Chapter 39 — Australia and the Child's Freedom of Thought
Religious freedom, safeguarding and the less frequently examined question of a child's freedom of thought and protection from coercive belief.
The Right Belongs to the Child
The previous chapter ended with a question which seems simple until we take it seriously.
Who owns the child's mind?
The parent?
The church?
The school?
The State?
Or the child?
Adults necessarily exercise enormous authority over children.
Children need protection.
Guidance.
Education.
Boundaries.
Care.
But none of those things logically requires ownership of the child's thoughts.
That distinction is recognised in international human-rights law.
Article 14
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child does not begin its discussion of religion by giving a religious institution a right over the child.
It begins with the child.
Article 14 says that States are to respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
That wording matters.
The right belongs to the child.
Not eventually.
Not only when the child reaches adulthood.
The child already possesses the right while growing toward the capacity to exercise it more independently.
The Parents Have a Role
The Convention does not remove parents from the picture.
It recognises their rights and duties to provide direction.
But there is an important qualification.
The direction is provided to the child in the exercise of the child's right.
And it must be consistent with the child's evolving capacities.
That is a very different model from ownership.
The parent guides.
The child's capacity develops.
The direction changes as that capacity develops.
Evolving Capacity
I find the phrase evolving capacities especially important.
A three-year-old and a seventeen-year-old are both children in law.
They plainly do not have the same capacity to make decisions.
Nor do all children of the same age develop at exactly the same rate.
Evolving capacity recognises development rather than treating childhood as one fixed state.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has made the point even more clearly.
Evolving capacities should be understood as an enabling process.
They should not become an excuse for authoritarian practices which prevent children developing autonomy and expressing themselves.
As children understand more, parental direction should progressively change.
Direction becomes guidance.
Guidance becomes advice.
Eventually there can be an exchange between increasingly equal minds.
The Destination Matters
That gives childhood guidance a destination.
Independence.
The purpose of raising a child cannot sensibly be permanent dependence upon the adult who raised them.
We teach a child to walk so that eventually the child does not need to be carried.
We teach language so that eventually the child can speak for themselves.
We teach judgement so that eventually the young person can make decisions without us.
Freedom of thought should develop in the same direction.
The Right to Reach a Different Conclusion
That means successful religious upbringing cannot logically be measured only by whether the child eventually retains the religion of the parent.
If the child's freedom is genuine, another outcome has to remain possible.
A Catholic child may become Catholic.
Or not.
A Protestant child may remain Protestant.
Or not.
A Muslim child may retain Islam.
Or not.
A child raised without religion may remain atheist.
Or encounter religion later and believe.
The important principle is not which answer the person reaches.
It is whether they eventually possess enough freedom to reach an answer which is genuinely their own.
The Exit Test
This suggests a useful test of religious freedom.
Can the person leave?
Not merely in theory.
Can they leave without being terrorised?
Without being told that eternal torture awaits?
Without losing every important relationship?
Without being treated as morally defective?
Without being told that questioning itself demonstrates evil?
Without being deprived of education, safety or ordinary social existence?
A door which may be entered but cannot safely be left is not an especially convincing expression of freedom.
Freedom to Remain Matters Too
The principle works in both directions.
A young person should not be forced out of a religion merely because somebody else dislikes that religion.
Freedom to leave and freedom to remain belong to the same principle.
The purpose is not to produce atheists.
Nor Christians.
Nor any other predetermined identity.
The purpose is to allow a developing person to think.
Australia Accepted the Convention
Australia ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990.
That created international obligations for Australia.
It did not, however, simply place every provision of the Convention directly into Australian domestic law.
That distinction matters.
A right can exist as an international commitment without automatically providing an Australian child with a simple domestic legal action based upon the treaty alone.
Parts of children's rights are reflected in Australian and State laws.
But the legal structure is fragmented.
A Promise and a Mechanism Are Different Things
That distinction appears repeatedly in this part of the book.
A declaration is important.
A right written into a convention is important.
A law is important.
But the existence of words does not establish that the person who needs the protection can actually use them.
A child needs a mechanism.
Somebody who listens.
Somewhere to go.
A process which can respond.
And protection from retaliation for using it.
The Australian Constitution
People sometimes speak about constitutional freedom of religion in Australia as though it were a broad personal bill of rights.
The constitutional position is narrower.
Section 116 restricts the Commonwealth from making particular kinds of laws concerning religion.
It prevents the Commonwealth from establishing a religion, imposing a religious observance, prohibiting the free exercise of religion or requiring a religious test for Commonwealth office or public trust.
But it is directed at Commonwealth legislative power.
It is not a comprehensive personal freedom-of-religion provision applying in the same way to every institution, parent, school and State.
Nor does section 116 itself give a child a simple general power to say to every adult:
“My thoughts are legally mine.”
Queensland Says Something Stronger
Queensland now has a more direct statement.
Section 20 of the Human Rights Act 2019 says that every person has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief.
It includes the freedom to have or adopt a religion or belief of the person's choice.
Then comes a particularly important sentence.
A person must not be coerced or restrained in a way which limits that freedom.
Every person.
A child is a person.
The Child Does Not Lose Personhood
That seems obvious when written down.
Yet much of the history of childhood has involved treating children as something less than complete holders of rights.
The adult speaks for them.
The institution defines them.
The family selects their identity.
The child is described as belonging to a religion before having any capacity to understand what the religion claims.
A baby can be described as Catholic.
Protestant.
Muslim.
Jewish.
Hindu.
Or atheist.
But the baby has not reached any philosophical conclusion.
What has actually been described at that point is usually the environment into which the child has been born.
Inherited Identity Is Not Yet Chosen Identity
There is nothing unusual about children inheriting culture.
Language is inherited.
Food.
Stories.
Customs.
Relationships.
Religion can be inherited in the same way.
But an inherited identity and a chosen identity are not necessarily the same thing.
The first tells us where the child began.
The second can emerge only when the developing person has enough information and freedom to decide.
Protection as a Child
Queensland's Human Rights Act contains another relevant provision.
Every child has the right to the protection needed by that child and in the child's best interests because they are a child.
That means two ideas sit beside one another.
Protection.
And freedom of thought.
They should not have to compete.
Good protection should help the child develop the capacity to exercise freedom safely.
Protection Is Not Permanent Control
Protection can easily be used as the language of control.
“I am doing this to protect you.”
Sometimes that is true.
Children genuinely require adults to protect them from dangers they cannot yet understand.
But protection should have evidence behind it.
It should be proportionate to the child's development and the actual risk.
Otherwise the word protection can conceal something else.
Authority.
Fear.
Control.
Or the adult's discomfort with the child's independence.
Rights Can Have Limits
Queensland's human rights are not expressed as unlimited in every circumstance.
The Act permits reasonable limits which can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society based upon human dignity, equality and freedom.
That requires reasons.
A limitation has to serve a purpose.
The relationship between the limitation and that purpose matters.
Less restrictive alternatives matter.
Again, this is different from:
“Because I said so.”
Who Must Respect the Queensland Act?
There is another limitation which matters greatly in practice.
The Human Rights Act primarily regulates Queensland public entities.
Government departments.
Police.
Public health services.
State schools.
And other bodies when they are performing qualifying public functions on behalf of government.
Private organisations are not automatically public entities simply because their activities affect the public.
A Significant Educational Boundary
That produces an interesting boundary around schools.
Queensland State schools are public entities.
Private and non-government schools, including religious schools, are generally not public entities merely because they educate children.
They remain subject to other laws.
Child protection still matters.
Anti-discrimination law still matters within its scope.
Criminal law still matters.
But the direct obligations imposed upon public entities by Queensland's Human Rights Act do not simply apply to every private school in the same way.
That distinction deserves attention when we talk about a child's practical freedom of thought.
Where the Belief Is Strongest
It creates an unusual question.
A State school operates directly within the public human-rights framework.
A child attending a school established around a particular religion may spend much more of the child's life inside an explicitly religious environment.
Yet that private school will usually sit outside the Human Rights Act's public-entity obligations.
That does not mean the child has no rights.
It means the route by which those rights can be protected may be different.
The practical consequences are worth examining.
Religious Instruction in Queensland State Schools
There is another example much closer to the boundary between parental direction and a child's own developing freedom.
Queensland law permits religious instruction in State schools.
Approved religious representatives may provide it during school hours, for up to an hour each week in the circumstances established by the legislation.
Participation is not compulsory.
But the administrative decision about participation is framed primarily through parental consent.
The Parent Chooses
Current Queensland arrangements allow a parent to provide written consent for a child to participate in religious instruction.
The parent can withdraw the child.
The parent's original instruction can continue from year to year unless the parent changes it.
For a young child that may seem unsurprising.
But the same statutory framework operates across school years during which the child's capacity can change enormously.
That produces a question I have not found answered simply by reading the legislation.
At what point does the child's own view become decisive?
What If the Child Says No?
Imagine a student whose parent has placed them in religious instruction.
At seven, the child attends.
At ten, the child begins questioning.
At thirteen, the child no longer believes.
At fifteen, the student clearly says:
“I do not want to participate.”
The parent says:
“You will.”
Which principle controls the situation?
Parental direction?
The child's evolving capacity?
The child's freedom of thought and belief?
The school's statutory obligations?
The answer may depend upon the particular legal and factual circumstances.
But the question itself should not disappear.
A Consent That Never Grows Up
I find one feature particularly interesting.
Queensland's administrative arrangements do not require a parent's religious-instruction choice to be renewed every year.
The choice can continue until the parent changes it.
The child, however, does not remain the same.
The six-year-old becomes ten.
Then fourteen.
Then seventeen.
The capacity evolves.
The administrative consent may not.
That seems exactly the kind of point at which the principle of evolving capacity deserves practical attention.
Whose Religion Is Recorded?
There is also a deceptively simple administrative question.
A school enrolment form may contain a religion.
Whose religion is it?
The parent's?
The family's?
The child's?
At six those may appear indistinguishable.
At sixteen they may be entirely different.
An administrative category can easily outlive the belief it supposedly describes.
The Right to Say “None”
Freedom of religion makes little sense to me unless it includes freedom not to hold a religion.
A person should be able to say:
“I believe.”
“I do not believe.”
“I am uncertain.”
“I used to believe.”
“I changed my mind.”
Or:
“None.”
None of those answers should by itself make a young person morally suspect.
The Freedom to Change
Change is particularly important.
A freedom which protects only the belief originally assigned to the child is not freedom of thought.
Thought changes.
Evidence changes.
Experience changes.
Knowledge changes.
The person changes.
The right therefore has to contain the possibility of changing one's mind.
Questioning Is Part of Development
A child asking why is not necessarily rejecting a parent.
A teenager questioning God is not necessarily rejecting morality.
A young person questioning doctrine is not necessarily damaged, rebellious or badly influenced.
They may simply be developing.
If evolving capacity means anything, questioning should be expected.
A mind becoming capable of independent judgement will eventually test some of the things it was first told.
Belief, Claim and Evidence
Freedom of thought requires more than permission to choose between beliefs.
A child also needs some understanding of how claims are evaluated.
There is a difference between somebody saying something is true and demonstrating that it is true.
There is a difference between belief and evidence.
There is a difference between testimony and independent verification.
There is a difference between an unexplained event and evidence for a supernatural explanation of that event.
Those distinctions are part of critical thinking.
What Evidence Does
Scientific thinking does not begin by deciding which answer we would prefer.
It begins with a claim which must remain vulnerable to examination.
Can it be observed?
Measured?
Tested?
Compared with alternative explanations?
Independently checked?
Does it make predictions which can fail?
When repeated observation is possible, can the result be reproduced?
The method is valuable partly because it allows reality to tell us that we are wrong.
The One-Off Miracle
A miracle illustrates the distinction.
Suppose somebody recovers unexpectedly from illness.
The recovery may be real.
The medical records may establish it.
Doctors may genuinely be unable to explain why it occurred.
But the additional statement:
“God caused it,”
is another claim.
The absence of another explanation does not by itself establish that explanation.
An unexplained event remains unexplained until evidence allows us to go further.
Can Religion Be Evidence-Based?
A religious organisation can use evidence-based knowledge.
It can become trauma-informed.
It can use what psychology, medicine and child-development research have learned about fear, attachment, coercion, memory and consent.
It can change harmful practices when evidence shows that they cause harm.
But using evidence-based practices does not automatically make supernatural claims scientific evidence.
Those are different questions.
A church can be evidence-based in the way it protects a child while still holding beliefs which belong to faith rather than empirical science.
A genuinely critical education should allow the child to understand that difference.
The Question Religion Should Be Able to Survive
If a religion is true, allowing a child to question it should not destroy the truth.
If the evidence is persuasive, inquiry provides an opportunity to examine that evidence.
If the child returns to the belief freely, the resulting belief would seem to me more meaningful than belief maintained because leaving was frightening.
If the child reaches a different conclusion, that outcome tells us that the freedom was real.
Freedom Is Tested by Disagreement
It is easy to respect another person's freedom while that person agrees with us.
The real test begins when they do not.
A parent who says:
“You are free to think for yourself as long as you remain Catholic,”
has placed an obvious limit upon the freedom.
So has the secular parent who says:
“You may think for yourself as long as you never become religious.”
The principle has to work in both directions.
Freedom Without Information Is Thin
There is another requirement.
To make a meaningful choice, a person needs some knowledge that alternatives exist.
A child who has encountered only one worldview cannot compare it with anything.
That does not make the worldview false.
It does limit the information available for choosing it.
A developing child should eventually be able to encounter different religious and non-religious explanations of human existence.
Not so that adults can tell the child which one to select.
So that selection becomes possible.
The Outside Door Again
This returns me to the outside door from the previous chapter.
A child cannot easily recognise a closed belief system while every source of information available to the child belongs to that system.
There needs to be some possibility of comparison.
Books.
Education.
Science.
People from other cultures.
People from other religions.
People with no religion.
Adults who can tolerate the child's question without trying immediately to supply the approved answer.
Exposure to alternatives does not dictate a conclusion.
It makes a conclusion more genuinely possible.
Freedom Requires Safety
Thought can be legally free while practically imprisoned.
Nobody may physically prevent the child from thinking:
“I do not believe.”
But if expressing that thought brings humiliation, rejection, threats, violence or eternal terror, the practical freedom is very different.
That is why coercion matters.
Freedom of thought cannot be measured only by asking whether somebody physically entered the mind and stopped the thought.
We have to examine the environment in which thought is allowed to be expressed.
The Private Thought and the Public Performance
A child can privately stop believing long before anybody else knows.
The external behaviour may continue.
Prayer.
Church attendance.
Religious classes.
Sacraments.
Approved language.
The child may therefore live in two different worlds.
The internal one.
And the performed one.
When those become separated by fear, we should be very cautious about describing the performance as freely chosen faith.
Fawning Can Look Like Faith
The same behaviour discussed earlier appears again.
The child smiles.
Agrees.
Repeats.
Participates.
Reassures the parent.
Avoids conflict.
That can look like successful religious formation.
It may also be appeasement.
The behaviour alone cannot tell us which.
The Child's Voice
The Convention on the Rights of the Child contains another principle which belongs beside freedom of thought.
Children capable of forming their own views should be able to express those views in matters affecting them, with appropriate weight given to their age and maturity.
That does not mean children make every decision.
It means their voice is evidence.
It should not vanish merely because an adult disagrees with it.
Listening Is Not the Same as Obeying
Adults sometimes resist children's rights because they imagine the alternative is children having unlimited control.
That is not necessary.
Listening to the child does not require doing everything the child wants.
Considering the child's view does not abolish parental responsibility.
Recognising evolving capacity does not mean pretending a five-year-old is an adult.
The point is much simpler.
The child's mind exists.
Its development matters.
And increasing capacity should produce increasing agency.
The Problem of the Silent Child
There is a further complication for children raised under strong authority.
They may not say what they think.
The absence of objection is therefore not necessarily evidence of agreement.
A child may have learned that objection is dangerous.
Or futile.
Or sinful.
Or disrespectful.
Or proof that Satan is influencing them.
A right which depends entirely upon the frightened child confidently asserting it may fail the child who needs it most.
Rights Must Be Reachable
That raises a practical question about all children's rights.
How does the child use them?
A seven-year-old does not read legislation.
A twelve-year-old may never have heard of Article 14.
A frightened teenager may not know that Queensland has a Human Rights Act.
So somebody has to make the right reachable.
Teachers.
Schools.
Doctors.
Counsellors.
Child-protection systems.
Human-rights institutions.
And adults prepared to listen.
A Right Nobody Knows About
A right can exist beautifully on paper and have very little influence over the life of a child who has never been told it exists.
That is why rights education itself matters.
Children should know, in language appropriate to their age, that they are allowed to think.
That questions are permitted.
That belief cannot be forced.
That adults can be wrong.
That institutions can be wrong.
And that asking for help is not a moral failure.
The Right to an Independent Listener
I increasingly think practical freedom of thought requires access to an independent listener.
Somebody who does not have a stake in maintaining the child's existing belief.
That does not mean an anti-religious listener.
It means somebody capable of allowing more than one answer.
The child should be able to say:
“I believe.”
Or:
“I don't.”
Without the listener deciding in advance which answer must be repaired.
What Would Real Protection Look Like?
For me, practical protection of a child's freedom of thought would contain several things.
Age-appropriate information about different beliefs.
Permission to ask why.
No punishment for private doubt.
No supernatural threat used to compel assent.
Increasing recognition of the child's own decisions as capacity develops.
Access to somebody outside the family's belief system.
A meaningful response when coercion becomes harmful.
And a genuine possibility of leaving an inherited religion at maturity without being treated as though the person has committed an offence against the family.
Leaving Should Not Require Escape
That distinction matters.
There is a difference between leaving and escaping.
Leaving means:
“I have considered this and I no longer believe.”
Escaping means:
“I have to get away before I can safely think.”
A system which makes escape necessary has already answered part of the question about freedom.
The Family Still Matters
None of this requires treating parents as enemies.
Families remain extraordinarily important to children.
Most parents try to pass on what they genuinely believe will help their children.
Culture, ethics, traditions and religion are naturally transmitted within families.
The question is not whether parents should influence their children.
Influence is unavoidable.
The question is whether influence develops into permanent control.
Influence Is Not Ownership
Every child is influenced.
By parents.
Teachers.
Friends.
Culture.
Advertising.
Religion.
Science.
Politics.
Stories.
Technology.
The goal cannot be a child untouched by influence.
Such a child has never existed.
The more useful goal is a person who gradually becomes able to recognise influence and evaluate it.
To Know That You Were Taught
That may be one of the most important achievements of maturity.
To realise:
“This is something I was taught.”
Not:
“This is automatically reality.”
Once that distinction becomes possible, inherited ideas can be examined.
Some survive examination.
Some change.
Some are discarded.
Some become more valuable because they have survived the examination.
A Culture Can Be Loved Without Being Obeyed
The same applies beyond religion.
A person can value family history without repeating every family practice.
A person can value a culture without accepting every inherited rule.
A person can love parents while disagreeing with them.
A person can understand why earlier generations believed something without being required to continue believing it.
That is part of what freedom of thought allows.
Australia's Question
Australia therefore has several different layers.
An international commitment to children's freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
A Commonwealth Constitution containing particular restrictions concerning religion but not a comprehensive individual bill of rights.
Different State and Territory legal structures.
In Queensland, a Human Rights Act which explicitly protects every person's freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief.
Child-protection law concerned with significant harm.
Education laws which still give parents substantial authority over the religious instruction of children.
And private religious institutions whose relationship with human-rights law differs from that of State institutions.
The rights are therefore real.
But the practical pathway through them is not simple.
The Gap Worth Examining
The gap which interests me is between the declaration:
“Every person has freedom of thought,”
and the lived experience of a child who says:
“I no longer believe what my parents believe.”
What happens next?
That is where the practical meaning of the right can be tested.
Can the Child Say No?
Can the child say no to prayer?
No to religious instruction?
No to a statement of belief?
No to confession?
No to a religious explanation of their behaviour?
No to an adult who says that God requires obedience?
The answer will not be identical in every circumstance or at every age.
But the direction of development should matter.
As capacity grows, the child's own answer should matter more.
Can the Child Say Yes?
The reverse is equally important.
Can a child raised without religion eventually say:
“I want to explore this faith”?
Can a sceptical parent tolerate that?
A principle which protects only departure from religion is not freedom of thought.
The child's emerging mind has to be allowed to move in either direction.
Freedom Is an Active State
I have come to think that freedom is not merely a word which names a country, a law or a political system.
It describes an active condition.
A person has to be able to think.
Question.
Compare.
Learn.
Disagree.
Refuse.
Change.
And sometimes return to an idea previously rejected.
Without those possibilities, freedom becomes largely ceremonial.
Freedom Cannot Require the Correct Answer
That may be the simplest test of all.
If I tell somebody:
“You are free to decide, provided you reach my answer,”
I have not really offered a decision.
I have offered compliance.
The same is true whether the authority is a priest, parent, teacher, politician, doctor or atheist.
Authority which genuinely respects thought has to tolerate the possibility that thought will produce disagreement.
The Child I Was
When I apply that principle backwards, I think about the child I was.
I did not need adults to decide that there was no God.
I did not need another authority to replace Catholic certainty with atheist certainty.
I needed room.
Room to ask:
Why?
How do you know?
What is the evidence?
Why should I believe you?
Why am I the problem?
Why does God need me to be frightened?
Why can I not say no?
Those questions might have changed a great deal.
The Child I Was Did Not Need Another Doctrine
This is important.
Replacing one compulsory belief with another would not have solved the problem.
I needed the right not to know.
The right to wait.
The right to examine.
The right to change my mind.
The right to discover that adults could be sincere and wrong at the same time.
From Protection to Sovereignty
Eventually childhood ends.
The protected child becomes an adult.
Parental direction should end.
The person's body becomes their own.
Their relationships become their own.
Their beliefs become their own.
Their memories.
Their records.
Their choices.
Their account of their own life.
That transition has a name which has become increasingly important to me.
Personal sovereignty.
Australia and the Child's Freedom of Thought
Australia has accepted the principle that children possess freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
Queensland has placed freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief into its own human-rights legislation.
Those are significant statements.
But their importance ultimately depends upon what happens when a child uses them.
When the child questions.
When the child disagrees.
When the child says no.
When the child changes belief.
When the child asks to leave.
A right which survives those moments is a meaningful right.
A right which disappears as soon as the child disagrees with the adults around them needs much closer examination.
For me, that is where freedom of thought finally becomes something larger.
It becomes the right to become oneself.
And that leads directly to personal sovereignty.
Readers who would like to examine some of these questions in relation to their own lives can continue into the Personal Sovereignty project.
