Sounds to me as if you are dealing with a classic case of late adolescent rebellion?
If so, it is likely that nothing you do will improve matters, and may even be counterproductive.
Where is this new attitude coming from? I’ll hazard a guess that it may well be a boyfriend.
Hormones can really mess up the young brain.
Probably all you can do is hope she grows out of it…
Disagreee. If a 20 year old woman wants to turn her back on her family’s strongest beliefs, the least she can do is explain why. The OP doesn’t have to get in an argument with her, but should at least be able to ask her to articulate her feelings.
Would you say the same thing if the situation were reversed and she was escaping from a coercive and controlling cult environment?
At 20 she is legally an adult.
Anyway, we are straying rather far from the original topic here.
Maybe this would be better spun off into a new thread…?
Coercive and controlling? Maybe not. But if her loving family were devout Catholics, or enthusiastic Mormons, and she became an outspoken atheist, or a Jew, yes, i would expect her to talk to her family about why she made that decision.
It depends on the dynamics of the family, surely?
If the family are rigid in their beliefs and hold them as absolutes, I can see why a child who leaves those beliefs would not want to talk about this to the family. It would only cause conflict.
But again I’m going to say… this is off topic, and @puzzlegal as a moderator should probably spin this off to a new thread?
Sure, that seems like a good idea. Here it is.
Any conversation I have tried to have with my devoutly Catholic about my lack of faith, starting from age 14 to now (so well over 40 years) has resulted in extreme displays of anguish, betrayal and disappointment from my parents. It’s not any kind of reasoned discussion.
It doesn’t come up much now that my child is past the stage where she might receive sacraments, but every now and then my mother or father will “forget” and try to get me to do something I’m not comfortable doing and then there will be a blowup.
Until Trump, this was the only issue which caused tension between my parents and me (and my wife). Otherwise we go along very well.
I was raised by pretty hyper-religious parents and I didn’t truly start to deconstruct and turn away until my mid-30s.
In my case, I would not describe it as “rebellion,” as if I were trying to be edgy or something of the sort, quite far from it. Rather, it was simply that I realized one day that there were numerous big, glaring, flaws of Christianity that I had been subconsciously squelching for decades. I decided that I would no longer suppress them, and once I did, I faced a serious reckoning with all my beliefs (which weren’t even really my beliefs, but rather, the beliefs my parents had tried to plant in my head from age 5.)
I can still remember when I told my parents that I rejected every aspect of religion and the supernatural, not limited to their Catholicism. I was in my young 20s. I had rejected any belief in G/god(s) when in grade school. It shouldn’t have been any great shock to anyone who knew me that I didn’t believe or belong to any faith, but looking back at it, I’m not sure what good was served by my telling them so blatantly that I rejected their beliefs. As I recall it, the way I said it was somewhat mean and unnecessary.
Of course, years later it woulda likely come up anyway when my mom expressed the believe that my wife and I weren’t REALLY married. I’m sure she baptized our kids in the kitchen sink. When our kids were older we had some kinda ceremony in our UU church. We had a Catholic friend act as sponsor and - with approval of his priest and our minster, he baptized the kids. My mom’s response was, “It didn’t really matter b/c it wasn’t in a real church.” 
There is only so much you can do WRT true believers.
My beliefs have shifted over the years and are a bit complicated. I used to identify myself as agnostic, but once I realised that the fundamental religion wasn’t the problem - rather the church and its synods, I started believing again. Is it foolish? I’m not sure. But what matters to me now is that I recognise that organised Christianity is a disease, and THAT’S what we should be fighting against. Believing in God and Jesus isn’t the problem, as long as you have love in your heart for others, and do good out of the kindness of your own heart, and not just because He told you to.
Personally, if she’s wanting to get into a Christian faith, KEEP HER FAR AWAY FROM A CHURCH. All they do is discourage critical thinking and push conservative propaganda disguised as “the Word of God” (this is from experience by the way). You should allow her to explore different expressions of faith on her own if she wishes to do that, but keep her away from any church if you can. She can believe in a god, but she should still be able to think for herself.
My ex-wife dragged our kids to mass every Sunday and Holy Day. They hated it, of course. I tried to tell her that when they hit teen years, they would likely make up their own minds about all that bullshit, which made her very angry. Sure enough, they’ve all put it in their rear-view mirror as adults, while their mother is still devout. They are all still friendly, but I’m sure their mother is very disappointed about it.
Is the wife an ex for this very reason, or was it unrelated?
Part of it. She was very prudish, which didn’t help.
No presumptive aspersions cast upon the OP, but I’ve seen this issue a lot since I’ve lived in the South, especially in the mainline religions.
A sizable portion of the congregation is parents who employ church as an extension of their own authority as well as an instrument of social conformity. The church is most happy to comply (and, unlike the evangelical mega churches, don’t have the means to give the kids much of a place there for themselves besides the odd basketball court). Inevitably when the kids reach the age of flexing their independence, off they go.
Then it’s a part of the overall push/pull of tribalism vs alienation of society. Old people lose social connections after retirement, kids moving far off due to the economic landscape, death of their spouse, etc. And all that’s left is their church. That was my parents’ church, and it’s where in 2004 and again in 2020 the priest told them that John Kerry and then Joe Biden weren’t necessarily “good Catholics,” and there was nobody there to push back.
Me, I’d visited them Unitarian Univeralist church for a few months: a welcoming place for Southern outcast: transplanted Yankees, Wiccans & Buddhist lites, atheists & agnostics; and of course gay kids kicked out of the churches of their childhoods. It all ended when a new pastor, a conservative lesbian, arrived and all the non-strictly UU activities were ended, and the church became the gay lifeboat for the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta. I couldn’t begrudge them that, especially since at that same time Meetup became a thing that the other others could employ.
Churches could be a place where the same issues faced by not just Abraham and Jesus are considered, but also Dorthy Day, Martin Buber and Albert Schweitzer, etc. But I guess people just can’t help themselves when it comes to their version of how to help each other.
I just can’t imagine this. What business is it of the parents? How much of the rest of their adult offspring’s life choices to you think they have a right to an explanation about? As I understand it (and I’ve never done it, so this is what I have absorbed from other people whom I respect) you raise your kids the best you can and hope for the best outcome*. Especially if you’re no longer supporting them, they don’t owe you (the parent) explanations about anything at all. It’s their life, not yours. There is nothing so personal as the choices one makes about religious belief.
I am very grateful that this was apparently the view of my parents. They were happy for me to share, but they didn’t insist it was their right.
edited to add: *And if you’re disappointed, you keep it to yourself unless you want to drive your children away.
Right? I didn’t say anything about rights. But i would expect a child who is close to their parents to want to SHARE something that important in their life.
I don’t know, I was never close to my parents. I was over 40 before I came out to them (of course, they already knew). And I only needed to share that for my own sake. Other than that, I do not have any experience of wanting to share personal and important things with my parents.
Whatever the child does regarding sharing is up to them. Parents need to manage their own expectations and keep them to themselves (in my opinion, of course).
Way to take things out of context. The OP wasn’t asking about running away from a cult, they were expressing concern that their daughter was sliding into a toxic, right-wing version of Christianity.
And I feel truly sorry for the people in this thread who became estranged from their parents over religion. All three of my children have taken a different, non-organized religion path from my wife and me. They are good, moral, decent human beings - which are the values we’d hoped religion would help us instill in them in the first place.
I did this when I was 19, but it wasn’t because of sudden realizations. I was raised in a very hellfire and brimstone church and had feelings that we couldn’t be the only church to figure things out for many years. What kind of god would say only the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 was going to heaven and all the rest were going to burn in hell for eternity? Also, a lot of going to heaven has to deal with the luck of where you were born. How many people in the world have been exposed to the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879? I have so many other issues, but this is the biggest one for me. My family wasn’t happy about me leaving, but I haven’t had a day of regret over this decision.
Cool. I saw him open for Weird Al, once.