A Rights-Based Proposal for Protecting Children’s Cognitive Autonomy in Religious Upbringing
Senad Dizdarević
Independent Researcher, Ljubljana, Slovenia
ORCID: 0009-0008-9369-2734 | Wikidata: Q138599746 | ISNI: 0000 0005 3005 8622
senaddizdarevic.hcommons.org
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The Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA) – The Rights Gap: Children, Consent, and Religious Identity
The Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA) shows that:
- Consent thresholds govern every irreversible identity decision — except one. Child-protection law across democratic jurisdictions establishes minimum-age requirements for marriage, military enlistment, voting, body modification, and gambling, grounded in the shared premise that irreversible, identity-defining decisions require cognitive and emotional maturity. Formal religious enrolment — which assigns a child a binding institutional identity before they can evaluate the claims involved — meets every criterion that triggers a consent threshold elsewhere in law, yet no jurisdiction has enacted a comparable protection.
- The asymmetry is structural, not accidental. The absence of a religious-consent threshold is not a deliberate policy choice supported by principled reasoning; it is an unexplained gap in the application of a general capacity-based framework already accepted across every comparable domain. The Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA) addresses this gap using existing rights doctrine — Articles 3 and 14 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — rather than inventing a new one.
- Cognitive liberty is the prior condition for all other freedoms. Ienca and Andorno’s (2017) neurorights framework establishes cognitive liberty — the right to form one’s own beliefs free from external imposition — as chronologically prior to freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and all other belief-dependent rights. Applied to formal religious enrolment before the development of evaluative capacity, this principle identifies the consent problem as a cognitive-liberty issue, not only a procedural one.
Evidence-Based Strong Atheism: The Structural Argument
- The First Law of Thermodynamics forecloses creation ex nihilo. Energy and matter can be neither created nor destroyed within a closed system; the universe, as an eternal system of EnergyMatter, has no point of absolute origination, which makes a creator-God’s act of creation from nothing physically incoherent within the framework of verified natural law. This structural constraint is independent of, and prior to, any philosophical or theological argument about the nature of God.
- The Kalam cosmological argument does not apply to an eternal cosmos. The Kalam argument’s first premise — “everything that begins to exist has a cause” — is inapplicable in a cosmological model in which EnergyMatter is eternal and undergoes structural transformation rather than absolute origination. An argument whose first premise requires a beginning point cannot function as evidence for a creator in a framework where no such beginning exists.
- The Via Negativa Paradox renders the classical God-concept self-defeating. The classical theological method of defining God by negation — infinite, immaterial, non-spatial, non-temporal, non-energetic — produces a description that satisfies the definition of non-existence rather than a description of a being capable of causal action. This is the Reductio ad Nihilo: the most rigorous theological definition of God collapses into a description of nothing. ARCA’s philosophical foundation rests in part on this ontological analysis, which establishes why the cognitive-autonomy argument is not merely procedural but structurally grounded.
The AIPA Method: From Deconstruction to Cognitive Reconstruction
- Religious Trauma Syndrome documents the psychological cost of pre-consensual religious identity formation. Winell’s (2011) clinical framework, corroborated by the emerging RTS literature (Singh et al., 2024), describes a recognisable cluster of outcomes — chronic anxiety, identity disruption, impaired critical-thinking confidence, and complex post-traumatic features — in individuals who exit high-control religious environments. These outcomes are the downstream consequence of precisely the pre-consensual identity formation that ARCA seeks to prevent at the upstream point of enrolment.
- The AIPA Method provides a structured pathway from conditioned belief to Pure Awareness. Developed over 22 years of longitudinal research, the Awakening Into Pure Awareness (AIPA) Method is a structured, evidence-based process for cognitive deconstruction of conditioned religious identity and reconstruction of autonomous epistemic agency. It operates within the two-element ontological framework of Evidence-Based Strong Atheism: Pure Awareness as the impersonal, non-energetic substrate of consciousness; EnergyMatter as the eternal closed system that constitutes physical reality. AIPA does not prescribe a destination worldview — it restores the cognitive freedom that pre-consensual religious enrolment foreclosed.
- ARCA and the AIPA Method address the same problem at different temporal positions. ARCA intervenes at the upstream moment of enrolment, before cognitive autonomy is foreclosed. The AIPA Method intervenes at the downstream moment of recovery, after a person has reached adulthood and seeks to reclaim the open future that was not protected in childhood. Together, they constitute a complementary framework: preventive legal architecture and restorative cognitive methodology, addressing the same rights gap from opposite ends of the life course.
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Abstract
Child-protection law regulates every irreversible, identity-defining decision available to a minor — marriage, military enlistment, voting, body modification — through minimum-age thresholds, yet no comparable threshold governs the formal religious enrolment of children. This article treats that asymmetry as a rights-doctrine gap. Drawing on Articles 3 and 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Feinberg’s ‘right to an open future’, the cognitive-liberty literature (Ienca and Andorno, 2017), and the Religious Trauma Syndrome literature, it argues that unilateral religious enrolment and fear-based conditioning of minors raise informed-consent concerns identical to those recognised elsewhere in child welfare. The primary justification is procedural parity. The article proposes the Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA): a tiered statute setting eighteen as the threshold for binding religious enrolment while preserving parental rights to share belief and provide religious education.
Keywords: children’s rights; freedom of religion; informed consent; Convention on the Rights of the Child; cognitive liberty; right to an open future; religious trauma; child protection law; Evidence-Based Strong Atheism; AIPA Method
Full preprint: Figshare DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.32755842
Peer review: International Journal of Children’s Rights (Brill/CHIL), manuscript CHIL-1750, submitted June 2026.
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Introduction: The Consent Gap in Child-Protection Law
Liberal democracies have spent more than a century building a consistent framework for protecting children from decisions they are not yet equipped to make. A minor cannot marry, enlist in combat service, vote, gamble, or obtain a permanent tattoo without reaching an age threshold tied to cognitive and emotional maturity. These thresholds rest on a shared premise: decisions that are identity-defining, difficult to reverse, and consequential for a person’s future options require a degree of capacity that childhood has not yet supplied.
Formal religious enrolment — baptism, confirmation, bar or bat mitzvah, and equivalent rites that assign a child to a religious institution — meets every criterion that triggers a consent threshold elsewhere in law. It is identity-defining, often treated as binding well into adulthood, and imposed on a person who cannot yet evaluate the claims involved. Yet no jurisdiction applies a minimum-age or consent requirement to it. Three clarifications frame everything that follows. First, the argument is legal and conceptual, not theological: no determination about religious truth is required. Second, ARCA distinguishes between participating in religious community life — broadly protected — and the formal legal assignment of religious identity, which is subject to the consent threshold. Third, ARCA’s Article 6 requires identical application across all religious and non-religious traditions without exception.
The article draws on three converging grounds. The primary justification is procedural parity: the same capacity-based reasoning already accepted for marriage, enlistment, and voting applies with equal force to religious enrolment. Supporting grounds are Feinberg’s (1980) ‘right to an open future’ — children hold rights-in-trust that protect their capacity for autonomous choice at maturity — and the cognitive-liberty framework (Ienca and Andorno, 2017), which establishes the right to form one’s own beliefs as prior to, and a precondition for, all other freedoms including freedom of religion itself. The full legal and philosophical analysis, including engagement with critics (Millum, 2025; Gheaus, 2024; Morgan, 2005) and the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence, is available in the preprint linked above.
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Religious Institutions Exercising Custodial Authority Over Minors
This section extends the analysis beyond the parent-child-enrolment axis and constitutes a new contribution not included in the Figshare preprint version of this article.
The consent concerns raised by formal religious enrolment are not limited to the family setting. A distinct and in some respects more pressing problem arises when children are placed within institutions in which a single religious tradition exercises educational, residential, disciplinary, or quasi-parental authority over them. Religious preschools and kindergartens, faith-based primary and secondary schools, boarding schools, residential care facilities, orphanages, and state-delegated foster placements operated by religious organisations are the most significant examples. In these settings, the cognitive-autonomy concerns at the heart of this article cannot be analysed exclusively through the parent-child relationship, because the institution itself becomes a primary authority shaping the child’s beliefs, social world, access to information, and practical ability to encounter alternative viewpoints.
A useful analytical distinction separates three levels of religious exposure. The first is ordinary family practice — participation in prayer, ritual, and discussion within the home — which ARCA treats as presumptively protected under parental rights in Article 5. The second is structured religious education provided by a community or school, which may be more or less comparative in character. The third, and most legally salient, is full or quasi-full institutional placement, where the same authority controls a child’s schooling, daily schedule, peer group, discipline regime, and religious formation simultaneously. Consent and practical exit are more meaningful at the first two levels, where alternative influences remain accessible; they are structurally constrained at the third, where the environment is, by design, comprehensive.
State-delegated religious authority presents the strongest variant of this concern. When a state places children in religious orphanages, residential care facilities, or faith-based foster arrangements, the child’s exposure to a single tradition is no longer solely the result of parental choice: the state becomes an indirect participant in the formation of the child’s religious identity. This creates an Article 14 UNCRC issue that is analytically distinct from, and in some respects more legally compelling than, the parental-upbringing question, because the child has no meaningful capacity to exit and no parental counterweight mediating institutional influence.
Children’s participation in organised congregational roles — altar service, choral programmes, youth ministries, and catechetical courses — occupies an intermediate position. Many such roles provide genuine social, educational, and cultural value and are highly regarded by families and communities. They also, however, place minors in structured relationships with adult authority figures whose legitimacy derives partly from religious rather than professional or credentialled standing. Independent governmental investigations in multiple jurisdictions have documented that the combination of institutional trust, spiritual authority, and reduced external oversight has, in a number of documented cases, created conditions that facilitated abuse and impeded disclosure (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017). The argument is not that such roles are inherently coercive; it is that they can place children in structurally vulnerable positions when independent safeguards are absent.
The common thread across these institutional settings is the potential combination of three features: comprehensive control of the child’s daily environment, the presentation of one tradition’s claims as settled identity, and the embedding of complaint and support mechanisms within the same authority structure whose conduct is in question. That combination directly engages both the open-future principle and the cognitive-liberty concerns at the heart of this article. ARCA’s statute does not address institutional safeguarding comprehensively — that belongs to implementation guidance and is a natural subject for subsequent legislative work — but Article 7(f) requires faith-based educational, residential, and child-care institutions to meet safeguarding and independent-oversight standards equivalent to those applied in comparable secular settings, including independent reporting channels not controlled by the religious authority in question. What the present analysis establishes is that the parity logic underlying ARCA — wherever children are held under sustained institutional authority that shapes their beliefs and identity, the same protection standards that apply in secular contexts should apply in religious ones — is not limited to formal enrolment acts and must inform any comprehensive child-protection framework in this domain.
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The Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA): Complete Model Statute
The statute below is offered as a basis for legislative and scholarly discussion. It follows the framing of existing child-protection statutes: restricting a specific legal act (formal religious enrolment of a minor) and a specific, narrowly defined practice (fear-based conditioning), while explicitly preserving the broader rights of parents and religious communities.
ARCA does not restrict adult religious practice, belief, or expression in any form. It establishes a child-protection threshold modelled on existing consent law, applied identically across all traditions, specifically to formal religious enrolment and fear-based conditioning of minors.
Preamble
Recognising that children possess the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and belief under Article 14 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that their best interests are a primary consideration under Article 3 of the same instrument; recognising that the binding institutional assignment of religious identity prior to the development of critical cognitive capacity raises informed-consent concerns analogous to those addressed elsewhere in child-protection law; and recognising the documented psychological literature on fear-based religious conditioning of minors; this Act, cited as the Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA), establishes minimum-age and tiered protections for the formal religious enrolment of children, applied identically across all religious and non-religious traditions.
Article 1 — Definitions
(a) ‘Formal religious enrolment’ means an act that creates a civil, legal, or institutional religious status with attached consequences — including registration in a state or denominational membership registry, the issuance of a membership or congregant number, or any designation that affects a person’s standing under family, education, or tax law. A religious rite or ceremony that creates no such civil, legal, or institutional status — including most infant baptisms, naming ceremonies, or blessings as commonly practised — is presumptively outside this definition unless combined with a documented coercive element described in subsection (c) or linked to an institutional registry described above.
(b) ‘Mandatory religious instruction’ means structured religious education, required by a parent, guardian, or institution, that presents religious claims as factual certainties rather than as one perspective among others.
(c) ‘Fear-based religious conditioning’ means the repeated, systematic use of threats of eternal punishment, family separation, or supernatural harm, of such intensity and frequency that a reasonable observer would expect significant and enduring psychological distress, used to suppress a minor’s inquiry or compel compliance. Ordinary instruction in a tradition’s eschatology or moral teaching, without targeted, repeated coercion meeting this threshold, is not covered.
Article 2 — Tiered Age Structure
(a) Tier One (ages 0–12): No formal religious enrolment as defined in Article 1(a) may be completed on behalf of a minor in this age tier. (b) Tier Two (ages 13–17): A minor in this age tier may participate in provisional religious affiliation with their own assent, which shall create no binding lifelong membership status and shall remain revocable at the minor’s initiative at any time without penalty or continuing obligation. Provisional affiliation includes participation in youth groups, non-binding confirmation or preparation classes, religious study, and community worship; it explicitly does not include formal registry-based membership. (c) Tier Three (age 18 and above): A person in this age tier may complete binding formal religious enrolment with their own informed, documented, and freely given consent. A formal enrolment purportedly completed in Tier One or without satisfying Tier Two conditions has no binding legal or institutional effect, but may be ratified by the individual upon reaching Tier Three.
Article 3 — Prohibition of Fear-Based Conditioning
It is unlawful for a parent, guardian, religious institution, member of clergy, or educational institution to subject a minor to fear-based religious conditioning as defined in Article 1(c).
Article 4 — Religious Education
Academic instruction in the history, sociology, philosophy, and comparative study of world religions remains permitted and is encouraged, provided it is presented in a balanced, critically open framework that does not present the claims of any single tradition as settled fact.
Article 5 — Parental Rights
Parents and guardians retain the right to practise their own religion, to share their beliefs with their children, to involve their children in religious community and culture consistent with Tier Two of Article 2, and to provide religious education as defined in Article 4. ARCA restricts only formal binding enrolment outside the conditions of Article 2 and conducts meetings that meet the definition in Article 1(c); it does not require neutrality in upbringing.
Article 6 — Religious Neutrality Principle
This Act applies identically to all religious traditions and to organised non-religious or philosophical associations that engage in comparable formal enrolment of minors, including but not limited to Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, new religious movement, and atheistic or secular humanist organisational contexts. No enforcement, guidance, or interpretation of this Act may distinguish among traditions by content, size, age, or social status; any such distinction is itself a violation of this Article.
Article 7 — Enforcement
(a) Violations of Article 3 are reportable to child-welfare authorities under the same framework applied to other forms of psychological child maltreatment. (b) Reports shall be subject to mandatory proportionality review and triage prior to formal investigation, so that isolated or ordinary instances of religious teaching are screened out, and enforcement resources are concentrated on documented, threshold-meeting conduct under Article 1(c). (c) Complaint review shall include independent oversight, periodic monitoring of enforcement data for discriminatory patterns across traditions, and a clear appeal procedure. (d) No child, parent, or family member shall be subject to retaliation for making a good-faith report; any such retaliation is itself a reportable violation. (e) A formal religious enrolment completed in violation of Article 2 has no binding legal or institutional effect, subject to ratification as provided in Article 2(c). (f) Faith-based educational, residential, and child-care institutions operating under this Act shall be subject to safeguarding and independent-oversight standards equivalent to those applied to comparable secular institutions, including independent reporting channels not controlled by the religious authority in question.
Article 8 — International Coordination
States adopting ARCA are encouraged to coordinate with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on implementation guidance and monitoring, and to structure enforcement consistent with the European Court of Human Rights’ requirement of ‘very weighty reasons’ and documented harm before restricting religious upbringing.
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Conclusion
Formal religious enrolment is one of the few remaining identity-defining, durably binding decisions to which no consent threshold applies. The legal and philosophical resources for closing that gap — UNCRC Articles 3 and 14, the open-future and cognitive-liberty literatures, comparative and European precedents, and the institutional analysis developed in the section above — are already substantially in place. ARCA assembles those resources into a tiered model framework, with the definitional and enforcement risks identified in the full paper treated as central to any future legislative effort rather than peripheral concerns.
The underlying claim is narrow and largely procedural, independent of any position on religious truth: that the decision to bind a child permanently to a religious identity belongs, in principle, among the category of decisions a society already agrees a child cannot yet make alone. The full argument, legal analysis, developmental evidence, philosophical engagement, and anticipated-objections section are available in the preprint linked below. The proposal has been submitted to the International Journal of Children’s Rights for academic peer review (manuscript CHIL-1750, June 2026).
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Further Reading and Full Versions
→ Full preprint (Figshare) — DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.32755842
→ Source article: Age of Religious Consent — Open Letter (god-doesntexist.com)
→ AIPA Method Journal — ARCA PR article (Lovable)
→ Lee Strobel’s Is God Real for Teens Book Review by Senad Dizdarević
→ Is God Real for Teens? Why It Matters to Know the Evidence-Based Truth About God’s (Non)Existence
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References
Feinberg, J., ‘A child’s right to an open future’, in W. Aiken and H. LaFollette (eds.), Whose Child? Children’s Rights, Parental Authority, and State Power (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980) pp. 124–153.
Gheaus, A., ‘Enabling children to learn from religions whilst respecting their rights: Against monopolies of influence’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 2024 (58(1)), 120–127. DOI: 10.1093/jopedu/qhae007
Ienca, M. and Andorno, R., ‘Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology’, Life Sciences, Society and Policy 2017 (13(1)), Article 5. DOI: 10.1186/s40504-017-0050-1
Lansdown, G., The Evolving Capacities of the Child (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2005).
Millum, J., ‘No right to an open future’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 2025. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1111/japp.12790
Morgan, J., ‘Religious upbringing, religious diversity and the child’s right to an open future’, Studies in Philosophy and Education 2005 (24(5)), 367–387.
Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘Japan: UN experts concerned by continued stigmatisation of religious minorities’ (Press release, Geneva: OHCHR, October 2025).
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Final Report (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2017).
Singh, S., Yadav, A.K., Chauhan, V.S. and Agrawal, M., ‘Religious trauma syndrome: The futile fate of faith’, Industrial Psychiatry Journal 2024 (33(Suppl. 1)), S309–S310. DOI: 10.4103/ipj.ipj_87_24
United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child, UN Treaty Series Vol. 1577 (New York: United Nations, 1989).
Vojnity v. Hungary, Application no. 29617/07, European Court of Human Rights (12 February 2013).
Winell, M., ‘Religious trauma syndrome’ [Series of three articles], CBT Today 2011 (British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies).
July 2026 Update II:: A new book, Is God Real for Teens?, is now available
Is God Real for Teens?: A Faith Deconstruction Guide for Teens, Parents, and Families has been published in ebook and paperback (ISBN 9798189356100). It applies the Evidence-Based Strong Atheism framework discussed in this article to a teen and family readership specifically, including a full evidence-based review of Lee Strobel’s Is God Real for Teens?, the AIPA Method for faith deconstruction and identity reconstruction, and the complete text of the Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA).
The full book page, including further detail on its contents, is available at god-doesntexist.com/is-god-real-for-teens-a-faith-deconstruction-guide-for-teens-parents-and-families with book details and an Amazon link for e-book and paperback.
July 2026 Update I:
A key part of religious indoctrination is the forced baptism—or enrollment—of children in a religion before they can think for themselves, read, write, or make independent decisions about important matters.
I have drafted a bill that would prevent religious violence against children, who would be allowed to join a religion only after turning 18:
The Age of Religious Consent Act (ARCA): Protect Children’s Right to Freedom of Thought and Childhood without Religious Coercion, Threats and Manipulations
Sign & Share and Support the ARCA Motion for Legislative Enactment.
Thank you!