When we Teach our Kids that God is Irrelevant, Expect them to Believe It.

 Let’s face it: secularism is growing in the United States.

There, I said it. I don’t like it, but even a casual glance at the religious landscape over the course of my lifetime demonstrates that the number of people attending worship services on Sunday mornings (or alternative days) has declined from the 1960s or even the 1970s.

While the increase in “no religious affiliation” is real, it is my belief that it is unlikely that the rise in the “no religious affiliation” crowd is due to some overwhelming acceptance of atheism. While there are some atheists who make reasonable arguments against theism, most of the fare available on the Internet are rather humdrum arguments that have long ago been answered. An in-depth evaluation of these arguments may convince the already committed, but would have little impact on someone seeking truth.

Rather, it seems to me that the real cause for the increase of the “no affiliation” crowd is the rise in a general indifference about religious belief, i.e., it just doesn’t seem to matter. Ask a non-affiliated person (other than your hardened atheist who, despite the books upon books written on the subject, believes that the argument from evil has not been answered) why he or she doesn’t go to church, and it is likely that the answer will be something like, “It’s just not my thing.”

Where did this come from? Why is it that people – especially younger people – are not finding belief in God important enough to deserve even the effort to investigate its claims? Why will they spend hours binge-watching their favorite television series, but not find the time to investigate whether God is real? Well, an article on National Review by Cameron Hilditch entitled “Why American Children Stopped Believing in God” explores this important question through summarizing a report by Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and its Recent Decline”.

The article begins by stating what those of us who are Christian believe to be obvious: the decline of Christianity isn’t because of some correlation where the more educated a person is, the less likely that person is to be religious. Poppycock, says Hilditch (without actually using the word.) He notes:

Religious conservatives would probably cite the loosening of the country’s morals that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Secular progressives might mutter something about the onward march of “Science” and “Reason” over time. But the data seem to show that the main driver of secularization in the United States has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools.

Here our secular progressive might raise his head again, perhaps feeling a bit smug about this finding. “See!”, he says. “Children used to be deprived of education and the life of the mind! They were stuck in the doldrums of ignorance and squalor before the benevolent hand of the state reached down and lifted them up into the world of literacy and critical thought. All that was needed was a little education to free them from hokey superstitions.”

It’s a simple theory, befitting the minds of those who have historically espoused it. But it’s falsified by the data. Stone cites the seminal work of Raphael Franck and Laurence Iannaccone on this point, who meticulously tracked religious behavior over time in their own work. According to Franck and Iannaccone, “higher educational attainment did not predict lower religiosity: More and less educated people are similarly religious.” Nor did they “find that industrialized, urban life reduces religiosity: A more urban and industrialized population was associated with greater religiosity.” The link between intellectual progression/modernization and secularization is non-existent.

Having discarded that theory, he spends some further time in the article before hitting the main point: The rise in secularism is the way that American public schools treat religious belief as irrelevant, and even go so far as to eliminate most religious thought from school. Hilditch writes:

So how do we explain this link between education policy and religious belief given that academic attainment itself isn’t a factor? It’s quite simple, really. Children learn more at school than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They imbibe a whole set of implied assumptions about what’s important in life. By excluding religious instruction from public schools, the government-run education system tacitly teaches students that religious commitments are not a first-order priority in life. Faith in God becomes a sort of optional weekend hobby akin to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are treated by teachers and administrators like weapons or drugs — confiscated upon discovery.

In this way, the hierarchy of values communicated both explicitly and implicitly to students in American high schools excludes religious claims from the outset. College, career, and popularity become the existential targets toward which the arrow of each student’s soul is aimed by bow-wielding commissars across the country. In a context such as this, secularization becomes ineluctable.

In his paper, Lyman notes:

In other words, the content of education matters. Evidence that education reduces religiosity is fairly weak: American religiosity rose considerably from 1800 until the 1970s, despite rapidly rising educational attainment. But the evidence that specifically secular education might reduce religiosity is more compelling. Indeed, statistically, most researchers who have explored long-run change in religiosity find that education-related variables, which I have argued are a proxy for secular education, can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.

It is an appropriate conclusion. If religion is treated as if it is no more than a private choice that has no impact on the society, it is easy to dismiss it much as you might decide against playing Bingo on weekends. “It’s not my thing.”

But it isn’t even as if Christianity is treated on equal footing with playing Bingo when it comes to the public education system. I doubt that anyone would seriously question that I could stand up in any school classroom in America and present a paper arguing that playing Bingo is a fun, interesting social activity and that everyone should play. I could do so without being in fear that I would be violating the unwritten rules that “we don’t speak of Bingo” in the classroom. I have no doubt that I would not be told to sit down because I was excluding those who did not play Bingo. It would be seen as perfectly acceptable.

But could I stand up in class in today’s schools and make the case for Christianity? Could I write a paper speaking of my reasons for being convinced that God is real and that Christianity is both a social and personal good? Except in a few remaining enlightened schools that understand that the purpose of education is to educate, I would almost certainly be told that speaking of God is not an appropriate subject for school, and that my speaking of my faith would exclude other students who did not share that faith.

Students who are paying attention will notice this. They will note that the answers to the questions never involve faith or Christianity (except when it can be taught in a negative way, see “The Spanish Inquisition,” “The Crusades” or “The Salem Witch Trials”). Even when faith is an important aspect of a positive event such as the Abolition movement and the Civil Rights Movement, it will be discounted. And, moreover, it is a topic that, like Lord Voldemort, is “that which must not be named.”

Is it any wonder that the students in 21^st Century America who have been raised primarily in the public schools where God as primarily taught through Christianity is discounted (at best, God is irrelevant and at worst evil) would believe that God is not worth giving up a morning trip to the beach?