Embarrassing Questions

"I'm going to the movies every Sunday afternoon," announced the seven-year-old girl. "Why?" asked her father. "Then Jesus won't get me," she explained. "At Bible school the teacher said that some day Jesus was coming down from Heaven and He would take each of us in His arms and carry us up to Heaven one by one."

"But why won't Jesus get you at the movies?" asked her father.

"Because the teacher said that Jesus would never go to the movies on Sunday."

This small fugitive is one of a multitude of moppets whose searching, touching, and often embarrassing queries fill the pages of The Questioning Child and Religion (Beacon Press; $3), by Edith F. Hunter. Author Hunter, who has three questioning children of her own, is a graduate of Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary. Currently, she is a curriculum editor for the educational division of the Council of Liberal Churches--the council that governs the two-year-old federation of the Unitarians and Universalists. Author Hunter thus speaks especially to religious "liberals" who are inclined to regard Jesus as great rather than divine, and to equate God with the force that makes the flowers grow (and children ask questions). But the problems of which she writes are the problems of all conscientious parents--Catholic, Protestant and Jew-living in the U.S., where children who play the same games may pray quite differently.

"The Sister Lied." For many a modern mother the Bible is an alarming compendium of nightmare fodder. Jehovah's slaughter of Egypt's first-born and his drowning of everybody but the Noahs, says Edith Hunter, have struck terror to many a young heart. Children brought up on The Little Golden Books should be ex posed to Scripture with extreme caution.

Theology, too, can be as divisive in the fourth grade as in the 4th century. Youngsters often come to blows and tears over the location of Heaven or the existence of Hell. "Billy says if you dig far enough you will find the Devil. Mama, is it true that there is a Devil?"

"The sister lied today," said a Roman Catholic seven-year-old. "She said Jesus could stand there and tell a mountain to move, and it would. She lied, because no one can do that." His father said, "Perhaps the sister merely thought Jesus could do that. She wasn't lying if she really thought so." Parents, says Liberal Hunter, should stress to their children that "it is all right to have different ideas about things."

The desire for conformity is a powerful factor in religious attitudes. The children of liberals often wish, in the words of one twelve-year-old boy, that "we could just say, 'We're Baptists,' and then believe whatever you're supposed to believe to go to Heaven. But it's too late now. We've already thought too much about it."

Both orthodox and liberal Christians, Author Hunter says, generally agree that Jesus should be presented to very young children as a little boy their own age. To the orthodox this recommends itself be cause children are thus introduced to Jesus at a tender age as a real person who, they will later learn, was God; to the liberals the presentation of Jesus as a boy eliminates the troublesome theology and the problems posed by the miracles. But Mrs. Hunter questions the soundness of this practice. The boy Jesus is usually "pictured as so good, helpful and kind that the six-year-old reader is a little repulsed." Mrs. Hunter would avoid introducing Jesus to young children at all, "since they may become thoroughly bored by Him before they have met the historic man at all."

Homework. More important than Bible stories and blind attempts to hand down doctrine, says Edith Hunter, is some homework on the part of parents and teachers. They themselves should read up on the Gospels and the teachings of the churches --possibly even organize groups to study with a minister. That way parents might be better prepared to straighten out junior theologians like Amy, who explained emphatically to her four-year-old friend Nancy that "God is dead and He's inside of you."

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