The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play

A set of toys that teaches kids about the parable of the sower. Image source.

I've been reading "The Kingdom of Children" by R. L. Stollar. In this post I want to talk about the way the book portrays it as a good thing for children to develop their own theology.

I want to know, *why* is it a good thing for children to develop their own theology? Like, my *feeling* when I read this is that I agree it's a good thing, but I want to think through the reasons why. If they're making up their own beliefs about God, aren't most of those beliefs going to be wrong? As an ex-evangelical I can tell you that evangelicals would be very concerned about the idea of children coming up with their own beliefs about God- no, we need to teach them the *correct* beliefs! It's very important! If people don't believe the correct things about God, they will go to hell! They will sin- and every sin hurts God infinitely, this isn't something you can just play around with like it doesn't matter. And if people have incorrect beliefs about God in some areas, even if it's just some minor little error that doesn't seem significant, WELL IT IS- those will lead to even worse incorrect beliefs about God, and worse sins. We have to make sure everyone believes all the correct things!

Yes, it's a very big deal in evangelicalism, that people have to believe the "correct" beliefs, and it would be terrible to just let everyone develop their own theology from their own thoughts and experiences. By contrast, liberation theology is based on the idea that people should make their own theology. It seems like a very key foundational aspect of liberation theology, a point where liberation theology is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from what I was taught in evangelicalism. I feel like, I agree with it, but I still want an explanation, because coming from an evangelical background, it's not obvious why it would be a good thing to let people figure out their own religious beliefs.

Let me give you some examples where the book portrays this positively. This is from pages 159-160:

Take the example of Stephanie. Stephanie is a sixteen-year-old Black girl described by Brett Webb-Mitchell in his book God Plays Piano, Too: The Spiritual Lives of Disabled Children. ...

Webb-Mitchell describes Stephanie as "a theologian in search of God." For despite her on-and-off hostility toward God and the hypocrisy of religious people, she finds immense meaning and hope in Jesus.  ...

Stephanie does not only find hope in religion. She also has profound, poignant insights into that religion. For example, Stephanie recounts the creation story from the book of Genesis with her own, unique perspective on it and the origin of sin:

In the beginning God ... creates the first man, and the man would teach other animals how not to hurt each other and stuff. Then he created a woman, and she take care of all the flowers and stuff. ... The man was black and the woman was Indian. And then, then they'd have children. ... (How did sin come into this world?) One of the children hurt somebody else ... willingly. Through hatred and jealousy, and then that's how they discovered that feeling of hating, or wanting to hurt someone or wanting to kill someone or something.

She is only sixteen and confined to a hospital due to disabilities, yet Stephanie has a striking vision of Eden that is much like the prophet Isaiah's vision of the kingdom of God: one in which people treat each other kindly and humans teach each other how not to hurt one another. The above vision is as vivid and full of colors and details as any creation story I have heard from adults. And Stephanie has an uncanny grasp on the reality of sin: sin is the dissolution of community. Sin is when one person hurts another person, which Stephanie can speak to because of the many people who have hurt her. ...

Intuitively, I like this. So let me try to put into words why it feels like a good thing to me that people come up with their own ideas about God, even though many of those ideas will be false in a strict factual sense. I wish "The Kingdom of Children" had talked about this, but maybe this is a normal part of liberation theology, so the book didn't want to get into the details of justifying it. So let me try here.

Stephanie presents a creation story which is similar in some ways to the creation stories of Genesis in the bible, but has some key differences. She says the first man was Black, and the first woman was Indian- the bible doesn't say anything about race in the creation story; really the concept of race doesn't make sense if literally only 2 people exist. (Also, Indian? Don't you need the country of India to exist before it makes any sense to talk about Indian people?) She also says sin entered the world when the first humans' children "hurt somebody else"- this sounds similar to the bible story where Cain killed Abel (Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve's sons), and in the bible this is a key point illustrating the sinfulness of humanity, but it's not the point where sin *began* - that was when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.

So from a "biblical inerrancy" perspective, this story is wrong because it doesn't agree with what the bible says. I think you can only see Stephanie's version of the creation story as meaningful if you don't believe in biblical inerrancy. Which, I don't believe in biblical inerrancy, so we're good on that front. In fact, the bible itself has 2 different creation stories that don't agree with each other- 2 stories that are not literally true, and make different points about humanity, God, etc. Stephanie's version makes additional points, so I do see it as a good thing.

Stollar points out, in the section I quoted above, that Stephanie has good insight into the nature of sin, and the way people are supposed to treat each other. I agree that these are reasons it's good and meaningful for people to make up their own ideas about God. The specific facts aren't true, but the abstract meanings that can be extracted are true.

To that end, notice how she said that the first man was Black- as a Black person herself, it's meaningful to tell a story where the first man is Black. The deeper meaning behind this is that God loves Black people, and it's wrong that many illustrations of bible stories treat white as the default, as if everyone important is white. These deeper meanings are literally true, I would say, even though the story she tells is not true.

Here's a similar example, but this one is a non-Christian child. From page 164:

Much of the time, however, we do not respond to children by allowing them to lead. We deny children the chance to be advocates or teachers. When children try to speak up, we often reject their teachings in a patronizing manner. Robert Coles gives an example of this rejection in the context of an American public school. There, a ten-year-old Hopi girl feels discouraged from sharing her religious beliefs with her teacher. The girl tells Coles, "The sky is where the God of the Anglos lives, a teacher told us. She asked where our God lives. I said, 'I don't know.' I was telling the truth. Our God is the sky, and lives wherever the sky lives. Our God is the sun and the moon, too; and our God is our [the Hopi] people." Coles asks the girl if she explained that to her teacher. She says, "No... because-- she thinks God is a person. If I'd told her, she'd give us that smile." Coles asks, "What smile?" The girl responds, "The smile that says to us, 'You kids are cute, but you're dumb.'"

... As Coles's story shows, such dismissiveness is actively damaging by discouraging children from sharing their thoughts. The young Hopi girl that Coles talked to had no interest in speaking up about her spiritual experiences because of her firsthand experiences with adult contempt. But if the teacher in the story had expressed willingness to listen, she could have been taught an immense amount about the Hopi girl's faith, which could have fostered better interfaith understanding.

The way this story is presented, we are being told that this Hopi girl's religious beliefs are meaningful and worth listening to, and it's bad when adults don't listen to children's ideas about religion- which is especially likely if the child has beliefs which differ from the adult's.

But let's explicitly ask why- why is it good to listen to this Hopi girl's beliefs? I *agree* that it's good, but let's talk about why. Stollar is a Christian, and I am a Christian, so from our perspective, don't we think that she believes some things which are not true, because they contradict our Christian beliefs? How could a belief be good and valuable if it's not true?

I would answer like this: A person's religious beliefs tell us something about how they see themself, their place in the world, their purpose in life. It's about identity, and it informs people's behavior. Listening to people share their beliefs, the point is not to evaluate "okay is that really what God is like though?" It's about the way that different religious beliefs correspond to different perspectives on the world. These different perspectives aren't right or wrong- but it's good to listen to different perspectives because they might have insights that you never thought about before.

Okay, so, what, is none of it actually true then? What's the overarching ideology here, which allows for this idea that it doesn't matter if someone's religious claims are actually true, but views religious beliefs more as (fictional?) stories which communicate our identity and values?

1. Is it "none of this is true, there is no god, but religion has psychological benefits, so it's great when people make up whatever beliefs they want, as long as those beliefs have a positive effect on people"?
2. Is it "There is a spiritual world, but it's so much bigger and more complicated than any of us can imagine. Any attempt to describe it will only capture a small fraction of the whole thing. All of these religious beliefs are true, to some extent, and all of them are incomplete."
3. Is it "I personally am a member of a specific religion, so I think *my* beliefs literally are factually true. *Your* beliefs are false at the points where they contradict mine. But I still think your religion is a good thing for you, and I won't try to convince you to change. The points you are wrong about don't have negative practical consequences, so it's fine. Also your religion emphasizes some important points which mine does not, so it *is* valuable for me to learn from you on those points."
4. Is it "I personally am a member of a specific religion. I believe in my own religious beliefs, but not with enough confidence to make big claims about other people being wrong. We are all just trying to figure it out, and I support people doing that."

I guess for me, I really am a Christian, so I have to pick #3 or #4. I would be interested in other people's opinions on this. If you're religious, or an atheist, or whatever, and you think it's not necessarily a problem when other people believe differently than you, well, why?

Also, the 2 examples I've shown from the book are positive, but I can tell you it's also very common for children to have odd understandings of religion, which are not really good for them.

For example: When I was a child, I really wanted God to tell me some specific thing I was supposed to do. I wondered if God would send me some kind of message and I would have to decode it and figure out the heroic act that God was asking me to do. There are bible stories where God gives a command to someone that they should do a specific thing, and they have great faith and they do it, and amazing miracles happen. I wanted that to happen to me. Maybe I had a skewed view of what it meant to follow God- I thought it was mostly about God commanding you to do some weird thing, and then you "have faith" and do it. The "one weird trick" of religion. (In contrast, I now think what we're supposed to do is boring stuff like generally being a good person, helping others, helping the world. "Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly before God.")

Sometimes in church, I would draw random lines on my church bulletin, hoping that God would somehow guide me subconsciously to make the lines in such a way that it became a picture of something, which would be the clue about what specific thing God wanted me to do. It never worked though; it never looked like anything. Just random lines.

Is this a bad belief for a child to have? Yes, I think so... but I think it's just a normal part of child development, not something we have to be in a panic about. If a child believes this, you shouldn't tell them it's wrong and they need to change- you should talk to them about it, to understand how they feel, and ask them questions to kind of get them thinking in the direction of "Think about the people in your life that you consider good people/ role models/ people who are following God. Is it because they did 1 big dramatic thing, or because they consistently do the boring work of caring about other people/ building some system they hope will make the world better?" And "Do you think God only pays attention to our obedience to Their arbitrary, out-of-nowhere personalized orders, and the rest of our lives is meaningless busywork?"

And actually, I think the reason I had that belief as a child was that I didn't feel like I had any meaningful choices in my life. I just did the things I was supposed to do- go to school, do homework, do what my parents said. In my regular life, there seemed to be no opportunity to do something meaningful to follow God- there was no opportunity to do anything at all except what I was supposed to do. But if God told me to do some specific small weird action, and then my faith and obedience caused some huge dramatic positive thing to happen- well, that would be a way that I could actually do something meaningful and follow God. I so wanted to follow God, but I couldn't imagine how to even do that in my day-to-day life.

So... yeah, this religious belief was connected to important facts about how I saw myself and my place in the world. It's worth listening to people, to understand how they think about those things. But also, if it seems like their beliefs are wrong in a way that's maybe harmful to them, you can ask them questions to get them to start thinking that maybe it would be better to have a bit of a different perspective. 

Another example: It's common for evangelical children to have salvation anxiety. We are taught that we all deserve to go to hell, and we need to "pray the prayer" to "ask Jesus into our hearts" so that we will be "saved" and go to heaven instead. Many times, I have been at church events which led children though this prayer. You have to hit all the important points- I admit that I am a sinner, I believe that Jesus died for me, I confess my sins and commit my life to Jesus. Oh, and you have to really mean it. It doesn't count if you just say the words but you don't really mean it.

Many many evangelical children worry that they somehow did it wrong. Maybe they didn't quite say the right words. Maybe they didn't "really mean it." Remember, if you get this wrong, you go to hell. Children who have salvation anxiety pray this prayer over and over- just in case all the previous times they accidentally did it wrong.

I don't think it's healthy for children to worry like this. I think the beliefs that cause salvation anxiety are harmful. 

The Sunday school teachers who tell children that they need to pray this prayer aren't trying to give them salvation anxiety. The intention is the opposite, actually- evangelicals claim that we can be confident in our salvation. We know that Jesus did the work, and all we need to do is believe in him. Evangelicals claim that this is much better than other religions who say you have to do good deeds in order to get to heaven- because how can you ever know if you've done enough good deeds? Evangelical Christianity only requires you to pray to prayer to ask Jesus into your heart, and really mean it, and that's it, then you know you're going to heaven, and you don't need to worry.

This example about salvation anxiety shows that children's beliefs are very much influenced by the environment they are in, and the religious claims they hear from trusted adults. The teaching from adults sort of defines the framework that they have for their religious beliefs, and then children fill that framework with the conclusions they draw. Adults tell them they need to "pray the prayer" to get out of hell, and children who are prone to anxiety will worry that they might have somehow "not really meant it" and will constantly worry about going to hell. 

So it's not necessarily a good thing when children develop their own religious beliefs. Yes, it is important to listen to them sharing their beliefs, in order to understand them better, as "The Kingdom of Children" says, but it's not like it's all beautiful insights every time children develop their own ideas about God based on their own personality and experiences. Sometimes it's harmful.

Okay let's get back to what I want to say about "The Kingdom of Children." There's a chapter called "Seeing Children as Theologians," and it says we should view theology as play. Children develop their beliefs about God by playing around, doing things like drawing, playing with toys that are bible story characters, having their bible toys interact with their Transformers and Dora the Explorer, etc. The book says that God is fun and playful, and it's a good thing to play around with ideas about God, and not really take it too seriously.

I like this. I think yes, you can discover actual truths by just playing around. That's certainly true for math and science- you play around with your legos or whatever, and you end up learning actually useful principles about physics and building, etc. If we're talking about playing around and learning religious or moral ideas from it, maybe it would be something like, you have an idea, and then you make your toys act it out and see what happens, and that helps you better understand if it was a good or bad idea. Just try it and don't take it that seriously.

"The Kingdom of Children" says adults should also do these kinds of "playful" things as part of our religious practice. Painting a picture of Jesus can be just as important as writing a sermon.

As an example of how children can do theology through play, "The Kingdom of Children" recommends the "Godly Play" curriculum. I was just looking around their website and it looks interesting. Stollar says this curriculum is great- but also says it's expensive so it's not accessible to poor children. It's important to consider all demographic groups of children, and make sure we are including them.

So, in summary: "The Kingdom of Children" says it is a good thing for children (and adults) to develop their own theology. And a lot of this theological work actually happens through play- it's good to play around with religious ideas and bible character toys, try different things, not take it that seriously. I want to know why it's a good thing for people to make up their own religious ideas, since most of those ideas will be factually incorrect. I have some possible answers to that- basically I think the important thing is that our religious beliefs serve as a way to understand our own identity and values. I also have concerns about children coming up with religious beliefs which are harmful. The book didn't talk about that at all, but I feel it's a really common thing. The book shows examples of children coming up with deep insights which adults should learn from, but doesn't mention that sometimes children come up with weird beliefs which cause them stress.

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Posts about "The Kingdom of Children":

"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)
The Kingdom of Children: Comparing Religions
The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology
The Kingdom of Children: Theology and Play

Related:

Faith, Fruit, and "Do you actually believe your religion?"

Believing in the God You Want