As overseas uncles often do, yesterday I had a quick catch-up phone chat with my six-year-old nephew, Gianni (who, to set the scene, is currently waiting for both of his front teeth to come in). My sister had just explained to me that Gianni was eager to share something very exciting with me.
She gave me the gist of the story before putting him on the phone, which was that Gianni's goldfish "Lucky" had jumped out of its bowl while they were away at the store, and when they came home they found it "dead" on the countertop. My sister scooped up the fish in a panic and tossed it back in the bowl, where its tiny body pirouetted lifelessly to the bottom before turning belly-up in what I can only imagine was a very dramatic climax to this particular fish's life. Even its eyes, my sister said, had that unholy white cataract glare of the dead.
After a smidgeon of grief duly conveyed (c'mon, this was my nephew's third goldfish in like two weeks), my sister gets to unpacking the groceries before flushing the scaly, white-eyed corpse down the toilet, Gianni returns to annoying his little sister, and while no one's looking, Lucky, true to his name, miraculously revives himself. He's a little worse for the wear, my sister tells me, and his eyes still "just don't look right" but there he is, alive and kicking again.
This is where Gianni gets on the phone. "Uncle Jesse!" (Yes, yes, very funny, but I'd like to think I don't have too much in common with Denver Pyle's character on the Dukes of Hazzard.) "Did you hear about my fish?" "That's really interesting Gianni," I told him. Then I thought of all the research in this area in developmental psychology, most notably the work of Mark Speece and Sandor Brent in the mid-1980s, who argued that an understanding of irreversibility was an important subcomponent of children's emerging concept of death, easily mastered around Gianni's age. I thought I'd probe him a bit in this vein. "That's kinda weird," I quizzed him. "I thought when something was dead, that means it can't come back to life again?" "Well, actually, did you ever hear the story of Jesus of Nazareth? He came back from the dead too!"
Whoa. What?!
Let me explain briefly why this was so bizarre for me to hear. My mother was a Jew (of the New Jersey secular clan, but ideologically a Jew nonetheless, who having once been held down as a child by a group of giggling little Catholics sifting through her hair for the rudiments of devil horns, not infrequently mentioned "those silly Christians" and their cartoonish beliefs) and my father was a rather lax Lutheran. I suspect my dad went to church without the rest of us every Sunday more to schmooze and flirt than get on God's good side. He's since remarried, this time to a quite serious atheist and has comfortably left all his forty-ish Bible think behind, so this seems to confirm my theory.
This strange religio-developmental brew had the following consequences for me and my siblings: my sister married into a large Italian Catholic family (now you know where Gianni got his name), my Bar-mitzvahed brother found one of the only Jewish girls in Southern Ohio and married her, then became a tax attorney (they named their kid Jakob, with a "k" to stress the Judaism thing), and as the baby of the family I became the un-Bar-mitzvahed, rambunctious, but I'd like to think sweet-natured, scientific atheist. Yet we're all kind of shoulder-shrugging in our different beliefs; none of us is willing to die for the cause, if you know what I mean. OK, so a few years ago I told a reporter that, with my research on the cognitive psychology of religion, "I've got my hands on God's throat and I'm not going to stop until one of us is dead." But that was just playing to the camera. To be perfectly honest, I need God around just like a judge needs his criminals; without Him I'd be out of a job.
My sister says Gianni's picking it up from the Catholic school he's been attending, and also from her very religious in-laws. Frankly, it doesn't bother me much. He's a kid (their kid) and one day he'll read his eccentric Uncle Jesse's articles on the evolution of religion. I've more faith in my nephew's intelligence than he'll ever have in God. Still, I confess I got a little creeped out by this newfound Christ-talk, as it's just so foreign to our immediate family and would have had my very Jewish grandmother (Gianni's great-grandmother) tearing out her hair.
Anyway, the detached empiricist in me finds it all quite neat. Gianni's apparent interest in the death-defying King of Zion is right in step with cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer's model of religious concept acquisition. In Boyer's model, children are inherently attracted to religious concepts because these concepts violate their expectations in important ways. Just like Jesus' unearthly return flying in the face of the natural order of things, or a dead bodiless person who can walk through walls, or a statue weeping blood, religious concepts are really good at catching our attention and thus sinking into our memories. In other words, their counter-intuitiveness makes them really sticky and hard to shake. This is why Richard Dawkins says they're a bit like virulent germs, but Boyer's model is much more nuanced, and far less vituperative, than that.
Again, I don't see religion necessarily as a bad thing. I didn't know who Jesus was at Gianni's age, but I'm sure he would have been as fascinating a figure to me as he is to Gianni. The closest thing I had was the spirit of Elijah, the ghost that swept through our home every Passover and got drunk on my dad's Manischewitz wine. For my day-dreamy young mind, Elijah was a creative muse, maybe even sparking my later academic interest in the supernatural. I don't believe in Elijah now, of course, and realize it was my dad getting drunk all the while, but I still think fondly of him. So Gianni's got his Jesus. More power to him. What's a little boy's life without some miracles and mayhem?
Warning: If you leave a comment with a Biblical passage, my eyes will glaze over like Lucky's.
