Steiner's term for the way a child before the change of teeth gives itself over to surrounding gesture with the whole physical body, not with the soul.
The Child's Bodily Religion in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the condition of the human being from birth to the change of teeth, when devotion is carried out by the physical body rather than by soul or spirit. Steiner set it out in the third lecture of Human Values in Education (GA 310), given at Arnheim in the Netherlands on 19 July 1924, where he calls the child's whole relationship to surrounding gesture naturhaft-religiös, of a natural religious character. The adult yields to the divine inwardly, with soul and later with spirit; the small child yields outwardly, through limb, breath, and blood, imitating every gesture made in front of it, moral quality included. An angry gesture repeated near a child passes into the circulation and organises the growing body. The practical consequence, worked out in Waldorf early childhood settings since 1919, is that the adult's conduct, not the adult's instruction, is the curriculum before seven.
The Child's Bodily Religion is the phase Steiner describes in Human Values in Education: before the change of teeth, a child cannot hold itself back from what happens around it. Gesture enters the body directly, and the moral tone inside the gesture enters with it. Devotion here is not a mood or a belief. It is posture, breath, and blood, an organic act of surrender performed by an organism that has no other way to meet the world.
In Steiner's Own Words
Through his physical body the child is given over to everything in the nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later life, this the child has also in his physical organism.
What it Means Today
Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore published "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates" in Science in 1977, reporting that infants only weeks old matched an adult's tongue protrusion, mouth opening, and finger movement. Follow-up studies pushed the age down to newborns under an hour old. The finding was contested for years, then broadly replicated, and it removed the assumption that imitation must wait on a concept of self. Meltzoff, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, built his "Like Me" framework on it (Developmental Science, 2007): the infant registers another person's act and maps it onto its own body long before it can think about either. Steiner is making the same observation from the far side. Where Meltzoff describes a supramodal body scheme, Steiner describes surrender. The child is not copying a gesture, it is inhabiting one, and what it takes in is not the shape alone but the disposition inside the shape.
Thalira synthesis: the laboratory measured the mechanism and stopped there, because a tongue protrusion carries no moral weight, while Steiner's claim is that the same mechanism receives rage and tenderness with equal fidelity. That turns a developmental finding into an ethical demand on every adult standing in front of a child. It is also why a Waldorf kindergarten teacher performs the task instead of assigning it, sitting down with the mending or the bread dough so that the children have something worth taking into their limbs.
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