The rights of children worldwide are defined by the United Nations, in their ‘Rights of the Child’ (1). This legislation supposedly safeguards children’s freedom to chose their religion. However, this is a nonsense, in that the United Nations also recognises that what children are brought up to believe is a parental decision. The question becomes: although society imposes limits on the age of consensual sex, marriage, and voting, on the premiss that these should be decisions based on mature judgement,why should the choice of a religion not be similarly prohibited until adulthood?
Is religious indoctrination considered less harmful than, say, allowing marriage at 15? An intolerance of those who do not share the same belief system is often fostered in childhood, which can lead to sectarian division, hatred, and murder. Some religious indoctrinists are also child abusers. Their religion is the evil it is supposed to combat.
In an American context, Karen Armstrong (2) analyses Protestant fundamentalist groups, and their belief that there is a ‘tight relationship between wickedness and poverty’. She states: ‘they have produced a religious version of militant capitalism’. Thus, ‘true Christians’ are necessarily Republicans, and such ‘Christians’ have a duty to elect politicians that will oppose ‘the homosexual agenda’, birth control and abortion rights, interfaith marriage, laws against bullying children, and Darwinism.
There is a ‘fundamentalist church’ on virtually all American streets. They are as common as hot-dog stalls, and their aim is the same: to get people to part with cash, some of which is diverted to politicians’ campaign funds.
The invasion of the fundamentalist mind-snatchers extends to American schools. Rick Nagin (3) reported on Katherine Stewart’s investigation into fundamentalist indoctrination of children: ‘Stewart uncovered a “nationwide effort” to “turn public schools into a base for indoctrinating” … the Child Evangelism Fellowship has set up a rapidly growing national network of the clubs that recruit and train children, aged 5-12, to bully their peers with threats that they will “go to Hell” unless they accept Jesus … ‘Good News Clubs’, under the guise of Bible study groups, infiltrate public schools … She found that 3,500 of the clubs have been established, offering after-hours indoctrination, with their numbers doubling every two to three years. Under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, under the guise of free speech rights of children, Stewart found that “one-fifth of the public schools in New York City are being used rent-free as churches after school hours and on weekends. This “church-planting” movement is dominated by evangelicals and seeks to turn all 1,200 of the city schools into church venues’.
Stewart attended National conventions in which: ‘leaders of these movements openly declared their intention to transform public schools into “Christ-centered” institutions and turn the U.S. into a “Christian nation.” The Good News Clubs, Stewart said, use their base in the schools for right-wing political campaigns.This concerted campaign is supported by right-wing legal groups dedicated to erasing the separation of church and state and financed by extremist foundations’.
At these conventions, and on televised ‘religious’ programs, often hosted by Sky Network, fundamentalists rant about the parental right to beat their child. They are salesmen who peddle books, such as Train Up a Child (4). This antithesis of human rights encourages parents to beat their children in a ‘Christian way’, but to be wary of neighbours who might contact social workers!
Lee Taylor (5), in an article, the Fifth Column of Child Abuse, tells of his own beating, which was not reported. He tells of his father conducting a ‘family worship’, during which he observes his son playing with marbles in his playsuit. He recalls: ‘I was knocked to the floor, grabbed by the scruff of my neck and dragged past my hysterical mother as I wet my playsuit, terrified and screaming. “See what you’ve done to your mother”? Daddy dragged me into the bathroom, took off my clothes and scrubbed my penis while lecturing on Sodom and Gomorrah and hell fire. He then dragged me down into the basement where I was beaten with a stick until my bottom was bloody. Back up in the kitchen, I was forced to get down on my knees and pray to God for His mercy so I wouldn’t have to burn forever in hell, separated for eternity from my family who loved me and wanted so much for me to be saved through the shed blood of Jesus on the cross of Calvary’.
This account is not a sensational choice that depicts abuse by a tiny minority of fundamentalists. Far more graphic accounts of such abuse could be given, and they are very plentiful in number. Yet, to mention child abuse in the name of religion offers insight into the mentality of those who perpetrate wider abuse under its banner.