I’m curious: how often do parents in religious households back up the command: “Stop hitting your brother!” with the addendum, “which a close reading of the interaction of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Commandments would suggest is prohibited”? Or even with the more straightforward: “because God said not to!” Relatively rarely, my guess is, because parental authority contains its own compulsion—and, hence, irresistible logic. I may be wrong, however, and will humbly look forward to being corrected accordingly.
I grew up in a non-religious household, and attended a non-religious school. I never heard God invoked as the source of moral authority either by my parents or teachers. Few of my classmates, to my knowledge, attended church or synagogue. I doubt whether a believer could pick out those of us raised without religion on the basis of our moral behavior. And not because our households were parasitic on religious teachings, but because a family will descend into chaos without order and respect for others.
The always emblematic Michael Novak sets out the usual case for why lack of religious belief must lead to “moral decadence” in No One Sees God. I quote his arguments here because they bear on the raising of children. Without a purported origin in divine commandment, Novak says, moral codes have little purchase on human behavior. “If morality were left to reason alone, common agreement would never be reached,” he writes, “since philosophers vehemently—and endlessly-disagree, and large majorities would waver without clear moral signals.” Ethical paralysis would set in: “If God is really dead, by what authority do we say any particular practice is prohibited or permitted? In the resulting social disarray, the most urgent of all moral questions has also become unsettled: ‘How shall we raise our children? What kind of moral example should we set?’”
I’m puzzled as to why Mr. Novak and other Catholic thinkers believe that reason can discover something as abstruse and remote as God but not a workable set of ethical principles, but I will leave that quibble aside for now. His predictions of secular moral paralysis strike me as rather overblown. Does any parent ask himself whether he must allow his nine-year-old son to run over his four-year-old sister with his bike because “God is really dead” or because philosophers disagree on whether morality is consequentialist or deontological? He does not, because the value of his children is self-evident, as is the necessity of inculcating in them common decency, if only for the sake of a sane household. And his children will learn that common decency through repetition and by gradually understanding that others have the same capacity for pain and sorrow that they do. To be sure, some households remain dysfunctional, but their problems almost invariably stem from the parents’ incapacity, not from the failure to invoke God as a reason to not kick your mother when she asks you to pick up your clothes.
By the time an individual reaches adulthood, this self-control and basic respect for others will usually have become instinctual, but if they have not, a moment’s reflection reveals the value of the golden rule. Our life and property depend on others obeying the law. Our own behavior, by setting an example, is an important bulwark of that obedience. Of the possible reasons why someone doesn’t run a red light on a deserted street at 3 am—sheer habit, fear of getting caught, an awareness of the fragility of social order, or the belief that he will go to hell if he guns it—my guess is that the fear of hell comes up infrequently.
In my household we do connect God and discipline, often saying “God wouldn’t like that” or “Would God like that?” to our children aged 2 to 9. Growing up in a churchgoing household, however, I don’t remember my parents doing that. Your point is generally correct, though. The main arguments for good behavior are force, parental authority, desire to please the parents, and appeals to Smithian sympathy (“look how sad you made her”). Human selfishness makes all of these motivations useful, and some don’t apply if you don’t get caught.
The big question is what happens when the child grows up. If the child hears his parents confess to sin and pray to God for forgiveness, he will not think that adulthood will give him the freedom to make his own Law. My five-year-old is fond of tracing levels of authority: “God is the boss of Daddy, and Daddy is the boss of Mommy, and Mommy is the boss of Amelia, and … and Benjamin is the boss of me, and I’m the boss of Faith.” (Not that she follows this in practice!)
How about saying this: “Stop hitting your brother or I’m gonna whack you! This family has rules!” References to an invisible man in the sky being mad about misconduct makes no sense to a child. Or to most rational adults either. Sheesh.
Heather,
The Catholic Church holds that common moral norms may be known by everyone, believer and unbeliever alike, through the natural law. This was a big deal during the Clarence Thomas hearings, because Thomas’s natural law beliefs (a result of a Roman Catholic education) were seen by the left as an obstacle to his nomination.
If Mr. Novak does not accept that unbelievers may know moral truth through the natural law, then he is defending his own peculiar understanding of religion, not the Catholic Church’s. What is strange here is that the sides have been reversed: Generally it is the secularist attacking natural law theory, and the Catholic defending it.
[NOTE: Going to risk an HTML tag. SInce you have no “preview” capibility (how 2004 of you!) and no list of accepted tags (how mean!) it’s a crap shoot.]
Michael Novak sets out the usual case for why lack of religious belief must lead to “moral decadence” in No One Sees God.
Then I would say that Mr. Novak is missing some basic theological instruction. In particular, the overloaded term “common grace” which in this case means that God provides all men with a moral compass, whether or not they believe in him. (Heart hardening, a la Pharaoh, is the withdrawal of this common grace.) Thus, from a Christian perspective, non-believers are perfectly capable of living moral, ethical lives–and the source of their morality is the same as it is for believers.
In other words, for Christians, it makes no sense to puzzle over morality in the absence of God. The absence of God would mean that we are the greatest of fools–in which case who gives a damn about a metaphysical conundrum. And morality among unbelievers, as I mentioned, explicable.
@Eric Rasmusen
Just so, but perhaps not in the way you meant that. If the child’s moral behavior is tied to a belief, then when that belief is lost or shaken ( and it almost certainly will be at least shaken), there goes the main support for the moral behavior. And it’s quite a bit more difficult and urgent to shore up a shaky foundation, once the teetering edifice is sitting on top of it.
Wouldn’t it be better, from the jump, to build on a more permanent base – like the actual, real world, and the behavior that makes for a civil society?
My understanding (from a non-professional) is that most contemporary child development and psychology literature agrees that kids of that age lack the physical hardware to reason to abstractions as the source of moral behavior. At most, they can derive empathy (“Do you like getting hit? No? Then why would you hit someone else?”) or consequence-reward (“Bad things happen to you when you hit someone else.”). Adding in an ontological “source” of those rules is, at best, superfluous.
Incidentally, if I tried to tell my 6-year-old that “Daddy is the boss of Mommy,” then I suspect Daddy might be sleeping on the couch for a while!
When I was a kid and my mother was angry at me, if, later in the day I had some bad luck, like tripping and falling, Mom would say, “That is God getting you back,” for whatever Mom thought I had done that was wrong. Of course, sometimes Mom had been mislead by my siblings or other people and I was innocent of what Mom thought I had done to merit punishment, and I was also savvy enough to know I had probably tripped due to my own carelessness, which lead me to be very skeptical of my mother and of God.
I have kids aged 7, 6, and 3, so I have ample opportunity to experiment with different ways of communicating about authority. We are also Christians, and God is a pervasive part of our lives… he is part of our correction of our kids as much as in our appreciation and encouragement of them.
But I don’t think we have ever communicated “God says not to, so don’t”, or that “God will be mad” (referring to Ken_K’s comment). We don’t even generally refer to a “God is the boss” mentality, or “God wouldn’t like that”.
Most often, we communicate that God, as our designer and creator, has built us to relate to each other most effectively when we follow some general principles. (These principles are not unique to those who learn them from religion… social science generally comes to the same conclusions, as would be expected.) So, don’t hit your sister… it isn’t effective at getting what you want, it doesn’t communicate love, and it (as an inherently selfish way of interacting) alienates you from the relationships that will be most important to you through your life. God has built us to depend on each other in relationships, and you have to learn to cooperate and communicate in caring, unselfish ways for those relationships to work. Now, obviously I don’t give that whole lecture every time… but that’s the basic principle that I try to communicate, over time. I might say, “Don’t hit… it hurts your sister, and makes her not want to spend time with you.” Generally I build the foundation of God’s design for us to live in relationships during later conversations, rather than invoking God as a trump card in the moment of conflict.
But for us, our relationship with God isn’t one of rule-following, but one of realizing our full potential through recognizing our designer and following him and his purpose for us.
Great question!
Mark
In my household, God and Jesus were more or less used as a positive example more than negative, and then it was as an empathic channel. So, if I was a jerk, I would be reminded that Jesus said, “What you do to others, you do to me.” When giving to charities, the same example was cited. Althought, the story of Jesus may be just so much applesauce, it was a useful cultural touchstone.
These discussions always seem to devolve into a fistfight over whether a lack of belief in God=instant murder spree. The problem struck as being both more profound and more subtle. A lack of belief in God hasn’t exactly given me license in my mind to rob and steal. On the other hand, once I lost my faith, I became far less sympathetic to others. I find no compelling reason to give to charity. How would a secular parent encourage this? Kant’s categorical imperative? I’m sure that’ll impress a kindergartner.
*Logically*, Novak and these other Catholic thinkers are correct: there is no particular a priori reason to believe that any particular moral code is “correct”. In sort of a twisted version of Occam’s Razor, then, the only distinguishing factor of all of the infinite moral codes is that an authority figure puts his weight behind the “correct” one.
I put “correct” in quotes because, philosophically, ethics is not about empirical statements. And yet, empiricism must play some role: for through the last ten thousand years of civilizations around the globe, from nearly secular to extremely religious societies, with religions ranging the gamut from animism to Abrahamism, people have generally followed the same very basic set of moral codes. (In fact, for most of that history, morality existed separately from religion — as a case in point, examine the amoral – indeed, often immoral – Greek gods)
Consequently, the notion that widespread moral paralysis would result from the explicit rejection of the moral authority of a divinity is clearly false.
I am not entirely opposed to physical punishment. It does work for some children, sometimes. The above is not an example that will work, IMHO. Most children would see that as an idle threat, and some will figure hitting their brother is worth getting whacked.
Ken_K — Maybe you just caught me in a bad, overly-sensitive mood today, but I also dislike the “invisible man in the sky” saying. When used, is not the intent to insult and/or make fun of believers? How is that helpful to anyone?
My parents never used any “God is watching” threats that I can remember. If I’d done something really bad, I was usually sent to my room to contemplate and put myself in the proper frame of mind to receive the lecture from my father when he got home. He was such a talented lecturer, I often begging for a spanking instead.
I certainly never used God threats with my children, though I did resort to “Granny would be so disappointed to see you act that way”.
As for running a red light at 3am, I do not for only one reason — fear of getting caught, specifically having to pay a fine. Pure reason leads me to believe that a few minutes of my time is not worth $50. Again.
Heather,
I note that you raise a similar issue in one of your recent pieces — maybe it was on the Dwakins blog or in the USA Today one. It puts me mind of this passge by Orwell:
Never, literally never in recent years, have I met anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not influence conduct as it would if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as afraid of Hell as he was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will make jokes about Hell. They wouldn’t make jokes about leprosy, or R.A.F. pilots with their faces burnt away: the subject is too painful. Here there springs into my mind a little triolet by the late G. K. Chesterton:
It’s a pity that Poppa has sold his soul,
It makes him sizzle at breakfast so.
The money was useful, but still on the whole
It’s a pity that Poppa has sold his soul
When he might have held on like the Baron de Coal,
And not cleared out when the price was low.
It’s a pity that Poppa has sold his soul,
It makes him sizzle at breakfast so.
Chesterton, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in Hell. If his next-door neighbour had been burnt to death he would not have written a comic poem about it, yet he can make jokes about somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief has no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler’s Musical Banks.
As I Please
Tribune, 14 April 1944
God’s job is akin to a night watchman—to pose a threat of enforcement first, when parents aren’t around and later, at any time that the individual, whether in the presence of others or not, might be inclined to do as he’s previously been taught he shouldn’t.
The Bible’s got it about right–just a bit sybolically and (deliberately) backwards.
First came the world. Some time went by before Man came along. Man saw, fairly quickly, that some aspects of behavior that came naturally needed
some sort of regulation if the social thing was going to work out. So, Man created God. Probably used Him on the kids first but figured “Not really any sense in wising ’em up just because they’re a little older now; it’ll make it easier for ’em to behave, ‘stead of cuttin’ loose all of a sudden.”
And, since it is the nature of Man to progress through the specialiation
of performances, there were soon specialists to manage their fellows’
adherence to the behavior (moral) code that had been doped out before.
God came in handy, too, as explanation for phenomena of every kind—and made the services of the specialists that much more valuable. And, often, they were successful in getting Him to send rain and you could count on their intercessions being successful about half the time when you wanted your woman to birth a boy baby.
As it was in the beginning…
God has built us to depend on each other in relationships, and you have to learn to cooperate and communicate in caring, unselfish ways for those relationships to work.
Yes! Exactly. We are social animals. No other explanation for morality is needed (or plausible). Now, the God angle is one theory …
@Eric Rasmusen
“Daddy is the boss of Mommy”? You might want to rethink the kind of morality you’re teaching your children.
The Divine Command Theory of morality was pretty well decisively refuted by Plato, in the voice of Socrates, over 2000 years ago in the dialogue Euthyphro. The short version is that “because God says so” is not an ultimate reason an act is moral unless you think God has no reason for saying so. Even among theists, people tend to think that God has reasons for giving this or that command; namely, most theists would probably say that God commands X because X is good. But if so then God’s commanding X cannot, even by the theists own lights, constitute its being good.
In short, be good for goodness sake. Happy holidays!
In the Brother’s Karamozov, there is a character who is finally convinced that there is no God. Freed from this belief, he decides that there are no consequences to his wickedness and he murders someone.
Imagine if he had been taught the believe in morality without them having to rest upon a belief in God? Then no crisis of religion would be able inspire such actions.
I like to think mankind is able to realize the mutually beneficial system of respecting each other without the punishment of a lake of fire or the reward of eternal life. Be good because it is good for all of us, not because of what you selfishly get out of it. Are the religious so unimaginative that they can’t understand how someone could think murder was bad without their being a God to punish you for doing it? If anything, God gives you more justifications to kill that He does take them away.
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Its called ethics and the golden rule.God is just a voyeur.
What always struck me as interesting about this argument is that it’s basically the exact opposite of what C.S. Lewis put forth in The Case for Christianity. His argument started out with the assumption that all humans possess a moral sense, and from there argued that therefore, God must exist. Novak, and many, many others, argue essentially that there’s no moral sense without first believing in God.
“In my household we do connect God and discipline, often saying “God wouldn’t like that” or “Would God like that?” to our children aged 2 to 9.”
@Eric Rasmussen – This sounds to me like manipulative, passive-aggressive parenting. I.e., God as the personally hurt, disappointed father in the sky.
Enforcing right and wrong by stressing the authority figure’s personal disappointment confuses children about the reasons for moral action and deprives them of the potential for moral maturity as adults.
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Heather, this is a great discussion. I was raised by staunch atheists in a small town whose population was overwhelmingly secular and Jewish (like my own family). I had no idea how cloistered my existence had been until years later when I first was exposed to Catholic thinkers. I encountered the sort of argument posed by Novak when I was in my twenties and was totally unprepared to respond to it. I think you’ve done a great job dissassembling Novak’s underlying assumptions and have provoked a really interesting thread.
Thanks.
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