MY FATHER’S HOUSE

DAN BARKER

When I was a child I thought of childish things:

Eternal life in paradise with angel wings,

A father up in heaven who would hover over me,

And tell me what to think, tell me what to be;

But now that I have grown,

It’s time to use my own good mind.

I’m outa here! Let me outa here!

I found my own place—

I’ve left my father’s house behind.

A normal Dad is really glad to realize

His little child has now become, before his eyes,

An independent person who can stand on steady feet,

An equal human being with character complete.

But God is not that way—

He orders me to stay his child.

For God so loved the world he gave his only son—

A sacrifice to pay the price for everyone—

And if you believe that this deserves a Fatherhood Award,

You can move in with the guy, and he will be your Lord.

But listen to this song:

Forever is a long, long time!

—Lyrics from “My Father’s House” © 2004 by Dan Barker

My mother-in-law, Anne Gaylor (founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation), claimed that you can’t raise children. Children raise themselves. We parents are simply facilitators. If we are the birth parents, we bequeath some of our genetics, for better or worse. We give them a home, an environment in which to feel safe and grow, access to education, resources, health care, love, and friendship. Then we let nature take its course. It’s not as though if we failed to do some critical task the kids would never grow up, never find a way through life. Anne’s four children grew up just fine; I married one of them.

I’m not an expert on child raising. I don’t think anyone really is. My only claim to credibility is that I do have five children. Having children of your own does make you a kind of expert, though that is probably because much of our learning comes through our mistakes.

Kids should not be forced into a straitjacket of parental expectations. I think parents who obsess about how to raise their children may actually do more harm than good. This is the children’s world too, and they are finding their way just like we did. Thinking back on how I was raised, I am surprised to remember that I never once thought of myself as “the son of my parents.” Yes, of course, I had a mom and a dad, and they were great parents, good examples, and I was proud of them and love them dearly, but I never considered it was my purpose in life to be an extension of their lives. I never saw myself as little Norman Barker, put on this earth to make him look good. What child has ever thought that way? (The dedication to my book Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist is, “To Norman Barker, my only father.” If we do need a father figure, it may as well be a real person. My dad is someone who has truly earned my respect.)

I think most freethinking parents have similar feelings. We don’t want to force our kids into any mold, unless reason and kindness are molds—well, no, reason and kindness are open ended, not constricting. What we truly want is the satisfaction of seeing our children become mature, self-reliant human beings, at any age, thinking for themselves, free and happy. Parents who want anything else are obsessed with control and not free and happy themselves.

My first four children were the product of a Christian marriage, from the time when I was a minister. They are all great human beings: generous, thoughtful, caring. The three girls are now raising children of their own and doing a wonderful job. My son is still single, a chef and a guitar player. Even though we took them to church as children and tried to instill “Christian” values, they ended up thinking for themselves. In this case, the religion didn’t seem to do too much damage. My Christian wife and I divorced, mainly for religious reasons,* and this clearly had an impact on the four kids, as all divorces do. However, I think we were lucky. My former wife and I decided that we would never place the children in a position where they were forced to choose between parents. My love and support for the kids has always been unconditional, and they know it. I repeatedly told them that they are free to think their own thoughts. They don’t have to agree with me. They don’t have to be atheists or agnostics in order to earn my respect. Consequently, at least two of them now have views that I would call freethinking, and the other two, although perhaps nominally religious, are quite liberal and open in their beliefs, which also counts as freethinking where the rubber meets the road in their daily lives. I don’t think any of them go to church, not regularly, although one was attending a Unitarian fellowship for a while. To my former wife’s credit—she later remarried a Baptist minister and remains a conservative believer—her love for the kids has not been tempered by the fact that we all don’t agree.

I married Annie Laurie Gaylor in 1987. She is a third-generation freethinker and editor of Freethought Today. She and I are now co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Our daughter, Sabrina, a fourth-generation freethinker, is currently in high school. She has been raised with a complete lack of religion. She went to a friend’s bat mitzvah some years ago, but beyond that has never been to a church or worship service other than the occasional Unitarian fellowship where Annie Laurie or I have spoken or performed. Most Unitarians are freethinkers, and our “service” was nonreligious.

When Sabrina was little, she had a vivid imagination, like most children. (She still does.) We all had a lot of fun pretending, playing games with imaginary creatures and friends. That is a healthy part of learning and growing. Rather than tell Sabrina that the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus were lies, we told her that we were pretending they were real, just like characters in a book or cartoon. She never had to go through the process of unlearning Santa or the Easter Bunny. We figured that this would allow her to have the fun of childhood imagination, not deprived of anything that her friends might have, yet not having to deal with the thought that her parents had deceived her. She “got it” from the very beginning.

When Sabrina was about three or four, I reminded her that we were just pretending and wanted to confirm that she truly grasped the concept of imagination. I guess I was a little worried that she might think we were expecting her to actually believe the stories, but she didn’t. She was quite clear and sensible. “I know it’s just pretend, Dad. But it’s fun.”

So I asked her, “How do you know the difference between what is pretend and what is real?”

“It’s easy,” she said immediately. “Things that are pretend can do things that you can’t do.”

Wow. She pretty much summed up naturalistic philosophy in those few words. “Things that you can’t do” was her way of saying “things that can’t be done.” We never explicitly taught her this worldview. We had not been taking her to “atheist Sunday school” in order to indoctrinate her as a materialist. We were not making her memorize “agnostic scriptures” or sing “naturalistic hymns.” She was simply a normal child in an environment that allows for individual thinking, and left on her own was quite capable of making natural distinctions.

Imagination is an amazing thing. It can be a fount of creativity, or, if taken seriously, a source of immense confusion. Just think what the world would be like if the Apostle Paul or Muhammad or Joseph Smith had been cautioned not to take their imaginations literally.

Of course, over the years, Sabrina has heard Annie Laurie and me talking about freethought and state/church separation. She has come to some of the meetings of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and listened to many of the speeches. So perhaps this amounts to a kind of “freethought education,” though it is all voluntary.

I should be careful when I say that Sabrina is being raised as a fourth-generation freethinker. That is technically not correct. She is a freethinker, and we are a freethinking family, but a person’s identity is not tied to their family. Sabrina knows that she is free to choose otherwise. She knows that she has the liberty to become a Buddhist, Catholic, Mormon, or Pentecostal. She also knows that if she made such a decision, we would be disappointed, and that we would be equally free to argue with her about it. However, we all agree that her choices are not mandated by her parents’ disappointment. In any event, there seems to be little danger that someone like Sabrina, having grown up in a freethinking environment, would be attracted to dogmatism.

In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins denounces those who identify children by the religion of their parents. There is no such thing as a Christian child or a Muslim child or an atheist child, he insists. We should call them children from a Christian or Muslim or atheist family. To call someone a Catholic child is to claim that the views of parents can be forced into the minds of children. Children might indeed grow up to adopt the views of their parents, as so often happens with religious indoctrination—and we have to wonder how truly “free” such a choice is—but the children, as children, are not free to responsibly choose their own lifetime religious identity.

Steven Pinker’s great book The Blank Slate shows that we come prepackaged with a basic human nature that is not as malleable as many religious, political, and philosophical systems imagine. We are who we are, biological organisms in a natural environment, and we get into deep trouble if we try to deny it.

I think the greatest problem with religious systems such as Christianity is their pessimistic view of human nature. If you teach a generation of children that they are sinful creatures by nature, that left on their own they are morally corrupt, deserving of eternal torment in hell, that they are not to be trusted to think their own (selfish, evil) thoughts, all of this can become—has become—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whole segments of the population grow up with a negative self-image, thinking they really are rotten, in need of a savior or father figure. They are told they are bad, so they act like it. Their religion exaggerates and demonizes normal human feelings, turning them into cosmic struggles with evil, creating devils to be fought instead of problems to be solved.

At the 2005 World Religions Conference, I was asked to represent atheism, sitting on the stage with a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Sikh, Hindu, and Native American spiritualist. (I accepted the invitation only after making it clear that atheism is not a religion, and they agreed to include it as a “world philosophy.”) The theme of the conference was salvation, and each of us was asked to summarize our respective positions on that topic. After pointing out that sin is a religious concept, hence salvation is merely a religious solution to a religious problem—would we respect a doctor who ran around cutting people with a knife in order to sell them a bandage?—I ended with these words: “If salvation is the cure, then atheism is the prevention.”

If you teach a generation of children that they are sinful creatures by nature, that left on their own they are morally corrupt, deserving of eternal torment in hell, that they are not to be trusted to think their own (selfish, evil) thoughts, all of this can become—has become—a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many in the audience laughed at that comment, some who should not have been laughing. They got the point: Much of religious education is an endeavor to solve a nonproblem. It is a confusing waste of time.

It is better to tell children that they are okay the way they are. Most secular parents are optimistic about human nature. We do not make our children feel bad for being—well, children. We do our best to affirm the positive potential of our children, and of ourselves. That is the major difference between religious and secular parenting.

DAN BARKER is the author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists (2008) and God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction (2016). With his wife, Annie Laurie Gaylor, he is copresident of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an organization working to keep state and church separate and to promote freethought. Dan has five children and has written three books for children: Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children (2002), Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide for Young Freethinkers (1990), and Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong: A Guide for Young Skeptics (1992).

* Editor’s note: To learn more about Dan’s deconversion, see Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists (2008).