I think it was while reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins a few years ago that I was first exposed to the idea of religious indoctrination as a form of child abuse. I remember feeling shocked and resistant at first to such seemingly strident language. For example, these two quotes from the chapter “Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion:”

“…isn’t it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs they are too young to have thought about?” (page 395 on Scribd).

“I am persuaded that the phrase “child abuse” is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.” (page 400 on Scribd).

Eventually, I relaxed into the idea and over time came to believe he’d made a valid point worthy of debate. Recently, though, while listening to the podcast Mormonism Live!, I realized I agreed with him strongly and completely and that I had my own reasons for doing so. During episode 054, “Mission Impossible,” while listening to callers discuss their own experiences with mental health and Mormonism, a thought began to form in my mind – it felt like I was having an epiphany of sorts and it gave me one of those “Aha!” feelings. This, essentially, is the thought I had, though I’ve had some time to cultivate it since :

Religious indoctrination is like braces for your brain.

Over the years I’ve become convinced that everything about the human experience is physical, including everything we call “mental” or “spiritual.” Thoughts, feelings, memories, and “spiritual” experiences are all just different kinds of feelings – feelings that have a physical cause and are felt as a physical effect.

The human brain is a physical part of the human body and its activity is the foundation for everything we experience.

Language is physical as well, although we may not typically think of it in that way. Whether language is written, spoken out loud, or thought silently in the mind, it’s physical – symbols on paper, sound vibrations through the air, neurons firing in the brain – all physical things in the physical world.

If everything is physical, including brains and all of the things that brains do, then religious indoctrination of a child (or of anyone really) is a physical attempt to physically influence a physical part of the child’s body so that it will function in a way that accepts the indoctrination. If an adult repeatedly teaches a child that a good God is watching everything they do or that a bad devil is constantly trying to trick them, for example, then the words used by the adult are physical things that have a physical effect on the child’s brain, for better or worse.

If you’ve seen the movie Forrest Gump you may remember scenes involving young Forrest and his leg braces. When Forrest is fitted for the braces, the cigarette-smoking country doctor tells his mother, “His legs are strong, Mrs. Gump, as strong as I’ve ever seen, but his back’s as crooked as a politician.” Later there is a memorable scene in which Forrest breaks out of his braces just in time to escape some bullies. He pushes the braces beyond their endurance while desperately trying to run away, and they break into pieces and fall off his legs, left forgotten in the road and never to be needed again. I thought of those scenes in Forrest Gump when I realized that religious indoctrination is like braces for your brain.

I also thought about what it was like to have braces on my teeth in middle school. The preparation for braces – with a little slightly medieval, jaw-expanding torture inflicted by a frustrated parent with a very tiny key. The braces themselves – getting used to them and learning to live with them and their awkward “in-the-way-ness.” And the beautiful moment when I finally got them off and my teeth felt all-new and oh so smooth and slimy.

When it comes to braces for legs and braces for teeth, generally speaking all responsible parties involved understand and agree what the braces are for and that they’re needed, and they plan together that eventually the braces will come off, liberating the affected area once again if and when the desired purpose has been achieved and it can function well on its own. When it comes to braces for your brain in the form of religious indoctrination, there is no such understanding or agreement, and no such purposeful exit strategy.

Braces for your brain are placed when authority figures repeatedly over time attempt to implant their own subjectively true beliefs into your mind as objectively true knowledge. This is most often done with children, but it can happen to anyone at any age. When the subject brain considers anything contrary to the implanted belief-braces, discomfort ensues from the collision of contradictions and the easier path is most often to re-route the contrary information to accommodate and preserve the braces, rather than allowing it to break down and replace them. All new information must go around or grow around the braces, or the braces must be broken down.

Perhaps there would be nothing wrong with braces for your brain if they were consistent with objective reality, or if they flexed and moved or fell gently away as needed to accommodate the natural growth of new and better evidence. But the braces of religious indoctrination aren’t like that when they insist that their way is the best way, and the only right way to be – an insistence which unnaturally, unnecessarily, and unjustly influences or alters the growth and development of a human brain.

When an adult repeatedly programs a child to believe that the adult’s personal, subjective religious beliefs are incontrovertible, objective facts about the world:

It is an unnatural mental brace, because if left alone the child’s brain would not necessarily come to those same conclusions on its own. It is also an unnatural brace in another sense; when the religious beliefs teach that supernatural explanations supported by subjective, religious beliefs are more correct than natural explanations supported by objective, scientific evidence.

It is an unnecessary mental brace because there are plenty of happy and well-adjusted people in the world who hold different and contradictory religious beliefs, or no religious beliefs at all. The evidence of human history so far strongly suggests that there is no one single set of religious beliefs that is widely accepted to lead exclusively to the greatest amount of truth and goodness or meaning and purpose. In other words, there is more than one right way to be a human, so religious indoctrination is unnecessary. While the religion itself may believe it offers something necessary that can’t be obtained anywhere else, and while there may be good evidence that is true for some people in some cases, history has shown it is not true for all people in all cases. And how does an adult know what will be the case in the case of a child?

It is an unjust mental brace because the child has little or no ability to understand, evaluate, and consent or not to the indoctrination, and by the time they do later in life it is often too late, or too painful to say no. It is also unjust because the child has done nothing to deserve having braces placed in its brain, but just happens to be a child of particular parents.

But is religious indoctrination child abuse, as Richard Dawkins famously claimed?

If it’s like putting braces on a part of a child’s body, and if the braces are unnatural, unnecessary, and unjust, then yes, it is, in some way and to some degree. But can something be considered abusive, if the abused enjoys and appreciates the abuse and feels that it has made them a better person, maybe even saved their life? Whether the answer to that question is yes or no, a problem remains, for how can we know ahead of time which religiously indoctrinated children will be a “success” and which will eventually be depressed, alienated, or perhaps even suicidal for their failure to fit in and live up to the religious beliefs implanted in their brains by well-meaning adults?