MANAGING DISSONANCE WITH RELIGIOUS RELATIVES

LIBBY ANNE

I grew up in a religious household. I was homeschooled, and my family attended an evangelical megachurch. We were members of a weekly evening Bible club, and my mother read the Bible aloud to us each morning after breakfast as part of our curriculum. We were also required to read the Bible on our own before breakfast, and in the evening my father prayed with us before bed. As I grew older I took apologetics classes with a family friend who was also a professor at a local theological seminary. Religion was integrated into every part of our lives.

Today, I am raising my own kids in a nonreligious household.

As I parent my two young children, I face several challenges. How do I raise my children with the freedom to form their own beliefs that I never had, while at the same time having strong convictions of my own? How do I balance both my own desire for peace with my parents and my children’s deep love for their grandparents with the freedom with which I am raising my children? How do I parent differently from my parents without splash damage hitting my children? None of these questions has an easy answer. In many ways, I’ve spent my children’s lives flying by the seat of my pants. Still, I’ve learned some things.

I’ve learned that raising children with freedom means letting go. I’ve learned that raising open-minded children in an often narrow world means showing respect for a variety of different beliefs and ideas while also providing them with specific values and skills. I’ve learned that negotiating between the freedom I am giving my children and my relatives’ religious certainty requires setting boundaries and expecting them to be respected.

Let’s go back to where this story starts. I grew up in a very happy home. There were problems, yes, but there was so much good. I loved church, and Bible club, and apologetics class. I spent time in the church library after services searching for new Bible commentaries or books on creationism to read in my spare time. I was passionate, and earnest, and content. I no longer hold the beliefs I did then, but my biggest objection to my upbringing is not the specific beliefs I was taught but rather the expectation that I must conform.

I didn’t realize how heavy this expectation was, or what it really meant, until I was in college. It was there that I was exposed to mainstream science, and after thorough study I became a theistic evolutionist. I still believed God created the world; I simply believed he’d done it through evolution. I didn’t realize that that seemingly small change in belief would entirely transform the way my parents viewed and treated me. I cried so many times as I watched my parents’ rigid expectations destroy our relationship. It felt like my entire world was shattering. I don’t want my children to ever have to face that.

How do I, as a parent, ensure that my children have the ability to meaningfully make their own choices free from the constraints of parental expectation? Much of that hinges on how I, as a parent, respond to the choices they make as they grow, and on how I treat others. It does mean balance, though. I want my children to grow up to be kind, caring, honest adults who have the ability to recognize and navigate through and around abusive structures, ideas, and relationships. Simply put, I want them to have tools.

Over time I’ve come to realize that I care more about teaching values and skills than about teaching specific beliefs. I want my children to have the freedom to explore various religions and beliefs, to make their own life journeys. I don’t want them to feel obligated to believe something just because I do, or to feel judged because they believe something different. As they prepare for their life journeys, I can give them overarching values—kindness, empathy, honesty—to guide them, and specific skills—critical thinking, awareness of abusive structures, the ability to stand up to unjust power—to protect them.

But even when I give my children values and skills, I still can’t determine whether they will adopt those values or use those skills. As a parent, all I can do is equip them and then let them fly. And sometimes flying means falling.

I had a landlady once whose daughter had been in an abusive relationship as a young adult. My landlady told me that she had voiced her concerns but then had focused on just being there for her daughter and loving her. She realized that her daughter had to see the problems for herself, and that if she continued bringing them up she would only drive a wedge between them. After several years, her daughter recognized the warning signs herself and left her abusive partner. The first person she went to was her mother, who had been there for her and who hadn’t judged or pushed the issue.

As a parent, all I can do is equip them and then let them fly. And sometimes flying means falling.

I am sure there will be times, once my children are grown, when they will end up in situations that I find genuinely concerning. I can’t change that. All I can do is provide my children with tools and set them free to make their own decisions.

While I don’t want to see my children enmeshed in abusive relationships or abusive structures, I don’t view religion as inherently abusive. I see religion as a structure that can be used for good or bad, depending on who is wielding it and what it is being used for. Recently, my six-year-old daughter suggested that if we moved we might need to go to a different denomination. I told her that I liked our Unitarian Universalist (UU) church because it is focused on doing good. “And Grandma’s church is focused on God?” she asked. “Yes,” I told her, “and some churches, like your Aunt Lindsay’s church, are focused on doing good and on God.” I want my children to understand the diversity of beliefs available to them.

Several years ago, when my daughter was around four, she declared that she believed in Jesus and Persephone. Jesus she had learned about from things she’d picked up from the wider culture, from books she’d received from relatives, and from the times we’d attended church with her grandparents. Persephone she had learned about from books we checked out from the library during her Greek mythology phase. And you know what? I let that be. I may find that combo a bit odd, but ultimately her beliefs are hers, not mine. When she asked what gods I believed in, I told her I didn’t believe in any at all. She found that interesting. It presented a moment to talk about the diversity of belief.

I have a number of friends who are pagan. I could declare this “woo” and criticize or laugh at it, but after growing up with such rigidity in belief, I find I can’t do that. Personally, I am not religious. I am fairly certain there is no such thing as a supernatural world. But I understand that ceremonies can have meaning, and that people draw their own purpose and values from a variety of sources. I love that my friends have the freedom to form their own beliefs—I love having that freedom myself—and I know that if I model respect for others’ beliefs, my children will see that and feel their own freedom to explore.

Sometimes my children crave certainty, and to have “their” beliefs spelled out for them. Several months ago my daughter asked me what “we” believe about heaven and hell. It made me uncomfortable, because it reminded me of the expectation growing up that “we” as a family must all believe the same things. But I realized that at her age, she’s still just trying to figure out where she fits in this world. And so I told her what I believe, and what her father believes, and told her that it’s up to her to decide what she believes for herself. But I also told her that she absolutely doesn’t have to figure that out now, and that even after she’s a grown-up she may change her mind about what she believes over time.

And perhaps that is the biggest difference: I present belief as a journey, not an ultimate destination or a predetermined conclusion. I want my children to grow up comfortable with asking questions and with changing their beliefs as needed. I want them to see life, and belief, and love, and learning, as a journey. I want them to be able to embrace themselves as they are, and where they are, without having to always look backward or forward. I want them to know that they don’t have to have all the answers.

In the UU church, I have found a community that supports my view of belief as a journey. UUs can be atheist, agnostic, or religious, but they are united by common progressive values such as respect for difference, a belief in equality, and deeply felt humanism. At our UU church, my daughter’s religious education begins with the students repeating a simple but profound phrase: “We are the church of the open mind, the loving heart, and the helping hands.” I love having a church community that embraces my children as they are and supports them in their own journeys while educating them about the diversity of belief.

Of course, raising my children with the freedom to choose their own beliefs after growing up in an evangelical home myself can cause tension with my parents. My relationship with my mother and father was extremely rocky for a time but has improved in recent years. However, they still do not know that I am not religious. They know that I am politically progressive, they know that we take the children to a UU church, and for now, that is enough.

My daughter knows that my parents do things differently in their home than we do in our home. Some differences are pretty obvious: They pray before meals and we don’t. Other differences may be initially less obvious, at least to a child in the first grade. Still, I’ve explained to my daughter that her grandparents’ church believes different things than our church does, and that she seems to get.

When we visit my parents, we go to church with them—they have family friends who like to see the children grow, and for us it’s a sign of respect while visiting—and when we do so, we allow our daughter to attend Sunday school. The first time we did this (she hadn’t been old enough before), I reminded her that her grandparents’ church teaches different things than ours does. “That’s okay, Mom,” she told me, “it will be interesting to learn about what they believe.”

I love her attitude and her inquisitiveness.

Currently, at age six, my daughter does not believe in God. After her Jesus and Persephone period, she decided on her own that gods and goddesses are all just stories—although she’ll sometimes inform me that she doesn’t know what she’ll believe when she’s older, and she very definitely still believes in mermaids: “They could be real, Mom! They could! We haven’t explored all the ocean yet!”

Recently, my daughter told me that we need to tell her grandma “that God is fake,” because she would probably want to know. She was very adamant and very concerned about this. And so we had a conversation, my daughter and I, about what makes beliefs “real” or “fake” and how to interact with those whose beliefs are different from ours. I told her that her grandmother believes she has seen proof of God’s existence in her own life and that she already knows that some people don’t think God is real. I also talked about how people draw meaning from their beliefs, and we talked about links between religion and culture, friendships, and family.

I don’t want my kids to get caught up in conflict between myself and my parents. My parents know we are doing many things differently as we raise our kids and have learned to respect that in their own way, probably because I haven’t exactly given them any other option. I’ve made it clear that they aren’t to use corporal punishment with my children when they watch them while my husband and I go out for an evening, and I’ve made it equally clear to my mother that my children love school and that I will not be swayed to homeschool by her tears. And at this point, we’ve reached a sort of equilibrium. If my parents fail to respect our boundaries, or try to use our children as a weapon against us, we will make changes. Until then, I love taking my children to my childhood home, and they love it too.

I don’t want my kids to get caught up in conflict between myself and my parents. Neither do I want my kids to think badly of my parents.

In all this, I don’t want my children to think badly of my parents. The other day I mentioned something we were doing that was different from how I was raised, and my daughter astutely noted, “Oh, so you are doing some things differently with us from how you grew up?” It was the door to an interesting conversation as I explained that, yes, I am doing some things differently, but I am also doing some things the same, and that if she has children when she grows up, she will have to decide what to do the same as how she was raised and what to do differently. I wanted her to see life as a journey, and different people as different.

And that—that right there—is important. I want my children to know that I don’t expect them to grow up to parent just the way I do, or to believe just the way I do. I want to model a working out of beliefs and life choices, a negotiation between what came before and what comes next. I want my children to understand that life changes, that people change, that beliefs change, that relationships change, and that that is okay.

LIBBY ANNE grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. College turned her world upside down, and she is today an atheist, a feminist, and a progressive. Her popular blog Love, Joy, Feminism at Patheos focuses on leaving religion, her experience with the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, the detrimental effects of the “purity culture,” the contradictions of conservative politics, and the importance of feminism.