Rachael Shillitoe is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Negotiating Religion and Non-religion in Childhood: Experiences of Worship in School.
Strhan applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Growing Up Godless at the Princeton University Press website.… children saw these lessons as providing opportunities to discuss whether there was evidence to support belief in God. Delilah described an RE lesson at Sunnybank in which she had raised these questions, stating, ‘we were learning about [the] Christianity God. I said, “Excuse me, how do you know that he’s real?” “It said in the Bible.” “Yes, but the Bible doesn’t have any proof though, does it?... It doesn’t show you that it’s real though.”’I think the Page 99 Test mainly works. Growing Up Godless is about how and why increasing numbers of children are growing up to be non-religious and atheist, based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with primary school children (aged 7-10 years old), their parents, and teachers in different parts of England. The book shows how the children’s atheism is shaped by a pervasive humanist culture – with humanism here referring to a worldview that valorizes science, rationalism, and empiricism as ways of knowing the world and centres the agency, significance, and broad equality of humans.
Although the children encountered the term ‘agnostic’ as well as ‘atheist’ and ‘theist’ during these lessons, there was little emphasis on agnostic ideas about the limits of knowledge or ‘unknowability’ as desirable in how these lessons were taught, and no discussion of a subjectivist non-religious worldview which values individual experience as a way of validating knowledge (Lee 2015). Rather, the content and pedagogical techniques used in these lessons – with pupils evaluating statements on the basis of evidence – expressed a humanist emphasis on the knowability of the world, which then manifested in the children’s perception of religious beliefs as lacking evidence or as illogical, as we saw in chapter 1. The children’s comments sometimes revealed a lack of understanding of what theists would understand as ‘evidence’ in support of their belief, while also highlighting the significance of RE in potentially leading children to evaluate and reject belief in God. Minnie from Sunnybank commented, ‘when I was younger, my mum said God was real, so I believed in God then, but then when I started coming to school and learning about RE, I just thought maybe he isn’t real, because there isn’t a photograph of him.’ Her friend Amber responded, ‘there isn’t proper proof of God yet,’ to which Minnie replied that if proof was found, ‘obviously I’ll believe in God then.’ Thus, we see how the idea that the children were encountering in RE – that what is real is what can be evidenced – could feed into how the children articulated their atheism as related to empiricist ideas.
Becoming (Self-Conscious) Non-Believers
As well as contributing to the children’s narratives of their non-belief in God being due to their empiricism and belief in science, RE was also significant for many children in crystallizing their awareness of their non-belief and non-religious identities. In other words, while many children were non-religious and did not believe in God prior to RE lessons, with religion relatively absent in their everyday lives outside of school, RE lessons were one of the main ways in which they encountered religion…
We explore how this humanism is something the children are figuring out in relation to the way their parents are bringing them up, what they’re learning about in schools, through their friendships, and via the media and culture they’re engaging with. Page 99 is in a chapter focusing on how schools are implicitly making this humanist worldview available to the children, which was leading them to conclude for themselves that they didn’t believe in God. Like the rest of the book, this page includes the voices and perspectives of children on these issues and shows how the children had a keen sense of their own agency to question religious beliefs they didn’t agree with.
As well as considering why these children didn’t believe in God(s), the book also explores what they did believe in and found meaningful in their lives. Here, it was striking that they had a sense of meaning as rooted in this world – for instance, in relationships with friends and family, or love for animals and the natural world – rather than in a heavenly, transcendent realm. In this sense, the book challenges stereotypical narratives that the decline of religion has led to a loss of meaning and purpose. We also explored the ethics and values interwoven in their humanism, for instance, values of equality and respect, and how all of these things related to their parents’ perspectives.
Overall, we hope the book provides insight into not only non-religious children's values and beliefs, but also how wider processes of religious and cultural change take place in everyday practices in their lives, such as the conversations they're having with parents over dinner, the TV programmes they’re watching, and the games they’re playing with their friends.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
