Just after they left the Birdcage Theater in Tombstone, Ariz., during the early 1880s, Morgan Earp asked his brother, “Wyatt, do you believe in God?” They had just watched a raucous version of Faust dealing with the devil.
Wyatt Earp fumbled the question badly, “Yes … no … maybe. Hell, I don’t know.” He laughed off Morgan’s question and his answer.
It is one of several places in the movie “Tombstone” – one of my all-time favorites – that shows Wyatt Earp wasn’t exactly a deep thinker.
In real life, he was a lawman, gambler, gunfighter, sportsman and clever negotiator in dangerous situations, but no one ever describes Wyatt Earp as particularly deep. As a storytelling technique, fumbling the God question shows that side of Earp exactly because most humans and every culture have to deal with the question of belief.
Some anthropologists argue that every culture wrestles with five major questions: human beings’ relationships to humans, to time, to work, to nature and to God.
These value orientations guide the way people live and cultures survive. They gave rise to the some of the most familiar words in American history: “All men are created equal,” “the pursuit of happiness” and “under God,” for example.
Humans have inborn drives to orient themselves and their cultures in all five of these areas; developing an orientation toward or away from God is almost universal.
Jews, Muslims and Christians are monotheists, for example. They orient themselves to a single god.
Pagans orient themselves to multiple gods.
Atheists orient themselves away from God; they specifically believe there is no God.
Agnostics orient themselves both toward and away from God by believing they can’t know whether or not there is a God and neither can anybody else.
Some humanists believe God is in us or that we are all part of God, and part of our task in life is to express that greatness.
All of those orientations orbit around the relationship between human beings and something we call “god.”
In fact, for me one of the strong proofs that God exists is that almost everybody orients themselves in relationship to their belief in God. It is sort of like God is the North Pole, and everybody uses a compass or a map to figure out what direction to take.
The view creates dilemmas. Taking down a Ten Commandments monument, for example, becomes just as strong of a religious statement as putting one up. No wonder Americans go round and round on that question.
Naturally children wrestle with these questions as part of growing up. They find different ways of looking at those five questions as organically as they learn to walk, to ask why and to say no. Children and teenagers wonder where they come from and what happens when people die, basic God questions.
Parents are usually more or less prepared to teach their children their beliefs about human relationships (an eye for an eye); about work (what is worth doing is worth doing well); about nature (consider recycling, global warming and secondhand smoke); and about time (time is money).
But many parents are uncomfortable teaching their children any beliefs about God; on the other hand, some parents eagerly teach their children a belief about God that is small, rigid – no bigger than they can personally think.
But there are some wonderful things about parents and children exploring together, in an open-ended way, the God question. Everybody learns from each other no matter their ages, for one thing.
We learned from one of our children who said at age 8, “I think we are ideas in the mind of God, and when we die we get to be with him really.”
Further, the search itself acknowledges that there is something bigger than me or you, or both of us together.
Even more practically, we know now that parents who actively ask the God question with their children increase the chances their teenagers will be more productive and stay out of serious trouble.
The search is a good investment in parent-child relationships.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. You can send e-mail to bill@billfrance.com.
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