The Holy Family

My sermon for last Sunday, the Feast of the Holy Family:

Quite often during my time as a priest I've had the experience of being told by parents that they don't believe in "brainwashing" their children about religion; that they think it's right to let their children "make their own mind up" about God and faith as they get older.

The idea seems to be that any attempt to pass on definite religious convictions is an interference with their children's freedom. At the extreme end of this viewpoint, we also have people like Richard Dawkins, who go as far as describing a religious upbringing of any kind as a form of child abuse.

An older, traditional view, certainly among Catholics, is that parents have a positive duty to impart their own faith to their children. They should have them baptised as soon as possible after they're born and start to bring them up as Christians - by teaching, by prayer in the home, and by their own example. 

The conflict here is between two very different mentalities. The modern mentality, which is widespread now in our culture, places religious faith in the category of personal opinion and personal taste. It's similar to whether you like country music or heavy metal, or the colour red better than the colour blue.

The older view holds that religious faith is more objective than that.

Nobody really argues with the idea that if you want to own and drive a car, there are a lot of non-negotiable conditions you involved: the car has to be insured and MOT'd every year or else you're breaking the law; you have to pass the driving test and hold a driving licence; you have to keep to the Highway Code while you're out on the road.

It's no good driving on the pavement or going through a red light and then, when the police pull you over, saying, "In my personal opinion, it's all right to drive like this". That won't get you very far in the Magistrates Court.

Analogies are never perfect, of course, but I think that religious faith, and parents' responsibility to pass on the faith, is more like the idea of learning to be a fit and safe driver than it a matter of expressing tastes in music or food or whatever.

There would be chaos on the roads if everyone was left to make up his or her own mind about what constitutes acceptable behaviour when we get behind the wheel, and this notion that religion is something that people can more or less fashion for themselves has had a similarly damaging effect on the integrity and coherence of the faith. Basically, it's the wrong mentality to bring to religion, just as it's the wrong mentality to bring to driving a car.

But there's a further aspect. Forty or fifty years ago there was a movement among Catholics in parts of Latin America and South America in favour of a more socially and politically critical faith. People looked around at the society they were living in, and they began to see their Christian commitment as demanding criticism and even opposition towards the way society was stuctured: the huge disparity between rich and poor, the lack of democracy, military dictatorships propped up by the CIA and so on.

They rejected the idea that Christian faith meant acquiescence in that situation, or that the only duty Christians have is to be good, obedient citizens who don't question their rulers' values or practices.

There was a book by the Brazilian literacy teacher Paolo Friere, and the title of his book summed up this tendency: Education for Critical Consciousness. Friere's idea was that commitment to the Gospel entailed thinking critically - and resisting and changing - the values and the structures of society.

We don't have to be living in a third world dictatorship for this approach to Christian faith to be relevant and sometimes necessary. There are many aspects of our society which, if we're serious about being our commitment to the Gospel, we have to adopt a critical and resistant stance towards.

In my view, one of the tragedies of the Catholic community in our part of the world over the last forty or fifty years is that we've been far more ready to allow the values of mainstream society to shed their critical light on ther faith, than we have been to shine the light of the Gospel on the values of modern society.

Whereas if Catholic communities - parishes, schools and families - took a leaf out of Paulo Friere's book, there would actually be more young people keeping hold of their faith as they got older, rather than rejecting it as boring and irrelevant. Because they would be growing up with a model of Christian faith that questions, rather than conforms unquestioningly, to mainstream attitudes and values.

Those are the two main ideas that came into my head when I was thinking about Christian family life and the responsibility of Christian parents: the value of representing the faith as something objective and truthful about God and the purposes of human life, not just a matter of personal taste; and the value of representing Christian faith that something that questions and criticises values that are othewise taken for granted by the majority in society.