Raised religiously (Bible Belt hometown). Dad is Presbyterian - Deacon and Elder in the church, does missionary work in the Sudan, never (and I mean NEVER) misses services. Mom is Lutheran, but indifferent. Dad’s second wife was Catholic. Current wife is Southern Baptist. Stepfather is Methodist.
I’m Wiccan, currently studying a lot of Buddhist and Hindu stuff 
Add me to the list of people who are confused by the difference between “indifferent” and “atheist”. I voted “atheist” because it’s clear to me now, as an adult, that my parents are atheists, but yeah, we didn’t exactly discuss how there weren’t any gods or how religion is false when I was a kid. My parents are hippies and when I was a kid, most of our social circle were too, so it was not unusual that we didn’t do religion. One of my mom’s friends was Buddhist, I guess. If we had been surrounded by lots of religious people, maybe my parents would have felt the need to be more active about explaining to me about our lack of religious faith, but it didn’t really come up.
For me the difference between being raised atheist and being raised indifferent, is that in my family, religion is seen as one of those imaginary things people believe in, not backed up by anything, you truly wonder how people can believe in it.
My great-aunt was the only religious person, really religious (going to mass, praying, keeping many pious images and stuff, trying to live according to catholic principes etc) all her life. When she died about three years ago and that her sister, my grand-mother, went through the house to sort her stuff and discovered even more religious stuff, I remember her saying with surprise that it seemed that she did really believe in it after all!
Picture this, my grand-mother and her sister lived in the same village street for decades and decades, seeing each other each week and usually several times a week, my grand-mother saw her sister being religious, and yet she never really believed that it was something she was believing in her heart for sure.
For me it tells something about my family view of religion.
Raised indifferent – parents were nominal protestants (Baptist & Episcopalian), but never talked about (or, as far as I know, even thought about) religion. I did go to Catholic school through 12th grade, but that was just a cost/quality decision.
Obviously they never cared about my atheism, and my father stopped being even nominally deist a few years ago, in his 60s. “I tried,” he said, “but it’s just too stupid.”
If you can’t tell the difference, then that seems pretty clear to me that it falls under the “indifferent” heading. If you read the OP, you can see that it’s about establishing whether or not people on this board have been raised explicitly to believe that all religions and supernatural occurences are false.
Uh, pretty sure she managed to keep her job because the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t teach that the Old Testament is literally true. I seem to recall being taught that Biblical literalism, especially in the OT where there were hundreds and thousands of years between the oral and written traditions, violates the doctrine of free will. (I.e., if every word of it is literally true, that removes any possibility of the people who wrote it having chosen to write something other than what God theoretically dictated.)
I was raised religiously and on a different planet. I chose the first one.
Raised strict Southern Baptist, there is no better way to make an atheist.
I was raised as a “Sunday Christian”. We very faithfully attended a mild-mannered United Methodist church every Sunday, but there was no mention of God during the rest of the week.
As a teenager I started going to the local Southern Baptist church because they had a big youth group that traveled a lot. At first they got me really enthusiastic about religion (those youth rallies, you know) but I experienced a severe backlash where I realized that I didn’t believe most of the things they were telling me. It put me off religion almost entirely. Maybe it would have happened anyway, or maybe not, if I had stayed with the more laid-back UMC.
Raised what I consider to be Evangelical Christian (went to Baptist and Lutheran churches though). Christianity affected every aspect of family life. My whole family (except for myself and my two sisters- we don’t seem wired that way) remains very religious. They don’t even believe in evolution, despite being well-educated - they all get arts degrees, so I doubt they’ve ever learned about it in depth.
I’ve been a science-loving atheist for some time now. Before that I was agnostic. I have never felt a strong faith in god, although I thought he existed for years and tried to develop a relationship.
Raised Baptist. Pretty hardcore, really.
Sunday school and Sunday morning services every week, as well as Sunday evening services for several years. For about ten of those years, my mom taught preschool Sunday school, and for about five of them, I taught third grade Sunday school. Wednesday evening services for a few years, until our church started an Awana program (essentially an evangelical program targeting kids) that ran on Wednesday evenings, and got my mom to run it for free. I went through the entire program, earning the Awana Citation award… from the link: “It represents a minimum of 10 years worth of hard work and service. The Citation is their reward for having spent countless hours attending group meetings, working with children, getting involved in their communities, completing 10 years of biblically grounded curriculum and learning more than 700 Bible verses.” After getting that, I then ran one of the Awana groups, for K-2 grade (now called “Sparks” in the program).
We ended up quitting the church because they were pressuring my mom to give and volunteer more time… a single mom with a muscular dystrophy disease working two jobs (yet living below the poverty line) who taught the most physically demanding of the Sunday school classes (yay, wrangling 30+ preschoolers!), and ran their kid’s club. We began church-hopping, but her health continued to decline, and the spell that religion had held was broken. I was pretty happy about it; I’d never liked the social atmosphere of church, hated the constraints all that attending put on things, and was resentful that I had been pressured to do all of that extra stuff.
During the week, I attended a private evangelical (and weirdly political/anti-government) Christian school, with Creationism-as-science the basis for nearly everything we did, chapel every week, and several weeks spent a year in “American Coalition of Unregistered Churches” conferences… the school was run by Greg Dixon and his Indianapolis Baptist Temple, which garners mention in this Southern Poverty Law Center article.
Yeah, I went to Catholic school, and we were never taught that the Bible was literally true. We were mostly taught that many of the stories were meant to be metaphorical - like the 7 days God took to create the earth could have stood for any length of time, Moses being in the desert for 40 days just meant he was out there for a long time, etc. We also learned about evolution in science classes.
There have been polls about this here, most people in Catholic schools were taught similar things.
I was raised “religiously” in the sense that my mother is an observant Hindu, and took me to the mandir on holy days, so I voted for that. I also attended (Anglican) parochial schools until I was 13.
On the other hand, both of my parents were physicians with a solid grounding in evolutionary biology and would have laughed at anyone who took creationism seriously.
I was raised indifferently. The only time I ever went to church was for weddings or when my babysitter brought me (with permission from my parents).
We might have been raised religiously but one of the men heavily involved with the church was a bit too interested in kids. Nothing was ever proved. In fact I’m not sure if anything was brought up against him, but he gave my Mom a bad feeling and she didn’t want me or my brothers around him.
There is this story that nicely sums up my family and religion.
My Great-Grandfather was a Minister in an area with a few small towns. He was the only Minister in the area so every Sunday he would travel to each church to perform the sermon. Of course his family went with him to every one so my Grandfather had three sermons every Sunday. When he grew up he decided that he had banked enough church time that so he didn’t have to go anymore.
My father noticed this and one Sunday asked his Minister, “When will I be a man?” The Minister said that that was a difficult question, why does he want to know. My Dad responded, “When I’m a man like my Dad, I wont have to go to church anymore.”
And true to form he didn’t.
Church of England Chrsitians at home (ie believers but no one mentioned it, not the done thing you know) but a religious schooling for me, service and prayers every day and once a month an hour service in a cathedral.
Sally Struthers? Could you please explain? If it is a joke, I don’t get it…
Simlare to mine - my mom was raised Episcopalian, and my dad became an one from Baptist when they got married. We went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals, and did the “Now I lay me down to sleep” thing plus “God bless Mommy, God bless Daddy…” every night, but that was about it. But my parents are classic tight-assed WASPs who don’t really talk about how they feel about anything. By the time I was confirmed, I’d pretty much decided most of it was bunk, but didn’t really make it plain to them until well after college. I was really surprised at how much it upset them; I had no idea any of it really meant anything to them. It always felt like “we go to church because that’s what people do” when I was growing up.
Raised C & E Catholic till about 3rd grade, then Grandmom got Mom, my brother & me going to Christian & Missionary Alliance regularly. Dad & Grandad attended occasionally- were more casual Christians. Then I took it to Eleven & became Charismatic, Rapturist, Bircher- now moderated but not recovered nor looking to be. I attempted anti-Evolution but it didn’t take- Dad would be proud.
Mom & I still both pretty religious, members of Assembly of God (Mom’s not into glossolalia tho). Brother casual but he does believe. Dad & Grandparents now passed away.
My father had been a minister and we always attended Sunday School and church service. However, we were not fundamentalists, his interest was more from a historical, philosophical and community service perspective and we never had any kind of indoctrination forced upon us.
4.37%(10 members) raised in an atheist household. Even I would have thought it would be a little higher than that.
I think you need to add the indifferent and atheist scores. You gave no clear definition and reading the comments any number of us could have answered either way between these options (myself included) depending on exactly how you worded your distinction. My parents didn’t actively promote atheism, but then they did promote science and scepticism (in general, just not in relation to religion in particular). So atheism was the logical outcome of what they promoted and I fit **Lekatt’s **characterisation. But I voted indifferent because atheism wasn’t actually and specifically promoted by my parents.