I attended church and Sunday School throughout my childhood. For myself and my family, church was a wholesome and healthy place for children to spend Sunday mornings receiving religious instruction in a fun and age-appropriate manner.
So imagine my surprise in 2005 when, during a late Sunday night phone call with my older sister, I discovered that my nieces and nephews had received a Sunday School lesson on Hurricane Katrina. I lived in the panhandle of Florida at the time and had witnessed thousands of displaced families coming into Florida, lining up, and being turned away from overfilled homeless shelters: men, women, and even the tiniest of children. The children in my family would, from that day forward, witness the pain and suffering of those families while wondering if their Sunday School teacher was right when she told them that the’suffering?these families endured was?because God punished New Orleans for hosting a Gay Pride parade. Pulling them out of that church may have prevented further messages like this, but does it eliminate the risk that these children would be affected by the messages being pushed on them by the Religious Right?
While surely most religious organizations?would never encourage these types of discriminatory (not to mention ridiculous and mean-spirited) messages to be taught to children, do you know for sure that your children haven’t been exposed to them? Most of us choose not to teach our children to be discriminatory or judgmental. However, a fundamentalist shift within many religious denominations is forming the messages not only in churches, but also in how religious groups fight to insert those messages into public education.
Recently, the foreverymom.com website featured an article entitled “10 Things We Don’t Want Our Children To Learn At Church.” Adding to that article, here are 6 of the craziest lessons being taught to children because of the influence of religious groups in the United States, particularly those groups with a fundamentalist bent. Think your children haven’t heard these? Perhaps you should ask them to be sure.
1. Bullying those you perceive to be sinners is the Christian thing to do.
Religious organizations have led the way in fighting anti-bullying strategies in public schools. Teaching children to be kind to other children that may identify as LGBTQ is, according to those fighting those efforts, simply an attempt to indoctrinate your children to be LGBTQ, as well.
Mission America, a Christian website that offers “commentary on the culture,” explains that while bullying can be severe and damaging,
“. . . the big push to solve this crisis is coming from ‘LGBT’ activists who see an opportunity to attack worthy moral standards and elevate homosexuality and gender-bending practiced by children to a place of honor.”
In other words, it isn’t about equality, it’s about venerating LGBTQ students and allowing them “special” privileges. You know, like reducing the increased likelihood of suicide among LGBTQ youth. God forbid that should become the norm.
2.?Islam and all of its followers?are evil.
In homes and in churches across the country, an anti-Muslim sentiment has become pervasive since 9-11. As such, Muslim children report increased bullying in schools. A lack of knowledge around the differences between the small groups of radical terrorists and the larger Islamic community as a whole is expressed by those on the right and by some Christian churches. The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, for example, has led anti-Muslim protests,
“wearing T-shirts with the slogan ‘Islam is of the devil’ on the back and carrying signs saying such things as ‘Jesus is not a liberal,’ ‘Islam Kills’ and ‘Jesus is the only way.'”
Anti-bullying website nobullying.com stresses that,
“parents and schools have to be on particular alert when muslim bullying presents itself. This is a kind of behavior that can turn into an ugly mob mentality quickly justified by twisted politics and errant thought about religion. It also breeds off of ignorance about culture as well.”
3. Science is bad.
Bill Nye released a YouTube video imploring parents to stop teaching their children to deny evolution, a proven scientific theory which holds that,
“. . . human beings and all other forms of life developed from a process of random genetic mutation and natural selection.”
Continuing to deny scientific truths, Nye said,
“. . . would hinder a country long renowned for its innovation, intellectual capital and a general grasp of science.”
Relevant Children’s Ministry, an online resource for children’s ministry leaders, refutes Nye’s statements by saying that,
“. . . a Gallup poll that surveyed 1,012 adults in May, 46 percent of Americans can be described as creationists for believing that God created humans in their present form at some point within the last 10,000 years.”
However, People for the American Way reports that,
“. . . the vast majority of Americans, 83%, want the Theory of Evolution to be taught in the nation’s public schools”
and
“. . . only a minority of Americans want both Evolution and Creationism taught as science, or want only Creationism taught at all.”
Meanwhile, American children have fallen behind as the leaders in math, science, and technology, according to U.S. News and World Report. Despite this, a battle to continue to offer creationism as a scientific theory and to eliminate evolution from the curriculum continues in states like Texas.
4. Being an independent or empowered woman is sinful.
Many fundamentalist churches agree that women should be submissive and that the feminist movement has led women astray from their true purpose: existing to serve a husband. If it’s important to you that your daughters learn to be strong and independent in their own right, or if you’ve taught your sons to respect women as equals, religious messages?may be undermining the work you’ve done.
As domestic violence is raised to the forefront of our consciousness as the pervasive and epidemic issue that it is, this type of religious teaching must be identified as perpetuating a culture that allows for and even supports a culture in which violence against women is accepted. As Christian blogger and talk radio host Jocelyn Anderson writes,
“until the doctrine of female subordination which is a doctrine of institutionalized discrimination that thrives on an unreasonable fear and hatred of women (and lies at the very heart of the issue and is what perpetuates it) is dealt with, the abuses will continue.”
The correlations between a religious belief in the inferiority of women and violence perpetrated against them has long been argued by scholars in both fields of gender and religious studies. Unsurprisingly, 22% of women first experience intimate partner violence between the ages of 11 and 17, making the empowerment of girls and young women more necessary at public school age than at any point in their lives.
5.?Sex is dirty and abstinence is the only lesson children need.
Sex education in public schools has been roundly criticized by religious groups, stating that,
“these curricula neither discourage nor criticize teen sexual activity as long as ‘protection’ is used. In general, they exhibit an acceptance of casual teen sex and do not encourage teens to wait until they are older to initiate sexual activity.”
Sex education is not universally offered in public schools because of these groups, and as a result, the U.S. leads all developed nations in terms of teen pregnancy rates, despite the fact that
“these statistics incorporate the almost 40 percent fall in the teen birth rate that the United States has experienced over the past two decades.”
Studies have proven that,
“abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are not effective in changing young people’s sexual behavior or preventing negative outcomes such as sexually transmitted diseases or teen pregnancy. More importantly, however, it confirmed that that programs that teach young people about abstinence and contraception/disease prevention, are, in fact, effective.”
Further, the New York Times states that
“teenage pregnancy prevention programs, when implemented as designed, actually do delay sexual initiation (abstinence) and promote use of contraceptives for sexually active teenagers.”
So much for all that separation of church and state, right?
