After reading Esprix’s excellent thread in Great Debates about changing religious beliefs from those with which one was raised, I began to wonder about how other agnostics/atheists have dealt with raising their children independent of religious beliefs. I’ve recently had some discussions regarding the idea that children do best raised in a religious environment not necessarily because of the faith, but because of the community.
I was raised without any religious schooling of any kind; we were definitely not a churchgoing family. My mom was raised Catholic but as long as she has been married has been non-practicing. My dad’s an atheist, period - he’s a “God is a crutch” type of guy. My sibs and I weren’t baptized; the only exposure during our formative years we had to religion and churchgoing was through our friends, and that was pretty minimal. I never really thought anything of it until I had teachers and door-to-door proselytizers tell me I was going to hell and it was all my parents’ fault. So I started reading up on religion and asking questions, and I found that I couldn’t buy into any of it. I simply didn’t have the faith. Despite that, I believe I am a good and moral person, and strive to raise my son as a good and moral person, without God. I think that if I can bring him up to be a kind, inquisitive, and considerate person without threatening him with eternal damnation or with the rationale of “God/Jesus/Allah/the Bible says so”, then I’ve succeeded as a parent. I certainly don’t want to hide him from religion, or quash any faith he may have. I want him to make his own choices about his spirituality. But I also don’t think I can, in good faith, raise my son within the bounds of a particular church or denomination because the idea of any God resonates with me not at all. I am just not a spiritual person, and I can’t get past the idea that me giving my son any religious training would amount to a well-intended lie.
This is an issue I’m really struggling with; I hate to think I’m doing my child a disservice by not sending him to Sunday school. Up to this point, I’ve tried to explain to the best of my knowledge why some people attend church, what it means to be Christian/Jewish/atheist, and encourage him to ask questions. In fact, we attended our first seder Passover weekend with my boyfriend’s family, and I have to say that I found it to be a beautiful tradition and rite, as well as a great learning experience.
Jeez. This is convoluted. So I guess what I’m asking is, how hard is it to successfully raise a child in a non-religious home? Is it harder without faith and a community behind you? How do you introduce faith-based concepts and knowledge to your child without endorsing them, or being judgmental?
I wrote a mega-long reply, and scrapped it.
Crux of what I was trying to say:
As a child from a non-religious background, I struggled to cope with my much loved Grandfather (Poppy) dying slowly from cancer. Because they did not have a faith, my parents had not given me any hope for life after death, at the same time they wanted me to be prepared for the inevitable loss of my Poppy, so they told me he was going to die. I had nightmares about death. I would lie in bed, and shake with the fear of dying myself. I couldn’t cope with it, because I was given no hope of the afterlife, I was told that death is when you stop existing. Come to think of it, I was told that death is where you go to sleep and never wake up, and I have a feeling this is when my insomnia started (aged 5)…
I plan to raise my children with no belief in God, because I don’t believe in God as such (I do believe in a Creator, but none of this Bible/Son of God on the Cross/Create the World in 7 Days stuff). I will teach my children there is a Heaven, and that they will be reunited with their loved ones in the afterlife without any mention of a God being involved. To me, this is straightforward. I will teach my children there is a Santa Claus to keep some magic in their lives, and I will teach that there is a Heaven to keep some hope in their lives. As adults, they are free to make their own decisions on these matters, and I hope I can be a good teacher, providing access to all the information on all sides of the matter without influencing them to believe as I do.
cazzle, what a sad story. I’m dreading the day my son has to come face-to-face with the death of a loved one. And I can see how faith in a higher power can give children comfort and hope. But again, this is something I can’t tell him in honesty that I believe in, and I would have to tell him the truth about how I feel. I guess I could say, “You know, some people think that when people die, they go to heaven if they’ve lived a good life.” rather than saying, “Nope. No heaven.” or “Heaven is real, but you have to do this and this to get there.” Maybe just the presentation of ideas is enough?
I think the best thing you can do for a child is not to pound religion into his head. My sister and I were very lucky—our parents never indoctrinated us into any religion. Never said anything pro or con about any of them; just left us to make intelligent decisions when we were old enough.
Give kids some credit—maybe they can handle the rough parts of life without being fed fairy tales. I never believed in life after death, and it just made me appraciate what we have now, more.
Tough Call. I was raised VERY Catholic (last generation of Altar Boys to memorize the Mas in Latin). My wife’s family dropped out of Church early on. We’re raising our daughter without Church. This causes some friction with my parents. There’s a UU church in town, but as with many UU churches, the congregation is tiny. Also, my parents believe that UU is worse than atheism, so it wouldn’t buy me points there.
My daughter has already confronted death – her cat and one grandmother died, both over a year ago. She was up last weekend crying about it again. I’m not convinced that giving her a belief in Heaven would change this, though. Ultimately, I don’t want to teach my daughter anything I don’t believe myself, for whatever reason. I would feel a hypocrite, and I think she’d see through it.
The best you can do, I think, is to teach your children what you believe and why. They’ll see the honesty in it, and the consistency. And you bare a good and moral person, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t even be asking this.
My brother and I were raised entirely without religion. My mother was a freethinker whose parents thought she was a Baptist. My father will occasionally admit to a sentimental attachment to Druidry, but he’s basically agnostic from a long line of agnostics. I think we turned out to be pretty decent people; I never felt in any way deprived, and my brother has never expressed such feelings. He’s agnostic, and I hover on the borderlines between agnostic and Wiccan.
If I should ever have kids, they’re not going to get any religion handed to them. When they’re old enough to decide for themselves what to believe, they’ll find it. That’s the way my brother’s raising his kids, and they’re doing well so far.
Oh, and the rest of what you said: I agree that honesty is of utmost importance, even when it’s awkward or inconvenient. Do your parents discuss their beliefs with your daughter, or is that taboo?
I agree. I appreciate that my parents raised me in a similar manner, and I refuse to submit my child to the scare tactics, exclusion, and self-righteous “moralizing” of many, many organized religions. But I would like for him to know what’s out there, and give him the opportunity to make an informed decision. He’s only 7 now, but in a few years I know he’ll have to deal with people telling him he’s going to hell for whatever reason, blah blah blah. When it happened to me, I was completely unprepared for it. I never knew what to say or how to defend myself.
**
I tend to agree with you here ( while the motherly and protective parts of me want to tell him fluffy-kitten stories about how Fido’s gone to a better place, I just can’t do it), but I worry about how I can tell him that while I don’t believe in God for number of reasons, it’s important to respect and not belittle the beliefs of other people. I’ll give you a f’rinstance: The little girl next door to us in our old apartment told my son her father was in heaven. My son said, “My mom says there is no heaven.” She ran screaming to her mother. How could I have prevented that? I’ve told him exactly what I think and why, and he’s aware that it makes us a little weird. I’ve always made it a point to emphasize respect for other’s religious beliefs, whether you agree with them or not (well, I can’t say I feel that way about the Taliban, but anyway…). Beyond that, I’m at a loss. I don’t feel I’m qualified to present much information to him regarding faith and spirituality in an unbiased manner, but I don’t want him to be all uppity about atheism, either. It wound up coming down to, “Listen kiddo, people get touchy talking about God stuff. It’s easy to upset people if what you believe is different. So sometimes it’s best not to talk about it. If it comes up, be honest, but also be nice.”
Re: the respecting other beliefs thing, I do try to lead by example, for what it’s worth. He’s never heard me say anything derisive about another individual’s beliefs, because I don’t really think that way. Except for that time I told the door-to-door Mormons, "THERE IS NO GOD, MORONS! NOW, I MUST RETURN TO EATING BABIES! BWAHAHAHAHAAAA!
Well, my parents DID warn me, “NEVER discuss religion with anyone.” Jews learn this early: if you disagree with someone about religion, they tend to kill you.
*I’ve recently had some discussions regarding the idea that children do best raised in a religious environment not necessarily because of the faith, but because of the community. *
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with community, but keep in mind that a church isn’t the only place to find it.
I believe I am a good and moral person, and strive to raise my son as a good and moral person, without God.I think that if I can bring him up to be a kind, inquisitive, and considerate person without threatening him with eternal damnation or with the rationale of “God/Jesus/Allah/the Bible says so”, then I’ve succeeded as a parent. I certainly don’t want to hide him from religion, or quash any faith he may have. I want him to make his own choices about his spirituality.
Pardon me for going into gush mode here, but… you rock! I wish everyone was so enlightened.
I am just not a spiritual person, and I can’t get past the idea that me giving my son any religious training would amount to a well-intended lie. This is an issue I’m really struggling with; I hate to think I’m doing my child a disservice by not sending him to Sunday school.
I know this sounds almostly facetious, but have you considered asking him if he wants to go to Sunday School or not? I mean, you’ve explained your viewpoint about things and told him what Sunday School is about, right? Unless he’s really, really young he may be old enough to make his own decisions about this stuff.
*So I guess what I’m asking is, how hard is it to successfully raise a child in a non-religious home?
Is it harder without faith and a community behind you?
*
While I can’t speak from experience, I would imagine that raising a kid is difficult no matter how you go about it. I think like a lot of things in life, you just have to do your best, attempt to do what’s right, and hope it works out.
Up to this point, I’ve tried to explain to the best of my knowledge why some people attend church, what it means to be Christian/Jewish/atheist, and encourage him to ask questions. How do you introduce faith-based concepts and knowledge to your child without endorsing them, or being judgmental?
Seems like you’ve done it already. If he has questions, you try and explain as neutrally as possible what people believe and why. You’re showed by your actions that you’re not hostile to religions, but at the same time you’ve presumably expressed that (or shown through other actions) you don’t believe in it yourself. So, he has the info, and then you let him make his own choices.
Or maybe I have too simplistic a take on all this.
-Ben
I think one of the keys is consistency. I was raised Catholic/Christian/Jewish. By the time I was ten I was clearly able to see the differences in the beliefs, and gave up trying to make sense of something that it appeared no one else could either.
It may not have helped that my father was a sworn and proud athiest. As much as I hated (or thought I did) my father as a kid, I always wanted to be like him. Just ditching religion outright was not only the easy way out, but the be-like-dad way. Regardless of how much or how little you drill specific religious beliefs into a child, they are going to follow your actions, not your words. At least until they are old enough to make their own decisions.
The one advantage I had with being exposed to several different belief systems, was the lesson in diversity. I learned early on that alot of different people believe alot of different things and all, or none, of them could be correct so respect what they believe. That is the lesson I’m trying to teach my children, respect others beliefs regardless of how much or how little they agree with your own.
It’s a tricky situation, especially where the parents differ in religious beliefs, but it seems to me that the mere fact that you care enough to worry about something like this is setting only good examples for your child/ren, and that is what counts.
I think the key is to simply avoid hypocricy. Don’t raise your kids with some religion you don’t believe in. Tell them that you are agnostic(which is what I think you kinda said) and that they can search for truth on their own.
Be totally honest with them. Tell them you don’t believe in God, so to speak, and that they can believe whatever they believe the evidence points to.
Children see through hypocricy even quicker than adults. Avoid it.
OK–what if you raised the kidlings with familiarity with the idea that SOME people have beliefs about things that are awfully hard to demonstrate empirically, and that some other folks (yourself included, perhaps) have your doubts, but it’s a good thing to know, at least enough to comprehend the typical cultural references, what it is that they believe?
And then you take them for awhile to a Baptist Church on Sunday, and later on on Saturdays you go to a Reformed Temple, and etc etc etc [including Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Born-agains, Sun Myung Moon, Scientology, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, the Native American worship of Gitchimanitou, New Age Wicca], the general immersion routine.
And as they age, if they express any interest in checking out where their agegroup is hanging out, religiously speaking, you encourage that, too, but you also encourage discussion of ethics, philosophy, meaning, purpose, causation, and also the history of organized religions and what they have wrought.
IMHO, that oughta vaccinate them against a lot of blind followerships and the wonders of established institutionalized religions while still leaving them open to wondering whether or not so many folks believing a lot of somewhat similar things might have been on to something.
Raising kids without religion, eh no big deal. Religion is a fast and easy way to give them a sence of simple right and wrong, morals, values.
Raising them without values is bad, very, very bad. But not using a prepackaged set is of no real concern. I happen to like my prepackaged set my parents gave me (mostly because its really flexable and encourages a lot of thinking through morality on your own) But if you haven’t found something you are comfortable with, no, don’t feed what you consider sub standard stuff to your kids. They’ll know and lose respect for you.
Give them what you feel is right and let them make educated choices. And love them dearly regardless of if they agree with you or not.
I raised without religion, and IMO, I turned out okay. I would like to raise my (hypothetical) children with religion - not because atheism leads to immorality or anything like that - because it is important to me. I teach Hebrew school, and I can tell how little Jewish education my kids are getting in their homes. Their parents expect it all to come from us teachers, I guess. Although I’m not particularly eager to have children (I’m 22 and not married), I look forward to teaching my kids Jewish traditions. That’s just something special that I wouldn’t want to leave to strangers.
No religion, no problem. Me and my 3 sibs were raised without any hints of faith or religion. It wasn’t a taboo subject, it just never came up… much like we never discussed the inherent silliness of baseball
As for trying to expose children to religions, I personally wouldn’t bother much. Religion, like the Beatles, is in the water. Some regions have a higher concentration than others, but it’s really hard to have missed it completely by the time you finish puberty.
If your child does turn out to be fascinated with religion, there are lots of different ways to gain exposure. Personally I took classes in Cegep and University to examine a bunch of religions… which I think gave me more of a historical appreciation of the faiths in question, rather than going to the appropriate ‘religious instruction’.
Just remember to set rules, enforce them, and don’t try to be your kid’s best friend until they’re adults
Now how can I take your response seriously if you’re gonna talk about baseball like that? Hm…maybe I should set up a shrine to baseball, and establish a set of morals from that. Stealing is good…I’ll have to give it more thought.
This is pretty much how I grew up. If I wanted to find anything out about it, I did it on my own, when I was old enough to care. However, in my personal situation (I’m an atheist, my boyfriend is a non-practicing Jew, and his mother is a very opinionated and very practicing Jew) I’d like to provide at least basic information to my son, because I know he will be exposed to at the very least Judaism through people close to us. Plus I’d like for him to be prepared when people call him a godless heathen.
My family always celebrated the typical Christian holidays, but without any religious significance attributed to them. So I still do this with my son. Now that we have a Jewish influence, we’ll most likely take part in, to some extent, some of those traditions, and I think that’s great.
That’s the way I see it, too. But I’m unsure as to how I can raise him in such a manner, yet without sounding judgmental or snide towards people for whom religion is a very important and real part of their lives. I mean, how can I say on one hand, I think God is a fairy tale and organized religion is intended to make people blindly obey, BUT that doesn’t mean people who feel differently are necessarily stupid or wrong for thinking so? Maybe it’s simply a tolerance issue; maybe the best way is to teach by example. I really don’t feel that way, so I hope he picks up on that.
You’ve neatly encapsulated what I’d like to do. Given enough information, he could really think about it, you know? And he’s got a lot of time, so that’s good.
I agree. However, some people in my acquaintance feel otherwise: that giving a child a religious education does not equal endorsing that religion. I think that basically amounts to hypocrisy. But I felt I needed to give it some thought…and here I am.
You hit it on the nose. This is exactly what I hope to avoid. Sometimes I wonder if I am what I am because I just wanted to be like my dad. I hope that if I show my kid that there are alternatives to what I believe, and he sees something that really feels right to him, that he’ll explore it more and come to his own conclusions.
Exactly. We’re in Chicago, so we see a lot of differing viewpoints on just about anything you can think of, and that’s why I love it here. Anything that I can do to encourage thought and exploration on his part is a good thing.
You’re right - but it is somewhat more difficult to find any sort of community outside of religious groups. At least for me it has been, maybe I’ve not tried hard enough. The argument my boyfriend’s mom made with this is that the community you become part of through shared religious beliefs also serves to support the moral teachings of that religion. In other words, it makes parenting easier and more effective because you have “backup”. While this may or may not be the case, I don’t think it would justify indoctrinating a child into, as Medea’s Child said, a prepackaged set of morals – the bad thing is, some of these you may not agree with, but feel obliged to go along with because of the “community”.
Aww…blush and curtsy. Thanks.
Actually, no, I haven’t, mainly because I know what his answer would be. One Sunday morning we had some proselytizers come to our door to convince us to go to their church that day. After I told them we weren’t interested, my son said, “Mom, I’m so glad we don’t go to church on Sundays because we can stay home and watch cartoons instead.” I have a feeling his response to extra school right now would be similar. He’s only 7, so while he might be curious about religion, he’s not willing to devote potential cartoon time to it. And I can’t really argue with that. I mean, Tom & Jerry is some good stuff.
Yeah, but you never know…screw up enough and you’re raising an axe murderer or professional wrestler.
Maybe I’m making it more complicated than it has to be.
Whew! Sorry about the marathon post! Thanks everyone for your responses. You’ve given me lots to chew on.
I don’t think I would worry too much about how he deals with being called a “godless heathen”. He’ll deal with prejudice against atheism/agnosticism like everyone else deals with the prejudices they run into against their religions (and I do consider it a form of prejudice to consider atheists wrong and feel the need to reform them.) Heck, it might even be a conversational ice-breaker for him. At a party - “Hey, I’m an atheist. Anyone wanna debate religion?” That oughta get things spiced up pretty quick
