Were you forced to go to church as a child? How’d that work out?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My parents were crazy fundamentalists, and my siblings and I were forced to attend church things several times a week. I mindlessly went along with this until I was around 16, when I suddenly became an atheist. This resulted in horrible struggles at home.

I have rarely been inside a church since I left home, 50 years ago. My siblings are also atheists. However, it seems that it is more common for the adult children of my parents’ religious colleagues to retain the grand old religion; many are preachers or missionaries.

2

My older brother and I were forced to attend religious services periodically as children and I became an atheist at about age 14. My brother has continued to attend. So for our family it was a split decision. It turned me away from religion while it brought my brother into religion. Needless to say my brother and I are two very different people.

3

I bought into it and considered the priesthood. Now I’m a vaguely-spiritual atheist (shutup! :wink: ) with an unconscionable number of pastors. It didn’t kill me and I found and find it interesting. Never had the bitterness some folks have, just knew that the RCC was too anti-women so I raised my kids in Catholocism Lite. One has stayed because she likes choir and VBS. I drive her and visit with my friends, one of whom is a year or two older than me, looks 20 years younger and a lot like Lisa Kudrow, bakes, invited herself onto our trivia team, and is . . . married. Nobody’s perfect, I guess. :frowning:

4

Mom took us to Lutheran church. I really enjoyed Sunday School. My brother and I made a lot of friends. I loved hanging out with all the kids on Sundays. The services were ok, I don’t know how much I paid attention.

I kept going on my own accord as a teen after being confirmed. There was a new pastor and a lot of my friends’ families had left the church. I stopped going because I stopped wanting to get up early on weekends.

I still consider myself religious. I still consider myself Lutheran but more ELCA than Missouri Synod (my childhood church was the latter, I find the former to be more Liberal).

My mom started going to Catholic Church again, which is where she was brought up until she took us to Lutheran church. Like me, she finds it comforting and full of good memories.

5

My sister and I, up to high school or so, were required to attend Sunday school, for which I believe our parents may have had an ulterior motive*. We only went to church a couple of times a year, and there wasn’t much commitment behind that. My father was a skeptic, while my mother was more conventional but was also more interested in the social aspect than religion. My sister and I also attended a week-long church-sponsored summer camp for three years, which had a very mild sort of religious instruction associated with it.

I became a conscious atheist around age 13. My (older) sister was uninterested in the issue for years until she became born again much later, an event which I’m pretty sure had nothing to do with these childhood experiences.

*I wonder now if that wasn’t their one reliable weekly chance for a little privacy, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

6

My parents were/are Clinton/Gore Baptists. I was strongly encouraged to go, but when I switched to a more liberal denomination in college they had no problem with it. I still identify as Xian and regularly attend a Unitarian Universalist church with my Jewish wife.

7

Forced is not the correct term for me. People went to church on Sunday. Then we came home and mom made fried chicken.

It was a welcoming place that had a lot social activity for a bashful teen. I would call myself a believer, up until maybe 20. Unfortunately I couldn’t help asking questions. In college I lost the social circle and kept the questions, which no church seems to like. So I guess I had it pretty easy except for naively falling for the whole story and wasting years figuring it out.

8

Raised Catholic, and went to Mass every Sunday until I went off to college. Stopped believing around 14*, but going to Mass was just something you did on Sunday mornings. And, of course, Christmas. I don’t think being forced to go to Mass had any affect on my beliefs, or lack thereof. I wasn’t rebelling. It just stopped making sense.

*Probably younger, but that’s when I realized it. Oddly, it was a lay teacher at a Catholic, all boys HS who pointed it out to me.

9

We weren’t forced to go, but in our house you did what you were expected to do without questioning it.
We also had to go to Sunday school until we were confirmed.

Now the only time you will see me in a church is for weddings and funerals.

Later on both of my parents became a bit annoyed with the church and my father stopped going. My mother never went much anyway.

My mother got religion all of a sudden in her later years and now she is upset that I don’t go to church. Just a few weeks ago she told me she’d give me $500 if I would go to church (any kind, any denomination) for 4 weeks in a row.
She is so sure if I would just go back it would change me into a believer. Especially if I would go to a ‘real’ church and not the stupid Catholic Church. This always leads into a long rant against the Catholic Church, and how she never should have agreed to let us be brought up Catholic, and if we had gone to a ‘real’ church I would be a believer, and my son wouldn’t be shy, and he would cut his hair and look so nice like my cousin’s boys.
I could use the money but even that isn’t enough to motivate me to go.
I’d do it for $5000, though.

10

No. I have never been to a religious service with my parents.

11

Like John Mace, I was raised Catholic by two Catholic parents, but I hesitate to use the word "forced’. It was just what you did on Sunday morning, go to Mass, swallow the wafer, and come home to get ready for football (or baseball, depending on the season) on the TV. Also had several years of CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes taught by nuns as I didn’t attend Catholic schools.

Rather drifted away in my thirties when I made the error of reading the Bible and figuring out that this really didn’t make much sense (I had already started questioning the whole ‘three aspects for One God’ thing in CCD, but let it slide).

Consider myself an strong agnostic (very probably no God, but final evidence not in) and a definite Areligionist (Even if God exists, no religion past, present, or (most probably) future has a clue).

12

If they were really crazy, doesn’t seem likely that would work out, so the question seems to answer itself assuming that premise.

But religions in general are based on some idea that they are true* and good, whether or not exclusively**. So members would naturally try to pass them on to their minor children. Then it’s just the usual potential crisis when children reach near majority and don’t necessarily share beliefs and values of their parent, which could be various cultural affiliations, moral codes etc. not just religion. For example many people without a religion still have a definite moral code, and one wouldn’t be surprised if they teach it to their children. Only first assuming the moral code is false would one say ‘why are you forcing that on your children?’

I’m Catholic not because I chose it from among all religions from a neutral starting point, but I don’t think entirely because I was brought up in that faith like 50 or whatever generations of ancestors. It’s some combination. I perceive (enough) truth, given my feeble ability to know the real truth, and goodness in it, people I loved and admired who brought me up in that tradition (yes ‘had’ to go to Mass), and people I met later on (my wife and her family) also had strong faith which bolstered my own. It worked out OK unless it’s not OK to be Catholic which I know some people think, so I guess they’d say it didn’t work out OK. :slight_smile:

*really any religion with exceptions pretty much proving the rule. I’m not a huge fan of either fundamentalist or very liberal Protestantism truth be told though I respect their members, but in the latter case they seem to have arrived at a ‘religion’ which basically doesn’t believe in itself. Whether or not that can attract many people for long it’s the exception to the general rule of world religions.
**Some religions go much lighter on exclusive truth than others. There’s no barrier to being a Confucian Catholic for example I know. But Confucian parents still try to pass on Confucian values and ceremonies.

13

I was forced to go to church and fucking hated it. We drifted among different Protestant denominations, which at the time I didn’t think was unusual. Eventually my father just gave up and slept in on Sundays, which I also didn’t think about at the time. I was just so grateful I didn’t have to go anymore.

14

Heh. Just remember, you asked!

My Dad was a very strict “Vatican I” Catholic. My Mother was brought up a snake-handling Baptist, but converted to Catholicism to marry my Dad. We went to church every Sunday, CCD every Tuesday, and narrowly escaped Catholic school. (Local Public schools were excellent, so no need to spend the money.) Very strict, very upright, the family priest who married my parents also baptized me, and had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with us at my Grandparent’s house every year.

Right up until my Dad needed a divorce so that he could sleep with his Argentinian secretary. Suddenly, my Mom switched us to Presbyterian, and started taking us to that church instead. No one from the Catholic church contacted my brother and I in any way to offer support, or even to see if we were all right. We didn’t go back to our Grandparent’s house until decades later when they needed help moving to Florida.

So, Presbyterian. I’m about 10 years old, and I look up at the front of the place, there’s the same guy up there on the same cross, so hey, I’m cool. I sang in the choir, taught Sunday school, went to youth group, it became the stabilizing force in my life. In high school, most of the boys I dated were from church. The occasional retreats gave me a break from my incredibly chaotic home, and probably saved my life.

Until I was 16, and found out that the reason so many of the women of the church treated me like a leper was not, as my Mother had suggested, due to any defect or misbehavior of mine. It was due to the fact that she had been sleeping with the married preacher of the church the whole time we’d been there. His wife was the secretary of my High School as well, and many of the administrators and teachers were not above taking things out on me as well.

So yeah, I didn’t go to church again (Except weddings and funerals) for a couple of decades after that. And no one from the Presbyterian church ever called to check on me. (Except friends my own age who I still hung out with.)

In the end I found a faith that works for me. There are no paid clergy, and no hard rules. There are shared beliefs and spirituality, and a basic respect for all paths to God. So I have a community of faith, without all the trappings that alienated me in the past. And true friendship, from people who reach out to me if I’m away for too long.

15

Went every Sunday as a kid. My favorite hymn was: “Praise God for whom all blessings flow…” When I heard that it meant it was over.

16

Yes, raised Catholic by parents who had been converted as teens/young adults. I went to Catholic elementary and high school. It’s worked out great – my faith is the center of my life and I feel so blessed to have been brought up with the foundation from my parents and educators. I took the wrong path for a while and was inspired to turn back to Him and he came running to get me, like the father in the prodigal son story. It’s a favorite because the father doesn’t sit there and make the son come back and make his groveling speech, he sees him in the distance and runs to get him and carry him back. Thanks be to God He did that for me.

17

Yes, I was. Normal Sundays didn’t bother me too much early on, but holy days of obligation springing up in the middle of the week could fuck right off. Later, I started hating it. I told myself I was a believer but was just lazy. Later I realized that I hated it because I was just going through the awkward motions.

18

I never went to church and didn’t really know what it was. My dog got ran over when I was about 8 and I made a cross for his grave. I asked Mom, “Hey Mom? Do dogs go to Heaven?” She told me, “Oh, there ain’t no such place. That’s just a bunch of crap that people’s made up.”

In the 5th grade some kids asked each other if they’d ever been ‘saved.’ Eventually, they got around to me and I had no idea what they were talking about. I told Blaine, “Saved from what? I ain’t never been in peril.”
He said, “That ain’t what I’m talking about. You know… you ever been saved? You know - SAVED! Will somebody tell him what it means to be saved?”

After listening to them for a while and their arguments over what is required to ‘be saved’, I dismissed the whole thing because they couldn’t agree amongst themselves - so they didn’t know what they were talking about.

In my senior year, I was curious and I asked my dad,* “Dad? Is there a god?”*
He told me, “Well, Boy… I reckon that’s just something you’ll haf’ta figure out for yourself.”

I met a neat girl that I liked a lot. She wouldn’t go out with me because I wasn’t a Christian. So I got interested in church. What I found out was that they’re all out to lunch - even on the basics. The churches and the preachers don’t have the foggiest idea what is required for salvation. I went to a lot of different churches and I listened to a lot of different preachers…
You can only be saved through absolution from a priest. - Catholic
You can only be saved through the only living church - Mormons - Latter Day Saints.
You can only be saved by Water Bapism. - Some Baptist churches - but not all
You can only be saved if Christ chose to love you before you were born. - Calvinism
You lose your salvation if you sin and backslide. - Wesleyan Trinity
You cannot lose your salvation because you are saved and sealed. - Some Baptists
If you fall into sin after salvation, you were never saved. - Vernon McGee, evangelist
You can repent and be saved again. - Pilgrim Holiness
If you lose your salvation you can never be saved again. - Church of Christ
Only those who finish the race will be saved - barely. - Many denominations
There is no need for salvation because there is no Hell. - Unitarian Universalist
Only those who speak unknown tongues have the indwelling spirit. - Pentecostal
Only those who keep the whole law will be saved. Keep short accounts with God. You can’t remain saved if you have un-confessed sins, Etc., etc., etc.

The bottom line is what I have discovered after many years of searching… Yes - there IS a God. But he is not to be found in the commercial ‘Christianity - churchianity’ churches. To find your salvation you must seek it yourself ‘with much fear and trembling’ and don’t rely upon the huxters and hustlers in the podiums of churches. Wide is the way of destruction and narrow is the path of salvation - few will find it.

They won’t find it because they will go to churches and allow the con artists to sell them a false doctrine and take their money. You have to find God’s plan of salvation by your own study and effort.
If one of these is true - then the others are lies - but that doesn’t seem to matter. The preachers all meet for a Saturday breakfast and agree to split up the masses amongst themselves and truth is of no consequence.

Most preachers say that there are ‘good’ people in all the churches and so they can be saved no matter what they believe to be true.

But the Bible says there is none good - no not one - so if good is the criteria nobody will be in Heaven. So what IS the truth?

19

Incorrect. Catholic doctrine says you can be saved if you seek God and try to do God’s will.

20

We were forced to attend Presbyterian church as young kids, then mom got re-married to an Irish Catholic guy and she became Catholic in a big way. As older kids we were forced (more so than before) to attend Catholic Mass. I never believed any of it, and left when I was 13 to move back with my dad. When I was about 20, I converted to Islam. Today, 25 years later, I am pretty non-religious.