I’m not afraid of the big bad church
Despite Christians arguing otherwise my experience of Christianity is that it is based on fear, not grace and love as promoted. In response to my experiences in fundamentalist Christianity I try to live my life with critical thought and not make decisions based on fear. However one issue I have found hard to resolve is what to do when my children’s paternal grandparents want to take them to church/Sunday school. I don’t want to lay down a blanket rule of “no church”, that would just make my kids want to go, but on the other hand I don’t want my children to be targets for shameless Jesus recruitment drives.
To be honest, I’ve been afraid and that has really irked me.
I have since discovered a blog The Meming of Life and am following Dale McGowan’s videos for Parenting Beyond Belief. I have yet to read the Parenting Beyond Belief book – it’s on my “to buy” list – but meanwhile the videos have been great. Each video is helping me let go of my worries and giving me reasons and tools to empower my children to think about religion for themselves. Dale McGowan outlines 4 reasons why religious literacy is important:
1. So they can better understand the world
2. To empower them
3. To help them make their own informed choice
4. To prevent the “teen epiphany”
It’s point number 4 that really got me. Mc Gowan explains that when teens hit that teen crisis of confidence and are looking for an anchor, they will probably encounter this:
Teen Christian Friend: “Do you know Jesus?”
Your Teen: “No”
Teen Christian Friend: “You DON’T KNOW Jesus!?!”
And then Teen Christian Friend hands an imagined solution to all Your Teen’s problems. If Your Teen isn’t religion literate then they are vulnerable to an emotional hijacking by religious fundamentalism. McGowan asserts that the more you expose your children to religious ideas and knowledge, which they are in control of, the less likely it is that they are going to head in the direction of toxic religion.
His stuff makes sense, it is relaxed, reassuring and offers something other than atheism vs. christianity. Check out the first video in PBB series:
This is not just a secular versus Christian issue, but also an inter-religious dialogue issue. One set of grandparents are Catholic and the other are Baha’i. So we’ve faced this question ourselves. My hubby is very open-minded and he probably wouldn’t mind our daughter being taken to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster if someone wanted to.
For me, being the more religious parent, the question for me is how to tackle ‘other people including relatives and friends believe different stuff to what we do, and what does that mean?’
When the issue cropped up about Granny taking our daughter to a Catholic Children’s Mass, I have to confess whilst I thought briefly “eeek no, church, nooooo” but my cognitive functions kicked in and actually said “how exciting, of course”. I figure that if I made everything forbidden (as you say) it would inevitably make forbidden fruit more enticing. Plus, I do think it is important for children to become aware of the beliefs and practices of our neighbours given that we live in multi-religious country and world.
So Granny took bub to the Children’s Mass and she has seemed to grasp the idea that Granny and Grandad, and Grandma and Pa, all believe different things and call Allah different names (i.e. God) but that’s okay. She’s quite proud of being Muslim (at the moment anyway) and she asks lots of questions about who can eat ‘piggy wiggy’ and if they call Allah ‘God’ it means they get to have a Christmas tree, but she also likes wearing a little hijab for prayer and running up and saying ‘assalamu ‘alaykum’ to any strange woman she sees in a headscarf in public.
So, I’m quite happy that she has learned at least a little bit about what others believe, and that different people believe different things and that as she grows up she will have the job of deciding what she thinks is true about all sorts of questions in life.
i think it’s brave to take the stance of letting them have an informed decision making capacity versus brain washing. bravo.
Church … even in what I write – it has come up. The red of Blood … perhaps you’ll care to wade in?