The Deem article takes Dawkins to task for not citing studies showing evidence of the negative effects of childhood indoctrination. The chapter of "The God Delusion" which argues that religious indoctrination may be a form of child abuse mainly focusses on two aspects: scaring kids with stories of hell, and bad education. On the former, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to conduct a statistical study of this, but he does cite the opinions of several victims, who presumably know their own minds. For example, one correspondent who had been sexually abused by her Catholic priest as a child, and suffered a bereavement when a young Protestant friend died, knew which she thought was worse:
Being fondled by the priest simply left the impression (from the mind of a 7 year old) as 'yucky' while the memory of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never lost sleep because of the priest - but I spent many a night being terrified that the people I loved would go to Hell. It gave me nightmares.
(Incidentally, which of those two showed more empathy: the priest, or the 7 year old kid? Rhetorical question!)
He also wrote of, and quotes, the therapist Jill Mytton, who still bears the mental scars of her strict Christian upbringing, and specialises in helping other adults who have been damaged in this way.
As for the bad education aspect, perhaps that would be more amenable to study. One could, for example, compare employment rates and educational achievements of the Christian homeschooled, kids taught creationism at school, and those given a regular secular education. But, come on: do we really need statistics to convince us that crap education is a bad thing?
Deem can't resist concluding that Dawkins is motivated by anger at his own "sexual abuse from a priest". But here's what Dawkins had to say on that subject:
Happily I was spared the misfortune of a Roman Catholic upbringing (Anglicanism is a significantly less noxious strain of the virus). Being fondled by the Latin master in the Squash Court was a disagreeable sensation for a nine-year-old, a mixture of embarrassment and skin-crawling revulsion, but it was certainly not in the same league as being led to believe that I, or someone I knew, might go to everlasting fire. As soon as I could wriggle off his knee, I ran to tell my friends and we had a good laugh, our fellowship enhanced by the shared experience of the same sad pedophile. I do not believe that I, or they, suffered lasting, or even temporary damage from this disagreeable physical abuse of power. Given the Latin Master's eventual suicide, maybe the damage was all on his side.
Does that sound like someone damaged and angry about the experience? It's a fairly common experience among men who had a British boarding school education. Elsewhere, he doesn't diminish the impact of serious sexual abuse, but can't we take his word for it that
in his case this fumbling did not cause a lifetime of anger against religion? The Latin master isn't identified as a priest, anyway, and I haven't noticed any particular distaste for Latin in Dawkins' writing...
As for the NSYR study:
The first thing which struck me is that it relied on statements from the subjects themselves: as if adolescents are always honest! My school days were long ago, but although I was of course completely honest and upstanding, I remember a certain amount of bragging from friends, a certain amount of exaggeration about one's experiences with alcohol, girls, the police etc. Conversely, wouldn't a religious kid be expected to under-report activities they'd been raised to view as bad?
Still, let's assume the kids are all telling the truth. So a religious upbringing delays the onset of "bad" behaviour. For example, the religious kids tended to take up smoking later. Isn't behaviour in the long run what really matters? Of the kids who attend worship at least weekly, there's an approximate doubling in the "when did you first get drunk?" figure at 9th grade; for those who never attend worship, the corresponding jump was at 8th grade. Big whoop. And since the study doesn't go beyond 12th grade, we don't know how many of those clean-cut kids go off the rails when they get away from their parents in college.
One or two of the tables were pretty funny. For example, "I get a real kick out of doing things that are a little dangerous". Since this is so vague, and will mean different things to different people, it seems pretty worthless. At school, I'd have regarded "doing things that are a little dangerous" as handing in a bad review of my English teacher's favourite play. Another table is "I like to test myself every now and then by doing something a little risky", to which the religious were less likely to answer "yes". But isn't this an important part of life, particularly young life? It's rather revealing of the religious mindset that the study assumes that testing yourself is a bad thing. In a similar vein, there's a table which shows that religious kids are less likely to argue with their parents. No shit. But is blind obedience always good?
It has less to say about religion encouraging good behaviour. The three tables for this are:
- Participation in community affairs or volunteer work. What kind? It doesn't say, but not all volunteer work is equal. Soup kitchens = good, knocking on doors with good news about Jebus = not so good.
- Sport, athletics or exercise. Ok, exercise is good, even if it's essentially a selfish activity. But "take your kids to church because it'll make them run more" has to be one of the least compelling arguments for religion I've ever heard...
- Participation in student government. I don't know what this is like in America (outside fictional portrayals), but if it's anything like my memory of college politics, I wouldn't call it a good thing.
So, in conclusion: filling kids with fear about the consequences of bad behaviour may indeed cow them into good behaviour, at least temporarily, as well as making them good little zombies fit for careers in the Republican party. But I notice that, although the figures distinguish between various religions, they make no mention of Islam. Perhaps that's not surprising in America, given N=2478, but it's disappointing. I'd love to have seen a study which concluded: "if you want good behaviour from your children, raise them as Muslims".
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