Religious Toys

Toys with a Religious Association

“Faith can be very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” While famous atheist author Richard Dawkins may offend some with this view on teaching religion to children, he does have a tremendous point. Imprinting religion on the minds of children can have negative effects, and one of the ways that parents do this is by giving their kids religious toys. For example, when I was young I had a doll who would pray the Our Father when her hands were pressed together. While definitely an innocent attempt by my mother to mold me into a good little Christian, I also consider it ignorant because it encouraged me, a naive child, to become indoctrinated

The doll folds her hands in prayer, and when the hands touch, she begins to say the Lord’s prayer. She wears her nightgown as she helps children learn how to say their prayers at bedtime in her singsong voice. There is also a play set that is made out of soft plush dolls and teaches children about the story of Noah’s ark. It includes a plush boat and a few small stuffed animals to go inside. Other religious toys that children are often exposed to include pop-up books, children’s bibles, and coloring books. These evolved from more mainstream toys of the past, which were often explicitly religious in their message. Since society has steadily been moving away from religion, these religious toys have become their own small segment of the toy

The doll has a large impact on the child because children are so impressionable. The doll teaches the child to blindly follow Christianity without even being able to comprehend it. It is the gateway for the child into a religious community that has views on all aspects of life, some of them especially challenging and controversial, on everything from what the proper expression of human sexuality is to how the world came to be. These children are initiated into the church society by hearing stories that they associate with fairy tales. Stories like Jonah and the Whale and David and Goliath are presented to children as real when stories like Jack and the Beanstalk or the Pied Piper are presented as fiction. This subconsciously prepares the child to be indoctrinated for the rest of his or her life, even when he or she doesn’t agree with the fundamental principles of the church he or she participates in. It’s not hard to find the root of the warped views on social justice or what other people should or shouldn’t be doing when children with religious backgrounds were told to believe such heinous stories. A lot of research has even been done about the altered perception of reality. Huffington Post released an article on how “religion affects children’s judgement of what is real and what is pretend.” There was a study done by Kathleen H. Corriveau, Eva