The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [92]
Two little boys, Sammy and Marty, both seven, are having a discussion, over milk and cookies, about God. Sammy says he believes in God and Marty replies he isn’t sure there is a God. Sammy says that everybody believes differently about God—some people believe there is a God and some people don’t.
“But,” Sammy adds, “it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it’s the same thing your Daddy believes. So I’ll go on believing there is a God.”
“Yes,” Marty nods in agreement, “you’re supposed to believe what your Daddy believes. So I’ll go on believing that maybe there is and maybe there isn’t a God.”
They finished their milk and cookies and go outdoors.
I had eavesdropped on them as in their childhood innocence they discussed theories of authority (they agreed) as well as philosophical conceptions of God (they disagreed). This innocence is fated to be overlaid very soon with more “sophisticated” reasons for belief and disbelief.
Clearly, Sammy and Marty were telling us about the “theory” of selective authority that guides them as they decide which beliefs to accept among a group of alternatives. It would seem that the concept of authority of each child has already expanded to the point where his Daddy is seen as a positive reference person and at least some other Daddies as negative reference persons. There may come a day when even one’s own father is rejected as a positive referent. But this day has not yet arrived for Sammy and Marty.
With Sammy’s and Marty’s discourse still fresh in our minds, let us make several additional points. First, as was pointed out in Chapter I, belief in God, however passionately adhered to, fought over, or died over, is not, in our conception, a primitive belief inasmuch as it is supported by something less than total consensus; it has a primitive character only in exceptional cases—in, for example, a primitive society where everyone believes in the same God or gods, or among those relatively rare persons who would believe in a Deity even if this belief found absolutely no social support at all, even if it was entirely rejected by the rest of their community. Second, as with his primitive beliefs, the child’s base of selective referents for his peripheral or ideological beliefs is gradually extended to include other persons and groups outside the family—social classes, religious and ethnic groups, peer groups, and political and national groups. Third, and most germane to our immediate research, it is easy to imagine Sammy and Marty changing their beliefs about many things, provided these changes are preceded or initiated by changes in their referents.
A number of findings and observations made by others seem to be consistent with the notions developed above. The social psychologist, Theodore Newcomb,[1] has reported that many girls at Bennington College became more liberal in ideology during their college years as a result of shifting their reference group from the family to the college peer group. It has been widely noted that members of the Communist Party in various countries of the world change their position about issues soon after similar changes of position emanate from the Kremlin, or if they cannot do so, defect or change their reference group. A devout Catholic holds the same beliefs about faith and morals as does the Church as a whole, and it seems reasonably certain that if the Catholic Church were to change its attitude about a particular issue millions of believers would change their attitudes in precisesly the same way. Bruno Bettelheim’s study of concentration camps suggests that Jews will develop anti-Semitic beliefs because they have changed their referents—that is, to preserve their identity and to survive physically, they will identify with the aggressor’s ideology.[2] Identification with the aggressor—that is to say, adopting one’s oppressor as a reference person or group—has been used to explain such phenomena as Jewish anti-Semitism and Negro Jim Crow.[3] Similar explanations have been offered for the success