Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions

by Phil Zuckerman

  In those first few years, Stacy and I tried to set clear boundaries, establishing clear do’s and don’ts for the grandparents. Or to be more accurate, clear don’ts. I think that my in-laws were somewhat hurt by our rulemaking, our rigidity, our resistance to their religion. Perhaps they felt like we were judging them, not respecting them. But as new parents, we were simply trying to do what we felt was best for our children. And there were times when we also felt judged and disrespected by them in turn. After all, didn’t they think that we were going to hell for not believing in Jesus? Didn’t they think our children were going to hell? And furthermore, they just didn’t seem to get our secular orientation. I sometimes felt like they looked down on Stacy and me for not believing in God. We sometimes felt like they didn’t respect our secularity, which we feel is a legitimate, respectable, noble life stance—not something to be condemned or pitied.

  Eventually, however, over the course of the last several years, things have mellowed out. A respectful truce has emerged between us. Basically, we have just decided to try our best to not talk about religion with them. We know where they stand, and they know where we stand. And so we simply try not to get into it. Stacy likens it to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” family policy. As she explains, “We just don’t go there. We want to be able to love and respect them, so why delve into these things that we feel so uncomfortable about? My mom’s religious views do not stop me from loving her.”

  Also, both Stacy and I have lowered our defenses quite a bit in terms of feeling like we have to “protect” our kids. And as we have grown more comfortable and secure as parents, we have stopped policing the grandparents. Again from Stacy: “We came to see that our children will understand that this is Nana and Grandpa—that is who they are. And we are still their parents. We will always be the dominant forces in their lives, making the deepest impressions. So we really pulled back and thought, ‘Hey, if Nana and Grandpa want to talk to the kids about the blood of Christ and hell, then our kids will grow to learn that that is what they believe.’ That’s okay. That’s life. They have a right to know what their grandparents believe, to know who they are. And it is Nana and Grandpa’s prerogative to let their grandchildren know what it is they believe. It has actually been a relief and a revelation to come to that secure place.”

  For my wife and myself, the challenges of being secular parents have generally only arisen when we are interacting with my in-laws, especially when we’re at their house in Colorado. That’s when we have to contend with religion intimately, and when we feel our secularity most acutely. But back home in Southern California it is pretty much smooth sailing. Because we live in a small college town on the West Coast, we are rarely confronted with much religiosity. There are a lot of secular people here, a lot of lapsed Catholics, liberal Episcopalians, cultural Jews, Unitarians, atheists, agnostics, academics. People like us. Nearly all the people we know are nonchurchgoers. Our children have many friends who come from secular homes of varying degrees. Religion is not part of their public school life. City council meetings do not begin with a prayer, nor do local sporting events. Nearly everyone we know is suspicious of politicians who wear their religion on their sleeve. In short, we live in a very irreligious nook of America. And thus being secular parents is fairly normal and not something most of us spend too much time dwelling on or mulling over.

  But many secular parents in America have a markedly different experience. Those moms and dads who live in extremely religious parts of the country experience a whole different reality when it comes to raising their kids. Those lingering moments of awkwardness that I used to experience around the dinner table at my in-laws’ home are nothing compared to what some secular parents in America’s Bible Belt are forced to contend with on an almost daily basis—mothers like Tonya Hinkle, who lives in a small town just outside of Meridian, Mississippi. In Tonya’s world, religious leaders are widely respected, religious traditions are faithfully upheld, religious congregations undergird community, and religious beliefs run deep—and they are not withheld from the public square. In such rural southern communities, being a secular parent can be really, really tough.

  A Secular Mom in the South

  Tonya Hinkle, age fifty, has lived in her one-stoplight town in eastern Mississippi for over twenty years. She used to work as a childcare provider, then as a school cafeteria worker, but she’s been a stay-at-home mom for the last decade. Her husband works for a local communications company. She describes herself as a “nonreligious person who never goes to church,” which isn’t a typical or common orientation among people in her little town. “When we first moved out here, the neighbors were friendly and charming, and then as soon as they discovered that we were nonreligious and had no intention of going to their churches, they became distant—or persistent. Others were just like, ‘Oh, you’re strange people. We don’t want to know you.’ … There’s just a real strong Christian presence in this area. It seems like everything in this town, every event—I don’t care what it is—always starts and ends with a prayer. And if you don’t belong to a church, you don’t exist. Everything revolves around the churches. And if you’re not part of them, you’re ‘agin’ ’em,’ you know what I mean?”

  Tonya initially enrolled her three kids—a boy and twin girls—in the local public school. She desperately wanted them to be and feel a part of their community. Being the child of a military father (air force), Tonya had always moved around while growing up, and she most definitely didn’t want that for her own children. She wanted them to have a sense of belonging, a sense of place. And she also wanted to be involved with their education. “I tried to help out, to assist in the classrooms, to be friends with the teachers.” But the invitations to church started right away—from other parents, from teachers, from the secretary in the principal’s office. It seemed like every time Tonya was at school with her kids, someone brought up the topic of religion and inquired about Tonya’s religious affiliation. And every time Tonya said that she and her family were not religious, awkwardness arose. Or sometimes a smidgen of scorn.

  Then the teasing started. Taunts in the schoolyard. Nasty notes being passed. Tonya went to speak with various teachers. Every single one was strongly Christian, and while they were sorry about the troubles that Tonya’s kids were facing, they each suggested sending them to church as the solution. The principal—a very active member of the largest Methodist church in town—offered up the same sentiments.

  Tonya felt isolated and frustrated. And soon the isolation and frustration were accompanied by real worry. One specific episode she recalls involved an instance of verbal harassment that her twins experienced on the school bus. As she recounts, “I think they were in first grade. I always waited for them when the bus would drop them off at the front of the house. I would go out there. And the girls got off and, you know, you could tell that they had been crying for quite a while. I mean, they just had tears running down their faces and they were hiccuping and crying. I calmed them down and asked them what had happened, and eventually I managed to get it out of them: this one girl had stood up on the bus and screamed—right in their faces—that they were going to HELL. That they were going to burn in all eternity because they didn’t go to church! I later found out that it was this girl’s parents that had talked to her about my children. You know—just vicious.”

  As on previous occasions, Tonya went to the teachers and the principal to complain. She met the same resistance. And she was forced to endure a fair bit of pious scolding from the principal’s secretary, who more and more frequently exuded a growing air of disapproval every time they happened to interact.

  But the worst was yet to come. And when it did, Tonya was left reeling. It was toward the end of the school year, in May, when her son was in fourth grade and her daughters were in second. She explained, often choking up with emotion, “When my mother got ill, she was put into a nursing home. Now, this is important—my mother was the only grandparent my kids had. My husband’s pa
rents were out of the picture, and my father had died before the kids were born. So Grandma was all they had. We would visit her regularly. Then one day things took a turn for the worse and she was, you know, moments away from death, and the nursing home gives me a call and says, ‘You better get down here if you want to say goodbye. Now’s the time.’ And I was going to take my children with me there so they could say goodbye to their grandmother, whom they loved dearly. And I was told by the school secretary, in the principal’s office, who I had had dealings with before—she knew my point of view—she said that they were not allowed to be taken out of school. My children. I could not take them out. She said, ‘You need to have a signed doctor’s note’ or something. You know, she gave me a bunch of crap. That’s the nicest way I can put it. When I explained the situation to her—that my mom was literally about to die and I wanted the kids to be able to say goodbye to their grandmother—she looked me in the eye and said that I could tell my children that they could see their grandmother in heaven.”

  Tonya felt as if she had been kicked in the gut with a bluntly sanctimonious, malevolently pious boot. She stood there shaking. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Her mother was dying and her children were being held captive. She was at a loss. The secretary had made it sound like Tonya would be breaking the law if she forcibly removed her children from the school premises. As she laments, “You know, at the time I really didn’t have the tools to defend myself.” She wasn’t able to get her kids out of school that day, and her mother died early that afternoon. Her kids hadn’t been able to say goodbye.

  Tonya never let her kids go back to that school. She was done.

  Did she consider moving somewhere else, perhaps to a city, where things might be different? No. As she explained, “My husband’s work is here. What can I say? A good-paying job is nothing to sneeze at in this country! But I guess it also boils down to stubbornness. I feel like I have as a much a right to live here as anyone else. Why should I have to move?”

  So she began homeschooling her children. The beginning was actually really rough. She had no preparation for such an undertaking. She found it difficult to navigate the paperwork, the planning, the scheduling. There were some subjects that she needed to heavily brush up on. It took her quite some time to learn how to be a good teacher, to adequately foster their educational development, to give the proper level of feedback, and so on. And all the other homeschoolers in the county were extremely religious; they made it unmistakably clear that they did not want any secular folk in their midst.

  But then, into this rather lonely and difficult situation, emerged some light. It came in the form of the late-night glow of the computer screen. Through the help of the Internet, Tonya found and got in touch with another secular mom in another small town about fifteen miles away. This was the best thing to happen to her in a long, long time. She and this mom became fast friends, their children clicked, and they’ve been homeschooling their kids together for over ten years now. It has been wonderful to have that support, that connection, that camaraderie. And in the past two years, two other families from a neighboring county have joined their “secular homeschooling” group. So now there’s a small core.

  Tonya’s experience as a secular parent in rural America is far from unique. One nationally representative study found that 41 percent of atheists have experienced discrimination within the last five years due to their lack of religious identification. And in my research into secular life in America, I have spoken with and heard from many other mothers out there with stories strikingly similar to Tonya’s. Mothers like Pat Cole, the wife of a truck driver, who lives in rural Arkansas, and also eventually chose to pull her only son out of public school because of the harassment he endured there, the constant proselytizing from teachers and school administrators, and the specific things that he was being taught on a regular basis: that abortion is murder, that evolution is “just a theory” that is inferior to the biblically supported notion of intelligent design, that homosexuality is a sin, and that “abstinence” is the only option for those teenagers who wish to practice safe sex. Or Becky Eaves, the wife of a military man, who lives in a small town in rural Texas, and knows all too well the isolation and alienation that can come from being secular in such deeply religious communities, isolation and alienation that are dramatically sharpened when children come into the mix, and one of those children is gay.

  Tonya insists that although she is raising her kids without religion, she doesn’t want them to uncritically accept her own spin on religious matters. She tries as much as possible to let them make up their own minds, or at least develop the capacity to do so. “I let them go to church things. If they want to go to this or that church activity, I let them. I try to give them a balanced view.” But how? “I give them the facts. And then I show them what other people’s beliefs are. And then I try to explain the difference between a fact and a belief. And let them choose for themselves.”

  In addition to talking with Tonya about the many struggles that she has endured while raising her kids without church or faith, I asked her about some of the good things that come with secular parenting. “Gosh, there are so many. Just really relating to them—as people. You know, they understand that the choices that they make have consequences. And I love to watch their minds grow. You can just see their minds opening up to all the different possibilities. You know—they are not limited. A lot of religious people are very limited in their way of looking at the world. Their religion tells them this and that, you can’t do this and you can’t do that. Religion is a way to control people, to tell them what to think, what to believe. And I want my children to make their own decisions. That’s been my focus. What I want for my kids is to let them be their own voice.”

  Cultivating Morality in Children

  Not all secular parents in America experience the extreme levels of alienation, isolation, and harassment that Tonya describes above. Those nonreligious mothers and fathers out there who, like myself, live in those parts of the country where religion isn’t so strong and there is a greater diversity of cultures, worldviews, and social milieus do not experience the raising of their children as an embattled struggle fraught with what can sometimes be painful challenges. For those who live in places where there are a lot of other nonreligious folk, being a secular parent is not such a herculean enterprise. It is just something you more or less muddle through with relative ease, only grappling with certain choices or confronting particular conflicts now and then. There can thus be no doubt that raising secular kids is a much softer and smoother ball of wax when you are living in San Francisco, Eugene, or Burlington than in Montgomery, Knoxville, or Sioux Falls.

  Just ask Dr. Deborah Kaufman. Debbie grew up in a comfortably wealthy part of New York City and she currently lives in a comfortably wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, near the beach. For Debbie, who is forty-five and the mother of two boys, raising her children without God is easy, pleasant, and even slightly mundane. Nary a struggle has come her way.

  Debbie is a psychiatrist and works as a head administrative supervisor at a large mental health facility. Her husband, a blue-eyed, blond-haired, chisel-cheeked Minnesotan, is a professor of political philosophy. Neither of their parents are believers, so unlike my wife and me, Debbie and her husband have experienced no conflicts with the grandparents. And none of the members of their rather large circle of friends are religious. Their boys, who are twelve and eight, have never met any kids who are strongly devout. They have never been invited to a church nor told that they should go to one. They have never heard anyone speak of hell, they’ve never met a Bible thumper, and they’ve never had religion pushed on them from teachers or administrators at school.

  Sure, the God question has come up on occasion. Not a problem for Debbie. She has had no difficulty answering her sons’ questions about God. “I always start by just saying that I think life is really wonderful, really beautiful, and that we are so lucky to be here, so lucky to be alive, so lucky
that we can appreciate the beauty of the world. But I tell them that I don’t feel the need to put God in there somewhere in order to appreciate all those things. So we tell them that. And then we say that some people do believe in God, but we don’t.”

  And what about when the kids ask about what happens when we die? Again, Debbie handles this topic with relative ease. “I have just told them that it is a time of peace. You’re not alive anymore. You’re part of the world. You just go back to being part of the world, and your body becomes a part of everything. I always try to be positive, to put it in positive terms—that you will become part of the world and return to the earth.”

  What I admire most about the way Debbie handles such questions is her ability to be clear and honest about her lack of supernatural beliefs while at the same time not putting down religion, not condemning it or mocking it. It is important that her kids know where Debbie stands on these topics, while at the same time healthy and good that she doesn’t sour them on the bulk of humanity—those billions of people who do believe in God or life after death. Debbie’s answers exude confidence rather than defensiveness, ease rather than stress, and openness rather than closed-mindedness. This may simply be the result of her own personality. But it may also be a result of the sociological fact that her daily life is devoid of religious bullying, zealous proselytizing, or fervent faith, and so, unlike Tonya Hinkle, she simply doesn’t ever feel embattled or condemned.

  How about morals and values? How does Debbie provide a moral foundation for her kids without belief in God? On this front, she is certain that theism is not necessary for a viable moral framework. “I don’t see how believing in God gives you morality. The way we teach them what is right and what is wrong is by trying to instill a sense of empathy—how other people feel. You know, just trying to give them that sense of what it’s like to be on the other end of their actions. And I don’t see any need for God in that.”