Father's Concern About Religious Indoctrination

Speaker 1 0:00

We have a Reddit post here that we're going to talk about, and this one's about religion. It's a little touchy, right? So this dad is concerned that mom and mom's family are indoctrinating their child, and he's got feelings about it. Do you want to start us off?

Speaker 2 0:22

This little girl is just a year old and, as the father mentions here, she is living with her mother and mother's parents. Mother might do some of the religious things a little differently if she were living alone. I don't know. But there are several things that father does have a problem with. He calls it indoctrination. They do take the child to church, to children's church, have a little service at home on Saturday, etc. They may have tempered the religious belief stuff when they were together, but now it may seem to be two really extremes, where the mother is a devout Christian and the father is a non-believer, he says.

Speaker 1 1:08

The expression is being unequally yoked.

Speaker 2 1:10

Yes, is how.

Speaker 1 1:11

I heard that growing up.

Speaker 2 1:14

Yes, me too.

One-Year-Old's Religious Exposure

Speaker 1 1:15

I can't just get past the idea at the moment that this kid's one, a one-year-old, is not being indoctrinated. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 1:23

And when she goes to children's church, they're just playing. Right, that's just playing.

Speaker 1 1:29

They're not having ontological discussions.

Speaker 2 1:32

Probably up until at least fourth grade or so. No, well, that's when you get into post-millennial dispensationalism.

Speaker 1 1:38

So I mean you have to segment this stuff out. I do understand the idea that you get brought up in a community, right, and so in this community, in this home in which this child is being brought up, she's going to just, by osmosis, take in some of these Christian practices and beliefs that he's concerned about.

Speaker 2 2:00

No doubt she believes that you should pray before a meal and they're going to let her start delivering the prayer as soon as she can speak Sure and encouraging it, and who knows what that prayer will be.

Speaker 1 2:13

His concern is that he doesn't have a good experience with people who identify as Christian generally Right, but also specifically. It seems like the mom's family in this were gatekeeping trying to keep him away from the child. So he's frustrated and angry and doesn't like these people.

Speaker 2 2:35

And who knows, they could have their own bias on the other side, in that they don't want her subjected to his belief system Exactly.

Cultural Differences in Parenting

Speaker 1 2:46

I found it really interesting that he found it necessary to parenthetically describe Christianity. I think that most people have a sense of what Christianity is, and I just found his language interesting here, where he said Christianity and then, parenthetically, a devout sect who practices the Sabbath and believes that Jesus will return one day. I don't know about you, but when I read that, it just gives me this idea that this person is really othering this Christian family and this is the same person, the same woman with whom presumably he chose to have a child Right, and so that just to me it just jumped off the page as I'm trying to message to everyone reading this what they are and what I am, and that we're entirely opposite.

Speaker 2 3:40

Right In the area where we live, with the oil and gas industry being pretty large here. We get people from all over the world and frequently they find each other, and I've had parents that were quite different. I remember a mom that was Southern Baptist and a dad that was Muslim, and he was definitely wanting his child to be of his belief system, and mom was just as fervent about her belief system and the child had zeroed in on. As I spoke with her various times about the variations in the belief system, it boiled down to bacon.

Speaker 1 4:29

I don't want to be. That's the first thing I was thinking. To me, it might be a food-based choice.

Speaker 2 4:33

It did. It boiled down to specifically bacon, and she did, and she was much older than this one-year-old. She was eight or nine when I first talked to her about it. I even testified about the bacon and the judge even wrote it in her summation that she would hope that the parents would give each other the freedom to let the child express what she wanted on either side.

Finding Middle Ground in Faith

Speaker 1 5:04

Yeah, and from my perspective that's what it's all about, and it's such a short-sighted thing that parents do. It's like they've never seen footloose. If you try to force your beliefs on a child and you try to curb what they can or can't do.

Speaker 1 5:16

they're just going to rebel. So in this situation, the best thing that both parents can do is to provide a loving platform, to give the information, to educate on both sides of it, and then, when the child is an adult, the child will make a decision for herself that probably incorporates, hopefully, the best of both. If one side is treating the other as heretical and forcing the child to choose sides, then she'll either choose a side to the detriment of the other and herself, or she'll choose neither and leave them both behind.

Speaker 2 5:53

That could be, and the little girl in the Beckett story. She really, really enjoyed attending services with both parents and she did almost every Sunday attend the opposite services and I thought it was really sweet how much she did seem to enjoy certain parts of each of the rituals at the different belief systems. As long as she got to eat bacon, she was happy. The different belief systems as long as she got to eat bacon, she was happy.

Speaker 1 6:24

Well, there's so much potential comfort there too from the different rituals. I have fear for this child as she gets older and sort of the campaign. I can imagine this dad being on to try to convince her that Christianity is wrong or whatever else, instead of letting her sort of discover for herself. But again, I guess from Dad's perspective it seems like an unfairly waged war.

Speaker 2 6:55

It's several against him, I think, is the way he looks at it. I do find some hope in his statement that, while I don't agree with their beliefs, I also don't want to tell my daughter how foolish I think they are. She loves them and will obviously look up to her mother and grandmother as she grows up. That tells me that, no matter how strongly he believes in their foolishness, he does see how important the bigger picture is of her love for them and that he hasn't, I think, already told his daughter how foolish that he sees that belief system.

Speaker 1 7:41

You know what. You're exactly right. That's a great piece of hopefulness in there. And I think also he was maybe venting a little bit in how he did the post, because when he summarized it he did his TLDR at the bottom there. The too long didn't read and he said, as a nonbeliever, what are some tactics you use to teach your child to think independently about religious beliefs?

Speaker 1 8:12

So that is a great expression, a great question and that doesn't have any of the same sort of tone as the rest of his post, and so I think he was working through the emotion in the post, and then when he thought, how do I sum this up, what I really think and what I'm really doing, it was, I think, a nicely worded, legitimate concern.

Speaker 2 8:28

And that one touched up a spot on me.

Speaker 2 8:32

I grew up the only child of a minister in a very restrictive and and particular, as he would call it, sect Christianity and I as such, my parents did not want me to think independently ever about our religious beliefs and while I questioned many of them, especially the more daily practical kinds of applications, I was never voicing it aloud because I didn't want to seem to be in any way opposing my parents and as the preacher's kid couldn't voice them, of course, in a Sunday school class or anywhere like that.

Speaker 2 9:18

But as I got older I even went from my undergraduate degree to that particular denominational college because my parents didn't want me to be exposed to other belief systems even at that age, and at that point I was still going along to get along with my parents. And then I went to a state school for my graduate training and on purpose took a lovely class called Transpersonal Human Development where I got to listen to reel-to-reel tapes believe it or not, also dating myself there of Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley and Babaram Das and some really interesting people from the 60s and 70s that I'd never heard of before.

Speaker 2 10:13

While I lived under a rock at that point and we didn't have a television it was. I finally did get my exposure to and education in, you know certain things like that, but I was not encouraged. So through the years it filled me with a desire to experience other religious beliefs. I've visited mosques in different parts of the world and I duck in every church I go by when I'm traveling. I just really want to see how Greek Orthodox I've just been totally thrilled by them and how my spirit responds to the different places of worship that I go to. I have a very similar response to each one of those places. So I would hope for this child, this little baby that she is, and to answer his question that she is allowed to experience other religions with an open mind, and her father will have an open mind to her doing so.

Speaker 1 11:27

Let's hope. I think, like you said, there is reason for hope on this.