Children are the Challenge-Jessica

As a parent we make decisions we hope are right for our children and we don’t find out if it was the right choice until many years later. For me it was the decision my wife and I made to raise our children without religion. 23 years ago I was an agnostic with atheist leanings and Lisa was a quiet Christian with Mormon leanings. Today as you well know I am a full blown atheist. Lisa is, I believe, a quiet Christian who has little to do with the LDS faith but allows her husband to go on and on about his beliefs.

I have been known to say out loud that exposing your children to organized religion is tantamount to child abuse. I recently finished Christopher Hitchens’ book God is not Great- How Religion Poisons Everything. He makes a case for religion as a form of child abuse but mostly focuses on the ritualistic abuses including circumcision and other forms of genital mutilation. From my experience it is the emotional fodder that I was most concerned about with regard to my children.
This is the first in a series of five entries I will make on this topic( I only have five children so five is enough and six is too many). I am starting with Jessica. She is not my first born and so you can see I am addressing her out of turn but she is the one I feel represents the best argument for avoiding indoctrination but also represents as a parent how I have failed to fully mitigate the results of the outcome.

Jessica is now 19. She is a beautiful child with a strong spirit. She is smart, very empathetic, and wracked with guilt. According to her mother, she is closer to her Dad in personality than to her mother. When I became the father of a daughter I thought the most important thing I could do for her is to help instill in her the belief that she could do anything and be anything she chooses. I wanted her to know that she could be successful without a man in her life and to find her version of success independent of her relationships with men.

When Jessica was about six she stopped dinner to tell us we needed to have a blessing on the food. This had been modeled at her grandparent’s home but not in our home. She was told that she could pray quietly to herself but the rest of us were hungry and we would continue on with the activity of eating, Several months later we were at my in-laws’ home having dinner. They asked one of the family members if they would give a blessing on the food. Jessica piped up and said, “Ooohhhh my dad doesn’t like it when you pray at the table. Well actually, it’s okay to pray….Just don’t say anything about god or Jesus Christ!” This of course brought an awkward moment of silence to the table with disapproving eyes fixed upon yours truly.

During same period in her life her uncle made a point coming up to our home in Taylorsville, Utah and picking her up to take her to the LDS ward in Lehi, Utah. Her grandmother bought her a children’s version of the Book of Mormon. For me this was intrusion and I objected loudly to both. The visits to church ended. However I was not permitted to throw the BOM out. I believe the book is in a box in my basement this very day.

I mentioned before that Jessica is wracked with guilt. I have empathy for this trait because I personally feel guilty for things I haven’t done yet. When she was in first grade she came home from school and I asked her how her day went. She looked at me and burst out in tears. “I think I cheated.” I asked her why she believed this and she said,” I was taking a test and I looked up and I accidently saw the answers on my friend’s paper.”

Irreconcilable guilt is my number one reason for avoiding indoctrination of my children at a young age. For a child like Jessica this guilt can be debilitating. Jessica is very obsessed about doing the right thing. Not because she has a Christian background and is concerned about heaven and hell but because she really tries to be good because it is the right thing to do. She has a strong moral compass and has not had a significant exposure to Christianity. Now this strong moral compass has not inspired her to do the dishes when she asked or to clean her room but she will not mistreat anyone intentionally and would not sleep for days if she had believed she had. Jessica has relationships with homosexuals, Mormons, and kids on the fringe. She is able to appropriately determine what is appropriate and what she wants no part of.

Some of the most heated discussions with her brothers include sexist comments, homo-insensitive remarks made without regard to sensitivity. So ask you can see the experiment worked….success! Not so fast. There have been other consequences to raising my oldest daughter without religion.

Jessica has attended some functions with the young women’s group attached to her friend’s LDS ward. On one event she was wearing a shirt that both her mother and I approved of and felt that it was flattering on her. She was pulled aside and told the shirt showed too much and was asked to pull it up. Jessica was very self conscious afterword and has never worn the shirt again.

Jessica is at the age where she is looking for relationships and dating is definitely on the agenda. However, in Utah where Mormonism dominates the culture, she finds that she is not “good enough” for many of the boys in our community. There is significant pressure to assimilate into the LDS culture. Most of the boys who find her cute cannot reconcile their desire to date her with the fact she will not be able to go to the temple with them and she is not willing to convert. Unfortunately, Jessica takes this personally.

I am not without fault in this dilemma either. As she would let it be known that she liked a boy whom we knew to be LDS I would ask her, “…to what end?” I would then cite one of my favorite lines from The Fiddler on the Roof: “A bird may love a fish but where would they make a home together.”

I live in an area dominated by the LDS church and it is not normal to allow your child to date a non-Mormon without significant parental intervention. If the subject of your affection is not willing to convert, significant pressure is placed on the child to terminate the relationship. Now I know this tribal response is common in other religions….my point of reference is the LDS church.

Jessica doesn’t know, at 19, what she believes. She is reluctant to challenge any of her friends’ religious beliefs or to ask direct questions about the doctrine because she wouldn’t want to offend anybody. She really struggles to find where she fits in and sometimes believes that she will never be taken seriously by the boys because she is not willing to convert. As her father I believe she is an amazing young lady with a ton of actual and potential assets. It is my desire that she not convert to any religion because I think it would be disastrous for her in the long run. I want her to fit in but there is reality that as a family we are slightly different.