The true, the false and mythical

By B.C.

A RECENT academic study, published in the journal Cognitive Science, analysed the way children respond to different stories, including religious tales. After conducting two experiments on 66 children aged five or six, the authors found a big difference in the responses of children who had been exposed to religion (either through church or religious schooling) versus those who had not. The "religious" children were not only more willing to accept supernatural stories in a religious context, but also they were more willing to believe purely fictional narratives.

What does this report have to do with the bold and best-selling ideas about monotheism proffered by Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American religion writer? The connection isn't obvious, but both matters have been on my mind recently.

Mr Aslan has a remarkable passage in the opening pages of his book, "No God but God", in which he distills Islam and its founding narrative for a non-Muslim readership. He writes:

It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true...Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the mouth of Muhammed, is to ask totally irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is "what do these stories mean?"

As I said when reviewing Mr Aslan's more recent book on Jesus of Nazareth, he does not entirely remain faithful to this principle when writing about Christianity. While giving himself permission to interpret Islam in a far more liberal way than most Muslims would contemplate, he deconstructs the received story of the life of Jesus, and posits another version, as though the historical facts of his life are both knowable and essential. But his point that "myths are always true"—in a sense that they accurately convey some deep meaning—still holds. Indeed, it is a powerful argument.

I was reminded of that argument when reading the academic study about the response of children to religious and other stories. In one part of the study, children were told: "Now I am going to tell you stories about some people you have never heard of. Some of them are real, some of them are pretend. I am going to ask you to put the picture [of the character in the story] in the "real" box or the "pretend" box." And as you might expect, the "religious" children were less accurate than their "secular" peers in choosing the right box.

But Mr Aslan, at least in his more subtle moments, would probably object to the very idea of dividing stories into "real" and "pretend". And he would have a point. Religious narratives are not necessarily true in the literal sense, but they can still be meaningful—infinitely meaningful—for those who accept them as "true" myths. Almost by definition, they are infinitely meaningful to some people, and this has been the case for centuries.

But that raises the question of whether it is worthwhile, or possible, to convey to children the idea that there might be a category of story which is neither "real" nor "pretend" but which nonetheless offers many people a light to guide their lives. Is that too subtle an idea to convey to a child?

Well, this much is true. Children are extremely good at discerning what their parents, teachers and other significant adults actually believe, and by what principles they live. When an adult tries teaching children something that he/she does not actually believe, the children sense that hypocrisy quickly. The reverse is also true. If grown-ups can make an honest distinction between statements that are real, pretend and "not necessarily real but still deeply meaningful", and live in the light of that distinction, then children will get the point too.

(Photo credit: PAUL J. RICHARDS / AFP)