The Study of Children in Religions: A Methods Handbook

5 “Maybe the Picture Will Tell You”: Methods for Hearing Children’s Perspectives on Religion

80 | 5 “Maybe the Picture Will Tell You” Methods for Hearing Children’s Perspectives on Religion Susan B. Ridgely As I sat with John and Sarah, parents of seven children, in their farmhouse, discussing the stereotypes of conservative Christian families, their eldest daughter, nine-year-old Gwynn, sat down beside me. She listened quietly until I asked her father what key principles of Christianity he tried to teach his children, both through his missionary work and at home. He replied, “Along with being good and loving, [God] is deserving of our lives. And just the whole fact, at least as we believe it, he created the world and created us.” Here Gwynn jumped in, “At least as we believe it? Didn’t that happen?” For Gwynn, who was home schooled and whose father heads a mission organization, her father’s move to display tolerance in an interview opened a new space of uncertainty, or even cultural relativity, in the conversation . She knew, as I did not, that her father did not speak that way when I, the researcher, was not around. Through this conversation both Gwynn and I gained new insights on how her parents tried to nurture a strong, devout Christian family. Through Gwynn’s interruption, I learned that her father, although prepared for opposing viewpoints in his discussions as a missionary , taught Gwynn and her siblings without doubt or question that God created the world and that they were to make him the center of their lives. When I began doing research with children, I worried that they would not be perceptive enough on their own to say anything of consequence. After all, at the churches I visited, the children always seemed to spend their time coloring, not paying attention to what was going on around them. I also worried that the children would only parrot what their parents said, as so many scholars and parents had warned me. Perhaps this fear that children did not or could not develop understandings of their own has contributed to the general lack of children’s voices in the study of religion that is outlined in this volume’s introduction. Children like Gwynn and others I talked with in my “Maybe the Picture Will Tell You” | 81 study of children’s interpretations of First Communion,1 however, showed me that young people do think for themselves and they do question their parents. Interviewing children alone and with their parents demonstrated that children do attend to the world in which they live and, as they do, they develop their own expectations and insights about that world. I believe that as a religious-studies scholar I have much to glean about the everyday rituals and practices of religion from some of its key participants: children. By allowing children to tell their stories themselves, I can gain a broader view of lived religion, going beyond traditional research methods and sources that use clergy, handbooks, catechisms, or other adult-generated media to discover how these adult-generated materials and the children’s own desires come together to create distinctive interpretations of rituals and beliefs. Further, children’s insights about their religion and their families often differ significantly from the views of their parents.2 To say that children have learned the lessons of scripture taught to them by their clergy and their parents does not mean that these children subscribe to the beliefs they have been taught or doctrines they have memorized. Religious-studies scholar Ruel Tyson and others, for instance, argue that “[g]estures are pivotal for they are at once public and personal. They are articulations of tacit beliefs and explicit feelings.”3 However, it remains true that the children in the churches that I worked with may have enacted the gestures of the Eucharist because of family pressure and obligation rather than their own belief.The only way for researchers to determine if the lessons learned by the children are those the adults intended to teach is to ask the children directly. Therefore, it is important to take the insights of all participants—men, women, boys, girls—into consideration to gain a greater understanding of religion as it is truly lived. With this network of influences and pressures on children in mind, I endeavored to develop a methodology that would enable me to do research with the children rather than on them or about them. In this chapter, I outline my efforts to perform child-centered ethnographic work in both Catholic parishes...