Historically religious liberty has been at the core of liberalism, reflecting its birth amidst protracted religious conflict. This helps explain why concerns about religious upbringings and education dominate recent philosophical discussions about the limits of parental authority. If we assume children’s moral equality, and add to that a desire to treat children in accordance with the same liberal values that we wish to see governing relations between adults, it seems right to suppose children should enjoy the same kinds of religious freedoms. The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child asserts as much. It seems a short step from here to the conclusion that coercing children’s religious beliefs and practices is as objectionable as coercing the religious beliefs and practices of adults.
On the way to saying what it is that I find wrong about this move, let me start with what I think is right about the idea that children should enjoy religious freedom. Parents do I think have a duty to protect and promote their children’s future autonomy, and this includes their future ability to question and potentially reject the religion of their childhood. Put differently, a religious upbringing and education that makes it psychologically or materially impossible for a person to question and leave the faith they were raised in is severely damaging—children should not be subjected to such an upbringing, and the state should protect children from such upbringings. One way to understand this principle is as asserting a right to religious freedom that children must be able to enjoy once they are adults.
That parents need to protect and foster their children’s future autonomy is not a controversial position. I can think of no one who would reject it, including those who argue strenuously for a parent’s right to raise her children in the faith the parent chooses, or those who who think it’s a parent’s prerogative to put her child in a religiously grounded private school. Parents may work to keep their children from defecting when they are older, but surely they hope to do this by convincing their children that what they believe is true and the practice of their faith is meaningful and good. It would be cold comfort if loyalty was achieved by way of psychological damage.
Controversy comes with the claim that children enjoy a right to religious freedom as children, meaning that parents treat children badly if they exploit their control over their children to encourage them to embrace the doctrines of a specific faith or compel them to practice it. Rather, the claim becomes, parents should raise their children in a religiously neutral way, giving them the intellectual wherewithal to decide such matters for themselves as they get older. Although the details of arguments offered here can be subtle, the gist of them was noted above: compelling religious faith and practice in the case of children is comparable to—and so just as objectionable as—compelling it in the case of adults.
That there is something peculiar about this style of argument ought to be immediately clear: parents, presumably quite rightly, make (and enforce) all sorts of decisions for their children that they would have no business making for other adults, and this includes decisions that can having lasting influence on children’s beliefs, values, and tastes. The standards answer to why parents rightfully decide or influence a child’s diet, healthcare, education, domicile, dress, cultural experiences, personal relationships, and so on is that having a (competent and loving) parent to make such decisions is generally beneficial to the child. If this suffices (I actually don’t think it does but that’s for another time), the obvious question is why it doesn’t work for a parent’s attempt to influence her child’s religion as well.
Well, religion is controversial—some people think it important to a child’s current and future well being, others regard it as a kind of mind poison that humanity as a whole, never mind children, would be better off without. Rather than force a controversial set of beliefs and values on an impressionable child, surely we ought to let her grow up unencumbered with such things so she can make up her own mind. So the the thinking goes. But here is the problem: 1) all of the things I’ve listed as generally accepted foci of parental authority can involve controversy and 2) raising children without religion is also controversial. Within limits, we allow parents to navigate the other parts of parenting that might be controversial and so why not with religion?