The New Atheists said raising a child in the faith is a form of abuse. The charge deserves a straight answer, not a wounded one — and part of it lands.
It is one of the sharper lines to come out of the New Atheist decade, and it was designed to be repeated: there is no such thing as a Christian child. There are only children of Christian parents. Call a four-year-old a Marxist child or a monetarist child and everyone hears how absurd it is — so why does religion get a pass?
Richard Dawkins pushed it further and called religious upbringing a form of child abuse — arguing that teaching a child hell is worse than physical harm, and that children should be raised free of any religious label so they can choose for themselves when they are grown.
Most Christian fathers who hear this get defensive, which is the worst possible response, because defensiveness is exactly what the charge predicts. Take it apart instead. There are three distinct claims inside it. One is a word trick, one is impossible, and one is a genuine rebuke the church needs to hear.
The Word “Abuse” Is Doing All the Work
Start with the rhetoric, because the argument depends on it.
“Abuse” is a word with enormous moral weight, earned by describing real horrors done to real children. When it is stretched to cover teaching a child that God made him and loves him, it is not being used to describe. It is being used to transfer. The horror attached to one thing is moved onto another thing by the use of a shared label, and the transfer happens before anyone has argued that the two are actually alike.
Ask the question that breaks the spell: what specific harm are you alleging, and how would we measure it? Not what emotion does the word evoke. What is the injury?
The honest answer usually turns out to be “the belief is false, and it is bad to teach children false things.” That is a legitimate claim, but notice what has happened. The argument has quietly collapsed back into the ordinary debate about whether Christianity is true. Which is where it belonged all along. If the gospel is false, teaching it to children is a mistake — the same as teaching them any other falsehood. If it is true, withholding it is the cruelty.
The word “abuse” was inserted precisely to avoid having that argument on the merits.
Nobody Is Raising a Blank Child
The second claim is the proposal: raise the child without a worldview and let him pick one at eighteen.
This is not a neutral policy. It is not even possible. Every household teaches a child what is real, what matters, what a person is for, what to do when you have wronged someone, and whether anything is owed to anyone. It teaches these things constantly — in what gets celebrated, what gets punished, what is worth missing work for, what is said at a funeral.
A home that says nothing about God has not declined to answer the question. It has answered it. The child learns, quite efficiently, that God is not the kind of thing serious people organize a life around. That is a substantive claim about reality, taught by a parent, absorbed by a child too young to evaluate it — which is, word for word, the thing being objected to.
So the real question was never whether to form a child. It was which formation is true, and whether it is held in a way the child can eventually examine for himself.
What God Actually Commanded Fathers to Do
It is worth reading the command itself, because it is far more conversational than the critics assume.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:6–7, KJV)
Notice the setting. Sitting in the house. Walking on the road. Lying down. Getting up. This is not an indoctrination program; it is the description of a life lived openly in front of a child, with the faith woven into ordinary conversation where it can be questioned, watched, and tested against how the father actually behaves at supper.
Notice also where it starts: in thine heart. A father cannot transmit what he does not have. Which rules out the coercive version at the source.
And when Paul gives the fathers of the church their instruction, he leads with a prohibition.
And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4, KJV)
Before he says teach them, he says do not exasperate them. The Bible got to the critics’ concern about heavy-handed religious parenting roughly nineteen centuries early, and made it a command.
The Faith That Tells You to Check It
Here is where Christianity behaves unlike the caricature. A belief system built to survive on unexamined childhood conditioning would not tell people to go verify it. This one does, repeatedly.
These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. (Acts 17:11, KJV)
Luke calls the people who fact-checked the apostle more noble. Paul does not complain about it. And he tells another church, flatly: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, KJV). Peter instructs believers to be ready to give a reasoned defense to anyone who asks (1 Peter 3:15). Paul stakes the entire faith on a falsifiable historical event and says so out loud: if Christ is not risen, our preaching is vain and so is your faith (1 Corinthians 15:14).
That is not how you build a closed system. That is how you build one that expects to be examined.
And there is a doctrine underneath it that the critics never account for: in Christianity, faith is not hereditary. You do not inherit it from a father the way you inherit a surname. “Ye must be born again,” Jesus told a religious man who had every advantage of upbringing (John 3:7, KJV). Every single generation has to come to Christ personally, or it does not come at all. A Christian home can teach, model, pray, and plead. It cannot produce the thing. God does that, one soul at a time, by consent.
The Part of the Charge That Lands
Now the honest part. Some of what Dawkins described is real, and Christians should be the first to say so rather than the last.
There are homes where the faith arrived as fear and nothing else — where a child learned that God is mostly angry, that questions are disloyalty, that shame is the primary tool of parenting, and that the point of the gospel is behavior management. There are children who were handed hell and never handed the cross. There are men reading this who can name the room where it happened to them.
That is not the Christian faith being transmitted. That is the Christian faith being falsified in the home while its vocabulary is kept. And Scripture has harder words for it than Dawkins does. Jesus said it would be better for a man to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. Paul’s very first word to fathers was do not provoke them to wrath.
Conceding this costs the argument nothing, because the criticism is being made from inside the Christian standard, not against it. The reason we can all see that fear-based, shame-driven religious parenting is wrong is that we are measuring it against a Father who is patient, who does not break a bruised reed, and who invites His people to come and reason together.
Two Ways to Hand Something Down
So the question for a Christian father is not whether to form his children. That is settled by the nature of a home. The question is what kind of formation he is running.
- Can they ask? A boy who is allowed to say “I do not think I believe that” at fourteen is a boy who might still be talking to you at twenty-four. Shut the question down and you have not protected his faith; you have taught him to hide it.
- Do they see it cost you something? Children are excellent evidence-weighers. They notice whether the faith changes what you do with money, anger, and an apology you owe.
- Do they get the whole gospel or only the fence? If a child can recite the rules and cannot tell you what Christ did for sinners, he has been given a religion, not a Savior.
- Do they see you repent? Nothing in a Christian home is more persuasive than a father who admits he was wrong to the people he was wrong to. It is the one apologetic that cannot be faked.
Nobody Is Born Into This Family
Here is the deepest answer to “there is no such thing as a Christian child,” and it is one the Bible gives before any critic raises it.
Strictly speaking, the objection is right — and Christianity said it first.
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12–13, KJV)
Not of blood. Not by descent. Not by the will of a parent, however determined that parent is. No one is a Christian because of who his father was. Every believer in the history of the world entered this family by personally receiving Christ, and not one of them got in on a family membership.
So what is a Christian home actually doing? Not manufacturing believers. Telling the truth in front of children, early and often and warmly, and then trusting God with the thing only God can do — while the child watches a father live as though it is all true, and decides for himself whether it is.
If you have children, that is the work. Give them the whole gospel, not just the fence. Let them ask hard questions at your table before the world asks them in a lecture hall. And when you are wrong, say so out loud to their faces, because the day they see that is the day the thing becomes credible.
And if you are the one who was handed fear instead of a Father — the door is still open, and it was never your father’s to close. He calls you by name and waits to be received.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist