belief in a man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud, and my dad only went to church because it was “the done thing”. The fact that we lived almost next door to the church would have made our non-attendance very obvious to the neighbours.
I was a Boy Scout for a while. I like it a little bit but it wasn’t my favorite activity. I memorized the things that had to be memorized to get from Tenderfoot to Second Class to First Class Scout, but didn’t really intellectualize my disagreement with the god parts. Nor did it have much to do with my eventually getting tired of it and leaving.
But we were mainly a troop that was about camping and pushups (something I was pretty good at). So, I think that the amount of god that gets infused into the troop activities is pretty leader-dependent.
Of course, I also recited the Nicene Creed every Sunday without believing a word of it, so I guess I was used to hiding my misgivings about the existence of any god. Boy Scouts was just one more place where one mouthed a platitude without actually believing in it.
Funny: I can still recite the Scout Oath and the Nicene Creed from memory. Just because you can make someone remember some words, that doesn’t mean they then of necessity believe in the concepts inherent in those words.
I have to say, the inability of a child to understand an oath would be the crux of my argument against compelling them to make it. To treat such understanding so flippantly is indeed very repugnant. I suppose it is only prudent to push issues children cannot understand off to their guardians, medical decisions come to mind, but indoctrination issues make things very complicated.
I suspect it is not a coincidence that the religious want to instill a sense of identity bound up in the church as early as possible. Religious people almost always use an identifier (“I am a Catholic, for example”) as opposed to a statement of belief (“I believe in Catholic doctrine”). Clearly the former is more difficult to discard than the latter. I can understand the comparison some have made with such indoctrination and child abuse.
I refused to be confirmed at the age of 13. My parents, who continue to be very involved with their church, required me to attend the pre-confirmation classes, but did not force me to go through with the actual ceremony. It’s not impossible to stop being a carbon copy of your parents at a fairly young age.
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“It’s perfectly obvious that the atheist children are in this case transmitting the prejudices of their parents. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s silly is to pretend that the process is somehow different when religious parents do it.”
I have a real problem with this statement. My parents were fairly liberal Methodists, but they still sent me to Sunday School and later forced me to attend Chapel services against my will. they told me that Christianity was true and never once informed me that there was any alternate view.
My approach with my own daughter was to explain that I did not believe in God but some people do and no-one can ever know for certain either way. I allowed her to attend a CofE primary school and told her that she was free to make up her own mind. At age fifteen she is an atheist.
I am not being silly and pretending that the process is somehow different. The process is entirely different. To my knowledge, there are no atheist primary schools, but if there were, can you imagine Christians sending their kids there and telling them that they were free to make up their own minds about God?
We studied Lord of the Flies at high school, when I was about the same age as the children depicted in the book. Even then I thought it was a load of horse droppings; in fact I even wrote a parody featuring the kids in my own form. Golding’s bleak view of humanity has a lot in common with the doctrine of Original Sin.
I just happen to have been teaching Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity the past few weeks, in which she talks a great deal of sense (along with a good bit of tiresome existentialist jargoneering, but not so much that it overwhelms). One of the things she talks sense about is respecting children’s freedom:
(Here is a link to the section of the book from which I drew this quotation.)
What everyone here is talking about is exactly what Beauvoir criticizes by implication: Religious upbringing is not intended to develop a child’s own new possibilities and capacities, it is not to open the future to the child — it is quite deliberately intended to constrain the child’s possibilities, to close the future so that the child adopts a pre-determined path through it. In short, it does not respect the child’s freedom or humanity, but seeks to stifle and control it.
There is nothing wrong with raising children who choose to follow your religious beliefs or otherwise make life choices much like your own. There is something deeply wrong with raising children in ways deliberately intended to deny them the very possibility of choosing differently from you.