There is a sentence of Jesus Christ that I have been thinking about increasingly in recent years. In the Gospel of Matthew, after the disciples ask who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus places a child among them and tells them: “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3, NIV).
This is an extraordinarily powerful image. Yet it is also easy to misunderstand.
Christ was obviously not suggesting that children possess perfect knowledge or perfect moral judgment. Children make mistakes. They can behave selfishly, conceal wrongdoing, and tell lies; developmental psychology documents such behavior from surprisingly young ages. Nor should Christianity romanticize childhood as a state without sin. The theological meaning is deeper. Immediately after speaking of becoming like children, Christ speaks of humbling oneself. The child therefore represents something particularly important for Christian life: humility, dependence, openness to correction, and the willingness to be changed.
That idea has led me to think about a question extending far beyond theology: Why is it sometimes so difficult for intelligent adults simply to say, “I was wrong”?
The question matters for Christianity. It matters for science. And it matters enormously for political economy.
The Child and the Possibility of Correction
Children are naturally curious. Anyone who has spent enough time around them knows the endless sequence of questions: Why? How? What happens if I do this? Why does that happen?
This curiosity does not mean that children are naturally better reasoners than adults. Quite the contrary: knowledge and reasoning abilities develop substantially with age. But children remind us of an intellectual disposition that adults can gradually lose—the recognition that the world contains an enormous amount that we do not yet understand.
The empirical literature on children’s confession and wrongdoing is more complicated than the simple idea that children always confess more readily. Research shows that even young children can conceal transgressions. At the same time, children’s understanding of confession, lying, guilt, punishment, and reconciliation develops with age. One study of children aged four to nine, for example, found age-related differences in the emotions children associated with wrongdoing and nondisclosure. Another experiment found that certain truth-eliciting conditions increased truthful disclosure among younger children in the sample but not among the older children.
The lesson I draw from this is therefore not the scientifically indefensible proposition that children are inherently more honest than adults. It is subtler. Our relationship with error becomes increasingly entangled with social consequences, reputation, identity, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
A child can discover that two plus two is not five and simply learn the correct answer. For an adult, however, admitting an error may sometimes mean much more than correcting a proposition. It can threaten professional reputation, political identity, membership in a community, or an entire worldview.
And this is where Christ’s demand to become like children acquires an intellectual significance.
When an Idea Becomes an Identity
I have encountered this problem repeatedly in discussions of political economy.
Some disagreements are productive. I may believe that a particular regulation generates unintended consequences; another economist may disagree about the magnitude of those consequences. We can examine the theory, compare empirical evidence, question assumptions, and perhaps modify our conclusions. That is how serious intellectual inquiry should work.
But another kind of disagreement is much more difficult. It occurs when an economic proposition has become part of someone’s moral and political identity.
Consider socialism. My own criticism of socialism comes from economics, history, and my broader classical-liberal understanding of institutions. But simply telling someone that “socialism is wrong” is not an argument, and treating every person who calls himself a socialist as economically ignorant would be intellectually careless. Socialist traditions are diverse, and serious scholars defending various forms of socialism have produced sophisticated arguments that deserve to be addressed rather than caricatured.
The more interesting problem arises when any ideology—including socialism—becomes insulated from correction.
Suppose someone has organized a large part of his worldview around several connected propositions: markets exploit people; private property produces injustice; profit is morally suspicious; economic inequality demonstrates market failure; government intervention generally corrects those failures; and socialism therefore represents a morally superior social order.
Now imagine that serious engagement with economics begins to undermine one of those propositions.
The difficulty is immediately apparent. Changing one belief may have implications for the others. If prices contain information that no central authority possesses, the case for centralized allocation becomes harder to maintain. If profit and loss perform functions of discovery and error correction, profit can no longer be understood simply as extraction. If private property affects incentives, investment, entrepreneurship, and the use of dispersed knowledge, abolishing or radically weakening property rights has consequences that a purely distributive analysis may overlook.
At that point, an economic disagreement can become an identity crisis.
What Political Psychology Tells Us
Psychology gives us useful concepts for understanding this phenomenon without assuming that people who disagree with us are stupid or malicious.
Research on motivated reasoning suggests that people do not always evaluate evidence as detached truth-seekers. Their conclusions can be influenced by prior commitments and identity. Dan Kahan’s research on ideologically motivated reasoning is especially relevant: people across political orientations can interpret evidence in ways consistent with their existing ideological predispositions. Importantly, this is not a pathology belonging exclusively to the political left or right. Kahan’s findings have challenged the claim that conservatives alone are distinctively prone to closed-minded reasoning; motivated cognition can operate across ideological camps.
The concept of identity-protective cognition takes the argument further. When a belief becomes connected to membership in a valued group, evidence against that belief can feel like evidence against the self. People may therefore assign different weight to information depending on whether it threatens or reinforces an identity to which they are attached.
This explains something that economists—and probably theologians—frequently encounter. Sometimes giving someone more information does not solve the disagreement. “Read another book” may accomplish very little if accepting the book’s argument would require the reader to reconsider a fundamental part of his identity.
The obstacle is no longer a shortage of information.
It is the cost of admitting error.
Intellectual Humility Is Not Ideological Surrender
This brings us to intellectual humility.
Intellectual humility does not mean believing that every argument is equally good. It does not require an economist to pretend that price controls have no predictable consequences, a historian to treat every interpretation as equally plausible, or a Christian to abandon convictions merely because someone challenges them.
Humility is not relativism.
It means recognizing a much simpler proposition: I can be wrong.
Recent psychological research has connected intellectual humility with lower political polarization and greater willingness to interact with people holding opposing political views. In a longitudinal study, Sgambati and Ayduk found intellectual humility associated with lower affective and attitudinal polarization and greater interaction across political differences.
Other research involving four preregistered experiments found intellectual humility associated with less affective polarization and greater willingness to approach rather than avoid political opponents.
There is something profoundly Christian about this intellectual disposition.
Christianity begins not with the proclamation of human perfection but with its rejection. Human beings are limited. We misunderstand. We desire things that are bad for us. We rationalize. We become proud. We hurt others. We sin.
The Christian response is not to construct an increasingly elaborate argument proving that we could never have been wrong.
It is repentance.
Repentance as an Intellectual Virtue
The Greek concept underlying repentance in the New Testament, metanoia, carries the idea of turning or changing one’s mind and direction. Matthew 18:3 itself begins with precisely this demand: unless you turn and become like children.
I increasingly think there is an intellectual analogue to repentance.
A scholar should be able to say: My theory does not explain this evidence. I need to reconsider it.
An economist should be able to say: My prediction was wrong.
A Christian should be able to say: I sinned.
And a politically engaged person should be able to say: The policy or ideology I defended produced consequences that I did not anticipate.
These sentences are extraordinarily difficult because they require us to separate truth from ego.
The irony is that admitting error is often treated as weakness when it may actually require greater strength than defending the error. Recent experimental research on political figures even suggests that admitting factual wrongness can improve perceptions of competence and interpersonal qualities rather than necessarily destroying reputation.
Yet pride tells us otherwise. Pride whispers that changing our minds makes us look foolish. So we defend yesterday’s mistake with today’s argument, and then defend today’s argument with tomorrow’s rationalization.
Eventually we may no longer be defending a proposition.
We are defending ourselves.
Socialism, Liberalism, and the Temptation of Dogma
This is where I would apply the argument to socialism—but also impose the same standard on my own intellectual tradition.
My study of economics has led me to believe that socialism suffers from fundamental problems concerning knowledge, incentives, property rights, entrepreneurship, and political power. Those are substantive economic and institutional arguments. They should be debated as such.
But if I criticize socialists for refusing to reconsider their worldview when evidence contradicts it, intellectual honesty requires me to accept exactly the same obligation.
A classical liberal who refuses to acknowledge a genuine market failure has learned nothing from intellectual humility. An Austrian economist who dismisses empirical evidence merely because it is uncomfortable has betrayed the methodological seriousness he claims to defend. A conservative who explains away every failure committed by politicians on his side is practicing the same identity protection he condemns in progressives. And a progressive who treats every undesirable outcome of intervention as proof that still more intervention was needed can make a theory effectively impossible to falsify.
No ideology grants immunity from human weakness.
That is precisely why the Christian dimension of this problem matters so much.
The Knowledge Problem Begins with Ourselves
Hayek famously emphasized the limits of human knowledge in social coordination. Knowledge is dispersed among millions of people; no individual mind or central authority possesses everything necessary to direct a complex economy.
But perhaps there is a more personal lesson hidden inside the same insight.
Before asking whether a government knows enough to organize society, we might ask whether we know enough to be so certain of ourselves.
Christian humility and Hayekian epistemic humility are certainly not identical. One is theological and moral; the other concerns knowledge and social institutions. Yet they intersect at an important point: both reject the fantasy of human omniscience.
The Christian knows that he is not God.
The economist should know that he is not an omniscient social planner.
And the citizen should know that political conviction does not transform opinion into infallibility.
Perhaps this is one reason Christ’s image of the child remains so powerful two thousand years later. A child approaches a world that is larger than himself. He asks questions because he knows, implicitly, that there are things he does not know.
Adults gradually acquire knowledge.
Unfortunately, we sometimes acquire pride along with it.
Becoming Like Children Again
When Jesus told his disciples that they must change and become like children, he was not offering a theory of developmental psychology. We should not force modern scientific claims into a biblical passage that was making a theological point.
But the metaphor nevertheless speaks powerfully to intellectual life.
To become childlike in the Christian sense is not to become childish. It is not to abandon reason, evidence, expertise, or conviction. It is to recover humility: the capacity to recognize dependence, to accept correction, and to turn when we discover that we have been walking in the wrong direction.
This may be particularly difficult when our beliefs form an interconnected system. Admitting one error can feel dangerous because we fear that everything else will collapse with it.
But perhaps that is precisely when intellectual honesty matters most.
If an idea is true, serious examination should strengthen it. If part of our worldview is false, protecting it from criticism does not make it true. And if discovering one error forces us to reconsider ten others, the appropriate response is not to protect the ten errors. It is to be grateful that we discovered the first one.
Christianity does not promise that human beings will never be wrong.
It asks something considerably more demanding: that we become capable of turning.
Perhaps that is one meaning we can draw from becoming like children—not innocence in the simplistic sense of never having done wrong, but humility sufficient to admit that we have something left to learn.
And perhaps the three most difficult words in intellectual life are also among the most liberating:
I was wrong.
References
Bowes, S. M., Costello, T. H., Lee, C., McElroy-Heltzel, S., Davis, D. E., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2022). Stepping outside the echo chamber: Is intellectual humility associated with less political myside bias? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(1).
Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8, 407–424.
Sgambati, T. J., & Ayduk, O. N. (2023). Intellectual humility and political polarization: An exploration of social networks, attitudes, and affect. Political Psychology, 44(4), 807–828.
The Holy Bible, Matthew 18:3.
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How to Cite this Article (APA 7th edition)
Wang, H. H. (2026, October 24). To Become Like Children: Christianity, Intellectual Humility, and the Difficulty of Admitting We Are Wrong. https://williamhongsongwang.com/2026/10/24/to-become-like-children-christianity-intellectual-humility-and-the-difficulty-of-admitting-we-are-wrong/
