How to Make
a Child Anxious

What this is about

Here is a conversation. It is made up by this page — it is not a quotation and it is not about any real child — but anyone who grew up in certain churches will recognise it.

Nothing there is cruel. The adult is worried about the child, which is a good thing to be. But look at what the child has just been taught, in about twenty seconds:

• There is a feeling he is supposed to be able to find in himself.
• Other people can find theirs. Reliably. On request.
• If he cannot find his, the problem is him.
• The fix is to look harder, and further back.

None of that was argued. It arrived inside a caring question. And it is a claim about evidence — about where a child should look to find out whether he belongs to God.

This page is about that one thing: where the evidence is kept. Not whether God works in people’s hearts — he does, and no church has ever said otherwise. Not whether faith has to be real — it does. Just this: what do you tell a child to point at, on the night when he feels nothing?

The short answer

The first exercise: which of these worries you?

Ten people describing feeling nothing, or feeling far from God. Some are from the Bible. Some were written by this page. For each one, say whether it sounds like a faith in trouble or like ordinary Christian life. Answer before you scroll.

The second exercise: two children

Two made-up twelve-year-olds in the same church. Read both, then answer the question underneath.

The bit about children who are already sure of themselves

One of the questions behind this page was whether a system like this teaches some children that they are spiritually better than the others. The honest answer is that it does not need to teach it. It publishes it.

Think about what a church has to do every week. Somebody gives the testimony. Somebody leads. Somebody is described as really on fire. Somebody is prayed for, and somebody is asked to pray. Each of those choices is perfectly reasonable on its own. Put together, they are a league table — and children read league tables a great deal faster than adults think they do. The child at the top has not been told he is better than the others. He has been shown a list with his name near the top of it, week after week, and told the list measures how close you are to God.

And here is why it happens without anyone intending it. The thing being measured — what is going on inside a child — cannot be checked by anybody. So the only thing left to judge is how confidently he says it. Confidence is cheap to fake and expensive to lack, so it wins. Not because confident children are liars. Most are entirely sincere. It is that the system cannot tell the difference, so it pays out the same either way — and charges the child whose honest answer is “I don’t know”.

The Bible treats the resulting self-estimate as an ordinary hazard, not a rare one. “For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself” (Galatians 6:3). And, more exactly: they are “measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves” — which Paul calls, flatly, not wise (2 Corinthians 10:12). Children measured against other children, on a scale none of them can check, is precisely that.

The other end of the same mechanism is the child who is already inclined to worry. Ignatius of Loyola described what happens to such a person, in the 1540s, better than most modern writing manages: the tempter, he says, looks to see whether a conscience is coarse or delicate, and “if it is delicate, he tries to make it more delicate in the extreme, to disturb and embarrass it more”. Whatever you make of the devil in that sentence, the observation is exact. Telling an anxious child to examine himself more closely is prescribing the disease.

Where this came from — it is newer than people think

Christians have always believed God changes people inwardly. What is recent is the machinery for producing and checking it. A very short history:

The most useful thing in that list is who is objecting. It is not sceptics. It is the movement’s own biggest names — Edwards in 1746, Wesley in 1767, Hannah Whitall Smith in 1875 — all warning against exactly the use that ended up being made of their teaching. The version that reaches a church youth group is not what those people wrote. It is what happened to their ideas once they were simplified, put on a timetable, and pointed at children.

What the old churches handed a child instead

The fair objection to all of the above is: fine, but what do you actually give a child? Not an attitude. A short list of specific things he can name at three in the morning without checking how he feels first.

Every one of those has the same property, and it is the only one that matters: it is still true when the child cannot feel anything. A date does not stop being a date. A creed does not stop being sayable. Words spoken over a child by a minister do not need the child to confirm them.

The old churches did not ask a child to prove the faith was happening inside him. They put him inside the faith and taught him to say it.

Where this page lands

Christianity is not a feeling you have to keep finding. It is something done for you, announced to you, and handed to you, which you then spend a life receiving. Feelings come with that and are welcome when they come. But a child should never be told that the presence or absence of a feeling is the evidence of where he stands with God — partly because it is not, partly because the Bible says his heart is the last thing to trust with the job, and partly because a child asked that question often enough will simply learn to give the answer that makes the room relax.

The version of Christianity described at the top of this page produces two kinds of damage, and it is worth being clear that they are different. Some children become anxious. Others become confident in a way that nobody has any means of checking, and are promoted for it. The system cannot tell those two apart, because it has no instrument that reaches inside anybody. That is not a moral failure on anyone’s part. It is a design fault, and it was pointed out — by Edwards, by Wesley, by Bushnell, by the Westminster divines — long before any of us got here.

Check it yourself

Six things, nearly all free, and the first four are short.

1. 1. Luke 18:1–17, in one go. Ten minutes, free. Read it without stopping at the chapter divisions and ask why the babies come immediately after the man who was so sure of himself.
2. 2. Psalms 13, 42, 43, 77 and 88. Twenty minutes, free. Read Psalm 88 last, and stop where it stops.
3. 3. Matthew 6:1–18, and 1 Corinthians 4:1–5. Ten minutes, free. The first is on the visible and the invisible; the second is Paul refusing to treat his own clear conscience as the verdict.
4. 4. Luther’s Small Catechism, the section on baptism. Five minutes, free online. One page, written for children to memorise. Read it and ask what a frightened child could do with it at three in the morning — then ask the same question about “examine your heart”.
5. 5. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). Two hours, free on Project Gutenberg. Short, in numbered paragraphs, and the best evidence anywhere that the loop in section One is real. Read it for the pattern rather than the theology: count how many times a settled question gets reopened, and notice that relief always arrives from outside him.
6. 6. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections (1746), Part Two. A couple of hours, free online. The twelve things that prove nothing. Between them they rule out nearly every test a modern youth group actually uses. Read it before deciding whether this page has used him fairly.