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| Children in a church pew. Image source. |
So now I find myself with all sorts of thoughts about religion and parenting.
A bit of background: I grew up as an evangelical Christian, and now I am an ex-evangelical Christian feminist, and my husband is not religious. My parents are evangelicals and I'll be taking little Square Root to their church whenever I visit. And my parents will probably want to read Christian books to him. And in school he'll have friends of various religions. And maybe someone will invite him to their church. And so on.
I don't want to isolate him from evangelical ideology. I can't go to church for mental health reasons, but my kid doesn't have any of that "baggage" and I really believe that if I give him a good foundation of healthy beliefs about morality, he will know to automatically reject any harmful religious ideology he encounters, and so occasionally going to church won't be an unhealthy thing for him.
My opinion about other people's religious beliefs is: I really don't care what you believe about God and religion, I care about how you treat people. For my kid, it's fine if he's a Christian (like me), or if he doesn't believe in God (like his dad), or if he believes any other religion. But it's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL that I teach him how to take care of his emotional health, and to respect other people.
I want to make a distinction between religion and morality. (And maybe these aren't the right terms to use, but I currently don't have better ones.) By "religion" I mean things like whether gods exist, the nature of God, whether the miracles in the bible really happened or not- things where there's not enough evidence one way or another, and so good people have come to different conclusions and that's fine. By "morality" I mean things like how important mental health is, how we need to respect people's boundaries, people have the right to make their own decisions about their personal lives, and so on. Things where we can know what's healthy or unhealthy because we can see the results when people live that way. We have real-life experience interacting with people, and so we can really know these things are true in a way we can't for religious beliefs.
For example, maybe someone believes "God thinks all humans deserve to go to hell." I would categorize that under religion. We can't prove one way or the other what "God thinks" or even if God exists. But how about this statement, which I would categorize as morality: "A God who thinks all humans deserve to go to hell is worthy of worship." Oooh, no. No, that is not true, and we can KNOW that's not true because we interact with humans every day, and our emotions and conscience tell us that people are good and it is good when people feel pleasure rather than suffering. And that anyone who believes otherwise is a monster who is very much NOT worthy of worship.
My kid can believe whatever he wants about religion, but I want him to agree with me on issues of morality.
Also, I don't want to be all negative when I talk to him about church. I don't want the first thing he knows about evangelicalism to be "this church is bad because they will tell you you are worthless and deserve to go to hell." People at church are good. They are just doing their best, even though they have some ****ed up beliefs that ruin the whole thing, FOR ME. That doesn't mean the whole thing is ruined for Square Root. There is still a lot of good he can learn from church people. And if I teach him a good foundation in morality, he will be able to reject the harmful beliefs when he encounters them.
In other words, I don't want to approach this from the negative side, "warning" him about religion. I want to teach him positive things about morality. Instead of "oooh it's so terrible that good evangelicals believe we all deserve to go to hell" I want to tell him "you deserve good things and happiness! all people do! now this doesn't mean other people owe it to you to always give you what you want, and for practical reasons we're not always able to have the happy life we all deserve, but in general, yeah maximizing everyone's pleasure should be our goal, because people deserve good things." I won't talk about hell, but if he knows that people deserve good things, then if anyone ever tells him that he deserves to go to hell, he'll know that OBVIOUSLY he should reject that.
So I'll be writing a bunch of blog posts in this "Taking My Kid To Church" series, about how I plan to handle teaching Square Root about religion and morality so he doesn't internalize harmful ideology like I did.
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Posts in the "Taking My Kid To Church" series:
If My Kid Is Worried About Hell
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