But What About Your Daughter | Leaving Your Religion

Years ago, when I was a youth pastor, I read an article in a youth ministry magazine that claimed 85% of all Christians accepted Christ before the age of eighteen. Based on these statistics, it encouraged youth workers to redouble their efforts to save youth and children. Once they went off to college or began exploring the world, the odds of young adults becoming religious were greatly diminished. Back then, I thought that outcome a tragedy.

When I was teaching religious doctrine to children, I never thought of it as indoctrination. As a religious person, I had the responsibility of raising them in the faith. While orthodox theology allowed for an age of accountability before which children weren’t morally responsible, every Christian parent was overjoyed when their son or daughter accepted Christ. The pressure was off. Their eternal destiny was assured.

Back then, if someone had suggested children weren’t developmentally capable of making an informed decision about religious belief, I would have missed the point. You indoctrinated children when they were most malleable, assuring their adherence to your religion’s beliefs and practices, because you loved them. This indoctrination, though inappropriate from a non-religious perspective, was the religious equivalent of a vaccination. You were protecting your children from ideas and experiences that might destroy them, from choices and actions that might damn them to hell. To do otherwise was irresponsible.

Now that I’m non-religious, I try to remember the religious motive. I remember the mother, who when I publicly abandoned a belief in hell, chastised me for threatening one of her tools for raising her children. She said, “Without the threat of hell, how do you expect me to raise a moral child?” This woman was not a negligent, abusive parent. Indeed, within her religious framework, she was an exemplary mother. Though she worried about hell, her primary concern was raising a moral child.

[,,,]
Again, I try to remember my indoctrination. I was taught that without religious training moral development was problematic, if not impossible. This prejudice was difficult for me to abandon. Since my moral training happened within a religious context, it was hard to imagine raising children without that undergirding. What could possibly replace the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule and the parables of Jesus? This anxiety may explain why many parents, though they no longer have much interest in religion, often return to their childhood religious communities when they become parents. They don’t know where else to go.

But What About Your Daughter | Leaving Your Religion