Children’s ideas of Christianity
I just finished reading “Like I Was Jesus: How to Bring a Nine-Year-Old to Christ” by Rachel Aviv in the August Harper’s. It’s a story about the Child Evangelism Fellowship, but (relatively rare for Harper’s) it isn’t just another “ack! Evangelistic Christians are totally scary!” piece. The most interesting thing about the story is her look at how children conceive of religion and the supernatural. A few exerpts:
When I first met Joshua Guido, the twenty-four-year-old director of the Child Evangelism Fellowship of Connecticut, I told him I had been an uncomfortably religious child, vaguely Jewish but mostly superstitious. I had worried that the Lord would punish me for bad behavior by killing my mother. I was constantly apologizing to Him: for stepping on my own shadow; closing the sock drawer too abruptly; turning the lights off before the moment when I felt a sign […] With the help of a few prayers I learned in Hebrew school, I turned the childhood taunt “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” into a religious worldview. It would have been a relief if someone had given me a rigid and alphabetized set of beliefs like those the Fellowship offers. (Instead, my parents sent me to therapy.)She follows some of the CEF missionaries as they save children in a housing project. She returns a week later to interview kids about how they feel about their new life in Christ.
“I thought we’d start helping people,” said Lamar, a handsome twelve-year-old who wore a jersey so large that most of his chest peeked out through the armholes. “If someone was having a baby, we’d just take them to the hospital and leave. We’d want to be good.” He walked behind me and leaned against the tree. “Nothing changed.” When I asked him if he would consider going back to club to try again, he became plaintive, “I took my heart out for God. One time should be enough.” Scott was more hopeful about his conversion. He said that it made him feel “smart.” “I don’t know why, but I’ll get a feeling,” he said. “God, like, reads your mind. He knows your brain. He crawls up inside you.”The most devout child I met at all the summer Bible clubs was Edwin Pareles, a tall, articulate nine-year-old with wire-rim glasses who lived in a public-housing complex in Hartford. He attended a Pentecostal church with his father, and he had already heard many stories about Jesus. Still, he called his conversion with Oscar [one of the missionaries], atop a rusted playground slide, “the most important moment of my life.” After the missionaries had left, I asked Edwin to reflect on his conversion. “I was pretending like I was at the beach with Jesus,” he said, sitting on the untrimmed lawn outside his barrackslike brick apartment. “There were some huge waves coming to me, but Jesus said, ‘Don’t worry about the waves, I’m here.’ I felt great because Jesus was with me. I felt I was a grown-up already. I was feeling like I was Jesus.”Later Edwin tells her the Devil put a question in his mind. He forgets it at first, then the next day says it came to him in a dream.
“The Devil told me the story of Jesus rising is kind of like Goosebumps,” he said, referring to R.L. Stine’s popular horror novellas, Edwin’s favorite books. […] When I asked him what made the Bible feel different, he quickly explained away his anxiety. “Well, there’s something about Jesus,” he said. “Everyone talks about Him, and then you believe in Him. And when you see Him on the cross, then you really believe in Him.” Now he was on more stable ground. The afternoon sun reflected off his glasses, and he looked calm and studious. “Jesus died for our sins. All R.L. Stine did was make a book for us. That’s the big difference.”The whole article is really fascinating. Well worth picking up.
