Is Faith Childish?

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At a recent visit to the house of my son and daughter-in-law near Chicago, my 3-year-old grandson pointed to the bald spot on the back of my head and asked, “Papa, what happened?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked.

“It fell out,” I said.

“Where is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I responded.

“Maybe it’s at your house,” he suggested, trying to be helpful.

We may see this as “cute,” but it’s a perfectly logical question given his knowledge of the situation. No one would accuse him of being stupid or even ignorant. A 3-year-old, after all, can’t be expected to understand the vagaries of aging. Even we who are experiencing it don’t understand them.

Exaggerating the Differences
It has often occurred to me how much we exaggerate the differences between us and children. We see the differences as huge. But are they really?

We may think of children as naïve and uninformed. Does that mean we’re sophisticated and brilliant? We also focus on what we see as the huge difference in experience and number of years of life. But the fact is, my grandchildren, my children, my parents and grandparents are my contemporaries.

Of all the generations of human beings, we are, or have been, alive at the same time. The amount of knowledge I have compared to my grandchildren is puny when you consider how much there is to know.

The perception of these differences become more accurate as we age, perhaps. Consider how we perceive the differences between an eighth grader, who is about 14 years old, and a first grader, who is about 7, a difference of 7 years. It’s considered a huge difference, but not when the older person is 60 and the younger one 53.

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All this brings me to the perception that many people have about God and religion – that it’s for children, something you grow out of, leaving behind childhood’s naiveté and ignorance. Fact is, faith takes an extraordinary amount of thoughtfulness and independence; not the kind my generation celebrated at Woodstock – basically doing whatever you want - but the kind that doesn’t put great stock in what society as a whole thinks is important.

Sometime as we grow up, usually on the cusp of adulthood, we begin to learn things that seem to be divorced from, or directly contradict, what we learned in religious education classes. And many of us fail to reconcile the perceived differences. Instead, we begin to consider what we learned from religion as childish. And we confuse “childish” with “child-like.”

Do we give up on God and religion because we study the matter intensively, poring over biblical and theological texts, trying to find answers, trying to reconcile our new knowledge with religious knowledge? I doubt it. Many of us probably give more time and attention to buying a car than we do to understanding faith.

And, of course, church and synagogue are perceived as boring and none of our contemporaries seem interested.

Major Reasons for Rejecting God and Religion
Here are some major reasons young people put God and religion behind them, according to one study.

·       Superficial reading of the Bible: Questioning the literal interpretations of passages as if they were the Bible’s messages.

·       Setting up false contradictions, such as between religion and science, “straw men” to knock down.

·       Objections to doctrinal and moral teachings (especially about sexuality) and making decisions about them based on one’s “gut feelings,” which are almost always based on what “society” believes about them.

·       An insistence on certainty before commitment, as if we experience much certainty about anything in life.

In writing all this, I don’t mean to minimize valid reasons for doubt. There are plenty of them. But doubt isn’t disbelief and people searching for God shouldn’t disqualify themselves as searchers because of it.

What’s important, in my opinion, is to continue the search with open-mindedness, persistence, patience (with yourself and others) and a determination to pray and study to overcome obstacles.

That’s not childish. That’s the most adult thing possible.