In 1732, Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism, discussed the connection between childhood corporal punishment and the development of a religious world-view. Susannah, who began punishing her children before they were one year old, saw the physical inculcation of obedience as a necessary part of the child’s religious education. She wrote:

I insist on conquering the will of children betimes [i.e, early in life], because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual. … This is still more evident if we further consider that religion is nothing else than the doing the will of God, and not our own....

In this remarkable passage, Wesley identifies a causal link between the experience of the child, who is coerced into disregarding his or her own will and following the will of the parent, and the experience of the religionist, who disregards his or her own will and attempts to follow the will of God. Wesley makes the striking suggestion that one who has not, as a child, been coerced into obedience will not develop a religious outlook. Although she did not speak in overtly psychological terms, Wesley proposed that the child’s experience of enforced submission to the parent provides a necessary psychic foundation for a belief system centered on submission to God.

In our own time, scholars from a variety of disciplines have also proposed that childhood may exert a profound influence on religion.  For example, Philip Greven (social history), Rita Brock (feminist theology), Jon D. Levenson (Judaic studies), Lloyd DeMause (psychohistory), Morton Schatzman (psychiatry), Martha Stout (trauma psychology), Lee A. Kirkpatrick (evolutionary psychology), Jay R. Feierman (ethology) and others have argued that aspects of religious narrative, theology, belief, and behavior reflect the situation of children. Some of these scholars have focused on the influence of painful childhood experiences, such as corporal punishment.  Freud, of course, and some of his followers, as well as contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, have also suggested links between childhood and religion.

Although their approaches, terminologies, and theoretical assumptions are varied, these scholars have all suggested that important aspects of religion may be epiphenomena of childhood. This singular possibility has profound implications for a range of scholarly disciplines, as well as for society and culture as a whole; it also is directly relevant to urgent practical problems associated with religion, especially violent religious fundamentalism. Nonetheless, efforts to elucidate links between childhood and religion have had a limited impact on either scholarship or the broad culture.

For the past 15 years, I have been attempting to clarify the influence of historically widespread patterns of childhood punishment, abandonment, and neglect on religion and religious experience.  My work is rooted in a detailed consideration of the history of childhood; the content of religious teachings and practices; and the psychology of metaphor, trauma, and memory.

I have focused on two related but distinct propositions. The first pertains to the historical formation of religious traditions; the second pertains to personal and cultural responses, including in our own time, to those traditions. Specifically:

First, that patterns of childhood punishment, abandonment, and neglect, which were endemic in the formative matrices of many religions, came to be thematically reflected in diverse aspects of these religions, including narrative, salvation teaching, liturgy, ethics, and ritual.

Second, that these thematic reflections of childhood have helped make religious teachings and practices personally meaningful, cognitively believable, and emotionally resonant, thereby contributing to subjective experiences of religious faith (the micro level) and the spread and persistence of religious traditions within cultures (the macro level).

In my work, I have been guided by a number of procedural objectives, which I believe have the potential to advance the childhood-religion paradigm in important ways.  These procedural objectives include:

A.) to root my arguments in early and foundational traditions, especially as embodied in canonical texts;

B.) to pay close attention to psychological and social processes that could mediate the influence of childhood on religion; put differently, to focus on the mechanistic plausibility of the links that I propose;

C.) to frame my arguments with reference to specific logical and empirical criteria that point to particular causal relationships between childhood and religion;

D.) to consider varied aspects of religion and religious experience (e.g., narrative, soteriology, metaphysics, ritual, ethics, faith, ecstatic experience, religious behavior) within a unified conceptual framework;

E.) to focus on childhood-religion links both within specific religions and, comparatively, between religions;

F.) to follow my arguments to their logical conclusions, unconstrained by theological or other considerations.