The neighbor kid pulled that line on me.
“Your parents don’t take you to church? You’re going to hell when you die!”
I rolled my eyes and stopped hanging out with him.
We were eleven, I think.
I’m frankly mystified at the notion that anybody can be forced to believe anything, but I guess it works for some people, or nobody would do it.
When I was 13, shortly after my Bar Mitzvah, I made it known that I no longer believed in a supreme being. It took my parents literally *decades *to accept this. They never held it against me, but they thought that somewhere, deep down, I really did belive in God.
When I was that age, I was still not clear on the fact that Jewish people weren’t Christian. Also, despite the fact that Mother was in the midst of converting to Wicca, I thought that all the Good People were Christian. Even if they were Muslim, Buddhist, etc. :smack:
My own road was kind of strange. Is kind of strange. Brought up Lutheran till I was about 10, vaguely Wiccan for two years, spent a year in Catholic school (Hey, this communion thing is a lot like cakes-and-ale! And the structure of these rituals is so similar…), spent high school and college generally areligious.
Converted back to Christianity – Episcopalian now – about four years after I got out of college. Started going to church last November, told Mother about it at Christmas. She was vaguely surprised. My grandmother was very smug, though my mother’s general lack of reaction took a bit of the wind out of her sails. Grandmother, you see, never approved of this “silly witch” stuff. She was rather looking forward to a row.
“I thought you’d get mad,” she said.
“Long as it isn’t a Lutheran church, I don’t care,” Mom replied. 
I have these discussions with my mother from time to time. I was raised Catholic, but I now consider myself Pagan or Unitarian. Mom refuses to accept this. “So you don’t believe in God?” (sigh) No, Mom, that’s atheism. Catholics don’t have a monopoly on God.
Mom has accused me of leaving the Catholic Church because it’s the “cool” thing to do – as if I’m in junior high and trying to sit at the popular kids’ table. I’d laugh if I didn’t find it so insulting. I’ve told her that I’m 31 years old and don’t give a damn what other people think. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. She’s also told me that because I’ve been confirmed, I have no choice in the matter. In her eyes I’m Catholic for all time whether I want to be or not. Sometimes I feel like she’s trying to bully me back to the church.
I think the problem stems from the fact that my mother knows very little about other religions. She was shocked a few years ago when I informed her that Jews don’t believe Jesus is the son of God (“who do they think he is, then?”). And she seemed genuinely interested in the principles of Wicca … until she realized that I was talking about Wicca (“That’s not a real religion! It’s witchcraft!”) I blame her addiction to The O’Reilly Factor. She seems to think that all “good” people are required to be Christian.
Don’t get me wrong – I love my mom dearly and we have a great relationship – but I’ve learned not to discuss religion in her presence. It’s not worth the aggravation.
“Religious” people don’t have a monopoly on irrationality or violence when their children choose a different path. The occasional hard core “unbeliever” can also be a piece of work. My parents were both strongly opinionated atheists—resulting from being disowned by their families when they married (Mom was raised Catholic, Dad Latter Day Saints).
For most of my life I felt a yearning towards God–running the gamut from developing pagan-type rituals with my brothers (offering bits of our food to the gods, etc.) to committing the sacrilege of bringing a Bible into the house. I was beaten for daring to bring “that trash” into the home. I suppose partly as a result, I persisted in reading it. When I went to a church youth group (mostly because a cute guy named Ralph went), I was grounded and made to write “There is no God” over pages and pages of paper.
As a young adult, I converted to a main steam religion, and my parents never forgave or understood. They did not attend my baptism and chose not to come to the ceremonial part of my marriage. I’ve never proselytized to family members, but this respect for their choices has never translated into a respect or attempt to understand mine. They made assumptions about my beliefs based on stereotypes, without recognizing the spectrum of beliefs and opinions that compose Christianity. There was a continual string of demeaning and insulting comments about my faith.
My children were taken to church when they were too little to make choices and later encouraged to attend when they lived at home. It never really seemed much of an issue—church was fun and social and something we all did as a family. Of my three children, one’s beliefs are similar to mine, one is in a significantly different denomination, and one thinks Christianity is a “lot of hoo-ey”. All three delight me and have sound reasons for their choices.
Reading the responses to this thread has given me hope for the future of humanity. I have not (and will not) tell my grandmother I am pagan. I have gone with her to do service at nursing homes. Why tell her (and hurt her) when we both belive the same thing?
“do unto others…”
I was raised by a fundamentalist Christian mother. My Dad had been out of the picture since I was about 3, and my mother told me that he left us because he didn’t love God. I didn’t find out until much later that he was a Christian too, just a more liberal one, and that part of the reason why we moved around so much was my mother was trying to prevent my father from having contact with me.
Anyway, I believed everything that my Mom did, that the Bible was literally true, that most scientists were liars who were trying to keep people from God, that all liberals were baby-killing monsters who were controlled by Satan. Things changed when I was 10 and the manager of our apartment complex reported my mother to CPS because my brothers and I were never in school. This resulted in two things - first, after my mother couldn’t provide sufficient documentation to show that she was in fact home-schooling us as she claimed, she was forced to enroll us in school. I was immediately put in remedial math and reading courses. I could barely read at 1st grade level and the only math I could do was adding and subtracting on my fingers. This also made it possible for my father to find me, though it was a couple of years before he managed to actually meet me.
Anyway, I was unpopular in school because of my beliefs and the way my mother dressed me, so at first I beleived her when she said that public schools were full of evil people. I learned to read very fast and was moved out of the remedial courses in a few weeks. I loved reading, but we had very few books in our house and I didn’t want to read anything from the school library, so I ended up reading the Bible. I had a lot of time so I got through it pretty fast. I started with the New Testament, which seemed weird because Jesus seemed so forgiving and accepting - very different from how my mother behaved. I then moved on to the Old Testament, and met the God I realized my Mom was really worshipping, the guy who urged his followers to commit genocide, the guy who sent bears to kill a few dozen children for making fun of his prophet’s bald head, the guy who advocated rape and infanticide.
It was quite a religious awakenening. I still believed it was all true, but I didn’t want to worship god anymore. At first I tried because I was scared of going to Hell, but I realized that, if god could read my thoughts he knew what was up and I was still going to go to Hell. I became agoraphobic because I was afraid if I went outside some freak accident might kill me and I’d end up roasting in Hell. I didn’t want to go to school and my mom pitched a fit when the authorities came after her again, thinking she was trying to keep me away. I was afraid to discuss my fears with my Mom because I was afraid she’d kill me if she realized how I felt.
I was pretty messed up until my Dad ‘kidnapped’ me when I was 13, I saw how different his interpretation of the Bible was than my Mom’s, and realized if two people can have such radically different beliefs based on the same book, there probably was no one religion that was correct. I became agnostic but came to enjoy going to my Dad’s church anyway.
Blanche–seems like you’ve had a rough row to hoe in life.
I hope you stay on the SDMB. 
Blanche, I have two questions for you:
Seriously, though, it’s impressive that you, and evidently more than a few others, can survive such upbringings to become well-adjusted adults. Humans are pretty resilient creatures…
I wouldn’t say I’m THAT well-adjusted. I’m incredibly jealous and in my early 20s I did some pretty outrageous things - I’ve already posted elsewhere my reaction to discovering my first husband had been cheating on me (revenge cheating with his closest friends and associates), which I saw as a really good idea until I started to mature a little more.
No telekinetic powers, and I hadn’t really developed much by the time I stopped living with my Mom.
I don’t have kids, but I’d say this is probably a better approach than making kids go to church. My mom was big on making sure my sister and I went to church. I don’t think that’s by any means the only reason neither of us shares her Methodist faith now, but I think it might have been a contributing factor. I never went to church again after I moved out when I went to college, and eventually ended up converting to Judaism. My sister I think also never went to church after she moved out, now thinks organized religion is fine for some people but is not for her, is married to a Catholic, and plans to let him raise the kids Catholic.
On the other hand, if you don’t make any effort to share your religion with your kids, they almost certainly won’t end up following it. Like most things, there’s a happy medium in there somewhere, which is probably different for each kid. And some of them aren’t going to share your faith no matter what you do.
I should also point out that what you do on Sunday or Saturday (or whatever) morning isn’t the be-all and end-all of being religious. Discuss religion the rest of the week, and do religious stuff other than going to church, so your kids don’t think that getting up early on a weekend morning and going to services are all there is to religion, or that religion is something you get out of the way one hour (or however long) a week and ignore the rest of the time. If all that religion is to your kids is having to get up earlier than they would like on a non-school morning and sit through a boring lecture, of course they’re not going to want to do that once you let them decide.
I was raised Lutheran - baptised, a few years at a private Lutheran school, confirmed, the whole deal. When I was young (around 11-12) I had a very close and personal relationship with God - I spoke to Jesus as if he was my friend, and I had absolute faith that He heard me and cared and even replied in His own mystical way. I attended church through high school and, while not terribly involved in Youth Group and all that, I mostly enjoyed it.
When I went to college it all just…fell away. I’d lost that feeling of having God as a close friend. I became thoroughly disgusted with people who claimed to be Christian but were, in fact, intolerant and ignorant assholes. I began instinctively wincing at Jesus-fishes and WWJD? bracelets.
I noticed that after I left home for college, my parents stopped attending church as well. My father was raised Lutheran, and my mother was raised Baptist and converted to Lutheranism at the same time I went through confirmation, but after I left home the religion in my family seemed to fade. I began to wonder if they really were Christians, or if they had faked it to give me a religious upbringing. I don’t doubt (much) that they both believe in God - they still pray before meals and whatnot - but my wandering away from the church doesn’t seem to have fazed them.
Now, as I’m getting to the point in my life where I’m thinking about having a family of my own (I’m 27), I’ve found myself thinking about religion again. There are many aspects of many faiths that appeal to me, but I can’t seem to bring in all together into a coherent whole. I keep meaning to try a service or two at the local Lutheran church - old habits die hard - but I keep wimping out at the last moment. As I think about marrying and having children, I begin to see the sense in raising one’s children with some form of religion - not only for the morality (the “love you neighbor as yourself” morality, not the “God hates fags” dreck), but to give a child a sense of history - a sense of belonging to something bigger than his/her microcosm.
The Boy (who will almost certainly become The Husband at some point in the near future) was raised without religion, and is pretty firmly agnostic, but has clearly stated that he will support whatever decision I make on the subject, and will attend church with our theoretical family if I ask him to. He’d never lie to our theoretical children about his beliefs, but he too sees the value in raising children with faith.
Whatever spiritual path I end up choosing to start my children down, I will respect whatever conclusions they reach. You can’t be forced into faith any more than you can be forced into love.