The Faith Of Children

When this interview appeared, Robert Coles was a child psychiatrist and writer who had worked for many years interviewing, documenting, and reflecting on the lives of people in all circumstances, particularly those of hardship and oppression. He had written more than 30 books, including the five-volume Children of Crisis and was working on a book about the development of moral and political values in children. In early 1982, Coles was interviewed by Robert Ellsberg, who was a Sojourners contributing editor at that time.
--The Editors

Robert Ellsberg: In discussing the faith of children, is it important to make distinctions between poor children and those who come from comfortable backgrounds?

Robert Coles: I think so. Many poor children in this country are living on the edge--if I may use Paul Tillich's expression. I think he meant it to apply in a theological rather than sociological sense. If you're hungry and don't know where your next meal is coming from, and if you're living in a ghetto or in a shack that has no sanitation or electricity and feeling down-and-out and worthless, then you're not far from the edge that Tillich and some of the existentialists had in mind.

You begin to ask why; and once people start asking why about their lives, fates, and destinies, they're entering religious inquiry. And children do that. But children who come from wealthy families are protected, among other things, from that question. They go to church on Sundays, some of them, but too often going to church is merely a Sunday ritual, and they're not near those marginal, down-and-out kinds of questions which, after all, were the questions Christ and his disciples came to terms with. Jesus and his followers were marginal people; Christ's particular kind of existence was not an accident.

When God became human his journey and vision were linked with a particular kind of life. The situation of poor and hard-pressed children is very much like the situation Christ himself experienced. It is a situation that prompts those important questions: Why do we live this way, what is justice, when will justice ultimately prevail, what is fair, what is decent, what is honorable?

Ellsberg: Some of the privileged children you've met have also asked these questions. In their case this may mean questioning the discrepancy between the kind of morality preached in church and that which is practiced at home.

Coles: If there's one thing I've done that has probably frightened a lot of people such as myself, who come from comfortable backgrounds, it's to pay attention to this ethical dilemma. The dilemma is the enormous discrepancy between the teachings of the Bible that have to do with justice and fairness and the lives we live. Our lives are so often connected to exploitation, greed, competition, and conformity to those qualities as they have been incorporated in a particular social and economic system. It's been unsettling to me as a parent, not to mention a social observer, as I talk to my own children and others that I've known, to realize how many children are able to spot these moral inconsistencies.

The problem for someone like me who desires that his children lead successful, competent lives, do well in school, get ahead in society, is knowing that the cost of this may at times be insensitivity to others, that in urging them to do well I may well be urging them to be inconsiderate or lacking in thoughtfulness about others. In other words, the Christian values of community and equality are not the easiest standards to hold up when you're also interested in perpetuating your privileged situation in society through your children and your own behavior.

Ellsberg: In Privileged Ones you tell the story of a child whose religious questioning was so disturbing to his parents that he was sent to a psychiatrist.

Coles: That is the most devastating story I've ever written. It's the story of a child who grew up in a very rich Florida family, whose experiences in the Presbyterian church somehow got to him when he was 9, 10 or 11, and prompted him to be very scrupulously concerned with the teachings of Christ. It got to the point that he was talking about them in school, upsetting teachers and fellow students by repeating certain statements that Christ made--namely, that it would be awfully hard for rich people to get into heaven (even though the child himself was very rich), that the poor would indeed inherit the moral and spiritual kingdom, and so forth.

The more he talked like this the more of a "problem" he became for his teachers, his parents, and eventually for a local pediatrician. Ultimately this boy ended up in psychotherapy because it was felt that he had what was called, of course, a "problem," and needed help. His parents were told to stop taking him to church. He was accused of being too literal minded, at a very minimum.

Ellsberg: And did they "help" him?

Coles: Well, they did "help" him, and he lost a lot of these Christian preoccupations and became another American entrepreneur.

Ellsberg: Perhaps it's a good thing they didn't have psychotherapy in St. Francis' time.

Coles: That's right! Psychiatry for St. Francis, psychiatry for St. Paul, psychiatry for Jesus himself! But that is the Christian dilemma. If you take Christianity seriously, it is a radical and, indeed, a scandalous religion. And how close one feels to the radical, scandalous nature of Christianity, how much we are willing to be "fools for Christ," is the problem for those of us who become professional people and end up in institutions like, for example, Harvard, where I teach.

Ellsberg: Your work of the last 20 years was originally prompted by the school desegregation crisis in the South and your efforts to discover what allowed people to face such oppressive conditions and get by with a surprising degree of dignity, courage, and grace. And as you spoke to these people they were constantly making reference to their religious faith. I gather that in the beginning you were not especially inclined to take such religious statements at face value.

Coles: There is an important gap between the sensibilities of most social scientists and social observers and the people we try to observe. So many who do this work are agnostic liberals who think of religion in the terms set by Freud or Marx or Weber or whomever--that is, religion as a sociological, psychological, or historical phenomenon. And we want to "interpret" it. So we say it's an illusion, or a superstition or an opiate, and we don't take terribly seriously what the people we are observing have to say about the religious and moral principles--the visions--that they live by.

I've found that the writing that I've done about religion among the poor and in the lives of children has been the part of my writing most neglected by critics and reviewers. People are all too willing to comment on my psychiatric conclusions. But they don't really care at all about what I'm reporting, what I have seen and heard about the religious life of the poor or the religious life of poor children.

I find poor children mentioning the Bible much more than I find well-to-do children mentioning it. I find Christ's life among the poor to be a very common source of inspiration and solace. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I think that Jesus still lives among the poor of this world; if he lives any place he lives among sharecroppers and tenant farmers and the black people of this country.

If you go into the neighborhoods where poor people live, black or white, you find a kind of intense religious spirit. Maybe we don't agree with the uses to which that spirit is sometimes put by particular individuals--but then I don't agree with the uses to which people of my ilk put religion either. And I think that children who are 5 and 6 and 7 who have been brought up in the Christian tradition are able to ask the same kinds of difficult questions that Christ himself asked as he surveyed the Palestinian scene a couple of thousand years ago. They are moral questions:

How am I going to live my life, what do I believe in, how is this all going to end up, and what is the meaning of life really?

When I was training to be a child psychiatrist, we were taught to brush aside such moral questions because they were usually interpreted as connected to some psychiatric unrest, some difficulty, some anxiety that was taking the form of moral inquiry. But the longer I've heard children ask those questions the more I've become certain that they are the fundamental moral, philosophical, and religious questions it is in our nature to ask.

Even before they go to school, children are approaching moral maturity through these questions. I don't mean maturity in the glib sense that it's used now by psychologists and psychiatrists; I mean the fulfillment of who we are as human beings, namely the creatures who ask about the purpose of this life. That is what we're put here to do--and presumably to find answers and then to live by them. And children begin asking as soon as they have the language.

Ellsberg: What kind of answers do they come up with, the children of migrant workers?

Coles: Among the migrant workers I've come to know in this country the questions are connected to the existential situation of wanderers, as Christ was a wanderer; of poor people, as Christ was poor; of exiles, as Christ was an exile; of the despised and scorned, as he was. And so it isn't only a social observer like myself who can make the connection between the life of a migrant farm family and the life of Jesus Christ. They themselves make this connection, though not in pride or boastfulness, because they don't want to be poor and hungry, and they do wish they could get a better deal out of this life. But it occurs to them that their situation is not unlike that of Jesus and those laboring people that he was so close to and to whom he turned with such affection.

Ellsberg: The charge is often made that religion makes the poor more acquiescent to their condition. They put their hopes in the future rather than trying to change the condition of their lives.

Coles: I don't notice that any of the people who write these things about the poor are ever changing the world in any way for all of their freedom from this kind of "superstition." The fact is that I don't see this charge borne out among the poor people I've known. I've seen moral outrage, I've seen efforts to organize and help themselves, even when they're defeated and beaten in these efforts over and over again.

It is very interesting that we demand of the poor that they change their situation when they have no power, no money, and no access to the social, economic, and political forces that the rest of us have. While we, who make this analysis of them, don't, I notice, go from that analysis to any significant efforts to change the world; or if we do make such efforts we have not been any more successful for all our lack of "illusions" and "superstitions."

I just don't think it's true, psychologically, that there is necessarily a politically dulling effect to religious faith. On the contrary, I've found in listening to people, whether it's in South Africa or Brazil or Northern Ireland or this country, that religious faith is usually connected with indignation and outrage. This notion that upper-middle-class atheist social scientists have perpetrated on us for the last hundred years--that religion dulls moral and political and social indignation--is a myth.

These people are saying that they have no religious faith, and all they believe in is history or the unconscious or the Comintern, and that others who don't see the world that way are by definition intoxicated, opiated, or inert. It could be that the people who are making these accusations of religion are the ones who are really inert. They're inert to the moral sense that is right out there if you just go out and listen and watch people.

How did the whole civil rights movement get started in the South? It wasn't led by agnostic university sociologists and theorists of psychology. It was led by Dr. King and Shuttlesworth and Abernathy--they were ministers, and they were responded to by people in churches all through that region. I saw it in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the early '60s.

These were revival meetings in the best sense of the word. It used to gall me when college students would come down, as well-intentioned as they were and as fine as their motives were; they would go to these churches and immediately you could hear that Marxist-Freudian rhetoric come out about the opium of religion. And meanwhile a lot of students I knew who wanted to be involved in the civil rights movement wouldn't get involved because at the time, they were telling me, they were in analysis, they were in therapy, and their doctors were telling them they were simply acting out this or that problem. Talk about inertia being connected to one or another kind of ideology!

You know my own field of psychiatry and psychotherapy has been used to make people quite inert, because they're so scrutinizing of their own emotions that they end up doing nothing. And for that matter I think Marxism with its ideology of history and its moments can also induce a kind of passivity: "Well, when the right historical moment comes we'll do something, but in the meantime..."

Ellsberg: But in the meantime, there's no need to behave decently toward the person next door or the stranger who needs our help.

Coles: Well, as you know, this is the great gap between transcendant ideologies and convictions, high-flown theoretical notions and the issue of immanence in all our lives: how we are going to behave five minutes from now with one or another person. You know, I pick up a book and I get a great idea out of it, and then I get into my car and start zig-zagging down Route 2, crowding out other drivers, behaving just like the greedy, manipulative entrepreneur that I say in my self-serving articles and speeches I don't want to be.

That is the great challenge in this life, and I think poor children growing up harassed and hard-pressed get to see it. They notice that some people who are well-to-do, very prominent and well-educated, talk a great line but don't live up to it. And who is going to notice this better than those who are powerless, hungry, and hurt? They're going to notice it because they're the victims.

Ellsberg:: One of the things I get from your books is the conviction that these people are not just victims, that they are more than just the sum of the economic circumstances of their lives.

Coles: There is a moral complexity to the lives of many poor people I've known. They have great resources and psychological qualities that I've tried to describe, which have to do with steadfastness, adaptiveness, resilience, and courage. These are qualities that one just can't help but notice and admire.

In the first volume of Children of Crisis I told the story of Ruby. I often tell her story because I think she is the greatest teacher one could possibly have. Here was a 6-year-old child who had to pass through mobs every day, escorted by federal marshals, to go to first grade in a totally abandoned school. She was one of the four black children who pioneered desegregation in two schools in New Orleans in 1960.

Here was a little girl who was called every name in the book, who was insulted and threatened, and yet could find time in the evening to pray for the people who were heckling her and could even pray for them while walking in their presence, while being insulted by them. She did this, she said, because Christ had told her something, namely that she must forgive these people because they didn't know what they were doing.

Now what can you say, psychiatrically, sociologically, in terms of developmental theory, as it's put, when you have a 6-year-old child with that kind of attitude? All you can do is be in awe of her. And she's not alone. I've met other children who can connect this world's meanness and unfairness with Christ's life and draw strength from his experience. And I've met children all over the world who show the kinds of everyday canniness and resourcefulness and steadfastness that enables them to get by.

I have to compare them with children living the kind of lives that people like myself have known from our own childhoods on, who take so much for granted, for whom so much is done, to the extent that we've become self-centered and spoiled. I'm not the first writer these days who talks about narcissism in American life, but boy, it's there to be seen--malignant self-preoccupation.

Ellsberg: Are you concerned that your own profession, psychiatry, has contributed to that self-preoccupation?

Coles: I think it has contributed an enormous amount to this problem. There are several very interesting psychiatric writers who have pointed out the ways that psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis are used by people as moral crutches in a sense far beyond what they were originally designed to do. Erik Erikson puts it very nicely in Childhood and Society when he talks about the importance of social and political indignation, without which, he says, "a cure is but a straw in the wind of history."

How do we bring up our children to have a sense of purpose in this life? A lot of poor children do have a sense of purpose; they have to work and they have to struggle through a mob to get to a school, they have to find the resources within themselves to survive. And meanwhile my children and the children of many people like me have everything handed to them, and the only demands we make of them are that they become more self-centered in their academic and personal competence so that they attain certain goals and can get the rewards this society has to offer.

It's a moral dilemma. Many of us have become narrow, self-preoccupied people, aided and abetted by our personal success and our psychological "health"--by that I mean that we've convinced ourselves that what mental health means is the smooth, successful, careerist life, a life free of anxiety, pain, and fear. And if you have anxiety, pain, and fear you go to a therapist to get rid of it.

But there is a worldview which says that anxiety, pain, and fear are part of what life is meant to be, that God himself assumed such a life, that he lived under continual anxiety, pain, and fear and ended up as a common criminal strung up on a cross and killed. Now, if you take that kind of existence as a very important one and as a model of sorts, then you're going to have a difficult time becoming as "successful" as you may have been told you ought be if you come from a middle-class family. You have a moral dilemma.

Many poor children don't have that moral dilemma, because they're living under the kind of moral, not to speak of economic and political, circumstances that Jesus himself lived under. It's awfully hard for those of us who are well-to-do to make sense of this, so we are confused, and so are our children. But I've never noted Ruby to be confused, or children like her. She knew exactly what she was doing. She had biblical sanction for that kind of courageous suffering.

My children have never suffered the way that Ruby has, and they're not sure what the Bible means as far as their lives are concerned. What they're interested in is how they're going to do in school, whether they're going to be able to go to x, y, or z college. And as I try to make inroads in that kind of sensibility in them and, I might add, in myself too, I find myself in a kind of moral anguish that I've never known Ruby to be in, nor her parents, who are extremely poor, hardworking people. So over and over again I am forced to make this sort of existential analysis of the poor as against the well-to-do in American capitalist life.

Ellsberg: It makes for a kind of irony in the title of your book, Privileged Ones, the fifth in your series on children.

Coles: Oh yes, absolutely. I think the title of that volume is ironic, and the stories are extremely sad and unnerving.

Ellsberg: I found them very sad. The earlier volumes, on one level, are stories of injustice and blocked opportunities--and yet the deeper impression seemed to come from the capacity of individuals to endure and rise above the forces that would grind them down. The children of the rich, on the other hand, seemed far more constrained by economic circumstances. Part of their upbringing seemed to involve the crippling of their ability to make the connections and ask the kinds of questions that you say are basic to what it means to be a human being.

Coles: I don't want to romanticize poverty, and I don't in any way want to deny to someone from a well-to-do family a rich, complicated, and important moral life. But by no means do affluent circumstances guarantee a rewarding and ennobling moral or spiritual life. And by no means does poverty guarantee only a suffering and impoverished moral life. That's the minimum statement on both sides.

As you look around, you find that, after all, circumstances prompt inquiry, and desperate circumstances may prompt the most taut and intense and enormously urgent kind of inquiry, again, such as Christ made; whereas a padded, self-centered, luxurious set of circumstances can prompt idle reverie, self-infatuation, indolence, and a lack of any kind of inquiry other than the following kind: What are we going to have for supper, when are we going to open up the swimming pool, where are we going to go for skiing this year, what country are we going to visit this summer, and on and on.

One is not per se virtuous because one is born poor; I am not saying, either, that one is per se wicked for being born well-to-do or rich. But I am saying that there is irony to the nature of one's circumstances. They are more important than some of us are ready to acknowledge. They're morally important.

Ellsberg: You are an admirer of Flannery O'Connor's stories. So many of them take place on a kind of battlefield of belief and doubt in which the antagonists are, on the one hand, children, trying to hold onto a sense of mystery in life versus the adults who would deny that mystery.

Coles: Christ was once a child. And I think what Flannery O'Connor tried to show in some of her children was the true nature of innocence, which is an earnest moral and spiritual inquiry and search that has yet to be undone by the kinds of "mature" rationalizations and self-justifications that the rest of us have learned to take so seriously.

Ellsberg: Is that what Christ meant when he spoke of the need for us to become like children?

Coles: I think he meant that unless we recognize the radical nature of Christianity, which means shedding the imperatives of the secular world and taking with extreme seriousness the imperatives of God, then we are kidding ourselves. I think we are meant to do as that child of the wealthy Florida family I described, who took seriously what Jesus had to say and worried about it, and didn't just worry about it in the abstract but worried about it concretely in his own life and the life of his family.

His family feared that he was turning everything upside down, but I think that's just what Jesus intended for us to do--turn things upside down, look at things in the strangest and wildest ways. It's very hard for us to do that. And psychotherapy is not going to help us do it. I'm not sure political activity is going to help us do it.

Flannery O'Connor wanted to help us do it by writing those stories, because she saw what the Bible was getting at. In all her stories she confronts secular, self-satisfied, 20th-century liberalism; she confronts it with Christian radicalism. It makes for a social, intellectual, and spiritual confrontation of the most dramatic kind.