An interesting article from a woman rasied Calvinist but later shed her faith and is raising her children without the concept of sin, a word that still makes her cringe in fear...
It's an interesting prospect. This woman has gone from former conditioning to responding to that former conditioning in such a manner as to weirdly fulfill it.
As we stood in line a few weeks ago at the Dickens Fair, I realized that my kids already knew what sin was, without ever having been exposed to the onerous religious weight of the word. Despite being unchurched, they are empathetic, loving and kind. And even more: They are fearless.
I gazed into Davia's upturned face and felt a rush of love and happiness. I had raised her without sin. Here was a kid who'd recently joked that the Christmas standard “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas” should be changed to “I'm Dreaming of a Diverse Christmas.”
She did have a moral code — one she followed not from obligation, but from her own desire to make the world a better place. A group of carolers strolled by, and she turned to watch them with a delighted smile, her question already forgotten. I leaned down and put my arms around her, watching the world from her perspective.
An explanation of sin could wait.
(Scheeres↱)
"She did have a moral code—one she followed not from obligation, but from her own desire to make the world a better place." It is as relativist as it sounds, and while relativism is not in and of itself damned or damnable, as such, this is precisely what Ms. Scheeres' predecessors, the Calvinist heritage, fears. I hope these kids continue to do well, but between introduction, setup, answer, and summary of result, it is a curious tale: A good introduction, typical background setup, and the answer is this idea of raising children without a concept of sin; the latter portion of the article, discussing the results, actually read more like a suggestion that these kids could withstand the scrutiny of their fifteen minutes of social media fame.
To the other, the author is an accomplished professional author, so I'm just going to go with something about column space and word counts. After all, that one does have a moral code, built not from obligation but their own desire to make the world a better place, does not exclude unfortunate results; I know a guy who did prison time for manslaughter because, at age twenty, he wanted to make the world a better place. And, sure, the victim
was violent toward a woman, but when we seek to make the world a better place with fists, and then a knife, stuff goes wrong.
I would expect there is, in the Scheeres household, some foundational concept of right and wrong, but between explaining the experiential history, framing the question, suggesting the answer, and observing the result of how awesome her kids are, it's true that column space probably precludes explaining how it works.
We started taking our kids to marches when the younger one, Davia, was an infant perched on our shoulders and 3-year-old Tessa danced between the lines of protesters as if it were a block party. We've marched for racial justice and for women's rights. Our church is the street, our congregation our fellow crusaders. We teach our children to respect the earth by reducing, reusing and recycling.
It's sinking in. My daughters make me proud by taking their own actions to confront injustice where they see it — by insisting we keep a box of protein bars in the car to hand out to homeless people at stoplights, by participating in school walkouts against gun violence, by intervening when they see kids bullied on the playground, by always questioning the world around them.
Train children up in the way they should go, and they shall not depart from it. Nothing says they understand, though. What is that modern iteration? Oh, right:
All of this has happened before, and will happen again.
The article is too pointed and fails to convey the particular potential strengths of this ostensible escape, while also following a post- or anti-Calvinist ego defense arc. There is much potential in what Scheeres considers, but the article itself seems nearly as naïve as modern Calvinists, as if the author cannot recognize other potential results of the formulation according to other priorities, moralities, or notions of the world as a better place.
The book version, if she ever writes it, should be interesting.
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Notes:
Scheeres, Julia. "Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin". The New York Times. 25 January 2019. NYTimes.com. 31 January 2019. https://nyti.ms/2sXB5Su
