A
solitary project: Some parents
build
a family religious foundation
By Lorna Collier
Published October 22, 2000
(Chicago Tribune, Health & Family)
When Dianna Narciso's children
ask her what happens to people when they
die, she doesn't mention heaven or Jesus or angels.
As an atheist parent, Narciso
doesn't have religious beliefs to pass
along to her three sons, ages 10, 8 and 3, even though it might make
answering their questions easier.
"I don't get to handle the `death
question' by telling my child a pat
story of living with Jesus and God," says Narciso of Palm Bay, Fla. "I
have to explain the facts."
To Narciso, this is the toughest
challenge she faces as an atheist
parent: dealing with the hard questions her kids raise without the
answers that religion can provide. "I don't get to teach morals with
the pat, `Because God or Jesus said so,' " says Narciso, who
home-schools her children.
Atheist and agnostic parents are
a minority among the United States'
overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian population--according to one study, only
about 8.5 percent of Americans call themselves atheists or agnostics,
while 86 percent claim a Christian faith. Perhaps because of this
minority status, atheist and agnostic parents face a host of special
challenges and problems, including, some say, harassment of their
children by schoolmates or other children; interference by neighbors or
other family members in their children's religious upbringing; limited
educational options in regions where private education is predominantly
church-based; and the belief that because atheists don't follow a
religious credo, they are incapable of raising children with moral
values.
Perhaps the top complaint atheist
parents voice--especially if they
live far from urban centers--is isolation.
"The biggest issue is social,"
says Theresa Schaefer, a librarian with
agnostic and secular humanist beliefs who is raising her son, Joe, 13,
in small-town Downstate Salem.
"Where we live, in a rural
southern Illiniois setting, the church is a
big element in social life and social relationships. We don't have that
in our life, there isn't any secular humanist community or Unitarian
community here," Schaefer says.
Not only does Schaefer find it
difficult to tap into a network of
like-minded adults for friendship and parenting advice, but Joe also
doesn't know many children who share his beliefs.
"When I go to school and people
ask me do I go to church, I'll say no,
and they'll say, `What do you believe in?'" says Joe. "I'll say I'm an
agnostic or a secular humanist. They'll assume that means the same
thing as an atheist, which it doesn't, and they will not talk to me for
a few days, just because of what I believe."
To expose Joe to children who
share his beliefs, Schaefer has sent him
for the last two summers to Camp Quest, a summer camp for children with
atheist, agnostic or humanist beliefs, held near Lebanon, Ohio.
"It was a lot of fun," says Joe.
"I just sorta fit in. I realized at
camp that I got it easy--some kids had been called names and treated
real mean."
Edwin Kagin, a Kentucky attorney
who founded Camp Quest five years ago
with his wife, Helen, says that he has found that many of the 40
children who come from all over the world to the camp each summer have
had negative experiences with others due to their beliefs.
"Some were actually crying,
saying this was the first time they'd been
able to talk about their feelings of non-belief without being
ostracized, scorned and threatened by their peers," Kagin says.
Jan Loeb Eisler, editor of the
"Family Matters" newsletter put out by
the Council for Secular Humanism, notes that adults sometimes are
behind these rejections of atheist children.
"There have been situations where
adult neighbors have been very mean
to the friends of their children who don't have the same religious
orientation," Eisler says. "They'll say to their kids, `You can't play
with Johnny because he's not a Christian, he doesn't go to church.'"
Although Camp Quest exists as an
option for children, many parents have
discovered that it's hard to find others who can understand their
unique problems. As a result, some have turned to the Internet for
support, while others have formed organizations in their areas.
Lynne Schultz is an atheist
stay-at-home mother of two preschoolers in
Fairfield, Iowa, which she describes as being "in the middle of
nowhere." She wanted to send her oldest child to preschool, but
couldn't find any in her area that were not church affiliated; she
tried to start a preschool or playgroup for atheist children in her
area, but couldn't find enough people to join.
"I only found one person who
lived an hour away, and that was through
the Internet," says Schultz, who has gained support from other atheist
parents via a variety of Internet forums, including an e-mail group for
atheist mothers, which formed earlier this year and includes about 30
members from around the country.
Bruce and Catalina Chadbourn are
an atheist couple who live in the
relatively large Minneapolis/St. Paul area, but still felt the need to
create a "free-thinking families" group about two years ago
.
"We wanted to get together with
other atheist parents to deal with
issues like feeling isolated or feeling judged by religious people, and
also to deal with school issues for children as they grown up," says
Bruce Chadbourn.
About four or five families come
to the monthly meetings, which are
limited to adults only; children come to separate social events planned
about four times each year. The parents discuss such things as how to
deal with family members who want to evangelize their children.
"One couple is afraid their
family might take their children and
baptize them on the weekend, which bothers them," says Catalina.
Another couple "feels like their parents are too old to deal with it,"
so they haven't disclosed their atheism. "Everyone is dealing with it
in a different way."
"It's nice to be around kindred
spirits," says Catalina, who felt the
sting of prejudice against atheists in her former job as a nursing
assistant at a hospital. She worries that her children--an infant and a
toddler--will be the target of harassment when they are older.
"If they are ever teased by being
called an atheist, I'm not sure yet
how I'm going to deal with that," says Catalina. "There's a lot of
mean-spirited clergy out there who badmouth atheists. They need the bad
guy, and we're it."
Deborah Boak and her husband,
Timothy Gorski, a doctor, are an atheist
couple who live in northern Texas. They say their children have
experienced prejudice. When their oldest daughter, now 10,
was in kindergarten, she was beaten once a week on the playground by
about seven classmates, who called her a "dirty atheist," says Boak.
That same year, Boak's next-door
neighbors discovered the family's
atheism; the neighbor boy, age 12, began shouting, "You'll burn in
hell!" at the Boak children whenever he saw
them outside playing, says Boak. The boy's mother preached to Boak's
daughter
over the back-yard fence, telling her that her parents were wrong in
not believing in Christ.
Not long after these incidents,
Boak and Gorski, along with another
atheist couple, decided to start a church for "freethinkers," called
the North Texas Church of Freethought, which aims to provide all the
services a church normally offers--such as ministering to the sick,
sponsoring charitable works and organizing social activities--"but
without the superstition that we just couldn't believe in," says Boak.
Not long after these incidents,
Boak and Gorski, along with another
atheist couple, decided to start a church for "freethinkers," called
the North Texas Church of Freethought, which aims to provide all the
services a church normally offers--such as ministering to the sick,
sponsoring charitable works and organizing social activities--"but
without the superstition that we just couldn't believe in," says Boak.
Since forming in late 1994, the
church has grown to include about 400
members, ranging in age from newborn to senior citizens, says Boak.
Meetings are held monthly in an Irvine hotel conference room, though
other activities take place throughout the week; the church also has
started a building fund to construct its own facility, and has inspired
similar churches in Houston, California and Australia.
"A lot of what we want to bring
to people is a really good sense of how
to make your life better, how to live your life in a very good way,"
says Boak, who is in charge of the church's youth department. "A good
half of the children's lesson is devoted to moral issues. We very
strongly know that human beings can be good and do the right thing
without superstition."
The idea that atheists aren't
moral people because they don't follow
Biblical rules, and therefore can't possibly raise moral children, is
one that sticks in the craw of many atheist parents.
"We give our child a sense of
right and wrong, but from a critical
thinking approach," says Catalina. "You don't need religion to teach
children about how to interact in a loving way."
Nonetheless, studies have found
that children in families that attend
church do better in school and stay away from drugs and sex.
"What hasn't been fully examined
is why that is the case," says Kristin
Moore, a senior scholar with Child Trends, a nonprofit research group.
"Is it because families who are able to go to religious services on a
regular basis are well-organized, cohesive families, and the results
are because these children come from effective families? Or are they
involved in a peer group who is engaged in positive behaviors? Or is
there, in fact, a belief factor?"
Mimi Doe, co-author of "10
Principles for Spiritual Parenting," says
this type of research "leads to the terrible guilt many families feel"
when they don't feel comfortable with any organized religion and aren't
sure how to raise their children from a religious or spiritual
perspective. In fact, says Doe, this was the No. 1 question she
received as America Online's spirituality expert.
"Parents can't find a church that
resonates with who they are," Doe
says. "I say, `Look: don't worry about that.'"
Doe, who has a master's degree in
child development from Harvard
University, does believe kids need to have their spiritual needs met:
They need to feel connected to their families, nature and other living
things. But atheists can be just as spiritual as religious people, she
says, because, in her view, spirituality and religion are separate.
"I define spirituality as the
consciousness that relates us directly to
God, but instead of God, you can certainly use `the universe,' `all
that is' or `a higher power,'" says Doe.
The important thing, she says, is
for parents to help fulfill their
children's spiritual needs in a way that works for them.
"I don't believe a family must
embrace religion in order to be
spiritual," Doe says. "Indeed, it's the everyday lives we are living
with our children that offer the richest opportunity for soulful
growth."
WHERE TO GO FOR MORE INFORMATION
There are numerous resources on
the Internet for atheist or agnostic
parents, including the following:
- The atheist discussion board on
"Parent's Place" can be found at
http://boards2.parentsplace.com/messages/get/ppatheist23.html.
- The Freethinking Families guide
to "Secular Parenting Resources on
the Internet" is at
http://www.geocities.com/secularparents/parenting.html.
- Parents' Corner is a list of
articles and other resources for
nontheistic parents; http://www.infidels.org/families/parents/.
- America Online has chat and
message boards available to atheist
parents by going to Keyword Atheism and following the links.
Copyright © 2000, Lorna
Collier