Category Archives: Liberal religion

Heaven or hell?

The writer Eileen Chang (also known as Zhang Ailing, birth name Zhang Ying) was born in Shanghai, and emigrated to the United States in 1955. At some point after she left China, she wrote an essay to explain Chinese religion to English-speaking foreigners. David Pollard translated portions of this essay in his book The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University, 2000) under the English title “The Religion of the Chinese.” I offer the following excerpts from Pollard’s somehwat clumsy translation:

The Chinese have a Taoist heaven and a Buddhist hell. On death all souls go to hell to receive judgement, so in contrast to the Christian subterranean fiery pits, where only bad people go to suffer for their sins, our underworld is a comparatively well ventilated place. By rights ‘The Shades’ ought to be in everlasting twilight, but sometimes they are like a perfectly normal city, the focus of interest for tourists being the eighteen levels of dungeons. When living souls escape through an aperture and drift down to hell, it is quite routine for deceased relatives and friends whom they meet there to take them around sight-seeing.

…

Actually the Chinese heaven is superfluous. Hell is good enough for most people. Provided their conduct is not too bad, they can look forward to a limitless succession of similar lives, in which they work out predestiny and unknowingly sow the seeds of future relationships, conclude old feuds and incur new enmities — cause and effect are woven closely together, like a mat made of thin bamboo strips; you get dizzy trying to pick out the pattern.

…

…the greatest obstacle to Chinese people being converted to Christianity is rather that the life to come that it depicts does not appeal to Chinese tastes. We can leave aside the old-style Christian heaven, where there is perpetual playing of golden harps and singing to the glory of God. The more progressive view of the earth as a kind of moral gymnasium where we limber up in order to go on to display our prowess in a nebulous other world, is also unacceptable to the self-satisfied and conservative Chinese, who regard human life as the center of the universe. As for the saying that a human life is but an ephemeral bubble in the tidal flow of the Great Self, such a promise of eternal life without individuality is not very meaningful either. Christianity gives us very little comfort, so our native folklore can still stand up to the high-pressure proselytizing of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity, though it has not counter-attacked, though is hasn’t the support of big capital, has no propaganda literature, no splendid peaceful sets, not even a bible — for since almost nobody understands the Buddhist sutras, it is as if they do not exist.

Actually, Chang’s description of the Chinese hell does sound better than the perpetual playing of golden harps.

Teaching kids how to be religious, part nine

Part one: Link

I began this essay by saying that the very title of this little essay is an absurdity, because you don’t teach kids how to be religious, because they already are religious. Yet at the same time we all know that we do indeed have to teach kids how to be religious. They may be inherently religious, but we know that we also have to teach them how to be religious. I think I can be a little more precise in that statement: Children, all persons, are inherently religious; but children, and all persons, can only be fully religious within community.

To say this flies in the face of common beliefs in the West, particularly in the United States. Here in the United States, we trumpet our idea that each human being is an individual unto himself or herself; we proclaim that like the cowboy gunslingers of our national mythos we can only rely on ourselves; we say that like the free-market economics which motivate us that individuals, not families or communities, are the primary unit of our society.

Here in the United States, religious education has been reduced to developmental psychology; it has been reduced to “lifespan faith development.” In this reductionist model, we have one primary method for teaching children how to be religious: we separate them by age, and teach them from a curriculum based on their “developmental stage.” We have become extreme followers of Jean Piaget, assuming that children are like little scientists who figure everything out on their own; and if they fail to live up to our expectations, we label them “developmentally delayed” and imply they are somehow less than fully human.

I find it sadly ironic that religious liberals bemoan the evils of development — housing developments that drive out family farms, economic development overseas that kills off local economies, etc. — while in our own congregations we “develop” our children. No wonder our children do not return to our congregations when they get older:– the contradiction is too much to stomach.

Years ago, John Westerhoff asked the question, “will our children have faith?” in his book by that name. Today, we have not yet learned how to teach our kids to be religious, and we are still asking that same question. If we are going to answer that question, we have to get beyond our limited, reductionistic models and methods for teaching kids to be religious.

And when I say “we,” I mean you and me:– not denominational officials, not ministers or professional religious educators, not parents, but everyone who considers herself or himself a person of faith. We have to abandon our overly individualistic notions of what it means to be religious, acknowledging that religion has to take place in a community that includes human beings and the transcendent (and probably other living beings too, but that’s a topic for another essay). When you say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual, and that’s why I don’t go to church [or to temple, or whatever]”, you are being overly individualistic, you are maintaining an attitude that will diminish the human community that nurtures individuals into faith, and therefore you are indirectly but in a very real sense preventing children from learning how to be religious — to be blunt, you are being selfish and you are killing religion. You and I cannot delegate the teaching of religion to someone else, hiding behind the insights of psychology in order to do so:– “Children learn best in Sunday school classes, taught by paid teachers, so I don’t need to get involved.” The very fact that you and I are religious (or spiritual, if you prefer that term) means that we are teachers of religion, and we had better shoulder that responsibility.

Teaching kids to be religious is a complex task, one that cannot be reduced to one sentence. Yet when we look at how and why we are failing our children, maybe we can sum that up in one sentence: We are not taking responsibility, as a whole community, for our children. Fortunately, you can change that situation: show up, take responsibility, learn how to teach our kids to be religious.

End of series

Teaching kids how to be religious, part eight: The limits of psychology

Part one: Link

So far, we’ve been using insights drawn from the science of psychology to help us understand how to teach kids to be religious. But psychology only goes so far when it some to religion. Its insights are useful, but we also have to consider theological anthropology, that is, our deeply-felt religious understandings of who persons are and how persons relate to the divine, and/or to something larger than themselves.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I’m going to speak from within my own theological tradition. Specifically, I’ll speak as a Transcendentalist and as a Universalist.

As a Transcendentalist, I know that human beings have the potential to experience something larger than themselves. As a mystical tradition, Transcendentalism isn’t quite sure what to call that something larger than ourselves. You could call it “God,” but for many mystics and Transcendentalists, even that word is too limiting for the overwhelming experiences that can burst in on us unannounced. You could call it “the collective unconscious,” and there would be some truth to that name, but here again the name is far too limited. You might want to say it is that which is highest and best in humanity, but many of us find our transcendent experiences lead us far outside what might comfortably called human. Maybe it’s best just to leave it nameless.

Whatever you call it, that experience of the nameless something that is larger than you are cannot be adequately explained by psychology. Developmental psychology falls short because transcendent experiences can come to anyone of any age or developmental stage. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs falls short because transcendent experiences can come when you are starving to death. The theory of distributed cognition falls short because transcendent experiences can come to people who live in communities that do not value or accept transcendent experiences. From this theological viewpoint, in other words, there is more to human beings than that which is summed up in psychological models.

As a Universalist, I believe that all human beings will ultimately be saved; the corollary to that is that all human beings are of equal value, theologically speaking. Universalism offers a very strong critique of developmental psychology. Developmental psychology says that human beings have to develop over time, which implies that human beings who aren’t yet fully developed somehow aren’t fully human. Defenders of developmental psychology squirm when I say that, and try to deny it — but in order for their denials to be at all effective, they have to acknowledge that developmental psychology presents a very limited understanding of human beings, an understanding which cannot encompass the full range of what it means to be human.

Universalism as I understand it tends to be neutral when it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or the theory of distributed cognition. These models are clearly valid — as far as they go — but they don’t go as far as the Universalist wants to go. The Universalist always winds up with the basic fact that all human beings contain that which is of equal value; the Universalist is likely to agree with George Fox when he said, “There is that of God in every person.”

If you come from another religious community, you’ll likely have your own theological understanding of human beings. I wager that if you think about it, you too will find that the insights of psychology are useful but not sufficient.

To be continued…

Teaching kids how to be religious, part seven: Distributed cognition

In an earlier installment in this essay, I already discussed that distributed cognition shows how children can perform beyond their expected level of competency by being placed in social situations that contain distributed cognition. To put it more simply, a human institution like a congregation has in it the wisdom of the ages, which is made accessible to anyone who is a part of that human institution.

In terms of practical application, I think of distributed cognition as creating healthy congregations as a container in which formal and informal teaching and learning becomes far more effective. To put it another way, religious education theorist Maria Harris has said that the whole congregation is the curriculum. Thus at a practical level, what we want to do is to tweak the congregation so that we allow distributed cognition to happen — we allow children to soak up the wisdom of the ages.

This kind of thing happens in the best schools and universities. We all know of schools where children seem to soak up learning from the moment they walk in the door; and we all know about other schools where even good teachers can’t seem to teach children anything. The same is true of universities, some of which seem far more effective at teaching their students, regardless of the efforts of individual professors.

You can watch this happen in healthy congregations that have the children in for all or part of the worship service. For example, in 2004-2005 I served as the interim associate minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois. When I arrived, we decided that children would attend the first twenty minutes of every worship service with their families. Prior to that, children had not attended worship in that congregation. Generally speaking, I felt that children learned as much or more about how to be religious in those twenty minutes, than they learned in fifty minutes of their closely-graded traditional Sunday school classes.

In the spring of 2005, we tried a different experiment in that Geneva congregation. Rather than offering traditional Sunday school classes, we offered a program loosely based on the “workshop rotation” model of Sunday school. We rotated mixed-aged groups through the various workshops, in order that children of different ages could learn from one another. In another experiment, during the Saturday evening worship service, when there were very few children present, we had one group that included children from age four to age eleven. In both these experiments, younger children were able to perform beyond their level of expected competency, because of the influence of the older children. At the same time, because the older children wound up mentoring and even teaching younger children, they, too, performed beyond their expected level of competency.

From these and other real-life experiments, I conclude that relying solely on closely-graded classes (e.g., classes containing only eight-year-olds or only eleven-year-olds) places real limits on how much religious competency children can gain. So here are some suggestions for incorporating distributed cognition into

For school-aged children, the mix of programs might include multi-generational activities (common worship experiences, social events, intergenerational choirs) along with mixed-age programs for children (workshop rotation, and special projects such as young people’s choir and plays) in addition to closely graded classes containing only one age group.

For teens, a mix of programs might include multi-generational activities (common worship experiences, social events), chances to mentor younger kids (teaching Sunday school), opportunities to be mentored by adults (formal mentoring programs), and opportunities to participate fully in the adult community (serving on committees and boards, helping run programs) in addition to closely graded programs such as youth groups.

Next: The limits of psychology

Blogging and religion

Way back on July 9, 2006, the Washington Post ran an article on ministers who write blogs, “Cyber-Savvy Pastors Blog When the Spirit Moves Them” by Megan Greenwell [link; and thanks World of Your Making for the link]. Some of the ministers Greenwell interviewed use blogs for evangelism and at least one uses a blog for personal reflection — but for me, the most interesting reflection on ministerial blogging was this…

The Rev. Jan Edmiston, pastor of Fairlington Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, said … the blogging phenomenon is part of a larger shift in the way religion is practiced — although she is unsure what form that change might take. She now devotes every other Monday to “monastery day,” when she sits in a coffee shop reflecting on the state of the church and expressing her thoughts on her blog, “A Church for Starving Artists.”

“I’m doing the things you would do in a monastery except with a cup of coffee and my laptop,” she said. “It’s completely spiritually energizing in ways a lot of people wouldn’t think possible. I think the church is going through a transformation similar to the Reformation, and blogging helps me work through where I fit into that.”

Now that’s an interesting new spiritual practice:– blogging in a coffee shop. Just as Edmiston calls her practice “monastic,” I think this is less a story of technology changing the way we do things, than it is a story of people finding and creating new ways to pursue spiritual growth and exploration. And as Edmiston says, it’s all very spiritually energizing — which doesn’t mean I have the faintest idea of what form this new change in religion will take.

Teaching kids how to be religious, part six: Developmentally-based programs

Part one: Link

When many people think of how to teach children to be religious, the only psychological model they use is developmental psychology — and with good reason: developmental psychology is an extremely useful model for planning cognitive and affective learning. Because so much has been written about applying developmental psychology to religious education, I don’t need to spend too much time on it.

The insights of developmental psychology basically tell us to create programs wherein children of the same general age (or same general developmental stage) learn together. In my own experience as a religious educator and parish minister based in local congregations, developmental psychology has helped me to figure out ways to create a mix of good programs for different age groups. The key word here is “mix”: while some religious educators feel they have to rely on just one kind of developmentally-based program, in my experience children are best served by offering a variety of programs, offered either concurrently (in large congregations) or successively (in smaller congregations).

For school aged children, the mix of programs might include closely-graded classes (traditional Sunday school and the Montessori-based “Godly Play”), closely-graded worship experiences (children’s chapel, or in large churches even more closely-graded worship experiences), and other programs like a children’s choir (in larger churches, several different children’s choirs, divided based on physical and intellectual development, will be possible).

For teens, the mix of programs might include closely-graded programs (traditional youth groups, mission trips, youth choirs), youth worship, and closely-graded classes.

As we’ll see in the next installment, these closely-graded programs can (and, I believe, should) be mixed in with multi-age programs.

Next: Distributed cognition

Teaching kids how to be religious, part five: Safety and security

Part one: Link

Psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote extensively about what he called a “hierarchy of needs.” It’s really a basic, common-sense insight: you have to have enough food to eat and water to drink before you start to worry about structure and order in your life, you have to worry about order and security in your life before you worry about having human community, you have to have human contact and community before you worry about self respect and respect of others.

  • Physiological needs — air, water, food, warmth, sex, voiding wastes, etc.
  • Safety needs — safety, security, stability, protection, structure, order, limits, etc.
  • Belonging needs — human relationships, family, community, membership in a congregation, etc.
  • Esteem needs — respect of others, and self-respect

All the above are what Maslow termed “deficiency needs”: you have to have them in order to survive, and if you are deficient in one of these needs, you have to make up that deficiency before you can meet the needs higher in the hierarchy. For example, if you are starving to death, or can’t breath, you have to make up those deficiencies before you can worry about self-esteem. Maslow visualized this hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, with a broad base of physiological needs at the bottom, narrowing to a point at the top.

According to W. Huitt (2004 [“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” Educational Psychology Interactive, Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved 21 July 2006 from http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/regsys/maslow.html]), the apex of the pyramid of needs has “growth needs” that go beyond the four deficiency needs:

According to Maslow, an individual is ready to act upon the growth needs if and only if the deficiency needs are met. Maslow’s initial conceptualization included only one growth need–self-actualization. Self-actualized people are characterized by: 1) being problem-focused; 2) incorporating an ongoing freshness of appreciation of life; 3) a concern about personal growth; and 4) the ability to have peak experiences. Maslow later differentiated the growth need of self-actualization, specifically naming two lower-level growth needs prior to general level of self-actualization (Maslow & Lowery, 1998) and one beyond that level (Maslow, 1971). They are:

5) Cognitive: to know, to understand, and explore;

6) Aesthetic: symmetry, order, and beauty;

7) Self-actualization: to find self-fulfillment and realize one’s potential; and

8) Self-transcendence: to connect to something beyond the ego or to help others find self-fulfillment and realize their potential.

This psychological model, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, has obvious implications for teaching kids how to learn to be religious. Most obviously, you have to start with the lowest levels of the hierarchy of needs. Children must have the following, in the following order:

  1. Water to drink, food to eat (you may have to supply food if the child’s family cannot give them adequate food), clean air to breathe (a problem in old or poorly-ventilated buildings), a place to void wastes, etc.
  2. Safety including physical safety (building must be safe and secure) and emotional safety (adult leaders must behave appropriately), order and structure, behavioral and other limits, etc.
  3. A human community to which they can belong, and feel welcomed in.
  4. Respect of others, and self-respect.

Once the congregation helps children meet these needs, we can go further and help children get to cognitive learning, aesthetic appreciation, realizing their own potential, and achieving transcendence. A common mistake that many religious educators make is to try to start with cognitive learning, while ignoring safety. When it comes to teaching kids how to do religion, in my experience as a religious educator and minister I find myself spending perhaps half my time at the first two levels: making sure the physical plant is safe and secure, making sure adult volunteers know how to provide emotionally safety and appropriate limits. Then I spend another third of my time at the next two levels: building community and helping create an environment where children can respect each other and respect themselves. Only then do I get to cognitive, aesthetic, and other needs.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has some real problems and limitations. In one glaring example, self-transcendence can burst in on persons who are starving, or who are experiencing emotional or physical abuse — if you want to use God-talk, God does not necessarily wait for you to be well-fed before manifesting.

In spite of the limitations, I find Maslow’s psychological model of a hierarchy of needs has helped me at a practical level far more than any theory of developmental psychology. To ignore the hierarchy of needs is to assume that every child you try to teach comes from such a privileged background that you can ignore basic survival needs.

Next: Developmentally-based programs

Teaching kids how to be religious, part four

Part one: Link

That still leaves us with the problem of how to teach kids to be religious. Given the limitations of the “lifespan faith development” approach, should we jettison it and try a completely new model? If so, which model? Or can we find a less drastic approach?

I’d like to suggest a less drastic approach. “Faith development” — or, as I prefer to call it, religious development — does have useful tools for us to place in our toolboxes. But developmentalism cannot be the only approach we use to teach kids how to be religious; nor can it even be the primary approach. Those of us who are concerned with religious education, spiritual growth and exploration, and religious development can’t limit ourselves to one approach or one way of doing things. We have to consider a range of models and methods for teaching kids how to be religious.

I’d like to consider three broad models and methods for teaching kids how to be religious. These three models and methods are all firmly rooted in congregational life. They are not mutually exclusive, but represent an ecology of mutually interdependence:– which is to say, you can’t do one without the other two. Each of the three grows out of the insights of psychological theory and research. Each of the three has implications for religious professionals, lay leaders, parents/guardians, and for kids.

The three models and methods can be summarized as follows:

(1) Safety and security. Drawing on Abraham Maslow’s model of the hierarchy of needs (and other models), physical and emotional well-being must be secured.

(2) Developmentally-based programs. Drawing on the insights of Jean Piaget and related developmental psychologists, the psychological development of individuals is nurtured.

(3) Distributed cognition. Drawing on the insights of Lev Vygotsky and theorists of distributed cognition, the whole congregation is understood as teaching kids how to be religious.

I’ll look at each of these three models, and their associated methods, in the next three installments of this essay.

To be continued…

Teaching kids how to be religious, part three

Part one: Link

In my own religious tradition of Unitarian Universalism, we made a fundamental mistake in the way we teach kids how to be religious. Back in the 1930’s, the Unitarians and the Universalists hired Sophia Lyon Fahs as their curriculum editor, and over the next two decades Fahs produced a brilliant series of curriculum textbooks. Brilliant books like The Church across the Street, which introduced junior high students to other Protestant traditions, attracted well-deserved attention beyond the Unitarians and the Universalists. The Fahs curriculum books were, in their own way, works of genius.

But an earlier book co-written by Fahs reveals one of her fundamental limitations as a religious educator. Exploring Religion with Eight Year Olds (1930), written by Fahs and co-author Helen Sweet Firman, tells the story of one Sunday school class over the course of a year, through a teacher’s journal and careful analysis of that journal. It, too, is a brilliant book, well worth reading even today; today’s religious educators can still learn from the progressive educational philosophy and pedagogy, the assessment techniques, the tradition of close observation of individual children.

Yet something is fundamentally wrong with the book:– the Sunday school class described in the book is a closely-graded class in a laboratory Sunday school that is not affiliated with any congregation, or even with any specific religious tradition. Fahs had completely divorced children’s religious education from the traditional multi-generational institutions of congregations and wider religious traditions. The children are influenced by each other, by their own inner thoughts and memories and inclinations, and by their teacher; it is an extreme form of individualism, which works pretty well but which leaves out big chunks of religion.

Fahs was not the only one trying to take religious education in this direction. The Universalist Angus MacLean was headed in the same direction, and in his book A New Age in Religious Education he tells churches to take the kids out of the worship service and drop them into closely graded Sunday school classrooms that look exactly like public school classrooms. That was the trend throughout liberal religion and mainline Protestantism in the mid- to late-20th C.: separate the kids from the adults, to the end that the individual development of individual children is nurtured and encouraged.

This was a brilliant idea, but it didn’t really work. Religious educators within liberal religion, and Christian educators within mainline Protestantism began to notice that once kids grew up, they didn’t stick around. “Oh well,” we said, “kids just naturally drift away when they’re in their twenties.” Liberal religion and mainline Protestantism began to decline in numbers, due in no small part to the fact that 80% or 90% of our kids drifted away and never came back.

We said this was “natural,” while turning a blind eye to the fact that other religious groups, like the Mormons, managed to hang on to a higher percentage of their kids. “Oh no,” we said, “we don’t want to be coercive like the Mormons, we don’t want to force our kids to stay in our religious tradition.” We ignored the fact that we were actively training our kids into an extreme individualism that encouraged them, even forced them, to leave us.

We also conveniently ignored the fact that our religious education was built on a deep-held assumption that we really didn’t want our kids to stick around. I had been an active youth leader in my church in my teens. When I tried to go back to my home church in my mid-20’s, I found there wasn’t a place for me. Indeed, I was subtly but actively discouraged from attending church:– many people ignored me at worship services, I was never invited to join a social group or a committee, it was made quite clear that there was no place for a single, childless young man in his early twenties in that church. The idea of closely-graded classes went beyond the Sunday school up into the adult religious community, and there was no “class” for twenty-somethings.

Fortunately for me, a few people like Hrand and Toby and Doug and Kay made sure I felt welcome; and my parents let me join their ushering team so at least I had some role in the church. Hrand, Toby, Doug, and Kay ignored the precepts of “lifespan faith development,” which seems to predict that twenty-somethings will go off and explore other religions. They, and others like them, realized that there were young adults who wanted to belong to that church. Intuitively, they also realized that some of us desperately needed the distributed cognitions built into that church, to help us deal with what was going on in our individual lives.

Contrary to the precepts of developmentalism, not everyone fits into a closely-graded religious education class. Not everyone thrives by being limited to contact solely with other persons of his or her own age. Given that we lose up to 90% of our young people, I’d hazard a guess that most people do not thrive under the precepts of “lifespan faith development.”

To be continued…