By Brandon Ambrosino
What if children didn’t have to be taught to believe in God? What if they were born with that ready-made belief somewhere embedded in their minds?
That’s the thesis of a 2012 book by psychologist Justin L. Barrett called Born Believers. Barrett, currently a researcher at Fuller Theological Seminary, has spent his career researching children and religious belief. After observing that children tend to believe that the world has order and purpose, he came to the conclusion that kids are born with a tendency toward thinking that there is some sort of supernatural agent behind this order. Or, as he put it to me over the phone, “children have a number of natural dispositions to religious beliefs of various sorts.” And while he believes that these dispositions can “certainly be overridden by certain kinds of cultural and educational environments,” he thinks the research shows that a child’s cognitive “playing field is tilted toward religious beliefs.”
A new study out this month, however, pushes against Barrett’s conclusion. Published in the July issue ofCognitive Science, the article presents findings that seem to show that children’s beliefs in the supernatural are the result of their education. Further, argue the researchers, “exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction.” In other words, said Kathleen Corriveau, one of the study’s co-authors, the study found that childhood exposure to religious ideas may influence children’s “conception of what could actually happen.” She also told me her research suggests that Barrett’s Born Believers thesis is wrong — that children don’t possess an “innate bias” toward religious belief.
Here’s how Corriveau and her colleagues conducted their research. They gave a total of 66 kindergartners three different narratives: 1) religious, 2) historical, and 3) fantastical. An example of 1) was telling kids the story of Moses parting the Red Sea so the Israelites could walk through on dry land. They then changed that story in two ways. For the “historical” version 2) they told the same story of Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, but they took out all the references to God and miracles: Moses crossed the water in a boat. For the “fantastical” version 3) God was replaced with some other fantasy mechanism.
All across the board, children thought the historical narratives were true. When it came to religious stories, predictably children raised in religious settings classified them as true, while kids raised in secular setting classified them as fictional. What was most interesting to Corriveau, however, was how children classified the fantastical story: while secular children classified it as pretend 87 percent of the time, religious children only did so about 40 percent of the time. To Corriveau, this suggests that “religious children have a broader conception of what can actually happen.” In other words, she told me, “religious exposure may influence the way in which children mark the boundary between factual and fictional, allowing for a more likely suspension of disbelief.”
So is that a bad thing? “Not necessarily,” says Corriveau. “In many learning situations, what this might mean is that religious children might be more willing to accept seemingly counterintuitive phenomena in ways that secular children might not.” It also might mean, she notes, that religious children have broader conceptual frameworks, and might have a “better ability to engage in unexpected outcomes.”
Barrett agrees with Corriveau on that point, noting that there’s real value with allowing children to experiment with the conceptual boundaries of what’s real and what’s not. According to him, the question “what if things were different?” is an important part of the learning process. “It sure looks like that’s the backbone of innovation, creativity, and all kinds of problem-solving in the world, both artistic and scientific.” As Paul Harris, one of the study’s co-authors, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The imagination is absolutely vital for contemplating reality, not just those things we take to be mere fantasy.”
Some, however, might decide Corriveau’s findings offer a compelling argument against religious education. The Raw Story‘s reaction to the study was that “Children exposed to religion have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction.” And discussing the study yesterday in an article titled Is religion good for children?, Slate‘s Mark Joseph Stern seemed to answer his own question in the negative: “When you’ve been told that a woman was created from a man’s rib, or that a man reawakened three days postmortem little worse for wear, your grasp on reality is bound to take a hit.”
Read the full article here.
Disclaimer: The author would like it known that neither he nor the other researchers interviewed suggest that religion is harmful to children