Chapter 36 — Teaching Fear to Children
The religious teaching of my school years: Hell, mortal sin, Satan, confession, punishment and obedience, examined through the materials and assumptions of the period.
Back to the Child
The previous chapter described some of the ideas I encountered much later as an adult.
Think for yourself.
Question authority.
Try to prove your own explanation wrong.
Look behind behaviour for causes.
Separate what is known from what is merely asserted.
Those ideas eventually became ordinary parts of the way I thought.
But they were not the intellectual tools available to the child I had been.
The child encountered something almost opposite.
The questions had already been answered.
The authority had already been established.
And doubt could itself become part of the problem.
The Catechism World
The Catholic education system into which I was born still belonged largely to the catechism era.
Religious knowledge was taught through propositions.
Questions were asked.
Answers were supplied.
The answer could then be learned.
Repeated.
Remembered.
And reproduced.
The old Australian catechism was commonly known as the Green Catechism.
It had been used in Australian Catholic schools for generations and was still in widespread use during the years of my childhood.
I do not presently claim that I can identify the exact edition placed in front of me on a particular school day.
That distinction matters.
My memory of religious teaching and the historical record of what was formally prescribed are two different layers.
They can inform one another without being treated as identical.
Learning by Heart
There is an interesting expression for memorising something.
Learning it by heart.
In practice it can mean learning words before having the intellectual capacity to examine what those words mean.
A child can reproduce an answer correctly without having independently reached the conclusion.
That is useful for multiplication tables.
It becomes much more complicated when the answer concerns eternity.
God.
Satan.
Sin.
Hell.
Sex.
Death.
Obedience.
And what supposedly happens to a person after they die.
Questions With the Answers Already Attached
A catechism can look like questioning.
There is a question.
Then there is an answer.
But that is not quite the kind of questioning I came to value later.
The purpose was not generally for the child to examine all plausible answers and decide which one was best supported.
The correct answer already existed.
The child's task was to learn it.
That is instruction.
It is not inquiry.
Hell Was an Answer
Hell belonged inside that system of answers.
The Green Catechism of the period taught Hell as punishment associated with those who died in mortal sin.
It was not introduced merely as:
“Here is one historical idea which some people believe.”
It belonged to the religious account of reality.
Hell existed.
Sin mattered because Hell existed.
Confession mattered because sin mattered.
Salvation mattered because damnation was possible.
For the child, those ideas reinforced one another.
The Scale of the Threat
No ordinary punishment could compete with it.
A teacher could keep a child in.
A parent could impose punishment.
A nun could strike a child.
A priest could condemn behaviour.
But Hell extended beyond all of them.
It extended beyond death.
There was no final bell.
No end of term.
No adulthood in which the child could finally leave.
The threatened consequence was eternal.
Mortal
Even the language was powerful.
Mortal sin.
The word mortal carried death within it.
Some actions were not simply mistakes.
They could alter the supposed condition of the soul.
The child was therefore not merely learning rules about behaviour.
The child was learning that behaviour could have consequences stretching into eternity.
Venial
Then there were venial sins.
Smaller sins.
The distinction created classifications.
Actions could be examined.
Thoughts could be examined.
Intentions could be examined.
The child's internal life itself became territory for moral inspection.
What had I done?
What had I thought?
Had I wanted something wrong?
Had I enjoyed something I should not have enjoyed?
Was I sorry enough?
Had I forgotten something?
A God Who Could See Inside
The God of that system was not restricted to observing behaviour.
He could see thoughts.
He could see intentions.
He knew what had happened even if nobody else knew.
For an adult philosopher, omniscience can be an abstract theological property.
For a child, it can mean there is nowhere inside the mind where the child is unwatched.
Privacy disappears.
Even thought can become morally dangerous.
Confession
Then there was confession.
A child was expected to examine what had been done and identify sins.
Those sins could then be spoken to a priest.
Again, I can now see the structure differently from the way I experienced it as a child.
An adult may voluntarily choose confession as a religious practice.
A child raised inside the system has much less distance from it.
The child has first been taught what counts as sin.
The child has been taught that sin has consequences.
The child has been taught the authority of the priest.
Then the child is asked to disclose.
That is not the same starting position as an adult freely seeking spiritual counsel.
Finding Something to Confess
There is also a practical difficulty in asking children to search themselves for wrongdoing.
If the authority says there must be something there, a child may feel obliged to find something.
Perhaps I was disobedient.
Perhaps I lied.
Perhaps I had a bad thought.
Perhaps I was angry.
Perhaps I did not pray properly.
Perhaps I had failed in some way I did not fully understand.
The process begins with the assumption that the child needs to identify fault.
That can shape the way a child learns to look at himself.
The Wrong Direction
For a child already being harmed by adults, that direction of inquiry can be disastrous.
The child is encouraged to search inside himself for sin.
But the important question may be outside him.
What is the adult doing?
Who is touching the child?
Who is frightening him?
Who is hurting him?
Why does he want to escape?
Why does he become frightened around particular people?
A moral system focused upon the child's faults can point attention in exactly the wrong direction.
Purity
Sexuality was another area surrounded by religious language.
Purity.
Impurity.
Bad thoughts.
Immodesty.
Sin.
The formal Catholic teaching of the period extended moral concern beyond sexual acts to thoughts, desires, words, images and behaviour regarded as immodest.
That created a strange environment for an abused child.
Adults could introduce sexual behaviour into the child's life.
Yet the child was being taught that sexual thoughts and conduct could make the child morally impure.
Who Introduced the Sexual Behaviour?
That is the question I would ask now.
Who introduced it?
If an adult sexualises a child, the resulting confusion does not originate with the child.
If a child subsequently displays sexual knowledge or behaviour unusual for that age, blaming the child may conceal the very thing which needs investigation.
The behaviour can become evidence against the child when it should have been evidence that somebody needed to ask what had happened.
Shame Is Efficient
Shame can regulate behaviour remarkably efficiently.
An adult does not need to remain in the room once the child has learned to police himself.
The child can carry the observer internally.
Did I sin?
Did God see?
Was the thought impure?
Am I wicked?
Will I be punished?
That is a powerful form of control because eventually the authority does not need to issue every instruction.
The child anticipates the judgement.
Satan
Satan supplied another explanation.
Temptation did not need to arise from ordinary human biology.
Bad thoughts could be associated with an external supernatural source.
Disobedience could acquire spiritual significance.
Fear, anger and resistance could be interpreted within a struggle between good and evil.
For most children this may have remained ordinary religious teaching.
For me it became much more personal.
The religious language was applied to me.
The distance between learning about Satan and being associated with Satan collapsed.
Teaching and Application
That distinction is important.
The existence of a doctrine does not establish how every nun taught it.
The wording of a catechism does not tell us exactly what happened in every classroom.
Nor does the fact that a religious teaching existed prove that every Catholic child experienced it as traumatic.
Children differ.
Teachers differ.
Families differ.
Context matters.
My concern is with what happens when the doctrine is combined with fear, coercion, abuse and adult authority.
The Text Was Not the Whole Environment
A book did not teach me by itself.
Adults interpreted it.
Adults selected what to emphasise.
Adults supplied tone.
Adults supplied punishment.
Adults decided what questions were acceptable.
Adults demonstrated what happened when a child resisted.
The words on the page were one layer.
The behaviour of the adults teaching them was another.
Obedience
Obedience fitted easily into that structure.
Parents possessed authority.
Teachers possessed authority.
Nuns possessed authority.
Priests possessed authority.
The Church possessed authority.
God stood above all of them.
For a child, the hierarchy could appear seamless.
An instruction from an adult could carry much more than ordinary human authority.
It could feel connected to the entire structure above it.
Questioning Was Not Neutral
That is why questioning could be difficult.
To question an instruction might be disobedience.
To question doctrine might be lack of faith.
To question a nun might mean questioning a religious authority.
To question a priest carried even greater weight.
The system did not have to say on every occasion:
“Do not think.”
The hierarchy itself taught the child which direction answers were supposed to travel.
Downward.
Not upward.
Fear Can Look Like Learning
A frightened child can become an excellent student of what an adult wants to hear.
The child watches.
Listens.
Learns the correct response.
Repeats it.
Avoids the answer which causes anger.
That can look like successful instruction.
It may sometimes be compliance.
It may sometimes be fawning.
The child is learning the belief system and learning the adult at the same time.
Repeating Is Not Believing
That returns me to an important distinction.
A child repeating the correct religious answer does not demonstrate that the child independently believes it.
The child may believe it.
The child may partly believe it.
The child may fear that it could be true.
The child may simply know the answer required to avoid trouble.
Those states can look identical from the front of a classroom.
Fear Is a Poor Measure of Truth
The strength of fear also says nothing about whether the proposition is true.
A child can be terrified of a monster which does not exist.
The terror is real.
The monster need not be.
A child can be terrified of Hell.
That proves the child has learned to fear Hell.
It does not establish Hell.
This seems obvious to me now.
It was not obvious to the child.
The Education of Certainty
One of the larger effects of that system was the confidence with which extraordinary propositions could be presented.
God exists.
God watches.
God judges.
Satan exists.
The soul exists.
Hell exists.
Certain actions endanger the soul.
The Church knows the rules.
The child was not being introduced to a collection of competing hypotheses.
The child was being introduced to certainty.
What Was Missing?
What was generally missing from the religious education I remember was the question I later came to consider essential:
How do we know?
What evidence would demonstrate that?
What evidence would show it was wrong?
Who made the claim?
When?
How did they establish it?
What alternative explanations exist?
What would happen if I reached a different conclusion?
Those are the questions which later became normal for me.
The Feynman Test
If I apply the method I described in the previous chapter to the religious teaching of my childhood, something interesting happens.
Take the proposition.
State it as convincingly as possible.
Now try to prove it wrong.
What observation would disprove Hell?
What observation would disprove Satan?
What evidence could show that a particular instruction did not come from God?
If no possible observation is permitted to count against the proposition, then the child is not being given a testable explanation.
The child is being given a belief.
That does not automatically make the belief false.
It does mean that belief and evidence should not be confused.
The Sapolsky Question
I can apply another method as well.
Instead of asking:
“What is wrong with this child?”
ask what happened before the behaviour.
Why is the child frightened?
Why does the child run?
Why does the child hide?
Why does the child strike an adult who grabs him?
Why does the child become vigilant?
Why does the child have difficulty explaining an event afterwards?
The answers may be found in what happened to the child rather than in sin, Satan or possession.
The Miller Question
Alice Miller added another possibility.
What if the theory itself prevents the adult from seeing the child?
If the adult begins with the proposition that the child is sinful, the adult may search for sin.
If the adult begins with Satan, the adult may search for evidence of evil.
If the adult begins with disobedience, the adult may search for ways to produce obedience.
But if the adult begins by asking:
“What happened to you?”
an entirely different story may become visible.
TFYQA in the Classroom
I sometimes wonder what my religious education would have looked like if TFYQA had been written above the blackboard.
Think for yourself.
Question authority.
Not:
reject everything the teacher says.
Not:
assume religion is false.
Simply:
ask.
How do we know?
Why do we believe this?
What do other people believe?
What evidence is available?
Could this interpretation be wrong?
Would a child have been allowed to reach a different conclusion?
A Genuine Choice Requires Alternatives
That last question matters.
A choice is difficult to call free when one answer carries approval and the other carries eternal punishment.
Believe and be saved.
Reject and risk Hell.
Obey and be good.
Resist and become sinful.
Those are technically alternatives.
They are not emotionally equal alternatives for a child.
Teaching Religion Without Teaching Terror
None of this requires children to be prevented from learning about religion.
Children can learn that Christianity exists.
They can learn its stories.
They can learn what Catholics believe.
They can learn what Protestants believe.
They can learn about Judaism.
Islam.
Hindu traditions.
Buddhist traditions.
Deism.
Atheism.
Agnosticism.
They can learn the history of all of them.
The question is whether education informs a child about belief or uses fear to make the child adopt one.
The Difference Between Education and Formation
That distinction may be uncomfortable because religious education has often had another purpose.
It was not merely to teach children what Catholics believed.
It was intended to form Catholics.
The child was not always positioned as an outside investigator examining a tradition.
The child was inside the tradition being prepared to continue it.
That makes questions about consent and freedom much more difficult.
A Child Cannot Choose What Has Not Been Presented
I could not choose between Christianity and deism when nobody had taught me what deism was.
I could not compare Catholicism with atheism when atheism was presented primarily as absence or error.
I could not compare competing theories of morality when morality had been attached to God.
I could not assess religious authority using Feynman's method because I had never heard of Feynman.
Choice requires alternatives.
It also requires the freedom to select one without being terrorised by another.
The Child Who Questions
There is another way to interpret a questioning child.
The child may not be wicked.
The child may not be rebellious.
The child may not lack morality.
The child may be thinking.
That possibility seems so obvious now.
It would have changed a great deal for me then.
Not Every Catholic Childhood
I do not present my childhood as the childhood of every Catholic child.
That would repeat the same mistake I am criticising.
Other children experienced Catholic education differently.
Other teachers behaved differently.
Other families created different environments around the same doctrines.
Many people remember warmth, community and kindness.
Those experiences are theirs.
Mine is mine.
The existence of a good experience somewhere else does not erase what happened to me.
Nor does my experience establish what happened to everybody else.
The Historical Record Matters
That is why I want to place my memories beside the surviving teaching materials.
What exactly did Australian Catholic children of my generation receive?
What did the catechism say?
What did school texts say about Hell?
What did they say about Satan?
What did they say about mortal sin?
Sex?
Obedience?
Confession?
Authority?
Those are questions which do not need to depend entirely upon my memory.
Books survive.
Teaching materials survive.
Church documents survive.
Other people's memories survive.
That gives us something against which my recollections can be tested.
The Teaching Changed
The historical record also shows that Catholic religious education in Australia began changing during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The old catechism approach was giving way to approaches which placed more emphasis on the Christian message as a whole and less exclusively upon memorising doctrinal answers.
A new Australian Catechism appeared in the early 1960s.
That change itself is important.
Teaching methods change because people reconsider what education should do.
The existence of change also gives us something to compare.
Hell Did Not Simply Disappear
The doctrine itself did not simply vanish.
The Catholic Church still teaches Hell.
Its current formal language places greater emphasis upon a person's free choice and describes Hell primarily in terms of definitive separation from God.
That is not the same language as the frightening imagery a child may have encountered generations ago.
But it raises an important question.
What does the child hear today?
Doctrine and Delivery
The formal doctrine is only one part of that question.
How is it delivered?
At what age?
With what imagery?
With what explanation of uncertainty?
Is the child told that people interpret the doctrine differently?
Can the child disagree?
Can the child opt out?
Does refusal have social consequences?
Does the child understand that religious claims are beliefs rather than facts established in the same way as gravity, geology or anatomy?
Those details may determine whether a doctrine is simply taught or experienced as a threat.
The Test Is the Child
Adults can debate theology indefinitely.
The more practical question is what happens to the child receiving it.
Does the teaching produce curiosity?
Or terror?
Does it leave room for thought?
Or demand submission?
Does it tell the child about a tradition?
Or make the child afraid to leave it?
Does it strengthen a child's capacity to make moral decisions?
Or teach that morality consists primarily of obedience?
Teaching Fear to Children
What I object to is not that somebody believed differently from me.
The problem begins when an adult takes an unverifiable religious claim and places the consequences of that claim upon a child.
The adult supplies the doctrine.
The adult supplies the authority.
The adult supplies the threat.
Then the child's fear can be presented as evidence that the lesson has been learned.
That is where religious education can cross into something else.
The child may indeed have learned something.
But what the child learned may not have been faith.
It may have been fear.
Then and Now
I know something about what that education felt like from inside one childhood.
The surviving material can help establish what was formally taught.
But another question remains.
More than sixty years later, what are Australian children being taught now?
Which ideas remain?
Which words disappeared?
What protections were added?
Can a child now question the teaching without fear?
And if Hell is still taught, how is a child expected to distinguish a religious belief from a threat?
That comparison belongs to the next chapter.
