As a child, organized religion was something that, despite my religious mother’s best efforts, I was never fully able to get on board with. Even when I tried, I could never get past the concept of a deity who seemed to be completely at peace with rape, child abuse, genocide, and other worldly horrors. There were many years in my childhood that I felt cajoled into believing a very serious set of ideas that was just never going to be for me. As a result, I always knew that if I ever had children of my own, that I wanted to raise them in a secular manner.
My young daughter was recently gifted a giant inflatable rainbow outdoor toy that she absolutely loves.
Last week, a neighbor passed by and cheerfully remarked “I like her rainbow!” I smiled and thanked her for the compliment. My mood shifted to disappointment momentarily when the neighbor followed up her statement with “full of God’s promise.” There it was again. The omnipresent “God.”
As an agnostic mother of two children, including one very curious toddler, raising children without religion is sometimes more challenging than I could have imagined.
It doesn’t take a Fulbright scholar to observe how ever-present religion is in our society. We “bless” someone when they sneeze without thinking twice. In public schools, children promise their allegiance to their country under a monotheistic deity on a daily basis. The words “In God We Trust” are emblazoned on our money. Religion is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it’s almost inescapable.
Death is, not surprisingly, one of the most challenging subjects to have to tackle as an agnostic.
My three-year-old daughter has recently started asking questions about “where” grandparents are who have been deceased. When this happens, I answer her very matter-of-factly and simply tell her that that person isn’t alive anymore, but that they are never completely gone because we have their memories. I don’t have the luxury of being able to offer a neatly packaged explanation of her being “in Heaven now” or being an angel.
Our family dog, whom we have had since even before our eldest daughter’s birth, is nearing death. We haven’t hidden this inevitability from her. We simply state to her that the dog’s body is becoming old and tired, and that when she passes away, she will no longer be in any kind of pain. There are no glossy tales of a rainbow bridge or an afterlife involved. The dog’s life will be over, and the joy is that we will always be able to remember her.
I’m sure to others my explanations just sound really morbid. But I would rather imbue her with the facts than insult her intelligence with a cutesy story that, in my opinion, simply isn’t true.
Agnostic parenting presents many other challenges besides discussions about death. We’ve had to have awkward conversations with close family members about why we’d prefer they don’t pray with our children. Providing the facts about the historical significance of “baby Jesus” (as opposed to the biblical significance) during the Christmas season has been complicated at times.
But the goal is always the same … to teach our children to be open-minded and mindful of the fact that all belief systems are just different ways of making sense of the same concepts: our world and the things in it.
Perhaps surprisingly, many of our close friends who also have young children are religious.
Although this can be yet another source of sometimes feeling incompatible with societal norms, I admire those friends for their dedication, and am happy that they have found something that makes sense to them, even if it has never made sense to me.
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised to discover, through these friendships, that despite our different belief systems, we want largely the same outcomes for our children: to instill them with kindness, compassion, and empathy.
I acknowledge that raising “godless” children doesn’t guarantee that they won’t want to pursue some kind of faith on their own at some point.
If this happens to be the outcome, I am comfortable with this and will not view it as any kind of failure of my parenting. In the meantime, I am happy to guide my daughters using science and critical thinking to explore the world on their own terms. If religion is a path one or both of them chooses to take, I want that to be a choice for them rather than a predetermined indoctrination.
To me, one of the greatest gifts I can give my children is a chance to define their world in a way that makes sense to them, rather than have their world already defined for them.
