< Sadly, the very first thing that comes up
in a Google Image Search for "mother in law"

There’s a laugh line in my seminar that isn’t meant to be a laugh line. It’s entirely serious, but they always chuckle.

In the section on extended family issues, I recommend letting your kids go to church once in a while with trusted relatives — and they chuckle at the word “trusted,” just a bit. It’s a knowing chuckle, of course. There are both trustworthy and untrustworthy religious folks, and many of us have both in our extended families. The untrustworthy are the sneaky proselytizers, the ones who tell our kids in whispers that Jesus loves them, that “I’m praying for your mama and daddy,” or even drop little hints of hellfire — not as a threat, of course, but as the thing they’re working so hard to save mama and daddy from.

The trustworthy are those who preface their input to my children with “I believe” statements instead of presenting everything as…well, gospel, and respect our decision to let the kids work it out for themselves in the long run.

It is my very good fortune to have a mother-in-law in Category #2.

The daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, graduate of a Baptist college, and devout churchgoer, she nonetheless has been absolutely fabulous about respecting our choices with the kids. I am quite certain she’d rather her grandchildren were being raised in the church, but she’s never pushed the point. When our kids do attend, perhaps 3-4 times a year, it’s always with her.

Her stock has begun rising even further with me lately. A few weeks ago I heard (secondhand) that a member of her church asked if it bothered her that neither of her sons-in-law is a Christian.

“Pfft,” she said. “You listen here. Those two boys treat my girls like queens. I can’t ask for more than that.”

She’s also been known to suggest that I’m more Christian than many Christians she knows. Considering the source, that’s a compliment I’m very pleased to take.

As I talk to nonreligious parents around the country, I encourage them not to assume too much about their religious relatives. Even those who are very serious about their own faith are often more willing to bend than we sometimes think. It’s not always the case, of course. Some will do their level best to put you in hell well before you’re dead, and once you’ve seen that in action, it’s more than an assumption. But I’m convinced that we jump to that conclusion too often. And I’m glad to hold up my own mother-in-law as an example.

Happy Mother’s Day, Babs!

Saturday was the 89th birthday of Pete Seeger, and Saturday afternoon I found myself listening to a Seegerthon on a radio station in Waco, Texas. I was on my way to give the full secular parenting seminar in Dallas, driving from Austin, where I’d given a secular parenting talk.

During my 24 hours in Austin, I learned, and instantly adored, the unofficial slogan of the city:

Austin is weird in that college-town, blue-dot-in-a-red-state way. Nonconformity was on my mind anyway, since the parenting seminar (which I gave on Sunday in Dallas) includes a segment on the importance of helping kids resist pressures to conform and find the courage to be a dissenting voice when dissent is called for.

Ten miles out of Waco, I heard Seeger sing a song I haven’t heard in maybe 25 years — a pretty little waltz concealing a howl of protest against numbing conformity:

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of tickytacky
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same

There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.

Even in the middle of relative nowhere, the song seemed to comment on my surroundings — the thrum of tires on the road, the repeating green EXIT signs, McDonald’s and Burger King signs looming over alternating exits, little tickytacky developments scattered around the Waco fringe.

And the people in the houses all went to the university
And they all got put in boxes and they all came out the same,

And there’s doctors and there’s lawyers, and business executives
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry,
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school

And the children go to summer camp and then to the university
And they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same.

Gotta talk to the kids about that sometime. Work it into a conversation, the whole thing about not being a sheep, about being proud of being different, even knowing it can make things harder.

Wait. Pfft! Not a conversation! Why yak it when you can sing it?

And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of tickytacky and they all look just the same.

There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.

After four days in Texas, I got home tonight in time to sing it to the girls at bedtime. Instant hit. They asked what it meant, what tickytacky is, what a martini is. We sang it again.

I kissed them, turned off the light, and went into my room to blog. I could hear them singing it quietly in the dark, giggling each time they got to “tickytacky.”

Nine-thirty — time to go sing to the Boy!

We live in a lovely subdivision of rolling hills. The parking lot of the neighborhood pool at the top of our block is the only relatively flat patch. I take the kids up once in a while so the girls can ride their bikes in a circle. Connor often comes along to take shots at the basketball hoop on the side of the lot. I drag along a beach chair, sit in the sun and watch the show.

A couple of days ago, our trip to the lot gave me the opportunity to watch a fascinating, age-old dance — the passive-aggressive kabuki play of middle schoolers exploring interpersonal ethics on the fly.

As Connor (12) dribbled the ball around the corner and entered the lot, a complication came into view. Three other middle schoolers were sitting on the curb by the basket — not under the basket, but juuuust off to the left, 5-6 feet from the drop zone. They saw Connor, paused for that telling second, then continued talking to each other. Connor also saw them, stopped dribbling for juuuust that telling second, then continued toward the hoop.

Anyone who thinks they greeted each other and proceeded to work out the emerging conflict of interest has neither met nor been a middle schooler. Neither did they come to blows. The three continued to sit, passively asserting one of the oldest and dodgiest rights in legal history (known various as squatter’s rights, “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” “I Was Here First,” or “You Can’t Make Me”) and silently daring the Boy to infringe on that right.

The Boy, on the other hand, was silently countering with the Greater Need principle, also known as “You Can Easily Slide Over, but This is the Only Hoop.” Both sides were relying on the obviousness of their respective claims.

He began shooting. The three continued talking as if basketballs were not landing inches from them. Connor did the best shooting of his life, since each successful two-pointer went straight down and could be recovered with a quick lunge before it brought things to a head (so to speak). At last one shot hit the rim and went wide left. Three heads ducked. Still no eye contact, though Connor smiled nervously as he ran for the errant ball (preparing himself for the “Heh heh, isn’t this a funny situation we’re all enjoying” defense).

Push, for some reason, never came to shove. After ten minutes and no ball-squatter contact, the girls were ready to go home, and we all did.

It’s interesting to guess what would have happened if someone had actually taken a ball to the head. Since both sides were showing a lack of common sense, outrage over the other’s failure to see what had been the “obvious” solution tends to be the only remaining option for both sides. Instead, it was middle school kabuki to the end.

Click ULTIMATE BIBLE QUIZ to test your Biblical knowledge! Forty multiple-choice questions! Fun for the whole family! My score, gawd help me:

I don’t usually wax political in this space, but there’s an activist organization I’m getting all hot and sweaty for lately. It’s The Interfaith Alliance (TIA), a coalition of 185,000 members from over 75 different religious and nonreligious perspectives founded in 1994 “to challenge the radical religious right” by protecting religious pluralism and the separation of church and state. They’ve had it with the use of religion as a tool of political manipulation and division. They think it’s bad for the church AND the state.

I have a collective crush on these people.

The president of TIA is Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy, Pastor for Preaching and Worship at Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, Louisiana and host of the program State of Belief on Air America Radio.

REV. DR. WELTON GADDY

Gaddy is a Baptist who remembers that church-state separation was woven into the founding of his denomination and remembers why. He is awesome. He is a force of nature. (And I’m not only saying that because he declared himself “so impressed” with my “important work” when he interviewed me on December 22. Goodness, I’ve forgotten about that completely.)

It was TIA that pointed out last week, in a way both brilliant and hard to refute, that “if a potential employer asked you questions about your religious beliefs in a job interview, it wouldn’t only be offensive, it would be illegal.” Yet one interviewer after another in the presidential campaign asks questions about personal religious convictions. And what is a campaign if not an extended job interview?

Asking how a candidate thinks religion and government should intersect — well, that’s a terrific question, and one that’s rarely asked. Instead, we get a litany of questions that violate the Constitutional guarantee that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” (Article VI, section 3), in spirit if nothing else.

This week had TIA drawing attention to an effort by Focus on the Family to put the “National Day of Prayer” (seven days away) squarely in the hands of evangelicals:

The National Day of Prayer Task Force requires volunteer coordinators to sign a pledge stating: “I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those with differing beliefs are welcome to attend.” The coordinators must also sign a statement of faith that includes the following language: “I believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God.” This clearly aligns a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

And so it always goes. When religion and politics mix, “religion” will inevitably become a single narrow expression of religion. In the case of the U.S., that’s evangelical Protestantism.

Anyway, I could go on all day about the great work of The Interfaith Alliance, but I’ll let you chase links on your own if you wish.

TIA homepage

The questions about religion that TIA thinks candidates should answer

The campaign for a more inclusive Nat’l Day of Prayer (if we must have one at all, *sigh*), led by a Jewish group of First Amendment defenders called…wait for it…Jews on First! Oh, how I love it!

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

It’s confirmed: the statistic over which I was so amazed — that 39.6 percent of prominent scientists lost a parent when they were kids — is twaddle. Thanks to blogreader Ryan (who sent the full text of the article I had quoted), I am spared the fate of including a bogus stat in a sidebar in my forthcoming book.

I want to write further about my error (which was silly and avoidable, not a minor slip), but I want to quote a letter from TH Huxley in doing so. Whenever I turn to that letter, though, I am so deeply moved that I have to quote half the letter, just in case someone hasn’t read this remarkable thing. Sometime next week I’ll write about the stat error.

Huxley and his wife had experienced the most unimaginable loss — the death of their four-year-old son Noel. First, a diary entry from the day after Noel’s death, followed by Huxley’s letter a few days later:

September 20, 1860
Diary of Thomas Huxley

And the same child, our Noel, our first-born, after being for nearly four years our delight and our joy, was carried off by scarlet fever in forty-eight hours. This day week he and I had a great romp together. On Friday his restless head, with its bright blue eyes and tangled golden hair, tossed all day upon his pillow. On Saturday night the fifteenth, I carried him here into my study, and laid his cold still body here where I write. Here too on Sunday night came his mother and I to that holy leave-taking.

My boy is gone, but in a higher and better sense than was in my mind when I wrote four years ago what stands above – I feel that my fancy has been fulfilled. I say heartily and without bitterness–Amen, so let it be.

The Queen’s Canon Rev. Charles Kingsley wrote a letter of condolence to Huxley, gently suggesting that he reconsider his agnosticism and accept the consolations of faith in his time of loss. Huxley’s equally gentle response to Kingsley is the most moving testament to intellectual integrity I have ever read. An excerpt:

September 23, 1860

My dear Kingsley –I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife’s account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits–and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us. To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you.

My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted. But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them–and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is—Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie….

I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

Pray understand that I have no a priori objections to the doctrine. No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties. Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that. Why should I not? It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter. Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness. But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel, “I believe such and such to be true.”

All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act. The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms. It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not if I would.

Measured by this standard, what becomes of the doctrine of immortality?

You rest in your strong conviction of your personal existence, and in the instinct of the persistence of that existence which is so strong in you as in most men.

To me this is as nothing. That my personality is the surest thing I know–may be true. But the attempt to conceive what it is leads me into mere verbal subtleties.

I cannot conceive of my personality as a thing apart from the phenomena of my life. When I try to form such a conception I discover that, as Coleridge would have said, I only hypostatise a word, and it alters nothing if, with Fichte, I suppose the universe to be nothing but a manifestation of my personality. I am neither more nor less eternal than I was before.

Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind–that my own highest aspirations even–lead me towards the doctrine of immortality. I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.

Science has taught to me the opposite lesson. She warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.

My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as a part of his duty, the words, “If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that was best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to the source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, I am to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge.

_________________________________

Sit down before fact as a little child,
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion,
follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads,
or you shall learn nothing.
I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind
since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

_________________________________

If at this moment I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those about me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy’s grave my sorrow was full of submission and without bitterness, it is because these agencies have worked upon me, and not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct for ever from the All from whence it came and whither it goes.

And thus, my dear Kingsley, you will understand what my position is. I may be quite wrong, and in that case I know I shall have to pay the penalty for being wrong. But I can only say with Luther, “Gott helfe mir, Ich kann nichts anders.” [”God help me, I cannot do otherwise.”]

I know right well that 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names. As our laws stand, if the lowest thief steals my coat, my evidence (my opinions being known) would not be received against him.

But I cannot help it. One thing people shall not call me with justice and that is—a liar. As you say of yourself, I too feel that I lack courage; but if ever the occasion arises when I am bound to speak, I will not shame my boy.

I have spoken more openly and distinctly to you than I ever have to any human being except my wife.

If you can show me that I err in premises or conclusion, I am ready to give up these as I would any other theories. But at any rate you will do me the justice to believe that I have not reached my conclusions without the care befitting the momentous nature of the problems involved.

I don’t profess to understand the logic of yourself, Maurice, and the rest of your school, but I have always said I would swear by your truthfulness and sincerity, and that good must come of your efforts. The more plain this was to me, however, the more obvious the necessity to let you see where the men of science are driving, and it has often been in my mind to write to you before.

If I have spoken too plainly anywhere, or too abruptly, pardon me, and do the like to me.
My wife thanks you very much for your volume of sermons. Ever yours very faithfully,

TH Huxley

[The complete text is available here.]

[NOTE: In preparing the following blog entry, I fell prey to a classic critical thinking error that goes by several names: “selective reporting,” “predispositional bias,” and “being an idiot.” Though the first several paragraphs are impeccably sound, the section on the Woodward paper is, unfortunately, complete rubbish. I say ‘unfortunately’ because it would have been fascinating if true. Ahh, but that’s how we monkeys always step in it, isn’t it now? I’ll leave the post up as a monument to my shortcomings and prepare another post about the specific way in which I misled myself.]

_______________

You’ve probably seen the studies confirming the low frequency of religious belief among scientists, and the fact that the most eminent scientists are the least likely to believe in a personal God. Very interesting, and not surprising. Uncertainty would have been profoundly maladaptive for most of our species history. The religious impulse is an understandable response to the human need to know, or at least to feel that you do. Once you find a (much) better way to achieve confidence in your conclusions, one of the main incentives for religiosity loses its appeal.

Psychologist James Leuba was apparently the first to ask scientists the belief question in a controlled context. In 1914, Leuba surveyed 1,000 randomly-selected scientists and found that 58 percent expressed disbelief in the existence of God. Among the 400 “greater” scientists in his sample, the figure was around 70 percent.¹ Leuba repeated his survey in 1934 and found that the percentages had increased, with 67 percent of scientists overall and 85 percent of the “eminent” group expressing religious disbelief.²

The Larson and Witham study of 1998 returned to the “eminent” group, surveying members of the National Academy of Sciences and finding religious disbelief at 93 percent. All sorts of interesting stats within that study: NAS mathematicians are the most likely to believe (about 15 percent), while biologists were least likely (5.5 percent).

[Here’s where the nonsense begins. Avert your eyes.]

But I recently came across a related statistic about scientists that, given my own background, ranks as the single most thought-provoking stat I have ever seen.

As I’ve mentioned before, my dad died when I was thirteen. It was, and continues to be, the defining event in my life, the beginning of my deepest and most honest thinking about the world and my place in it. My grief was instantly matched by a profound sense of wonder and a consuming curiosity. It was the start of the intensive wondering and questioning that led me (among other things) to reject religious answers on the way to real ones.

Now I learn that the loss of a parent shows a robust correlation to an interest in science. [Not.] A study by behavioral scientist William Woodward was published in the July 1974 issue of Science Studies. The title, “Scientific Genius and Loss of a Parent,” hints at the statistic that caught my attention. About 5 percent of Americans lose a parent before the age of 18. Among eminent scientists, however, that number is higher. Much higher.

According to the study, 39.6 percent of top scientists experienced the death of a parent while growing up—eight times the average.

Let’s hope my kids can achieve the same thirst for knowledge some other way.

Many parents see the contemplation of death as a singular horror, something from which their children should be protected. If nothing else, this statistic suggests that an early encounter with the most profound fact of our existence can inspire a revolution in thought, a whole new orientation to the world — and perhaps a completely different path through it.

[More later.]

_____________________

¹ Leuba, J. H. The Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study (Sherman, French & Co., Boston, 1916).
² Leuba, J. H. Harper’s Magazine 169, 291-300 (1934).
³Larson, E. J. & Witham, L. Nature 386, 435-436 (1997).
⁴Woodward, William R. Scientific Genius and Loss of a Parent, in Science Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 265-277.

[This column also appears in the April 16 edition of Humanist Network News.]

In a recent article in USA Today (“Am I raising ‘atheist children’?”, March 17), author Nica Lalli addressed a common question for nonreligious parents: “How would you respond if one of your children became religious?” As the topic went rippling through the nonreligious blogosphere, both the consensus inside nonreligious parenting and the false assumptions outside of it were revealed in comment threads.

Like so many questions we hear, the way it is asked is at least as revealing as any answer. Sometimes I can barely hear the question itself for the clatter of the thrown gauntlet. The tone of the question often implies that all my high-minded claims of parental openness are a self-deluding sham—that hearing that one of my kids had chosen to identify with religion would cause me to fly into an icon-smashing, garment-tearing, child-disowning rage, well before the child had reached the stirring refrain of “Jesus Loves Me.”

There’s a strong consensus among nonreligious parents against putting worldview labels on our children or guiding them by the nose into our own. It’s not unanimous; some of the blog comments I’ve seen since Nica’s piece made me wince, like the atheist mother who said she would not “let” her child identify with religion. Fortunately, no hot or staining beverages were in my mouth when I read that. Let? Let? I’m not even sure what that means. But that view is happily rare. Most of us are more committed to parenting our children toward genuine autonomy than churning out rubber stamps of ourselves.

One of the many problems with the question is the implication that religious identification is a single point of arrival, like the day a young adult’s daemon takes a fixed form in His Dark Materials or palms begin flashing red in Logan’s Run. Did it work that way for you—or did you pass through a number of stages and try on a number of hats along the way? I thought so. And see what a lovely person you turned out to be.

A close relative of mine went through a period of experimentation with different worldviews. After being a fairly conventional New Testament Christian for a while, she became something of a Manichaean dualist, believing the world was divided into good and evil, darkness and light. She eventually went through a sort of Einsteinian-pantheist phase before adopting a benevolent, utilitarian humanism.

Then she turned six.

I encourage my kids to try on as many beliefs as they wish and to switch back and forth whenever they feel drawn toward a different hat, confident that in the long run they will be better informed not only of the identity they choose, but of those they have declined. Were I to disown my kids each time they passed through a religious identity, I’d have to keep a lawyer on retainer.

Now let’s get specific. My child has become “religious,” you say. Is it “Love-your-neighbor” religious…or “God-hates-fags” religious? “Four Chaplains” religious…or “9/11 hijackers” religious? Dalai Lama…or Jerry Falwell?

Adding to the difficulties is the almost comic range of meaning of “religion.” A good friend of mine has verses from the Book of Psalms scrolling around the walls of his bedroom and believes that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the sole path to salvation—yet describes himself as “not at all religious, really.” Then you have the Unitarians—the majority of whom are nontheistic—who tend to insist, sometimes downright huffily, that they are religious.

Just as troubling as the idea that I’d protest any and all religious expressions in my children is the notion that I’d applaud any and all nonreligious outcomes. Though many of the most ethical and humane folks I’ve known have been nonreligious, some of the most malignant and repugnant SOBs have been as well. So, then: Is it “Ayaan Hirsi Ali” nonreligious—or “Joe Stalin” nonreligious?

Perhaps you can see why I consider the question, “What if your child becomes religious?” as unanswerably meaningless as, “What if your child becomes political?”

I have three compassionate, socially conscientious, smart, ethical kids, with every indication of remaining so. If they choose a religious expression, it’s likely to be one that expresses those values. They might become liberal Quakers, or UUs, or progressive Episcopalians, or Buddhists, or Jains, framing their tendency toward goodness and conscience in a way different from but entirely respectable to my own way of seeing things. We could do far worse than a world of liberal Quakers.

If instead one of my kids were to identify with a more malignant religion, I’d express my concerns in no uncertain terms. But the consequences of the belief would be the main point of contention, not the fact that it is “religious.” And my love for my child, it goes without saying, would be reduced by not so much as a hair on a flea on a neutrino’s butt.

Alright, alright…I admit I haven’t been reading Dale’s blog. He’s been blogging for about nine months – oh, a year? – but somehow I never get around to reading it. Oh, I hear about what he writes on occasion as the day winds down and he shares a response that a reader had to a particular entry…it’s just that I never get around to actually reading the blog myself.

Nevertheless, I’ve been invited to write an entry. I don’t even remember the last time I had to write something of this length that others would read. I can’t even keep up with an easy book journal. I find writing intimidating. But as I thought about writing an entry, I actually became excited and curious: What would I write about, who would read it and how honest would I be?

Here goes…

I find people’s personal stories fascinating. We learn so much about each other when we know something about each other’s pasts. So I’m going to start with my personal story, specifically my family of origin and the role of religion in my upbringing. I feel very strongly that our families of origin play a significant role, positive and negative, in how we ourselves parent.

My mother is the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister. Let me emphasize the Southern. My mother and her three siblings seem to have loved their father dearly. Their descriptions and my memories of him are of a very loving, generous and kind man. Our son is named after him.

My father was also raised in a Southern Baptist family, and his father was in the military. I don’t know how regularly they attended church or with what intensity their beliefs were practiced. My parents met at Oklahoma Baptist University, and when I was born, my parents attended First Baptist Church, Atlanta.

Since the word “Baptist” has occurred four times in two paragraphs, it’s safe to say I have a Baptist background.

But my parents eventually left First Baptist because of disagreements with church ideas and wound up at Mount Carmel Christian Church. Notice the missing denomination.

The change did not go over well with my mother’s parents.

My parents eventually divorced. When I was in second grade, I moved with my mom, sister, and new stepdad to San Francisco. This reintroduced the Baptist thread, because stepdad was a Southern Baptist minister. Or had been, anyway—he left the church when the church turned its back on him during his divorce. His feelings of rejection and church hypocrisy were intense. Soon after we moved to San Francisco, by his orders, our family stopped attending church.

Not exactly how my mother had envisioned our new life in California.

My stepfather eventually began playing racquetball on Sunday mornings, which gave my mom an idea: she could take us girls to church during racquetball time. He wouldn’t have to go. But another family dynamic comes into play here – one we definitely don’t have time to get into: Our family, he said, did things “as a family” or not at all. Either we all went to church, or no one went to church. Since he wasn’t going, neither would we.

What’s a well-intentioned Christian mother to do? Well, since Tuesday nights was our stepdad’s late night at work, we started praying before our meals on Tuesday nights. After the meal my mom would choose a passage from the Bible, read it to us, and try to discuss it with us. If we heard his car come up the alley, we quickly put everything away.

This went on for years.

During this same time, our family began going to Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco—but only for Christmas and Easter services. (My stepdad was raised in the Episcopal Church so perhaps he felt some desire to reconnect with that denomination.) Since Mom got to pick what we did on Mother’s Day, we went to church on that day as well.

So let’s sum up: We have the southern Baptist preacher’s daughter who occasionally goes to the Episcopal cathedral and one night a week secretly teaches her daughters about Christianity. We have the former Episcopalian turned Southern Baptist minister turned church-rejecting stepfather. And you have me, the quiet, observant, relatively compliant teenager.

Decision number one: When I go to college, I’m going to church every Sunday.

Decision number two: When I get married, we’re going to pray before dinner.

I headed to UC Berkeley, and sure enough, began going to a local church. I don’t even remember the denomination. Even after spending a Saturday night at a boyfriend’s place (okay, that’s my first sweaty-palmed honest phrase…what if my mother reads this?!) I would get up on Sunday morning, put on my nice clothes and walk to church. I continued going to church during college and during grad school at UCLA. And all along, it had more to do with defiance of my stepdad than belief.

When Dale and I got married, we didn’t pray before meals but did attend Wooddale Church, a Baptist-aligned megachurch in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. We went to Wooddale for about five years and even participated in a commitment ceremony with our two-year-old son, promising to raise him in a Christian home.

But it was wearing on Dale, and one day, as we were driving home from church, he said, “I just can’t go to church anymore.”

Let me stop there for a moment. As an elementary school kid, I wanted to go to church to make new friends and participate in the social activities I remembered from our time in Atlanta. As a teenager, I was completely neutral towards the Tuesday night prayer and bible verses. I was more in love with the fact that we were doing something behind my stepfather’s back. As a college student, I was in control of whether I went to church. And now, as a married woman, I was going to church with my family.

So “I just can’t go to church anymore” didn’t sit well.

Looking back, though — and it’s only recently that I have looked back — I realize it still wasn’t about belief vs. disbelief. I was still “siding” with my mom against my stepdad, still fighting a battle that was long since over.

There’s more, of course…but why not leave you with a cliffhanger until next time?

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BECCA McGOWAN is an elementary educator. She holds a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a graduate teaching certificate from UCLA. She lives with her husband Dale and three children in Atlanta, Georgia.

One year ago today, Parenting Beyond Belief was born. The doctors were a bit worried at first — she was mostly blue, for one thing — but her spine was straight and she had two hands. Different sizes, sure, but two.

PBB opened on Amazon at 3300, the top one-tenth of one percent. A book that opens around 3000 typically settles contentedly into the 30-40,000 range after 6-8 weeks. Though the rank has gone up and down, it has been remarkably steady in the long haul, averaging around 3600 out of 4.5 million. Last night I checked the rank: 3302. So the audience continues to find the book, which is lovely.

This site now averages 1400 visitors a day, including a secular parents discussion forum, this blog, a page of resources for nonreligious parents, and the seminars. And the manuscript for a follow-up titled Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide to Parenting Beyond Belief is due to the publisher in five weeks and should be released around December.

the seminars

I am not a people-person. Folks always tell me they’re shocked to learn this. I suppose I do navigate PeopleWorld fairly well when necessary, but it doesn’t come naturally. I’d always rather be with a few familiar old shoes than a crowd of any kind. Parties suck the energy out of me, even as they make a bass-drumming bunny out of my wife. I disappear once or twice during any given party — simply decamp to the bathroom to splash water on my face and not chat for a few minutes. I’m not proud of this social ineptitude, but there it is.

Hiking alone for five days straight, on the other hand, or working alone in my home office every day, seeing only humans with whom I share DNA (in one way or another) for days on end, even weeks? Bliss.

So saying a seminar tour is more than a tad out of my comfort zone is…well…accurate. But we all have to move out of our comfort zones, or so I’ve heard.

Which is why I am surprised and even a bit pleased to discover, with six cities down and hopefully 30 to go, what it is that I look forward to as I leave for each trip.

It’s the people and their stories.

I am endlessly fascinated and moved by the human stories I’ve been hearing on the road. I simply can’t get enough of them. The mother of a newborn who is wrestling with her mother-in-law over baptism. The couple who recently found their way out of fundamentalism together and were immediately cut off (along with their daughters) from the rest of their family. The mother who pulled her daughter out of a religiously-saturated public school in the South to homeschool her — only to find the local homeschooling group required a pledge to follow “Christ-centered curricula” and to never teach evolution. The father whose ex-wife has converted to conservative Islam and now seeks full custody of their daughter — and appears close to getting it.

Then there are the adult nonreligious children of nonreligious parents, who wonder what the big deal is, as well as couples from families that are both religious and entirely open.

I’ve met people with deep scars and deeper resentments from having the fear of Hell drummed into them as kids, as well as the parents of a seven-year-old currently being terrorized to tears with that grotesque idea by his playmates.

Those most wounded by religion in the past often have the hardest time hearing that their kids need to be religiously literate. They want to keep the damn stuff as far from their kids as possible. I try to make the case that this is a recipe for producing a teen fundie — an attention-getting claim if ever there was. (I’ll make that case in an upcoming blog.)

One gentleman argued that we must say the word “evidence” as often as possible to our kids, suggests calling the winter holiday “Chrismyth,” etc, to drill home the difference in the religious and nonreligious approaches to knowledge. I’m not a big driller-homer, myself. I like to achieve the same things more subtly. But we all have to find our level.

I met a young woman for whom the section on helping kids deal with death had a special intensity: her husband, the father of their kids, has been diagnosed with brain cancer. I’ve been haunted by the thought of her and her kids nearly every day since we met. It completely breaks my heart, in no small part because my own dad died when I was young. I saw my own mom, widowed at 39, in that woman, and myself in her son.

A lesbian couple is currently working on pregnancy, even as they worry about coming out as nonbelievers to the evangelical parents of one of the women — something they want to get out of the way before a child arrives. “I love them dearly,” she said, “and they’ve just come around to accepting that I’m gay, and we’re talking again. Now I’m going hit them with this?”

I spoke at length with the parents of an impressionable seven-year-old (what other kind is there?) who has been invited, repeatedly, to join his friends at a Wednesday night bible study. The hitch? No parents allowed. One wonders why.

The seminar ends with suggestions for helping kids think about death. A child who becomes obsessively fearful of the idea of her own death is often stuck in a false concept of oblivion — what I call “me-floating-in-darkness-forever.” I offer a few specific ways to reframe this. After one seminar, a man approached and shook my hand.

“That thing about ‘me-floating-in-darkness’? I’ve always been terrified of death because that’s the way I’ve always seen it! I never even realized I was seeing it that way until you said that. I’m walking out of here today less afraid of death. That alone was worth the price of admission!”

All that after six cities.

The trick, as you might imagine, is coming up with a seminar that serves all those different needs, and what a trick it is. Any given issue has a wide range of significance to the audience. Take extended religious family. For some, this is a non-issue: the family is secular, the family is religious but open, or the family is 2000 miles away. For others, it is THE ISSUE.

Up next: Dallas/Fort Worth. I can’t wait to hear what y’all have to say.