A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from a minister who took me to task for something I had written many years ago. The statement in question was based upon some of my early research on children’s conceptions of their religious identity. For this study, I interviewed several hundred four to twelve-year-old Catholic, Protestant and Jewish children. I posed unusual questions so as to provoke their own ideas, rather than something they might have learned at Sunday school. One of the questions, for example, was “Can a dog or a cat be a Catholic Protestant or a Jew?” Another question was “How can you tell a person is a Catholic, Protestant or Jew?”

What I found was that children’s conceptions of their religious denomination developed in a series of stages that were related to age and to the stages of intellectual development described by famed Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (Piaget 1950). Young children, up to the age of five or six, had a global conception of their religious denomination and thought of it as a general category such as nationality. When I asked one young child if his dog could be a Protestant he replied, “No he’s a Black Lab.” At the second stage children had a concrete sense of their denomination. When asked if his dog could be a Protestant, a seven year-old said, “Yes, he’s part of the family, but no, he’d bark in Church and the Minister would kick him out.” Preteens, aged 11-12 had a more abstract conception of denomination as a belief system. One twelve-year-old said his dog couldn’t be a Protestant because “He isn’t intelligent enough and can’t understand the Bible.”

On the basis of these findings I made some recommendations with respect to religious education. It was for one of those suggestions for which the minister took me to task. In my work with adolescents I found that once they attained the mental abilities that appeared along with puberty, they were able for the first time to appreciate the privacy of their own thoughts. As a consequence, many young teenagers create a personal religion in which God is a confidant who will not reveal the thoughts they have shared with their personal Deity. My suggestion for this age group was that religious instruction ought to be put on hold for early adolescents and the time used for the discussion of personal and social issues.

It was this suggestion with which the Minister took issue. He insisted that religious instruction be maintained to insure the young person’s continuous commitment to his or her religious community. I disagree, and believe most young people will come back to the faith of their family with renewed commitment and enthusiasm if given a break from, all too often, tedious religious instruction. I wrote back and said, “Let’s agree to disagree.”

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Piaget, J. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.