I think it would be a very bad thing if anyone—the government, your friends, relatives, or neighbors in your community—could force you to go to church. After all, you are an adult, which means you have the standing to decide whether you want to live a religious life or not. Even if you should be going to church, it seems wrong for anyone to make you go.1
But most people believe it’s okay for adults to force their children to attend church. Even when young children protest that church is boring or that they don’t believe in any of the stuff the pastor teaches, it is very rare for anyone to object that the parents violate their protesting children’s rights by making them go to church. Others may think forcing a protesting child to go to church is imprudent or evil or something else, but few will assert a negative right on behalf of the child against mandatory church attendance.
So, here is our question: Why is it okay for parents to force their children to attend church while it is not okay for adults to force other adults to attend church?
Here is an interesting answer: it’s not.
Matthew Clayton is a political philosopher who famously argued that parents are morally obligated not to raise their children religiously. For example, they should not take them to church, have them baptized, or pass down non-neutral views of any religion in particular. Instead, parents should only raise their children in ways that their children could not reasonably reject when they become adults (355). Because Clayton thinks a religious upbringing is something children could reasonably reject in adulthood, he believes such an upbringing is impermissible.
Why does Clayton care so much about what children consent to in adulthood? He appeals to this example:
Skin Graft plus Nose Job: Betty, who is an unknown visitor, is rendered unconscious by an accident and is having a skin graft to restore the damaged skin on her face. The doctor also sees that Betty’s nose might be a more attractive shape and so fixes that as well.
Did the surgeon do something wrong in performing the skin graft? Presumably not, since she reasonably expects that Betty would have consented to the graft if she had the chance. But did the surgeon do something wrong in performing the nose job? Yes, since the doctor cannot reasonably expect Betty to consent: Betty might like her nose just the way it is, she might dislike it but keep it nonetheless because she thinks nose jobs are vain, or some other reason. But the lesson to draw here is that a doctor should not alter their unconscious patient unless she can reasonably expect the patient to consent after the surgery.
Clayton thinks this principle is what makes religious upbringings wrong. Just as the surgeon should only treat her unconscious patient in ways she can expect the patient to consent to post-operation, parents must also treat their children in ways they can expect their children to consent to in adulthood. On this view, raising a child religiously is akin to a surgeon taking it upon herself to give her unconscious patient a nose job.
When I first heard this argument, I thought it was pretty ridiculous. Clayton is very concerned with protecting children’s freedom, yet what he says about a religious upbringing struck me as totally consistent with that freedom. After all, the overwhelming majority of children are raised religiously and can act autonomously in their adulthood. It’s not as if their upbringings inhibited their abilities to reason about the merits of the many religions they have before them once they enter adulthood. As long as parents do not inhibit their child’s ability to develop the requisite cognitive skills to think critically—something that requires some pretty serious parental malpractice, I think—that child will naturally develop into an adult who can decide for themselves about religion.
But now that I’m a Kantian about freedom, I see this argument as much more persuasive, even if I still see it as unsuccessful.
Initially, I was thinking of the development of a child’s autonomy as an achievement: children become autonomous when they develop the requisite capacities to think critically about a wide range of options they could pursue. That’s not a bad view of autonomy; it seems to be that of some very stout political philosophers (e.g., Joel Feinberg, Joseph Raz). When parents do horrible things to their children that stunt their ability to think critically, it is this achievement view of autonomy that explains what has gone wrong: children do need the space to develop and learn about the world so they can eventually make decisions about how they will live their lives in adulthood.
The virtue of Clayton’s argument, however, is that it shows how much more is at stake in autonomy than the mere developmental achievement of critical thinking. More than this, a person is autonomous when she is the one who decides which ends she pursues. When someone else decides which ends I will pursue, I am no longer independent—I am dependent on them. This is the Kantian view of freedom that gets at the heart of what really goes wrong when someone violates our autonomy. After all, think back to the Skin Graft case. What went wrong there? The surgeon probably made the patient’s life better by fixing her face, so it cannot be that the surgeon harmed the patient or inhibited her developmental capacities. Instead, the fundamental way the surgeon wronged the patient was by setting an end for her—in this case, the nose job—that she did not set for herself.
The question, though, is whether this more robust account of freedom indicts parents who raise their children religiously. Clayton thinks so. In his view, parents who give their children religious upbringings wrong their children in the same way the surgeon wrongs the patient with a nose job: in both cases, someone sets an end for another, and the end-setter cannot reasonably expect that the subject will consent to that end. Therefore, parents ought not to raise their children religiously.
Clayton’s view is interesting, but it’s wrong.
For one thing, Clayton’s so-called liberal view is not very liberal. I came across this passage from Nicholas Wolterstorff while watching the Mavs game last night that captures this well:
It would be both implausible and contradictory…to argue that education for autonomy [i.e., education without induction into a religious tradition] belongs to the essence of the liberal polity. Implausible, because every liberal democracy on the face of the earth allows parents to induct their children into their own [religious] perspective…[C]ontradictory, because forcing all children into education for autonomy would be a flamboyant example of discriminating against the [religious views] of most parents in present-day liberal democracies (“Do Christians Have Good Reasons to Support Liberal Democracy?”, 315).
Liberals like Clayton care deeply about parents being able to live out their religious views, and yet they attempt to prohibit these parents from…living out their own religious views. At least in America, most religious people are Christian, and virtually every Christian denomination I’m aware of sees it as a basic obligation of parenthood to raise children in their faith. For example, here are the baptismal vows I took when I baptized my children:
Celebrant: Will you be responsible for seeing that the child you present is brought up in the Christian faith and life?
Parents and Godparents: I will, with God’s help.
Celebrant: Will you by your prayers and witness help this child to grow into the full stature of Christ?
Parents and Godparents: I will, with God’s help.
[…]
Celebrant addressing the congregation: Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?
Congregation: We will.
The whole point of this liturgy—one that many Christians use today in some form, whether that is in the “Baby Dedication” of low-church Protestants or the baptismal vows we find in the Book of Common Prayer—is that parents are required to raise their children in their faith, and their churches are required to help support them. Though I’m not familiar with other world religions, my guess is that they likely share a somewhat similar view of one of the foundational jobs of parenthood: raising your children in your faith. But if Clayton is correct, a commitment to liberalism—something that is supposed to be neutral about the content of religious commitments—undermines basically every religious person’s view of parenthood. This does not seem very liberal!
Here is another problem: Clayton thinks parents have a moral obligation to impart a sense of justice to their children, yet justice seems inextricably linked to some sort of religious worldview (or, at least, a worldview that reasonable people could disagree about). If this is correct, then it will be very difficult for parents to meet this obligation under Clayton’s moral prohibition against religious indoctrination. Andrew Franklin-Hall—a really excellent philosopher at Toronto—makes this point well:
If children are going to accept the authority of justice and have some understanding of how being just fits into the good life, then they will need to be at least provisionally initiated into a certain comprehensive doctrine that makes sense of these things…After all, it is not far down the road of moral development before the child starts to ask questions about why he must treat others fairly if he doesn’t want to…If we present these principles as completely self-standing or self-certifying, then we are presenting them as the whole truth about justice—as a comprehensive doctrine, in other words (380).
This, to me, is a decisive reason to reject Clayton’s view. When you teach a child that racism is wrong, they will want to know why racism is wrong. The best someone can do under Clayton’s constraint is to say something like, “Because all reasonable people think racism is wrong, as racism fails to treat others with respect.” That’s surely too flat an answer: racism is wrong regardless of what reasonable people believe about it, and curious children will surely want to know what it means to respect someone and why they should care about that. At this juncture, parents have to shrug.
I don’t see why parents couldn’t both have an obligation to teach their children about justice from their faith traditions. As long as all children reach the end point of learning about the importance of respecting others, it seems perfectly fine for parents to get them there through their worldviews. We could adopt something like
’s view of convergence liberalism: all parents should ensure their children learn about justice, but they are free to converge on the importance of justice from their religious traditions. That way, parents can teach their children the importance of respecting others from their perspectives (the only perspective from which they can teach, anyway!)One last reason (that I hope to turn into a dissertation chapter) is that parents seem to have an obligation to their children to help them live a good life and not merely one that is conducive to the development of their autonomy. As Norvin Richards has observed, this is what marks the difference between the surgeon and parents:
Parents (but not…surgeons) have to strike a proper balance between paying proper respect to the independence of the person who is ‘in their hands’ and meeting their obligation to help this person develop qualities that will help him have a good life (91).
You can have a child who receives an adequate education toward autonomy but also has a miserable, impoverished childhood devoid of any meaningful activity. Think, for example, of the Zoomer who spends all of his free time outside of school mindlessly scrolling through TikTok. This child will eventually develop into someone we would also consider autonomous, but it seems her parents failed her by not helping her live a good life. This is not the child’s fault since one of the defining marks of a child is that she is too incompetent to determine reliably on her own how to live a good life. If children are going to have a shot at living a good life, then it seems parents have to step in and direct them toward meaningful things: instead of endless TikTok, the parent has her child read a good book, join a baseball team, or something else.
But if parents are going to fulfill their duty to help their children live a good life, then it seems the only way they can do that is from their view of what the good life consists of. This is precisely what Clayton’s view forbids since children could reasonably reject their parent’s conception of the good life later in adulthood. So, something has to go: Either parents have a duty to help their children live good lives that would require them to violate Clayton’s prohibition, or they lack such a duty. I’m going to guess that Clayton’s prohibition, not the parental duty to help children live a good life, has to go.
I don’t pretend everyone shares this intuition. My religious friends who are sympathetic to versions of Christian Nationalism and Catholic Integralism will no doubt say that, in some cases, it would be a very good thing if others could force you to go to church. This is not a ridiculous view. If you’re a natural lawyer of a certain sort, you may believe states exist to direct everyone to the common good. From this commitment, it’s not too hard to get to a denial of our original intuition: Because our supernatural good is communion with God, maybe part of the state’s job is directing everyone to communion with God.
has given an excellent argument that natural lawyers who affirm that the state’s job is to procure the common good but reject Catholic Intergralism are inconsistent, and I think it’s decisive. Nonetheless, I will assume for the rest of this post our starting principle—i.e., it is wrong to force an adult to go to church— is true.
Not on the theoretical question here because I'm no ethicist. I considered NOT making my kids go to church because I think that, if anything, churchgoing as children turns the off from religion. The boring goody-two-shoes Sunday school, religion as a means of social control enforcing parental authority, and the dullness of the whole business. I would never have gotten religion if I'd grown up with the kiddie version of it. In adolescence I was looking for what lots of my peers were, which I thought of as 'the spooky' or 'metaphysical thrills'. The exotic, the out-of-this-world, the escape from the ordinary. That's how I saw the church because I wasn't raised with it and why I joined.
“…but few will assert a positive right on behalf of the child against mandatory church attendance.”
Wouldn’t it be a negative right?