Revival meetings were incredibly emotional, particularly for young teenagers. Many of my friends were deeply affected by them. Those meetings often emphasized fear. Young people were forcefully reminded that failure to accept Jesus as our personal savior would lead to hell. Forever! Some of them were scarred for life. It is hardly surprising that under such circumstances the youth were often terrified and the decisions they made were suspect.
Many young people were filled with fear by powerful professional speakers brought into our town for exactly that purpose. I have already commented about how I thought that this was unfair. Now I want to carry that thought a little farther. I want to go beyond revival meetings. What about Sunday School? Were they any better?
Parents often indoctrinate their children. They want to teach their children the truth. I consider that reasonable, but when they go beyond teaching to taking away the decision of the child and making it their own they have gone too far. For example, when they hire professionals who know how to manipulate the children into doing their will, they have taken the choice away from the children.
Indoctrination by parents of their children is extremely popular in many societies and among many groups. Evangelical Christians are great practitioners of it, but so are other groups. It is not an accident at all that most children raised in Christian homes become Christians as adults. The same goes for Muslims, Jews, and most other religions. Is each group so good at teaching their children? When the vast majority of children from each religion follow the religion of their parents, I believe that is pretty good evidence that the parents have gone beyond teaching to indoctrination. In such cases, they have manipulated the children and taken their free choice away. Why else would each religion be so successful?
I think it is because parents of many religions indoctrinate their children into the religion of the family. Few of the children reject that direction by their parents and thus few choose some other religion. I don’t think it happens often. When children are young they are hardly in a position to resist the influence of their parents. Many follow their parents without reasoning. Indoctrination leads exactly to that. Is this a free choice?
Mennonites used to think that it is was very important that children not be baptized at birth. That was because the choice of religion would then be that of the parent, when the choice should be that of the child. I agree with that entirely. I believe that they meant that the decision of the child had to be freely made. Infants can’t make such choices. Otherwise, again, the decision would be the choice of the parent not the child.
Indoctrination robs the child of choice and substitutes the decision of the parent for that of the child. I would think Mennonites would reject that unequivocally. They don’t. If parents don’t allow their children to make their own decisions on important subjects such as choosing their faith, or no faith, they are really making the decision for their children. They are taking that decision away from their children.
One person’s indoctrination is another person’s Sunday School.
I also remember the intense emotion involved in revival meetings. As a young person I went because I thought I should, I thought my parents believed it was a good idea, and I found them attractive as in mesmerizing. So it was very liberating for me when on one occasion I returned home from a Brunk meeting and after talking to my mother about it, she said to me, “You don’t have to go to those meetings, you know.” I had just assumed it was the kind of thing she would have wanted me to attend. Her saying that gave me the distance I needed to evaluate on my own whether these were the kind of events I wanted to attend or not. I can’t remember if I ever attended again, but at least I now felt free to make a decision one way or the other.
Spiritual freedom is a wonderful thing