Morality 2: Indoctrination

An Argument from Moral Autonomy

Credit to TheraminTrees for both inspiration and several of the analogies used.

For a well-explained and stylistically brilliant video essay version of this argument, watch them here.

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This critique does not apply to every form of religion. Some traditions, such as Reform Judaism, honor doubt as devotion and treat questioning as a path toward holiness. In such spaces, belief is not imposed but tested, and what survives inquiry earns its authority. The argument that follows is directed only at systems that demand obedience before understanding, that mistake silence for faith, and that punish thought as betrayal.

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Preface

A crowd gathers. They clap and whistle as two parents, Patricia and Colm, present their young child, a young boy named Ben. He is welcomed into the party with thunderous applause and many cheers. His parents beam. A minister announces that their political movement has gained a new member. Cameras flash.

For the rest of Ben’s childhood, he will attend weekly meetings. He will sing songs praising their dear leader. He will cast votes in ritual elections where the party always wins. He will be told that dissent against the party is a vice and that obedience to it is a virtue. The same party talking points will be drilled into Ben’s head. Again, and again, and again. The party’s dear leader is always right. Those who oppose the party are evil. Those who don’t actively support the party are evil just the same. Those who were in the party but rebelled suffer terrible consequences, he is told. Only the most devoted party members will live a good life.

These ideas will only be strengthened as Ben is sent to a party school, where the goal is primarily to keep the students’ political convictions in line with the party. Ben will wear the party colors every day. All of his peers will, too.

But, as he grows older, Ben starts to recognize that some of what the party teaches seems wrong. Contradictory. Nonsensical. Maybe even hypocritical. At first, he may voice these problems without fear. Then, he will be reminded that the party is perfect, so his criticism must be wrong. Ben isn’t satisfied with this. Ben will be accused of betrayal and feel guilty, scared, and isolated. Critical thoughts about his party will now elicit emotional responses like self-hatred and anxiety. He will default to viewing his misgivings as the product of his own ignorance, not the system having actual flaws.

Before long, because of his need for community, he will learn to block out critical thought of the party altogether. He will learn that compliance is rewarded. When he raises funds, publicly agrees with the party’s candidates, and affirms the party’s views, he will be showered with compliments and told that he is a prime example of a good party member. This deepens his identity within the party. And when he reaches thirteen, he will stand before a congregation and declare his lifelong loyalty to their dear leader, affirming that he will always vote for the party, and that he will campaign for the party to others for the rest of his life. He affirms that this choice is made entirely of his own free will.

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Patricia and Colm will be ecstatic. They will look on with pride, genuinely believing that they gave their son a choice.

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I suspect that very few of us would struggle to recognize this hypothetical as abusive. Reminiscent of the likes of North Korea or Orwell’s 1984.
Most of us would see it as the colonization of a child’s mind. If politicians tried to encourage this sort of induction into their parties, there would be huge public outrage.

Yet if the party banners were replaced with crucifixes or crescents, the songs with hymns, and the slogans with verses, most of us would not struggle to accept at all these same tactics in religion. The conditioning of a child to believe what their parents believe now morphs from systematic abuse into an act of love, purely by the change of context. We recoil from political indoctrination but revere religious indoctrination, even when the mechanism is the same: repetition, fear, and social reward shaping belief before reason can speak. The indoctrination of babies, the manipulation of children through endlessly repeated dogma and promises they are not equipped to evaluate or resist, and the systematic denial of space for doubt and questioning of the system is abhorrent in one context, but acceptable in another?

We hold two radically different views on child indoctrination depending on context. We are protective of the child in regards to politics, but in religion, we are protective of the indoctrinator.

This essay asks why.

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I. Politics and Piety

Ben’s story is an experiment in moral symmetry. It asks whether identical methods of conditioning can be good in one context and evil in another. Indoctrination by any other name remains the same: the systematic construction of conviction without consent.

If a political party declared that infants belonged to it at birth, taught them its ideology as truth, punished questions, and bound their identities to its symbols, we would call it coercion. When that happens in totalitarian states, we do. Yet when religion does this, we call it tradition. The moral inversion reveals itself only when we strip away the sacred vocabulary.

Faith acquired under threat or reward is little more than compliance. The child’s mind becomes a theater of loyalty, where community and tribalism trump critical thinking.

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II. Semantics

I have encountered many who say that “indoctrinate” simply means “teach.” In archaic English, it did. But language evolves. Modern usage draws a sharp line between education, which invites critical engagement, and indoctrination, which forbids it. I feel the need to draw this line here. I am not criticizing education, even in religious contexts. I am criticizing indoctrination.

Education presupposes the student’s eventual independence. It is an act of liberation. Indoctrination seeks dependence. It is an act of control. The problem is not what is taught but how. Education gives more breadth of worldviews, allows dissent, and shows claims as revisable, not immutable.

Imagine a school. There, drama teachers only discuss the playwright Anton Chekhov. No others are allowed in discussion. Music teachers there teach that Chopin is the one true composer. Any preference for others results in expulsion. Math teachers threaten public execution by beheading for anyone that mocks Ramanujan. Would anyone call that education?

Teaching a child that “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” is education: it’s revisable (if evidence changed, we’d update textbooks), it’s testable (anyone can verify, even in a basic lab), and doubting it with good-faith experimentation carries no social penalty. Teaching a child that “doubting God condemns you to hell” is indoctrination: it’s unfalsifiable (no evidence could disprove it), alternatives are forbidden (other religions are “false”), and dissent is punished (with both eternal torture and social exile).

Religious indoctrination does not merely convey ideas; it constructs a psychological immune system around them. Doubt becomes sin. Ignorance is contorted into purity. The mind’s critical faculties are disabled, and any questioning functions as grounds for shame.

A child who has never learned to ask “why” cannot later choose “what.” Without exposure, there is no freedom. Without freedom, belief is but conditioning.

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III. Pedagogy

Apologists claim that indoctrination teaches moral values. A child may obey commands, yes, but obedience born of terror has no moral content.

The moral lessons of religion (do not steal, do not lie, treat others well) precede religion. They arise from empathy and reciprocity present all over the world an in every religion and secular morality.

Empathy, reciprocity, and fairness arise from human psychology and social cooperation, not divine revelation. Secular ethical systems (Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, social contract theory, etc.) have developed sophisticated moral frameworks without invoking God.

Moreover, the claim that religion is necessary for morality is empirically false on two grounds:

1. Secular societies (e.g. Scandinavia) generally have lower crime rates than highly religious ones (e.g. the U.S. Bible Belt). This would be unexpected if religious integration increased morality.

2. Moral development studies (Kohlberg, Piaget) show that children reach higher stages of moral reasoning through cognitive development rather than religious instruction.

The irony is that indoctrination often impedes moral development. When children obey out of fear rather than understanding, they fail to develop internal moral reasoning. They learn to comply, not to evaluate. A child raised with exposure to multiple ethical systems and taught to reason morally will develop a more robust conscience than one taught to obey under threat. Morality requires thought. Indoctrination tells the child to do good not because good is worth doing, but because disobedience hurts. This fundamentally displaces thought in moral reasoning.

The result is a counterfeit ethics. Fear may restrain wrongdoing, but it cannot create goodness. The same system that teaches children not to steal also teaches them that genocide, slavery, and torture can be (and ARE) holy when God commands them. Indoctrination privileges deference to authority figures over deference to principles and the moral agency of the indoctrinated suffers.

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IV. The Architecture of Belief

Indoctrination succeeds because it takes root in the mind before reason can resist. The Jesuits understood this perfectly: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.”

Early childhood is the era of unconditional trust. The mind absorbs, imitates, and repeats. When divine commands are introduced at this stage, they become indistinguishable from reality itself. To question them later feels like questioning existence.

Psychology calls this cognitive entrapment. Once belief fuses with identity, it defends itself automatically. Dissonance between moral intuition and doctrine is resolved not by revising belief but by revising perception. The believer bends reality to fit dogma because the alternative feels like annihilation.

An analogy: Police walk up to Karen’s door. They are looking for Karen’s son, Joe. Joe has been charged with several counts of murder. The police describe the killings: they are nothing short of chilling. Karen dismisses this. She knows her son. She is sure she will be able to provide some alibi. But, upon checking her calendar for the dates of the murders, Joe was out hunting on every one. “A coincidence,” thinks Karen. She knows her son. He would never do such a thing. Later, in court, a victim who got away identifies her son as his attacker. But she knows the man is lying or mistaken. “Joe just has one of those faces where people mistake him for people they know,” Karen thinks. She knows her son. Then, videos are found on Joe’s computer of Joe and his friend torturing animals that they were hunting instead of putting them down. Karen chalks it up to the friend being a bad influence. She never liked him anyway. This wouldn’t be Joe. She knows her son. More videos are found. She is shown footage of Joe and his friend recording themselves killing the victims, laughing. Karen can’t make sense of what she’s seeing. But she knows there must be some explanation. She knows her son.

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When we become heavily invested in a belief, we don’t just happily give it up when we’re faced with inconsistent facts. We’re much more likely to reject the facts to preserve our belief. We will know that we disagree with them, but will not be able to place what we disagree with. Frequently, our reasons will be emotional aversions born of conditioning, not rational or principled disagreement. Indoctrination operates by the same mechanism: loyalty first, truth later. The child learns that discomfort signals error, that doubt is rebellion, that thought itself is dangerous.

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V. Altruism

When pressed, defenders of indoctrination often move to benevolence. They claim they are “helping the child find their Christian identity.” The phrase is sentimental, but its logic is alien. You cannot help a child “find” an identity by assigning one.

If a political leader said they were helping grade-schoolers “find their Democrat identity,” we would see through it instantly. If an overzealous parent said that they were helping their 8-year-old “find their identity as a Harvard-educated brain surgeon,” we would immediately call BS. Identity cannot be implanted by those who stand to benefit from it. It must be discovered through the freedom to explore alternatives.

Moral education requires breadth. To love a child is to expose them to the full range of human thought and to trust that truth will stand on its own. Indoctrination reverses this. It assumes that truth cannot survive contact with competition. It is, at heart, an act of fear.

Parents who truly wish to guide their children toward wisdom must risk their disagreement. Anything less is ownership.

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VI. Love as Violence

On February 2, 2015, a boy in Missouri was abducted by a 23-year-old man. The man told the 6-year-old that he would be nailed to a wall. The boy was stripped half-naked by a woman who told him that he would be sold into sex slavery. They pointed a gun at him when he cried. But these weren’t actual traffickers. They were the child’s aunt, his mother, his grandmother, and a family friend. They did this, they said, to teach him not to talk to strangers. Their defense lawyer defended them by appealing to their love.

They believed they were protecting him. Yet the sincerity of affection does not erase the violence of the act. Fear does not educate; it conditions. What those adults did to that child physically, religious indoctrination does psychologically—teaching existential terror while claiming to do so for protection.

Parents who threaten children with eternal torment for disbelief are not safeguarding souls. They are installing anxiety as a permanent feature of consciousness. Fear becomes a leash.

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VII. Harm

The harm of indoctrination does not vanish with maturity. Its residue lingers in the conscience, shaping how entire generations respond to dissent. A child taught that obedience is righteousness will one day grow into a citizen who mistakes authority for virtue.

Consider the movements that justify persecution in the language of purity: churches that campaign to deny rights to LGBTQ people while calling it love; sects that urge the subjugation or death of unbelievers as a defense of truth; parents who disown their children for wanting to identify with a different gender. These are not aberrations but the full bloom of seeds planted in childhood—the learned association between conformity and holiness, between doubt and sin. Indoctrination’s first victims are children, but its consequences are written in the lives of those who such children grow to govern.

The damage is not always visible. Sometimes it takes the form of guilt for thoughts never acted on, or the reflex to apologize for existing outside approved boundaries. It appears in adults who cannot make moral choices without consulting an imagined overseer because they mistake anxiety for piety. Communities shaped by this conditioning often become echo chambers of insecurity, where affirmation replaces truth, and loyalty is measured by how loudly one condemns outsiders. The harm is subtle but cumulative: entire moral vocabularies are rewritten so that empathy is suspicion, and disobedience, no matter how principled, feels like sin. Indoctrination’s reach extends far beyond childhood; it lingers as a structure of thought, quietly scripting the lives of people who never learn how to live freely.

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VIII. Meaning and Legitimacy

I have encountered many an objection based on personal experience: “I have great meaning in my personal religious beliefs! How dare you call them abusive!”

However, and I repeat myself in hope of clarity, I do not think education in religious contexts is inherently bad. Indoctrination is the sole target of this essay. So proceeding with the assumption that the objector was indoctrinated as a child, there are still issues.

Meaning found despite coercion is still meaning, but it would have been more authentic if reached through freedom. A person who chooses their faith after exposure to alternatives holds it more securely than one who never knew there were alternatives to consider.

Consider an analogy: a person raised in an arranged marriage might genuinely love their spouse. That love is real. But the arrangement’s morality depends on whether consent was possible. If the marriage occurred before the person could meaningfully choose, the love that followed (despite being real and meaningful) does not retroactively justify the coercion that occurred when the marriage was arranged.

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IX. Recovery of Thought

Those who escape indoctrination describe the process like amputation: some necessary violence to survive. The first breach often comes from something small: an unanswered question or some personal experience warranting later revisiting. Once the thread is pulled, the tapestry unravels. The world collapses, and then slowly rebuilds.

Thinking freely post-indoctrination is often described like vertigo. The ground that once felt solid dissolved. But disorientation is the cost of honesty. The mind that was once a fortress of certainty becomes, at last, a landscape of inquiry.

This recovery is moral adulthood. Doubt is not decay but rather the immune system of reason. The child who learns to think critically gains something far holier than faith: genuine self-possession.

To rebuild a worldview consciously is to claim ownership of one’s mind. And from that ownership arises the first real possibility of virtue. Goodness understood is goodness chosen.

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X. The Veil of Ignorance

John Rawls imagined a thought experiment in which people design a society from behind a veil of ignorance, unaware of their future identities. Justice, he said, is whatever principles we would choose without knowing who we will be.

Apply that veil to religion.

Imagine two societies:

• Society A, where children inherit their parents’ religion (whether it be Christian, Muslim, Sikh, or others) as absolute truth and are taught to fear alternatives.

• Society B, where children learn about all religions equally and choose or reject all on their own.

Behind the veil, which would you risk being born into?
No one, knowing nothing of their future culture, would rationally choose Society A. The fairness of Society B is self-evident. Yet our world largely operates as A.

A just society protects the right to belief. A moral society protects the right to unbelief. The two rise together or fall together.

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XI. Conclusion

Religious indoctrination recruits the architecture of love (family, trust, reverence) and turns it into a conduit for control. The child learns that obedience is safety, that fear is wisdom, and that questioning is betrayal.

Faith that cannot tolerate examination is not reasonable.

To love a child is to equip them to outgrow you. To teach them truth is to risk their dissent. Any creed that demands uncritical loyalty from those who cannot yet reason has already admitted its weakness.

We would never tolerate a political party that claimed infants as members, enforced its ideology through fear, and punished dissent as sin. Yet we baptize the same structure when the emblem is divine. The method is the same, only the vocabulary differs.

We would not abide it in politics.
We should not abide it in religion
The mind of a child is not soil for conquest but ground for cultivation.