S. admits it. She and her husband have been lying to her in-laws about going to church. I suggested they were fibbing, but whatever you call it, the truth remains: it’s so much easier to pretend, on the phone to her husband’s minister father and his wife, that the religion S. and her husband both grew up in remains a part of their daily life. But as S. said when she described her quandary to me, the differences between the way she and her husband practice their religion and the way his parents do can’t be tiptoed around for long ”” not with a chatty toddler in the mix.
S. wanted to know how she and her husband could navigate this generational divide without alienating his parents (and although S.’s husband wasn’t the writer, he’s trying to figure this out, too). And (as many of you suspected) she was kind of hoping for a bigger endorsement of taking the easy way out: teaching her daughter the art of evasion, and dancing around the subject forever more.
I read it very quickly, so I might have missed something. However, what struck me most was that no one suggested that S. and her husband start going to church more regularly. It’s almost as if that answer was excluded as too difficult.
It was interesting to see who blamed the Christian parents (grandparents) and who blamed the unbelievers.
#1 — No one suggested it because, if you read between the lines, these folks don’t want to attend church. The only times they do is right before they’re going to see the in-laws so they can speak about it and won’t have to lie.
I thought the self-identified Episcopal priest “Mark” had a good response. Otherwise, I think the gift of faith is just that — a “gift.” Jesus pointed out many times that it’s the Father in Heaven who enlightens, calls, and reveals Himself to us. Having parents and in-laws demanding church attendance is off-putting and doesn’t help the situation. Better that these people pray for God to guide their family members and touch their hearts, if it’s meet and right that He should do so. 🙂
Of course another way of saying it – is that family members love each other when they desire that which is good. We know from Scripture that loving God is the first commandment and so greatest good. Nor is Jesus himself completely shy of teaching those he loves! So desiring that one’s children and grandchildren love God can hardly be a bad thing. The grandparents may have been given reasons to think that their son and his family are people of faith, and surely caring about their faith journeys is IMO rather praiseworthy.
The first step is for the family to be honest with their loved ones. Without truth – love is lost. With truth the grandparents can begin pray and act in love for their unbelieving loved ones – that they may receive the gift of faith.
David DuPlessis used to say that God has no grand children. Where is the news sory here?
It’s not a news story. It a blog comment on a letter to an advice columnist. God may have no grandchildren but he does seem to have some interest in what parents and grandparents teach their family members.
@5,
The story here is that many American atheists are in the closet, to a greater or lesser extent – they may conceal their atheism from their partners, or their family, or their social community or their professional community.
As a Brit, I was ignorant of all this until about three or four years ago when I starting talking to US atheists on the web. In Britain, announcing one’s atheism doesn’t cause much of a stir. Whereas in the US, I am told the consequences can be significant: children disowned, families broken apart, atheists ostracized by their community, socially or professionally.
An example from the comments about the source article (from Stacy Bird):
[blockquote]I was the child who revealed to my Catholic grandmother the truth that no one in my family went to church. I was eleven and neither parent had told me that we were hiding this information. I doubt that I would have known how to lie about it, even if they had.
The result was that my grandmother left our home wailing that we were all going to Hell. I was disowned. After that day, If I answered the phone when she called, she would let out a high-pitched scream as if she was being burned, insisting that no such person by my name existed.
My mother never forgave me, insisting that I was responsible for my grandmother’s dementia years later. [/blockquote]
Hopefully we can agree that the grandmother’s reaction was somewhat unchristian. Nevertheless, American atheists tell me that such reactions are not uncommon. Hence some of them stay in the closet.
Ain’t that the truth…
The Catholic story quoted in #7 is absurd. If it’s true, and the grandmother was “wailing” and slamming down the phone when the grand-daughter called then I would strongly suggest that she already had significant symptoms of dementia. Many, many, many Catholic grandparents have grandchildren who either: 1) don’t go to church or 2) are not baptized in the Catholic church. I have never heard of a single one of them responding like this, which would so obviously be counter-productive.
As a simple rational test (“does this story sound true or made up?) I might also ask the following: The girl is 11 years old (presumably has siblings?), yet the grandmother never noticed that the girl (and siblings) a) was not baptized b) never made a First Communion c) was never Confirmed? My mother attended (by flying if necessary) all of the baptisms of her grandchildren and most of their First Communions and Confirmations. I think she would have noticed if these events were never occurring. Then too, do we also assume that the grandmother never visited the family on a Sunday, Christmas, or Easter, such that the question of going to church never came up? The story that the grandmother was a devout Catholic who had no clue that her grandchildren weren’t being raised in the Church until an 11 year-old let the cat out of the bag, whereupon the grandmother went nuts only makes sense if the grandmother was substantially non compos mentis to begin with.
The fact remains that many Christians in the US do react very negatively to atheists, either personally or socially or professionally. That’s a real problem, and that’s why some atheists stay in the closet.
Maybe depends where you live. I’ve been 20 years in Fortune 500 corporate life and my parents were 25 years in Ivy League academics and I never saw it. If anything (in Ivy League academics) the opposite. One time my little four-year came direct from a Vacation Bible School event to a Princeton University kids event and before it started he yelled out “Jesus is the light of the world.” From the looks on their faces, I thought they were going to call security. 🙂
The US is such a huge and varied country compared to any western or central European state. It is so diverse. I haven’t come across the reaction that Gnu recounts but I can surely imagine it. I have however come across socially ostracising conservative folks. But that’s the Episcopal Church for you…
Just noticed another bizarre part of the #7 story. The grandmother CALLS the family (who she has said is all going to hell) regularly but won’t speak to the KID who told her that the family doesn’t go to church but presumably WILL speak to anyone else in the house??? Huh??? I think, if this story is even remotely true, that what she said to her grandmother went way beyond “our parents don’t take us to church.” Especially since she goes on to say that years later her own mother blamed her for her grandmother’s mental problems.
Catholic Mom:
[blockquote]Maybe depends where you live. [/blockquote]Maybe it does. So what?
[blockquote] Just noticed another bizarre part of the #7 story.[/blockquote]Again, so what? Maybe that story was entirely fictitious, it doesn’t matter. There are numerous real examples of atheists being treated badly.
Hence the article in the NY Times discussing the ethical implications of lying about one’s atheism. If it weren’t for the negative reactions, there would be no story.
And if you’d like to read some of these ‘negative reactions’, the atheist forum to which I belong regularly receives hate-mail from supposed Christians. They gloat at the thought of seeing us hurled into hell on Judgment Day; they pray that we get cancer and die horribly; they say we are tools of Satan, that we are evil and disgusting and deserve to suffer eternal torment.
I can provide a link, or post a couple of examples, if you don’t believe me.
And in those circumstances, it’s pretty obvious why a person might conceal their loss of faith from a parent. They don’t want their parents to see them as the enemy.
I suspect they conceal their loss of faith from their parents because they don’t want their parents to feel hurt and disappointed. In the same way that children always do when they feel that they have somehow not lived up to their parents expectations. For example, I knew somebody who took 15 years to get a Ph.D. Around about year 13 I asked them how their parents felt about it and they said “oh, I told them five years ago that I got my Ph.D.” What are the ethics of telling your parents you have a degree that you don’t yet have? Pretty much the same issue.
BTW, there is a huge difference between “that story” and crazed hate mail sent to atheist forums. “That story” implied that Catholics (or at least a reasonable subset that the story was representative of) went berserk when told that their children don’t go to church and might very well flip out, scream at the top of their lungs that they were all going to hell, and never speak to them again. This being the case, one would be extremely cautious before daring to make such a revelation. This of course is ridiculous and the story intended to illustrate the point is bogus.
On the other hand, I’m not at all surprised that insane remarks are posted to an atheist forum. If you read ANY of the remarks posted under ANY yahoo news story, (type in yahoo.com, select a news story, scroll down to the comments) approximately 1/4 of them are psychotic — and I mean this literally. Crazy people post a lot on public forums.
Catholic Mom:
[blockquote]I suspect they conceal their loss of faith from their parents because they don’t want their parents to feel hurt and disappointed. [/blockquote]Being considerate of others’ feelings isn’t a bad thing. But it’s not just about feelings of hurt and disappointment. It’s about rejection, ostracization, and hatred. Some Christians believe that if one is not with God, one is against him. So if children declare their atheism, some parents (and some communities) turn against them, because they’ve become tools of Satan and deserve to go to Hell.
That’s rather more than ‘disappointment’.
[blockquote]On the other hand, I’m not at all surprised that insane remarks are posted to an atheist forum. If you read ANY of the remarks posted under ANY yahoo news story, (type in yahoo.com, select a news story, scroll down to the comments) approximately 1/4 of them are psychotic—and I mean this literally. Crazy people post a lot on public forums. [/blockquote]
These people profess to be Christians. Your classification of them as merely ‘insane’ is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy: [i]those aren’t ‘real’ Christians.[/i] Trouble is, they look pretty real to us.
[blockquote] Some Christians believe that if one is not with God, one is against him. So if children declare their atheism, some parents (and some communities) turn against them, because they’ve become tools of Satan and deserve to go to Hell. [/blockquote]
Maybe somewhere on the planet. Not that I’ve ever encountered. Statistics please.
[blockquote] Your classification of them as merely ‘insane’ is an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy: those aren’t ‘real’ Christians. Trouble is, they look pretty real to us. [/blockquote]
No — my classification of them is not that they are not “real Christians.” Maybe they are. I would have no way of knowing. My classification is that they have something mentally wrong with them. I’m not talking about public comments about God/religion/atheism in particular. I’m talking about ALL public comments in non-moderated forums. People begin shrieking that Obama is an agent of al-quida, that [insert object of wrath] should be publically executed etc. etc. You don’t need a medical degree to discern that they are not rational. Actually, I’m not even sure that they’re serious — I suspect most of them are just trolls. So telling me that people who say they are “Christians” in completely open internet forums say x, y, or z tells me absolutely nothing. Find a survey of people who qualify as Christians in some even minimal way and demonstrate that these remarks are common, or even exist.