Teaching tolerance: Be careful when talking to children

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/11/2024 (665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like most children, I believed everything my parents told me when I was very young.

Because of them, I believed Canada was the greatest country, that the Maple Leafs were the best team in the NHL (it was the 1960s), and that roast beef was always and only to be eaten at supper on Sundays.

I also believed that we, as evangelicals, were the only true Christians — in the world.

For me, that meant believing no other Christian denomination besides ours was going to heaven. Not the Catholics, for sure. And no mainline Christians, either; not the Anglicans, Presbyterians or the United Church. As for other religions, there was no hope for them at all.

Those ideas were reinforced at church by pastors and Sunday school teachers in sermons and lessons. Everywhere I looked, adults taught me to see my particular brand of religion as the only right and true one.

Of course, this caused me to view people from other denominations as spiritually lost, people whose only hope for heaven lay in joining my kind of Christianity.

Later, as I grew older and had more life experience, I realized my parents — and my church — were wrong. Very wrong.

Looking back, I don’t blame them for what they taught me. They were just passing on to me what had been passed on to them by their parents and grandparents and preachers and pastors.

Plus, the world was more insular back then. The chances of meeting and getting to know people from other denominations was limited. And the chance of meeting people from other religions was almost non-existent. There was no mosque in the town I grew up in, for example. And the synagogue (which I didn’t even know existed at the time) was very small.

Why do I mention this? Because last month I happened to see a video of a pro-Palestine demonstration in Winnipeg that was very disturbing.

In the 1:11-long clip, a young boy — I’m guessing he was seven or eight years old — is seen singing repeatedly into a microphone: “All Zionists are racists.” At the 28-second mark, a male adult guides another young boy, about the same age, into place beside the first boy. This second boy has a megaphone. He joins in, saying the same thing over and over to people passing by.

As I watched the video, I wondered if the two boys understood what they were saying. What did they actually know about Zionists? Had they ever met any? And what did they know about racism?

They probably understood as much about those things as I did about Catholics, mainline Christians or other religions when I was their age.

While some Zionists might be racists — just like some Christians might be racists, and members of other religions or other groups, too — it’s certainly not true that “all” Zionists are racists. Is that the lesson those parents really want to teach their kids? That everyone who believes in Israel’s right to exist is a racist?

It was just a rally, someone might say. It was only theatre. An attempt to capture attention. No big deal.

But ideas implanted in young minds can be sticky. I know this because of my own experience, The ideas planted in my mind as a child stuck until my late teens before they were dropped, mainly due to meeting people from other denominations and religions.

But what about these young boys? Will they also decide later in life the adults in their lives were wrong, too? Or will they pass this idea along to their children and grandchildren? And if that happens, how will we ever break the cycle of hate and fear of others?

In saying this, I am in no way diminishing the suffering in Gaza, or the right of people in Winnipeg to draw attention to it and protest about it. I’m appalled by the deaths of 40,000 people there, and fervently wish the bombing and starvation and suffering would stop. I hope and pray for a ceasefire to end the conflict. I want all animosity and hate in the region — whoever it is directed towards and whoever is directing it — to end.

I want for everyone, Israelis and Palestinians, to live in peace and security, to live in a time when the vision of the prophet Micah will be realized: “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” (4:4)

And I want us all to be careful about what we say to the children. What we say now will resonate into the future.

In his book Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela said: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Those are wise words, and worth following.

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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