The Times reported at the weekend that the "Muslim birthrate" is significantly higher than the British average, and that "Almost a tenth of babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim." Richard Dawkins then wrote a letter to the newspaper, saying that "Babies and toddlers are too young to know what they think about origins, moral philosophy or the meaning of life". We would not, he points out, ascribe philosophical positions or political beliefs to a child too young to know its own name, so why is religion different?
Ah, but religion is different, say some people. It's not a political belief. A child is born into a faith; a Jewish child will be circumcised, a Christian one baptised; they are brought into this world as a member of this faith, and until they choose to leave it, that is what they are. "As long as new atheists continue to pretend faith no different to support for political parties, this will be a dialogue of the deaf," says HuffPo's Mehdi Hasan, himself a Muslim. He went on: "It's odd to go against centuries of history and deny parents right to bring up kids in their own faith".
For the record, I don't think it's "child abuse" to bring a child up religious; I don't believe that religion is necessarily a force for evil in the world; and I do sometimes think Dawkins's blunderbuss approach to these matters can be unhelpful. But this is one of those cases where he's straightforwardly right.
Of course parents should be able to bring up their children in their faith, to baptise them, to feed them halal baby-food or fish on a Friday, to push their Bugaboo Bee into the local church and shush them during the service. That's fine. But that baby is still not a "Muslim" or a "Christian" or an "atheist" or a "Mormon". Those are labels that we apply to ourselves with certain meanings – possibly a set of beliefs, possibly simply a collection of cultural practices, possibly nothing more than the fact that our parents called themselves that so we do too. The religious label can be central to your life, or entirely unreflected upon and incidental. But until you can understand what that label is, you can't apply it to yourself.
Of course, religious identity is different from political identity. But it is still an identity. You're not religious if you don't identify yourself as religious: you can't tell me I'm a Seventh-Day Adventist, I need to decide to be one. It's not like nationality, which needs to be assigned at birth for boring pragmatic reasons of bureaucracy.
At what point do we start calling a child "religious" or "atheist"? Clearly, there's no precise point: as an adult, he or she will understand the issues, and can declare itself Jewish or whatever without fear of contradiction; as a newborn, it can't even lift its head, let alone understand the concept of God. Slowly, in between, it becomes meaningful to ascribe complex beliefs to it. You can argue forever about whether a five-year-old has sufficient understanding to describe itself as an atheist or a Christian, or whether it's just parroting a term its parents use; but at least it, unlike a newborn, can understand the question "are you religious?" sufficiently well to give an answer of sorts.
Is it harmful to call a baby a "Muslim baby" or a "Christian baby"? Probably not, in the grand scheme of things. It's just daft and meaningless. Babies can scream, feed and poo. They cannot think grand thoughts about the origin of the universe and they cannot weigh the benefits of a cultural identity. If you want to call the baby a Scientologist, go ahead, but be aware that you might as well say the same thing about your goldfish.