Through a Glass Darkly

There was sure to be a backlash to the 100+ years of Sunday School, as well as to all the Bible camps and vacation Bible schools Christians have conducted. And here it is.

Jeninne Lee-St. John reports in Sunday School for Atheists that there is a growing movement of institutions for kids in atheist families modeled after Christian Sunday Schools and Bible camps.

Seems to me their parents are attempting to “innoculate” their kids against that dreaded contact they will inevitably have with Christians in United States society.

According to the article,

The lives of these young people would be much easier, adult nonbelievers say, if they learned at an early age how to respond to the God-fearing majority in the US.

Besides responding, negatively one would assume, to the “God-fearing majority,” there are other reasons to catch the kids early before any real damage is done:

Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it’s O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.

Apparently this movement has been inspired by awful experiences like the one this mother had to endure when her son fell into the clutches of a Bible-toting neighbor:

Kneisley, 26, a graduate student at the University of Missouri, says she realized Damian needed to learn about secularism after a neighbor showed him the Bible. “Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared,” says Kneisley. In most ways a traditional sleep-away camp–her son loved canoeing–Camp Quest also taught Damian critical thinking, world religions and tales of famous freethinkers (an umbrella term for atheists, agnostics and other rationalists) like the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

The mother of little Damian (Ironic, no?) is making sure he gets one hell of an education. Hell as in “without God,” of course.

And this sounds like a real uplifter:

One Sunday this fall found a dozen children up to age 6 and several parents playing percussion instruments and singing empowering anthems like I’m Unique and Unrepeatable, set to the tune of Ten Little Indians, instead of traditional Sunday-school songs like Jesus Loves Me. Rather than listen to a Bible story, the class read Stone Soup, a secular parable of a traveler who feeds a village by making a stew using one ingredient from each home.

How original. I guess it’s appropriate that the anti-Sunday-school would be a rehash, albeit in antithesis, of the original. But it does get more sophisticated for the older kids. They get “Socratic conversation:”

Down the hall in the kitchen, older kids engaged in a Socratic conversation with class leader Bishop about the role persuasion plays in decision-making. He tried to get them to see that people who are coerced into renouncing their beliefs might not actually change their minds but could be acting out of self-preservation–an important lesson for young atheists who may feel pressure to say they believe in God.

Now that is sophisticated. Actually, it’s probably more sophisticated than Socratic if the discussion holds to my own experiences with atheists. Notice that the class leader’s name is “Bishop.” Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?