Living the Secular Life_New Answers to Old Questions

by Phil Zuckerman

  In fact, Debbie is convinced that the secular morality she strives to instill in her children is actually much better, more mature, and ultimately more durable than a morality based on faith in God. “If your morality is tied to a religious belief system, well, that can come and go—because, who knows? I mean, if your morality is all tied in with God, what if you at some point start to question the existence of God? Does that mean your moral sense suddenly crumbles? The way we are teaching our children about wrong and right and empathy and how to treat other people, no matter what they choose to believe later in life, even if they become religious or whatever, they are still going to have that system. Their morality does not depend on Adam and Eve being in a garden or anything like that. It just works on its own.”

  Debbie’s discussion here relates directly to Sonja’s “eye in the ceiling” hypothetical that we described earlier. If the morality we seek to foster in our children is totally or even partially dependent upon faith in a supernatural entity, such as the Eye of God watching us, or in ancient tales about talking snakes and original sin, then it is intrinsically less stable than a morality that is built upon rational explanations for why we should or shouldn’t do this or that, or appealing to empathy and the feelings of others.

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  DEBORAH’S REFLECTIONS ON the moral instruction of her children also link nicely to the foundational work of Lawrence Kohlberg, the eminent professor of psychology who worked at both the University of Chicago and Harvard. Dr. Kohlberg is well known for his studies concerning moral reasoning and development. After years of probing how children, teenagers, and adults understand, think about, and explain morality, Kohlberg argued that nearly all humans pass through various stages of moral development as they grow and mature.

  At first, when very young, children tend to understand wrong and right simply in terms of punishment. Thus at age three morality basically boils down to this: if you can be punished for it, it is wrong; if not, then it is okay. But as we grow older, this conceptualization of morality fades and other factors and considerations come into play. For example, social approval and disapproval become more significant. And then, as we further progress and develop, we begin to see that something may be wrong not merely because there is a rule against it or because others condemn it, but because it may have negative consequences for others or for oneself.

  Kohlberg outlined six stages of observable human moral development, and the final stage, usually not attained until late adolescence, involves moral reasoning that is based on universal ethical principles, such as justice, equality, respect for all human beings, and the Golden Rule.

  And what many people think—including philosophers like Bertrand Russell, authors like Salman Rushdie, and mothers like Debbie Kaufman—is that religions, especially the more conservative or fundamentalist, seem to be trapped in the earliest, least developed stage of human moral progression, basing notions of wrong and right merely upon whether or not they warrant God’s punishment. Furthermore, some studies indicate that religious parents who employ the threat of God’s punishment can be at risk of developing in their children debilitating personality traits such as excessive self-blaming. So Debbie deliberately avoids emphasizing punishment in the moral upbringing of her sons. For her, talking about empathy, treating people the way one would want to be treated, and acting in this world in a way that one would want others to act, à la Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, is not only a more humane form of ethical instruction, but also more sound.

  What We Know About Secular Parenting

  The experiences of parents like Tonya Hinkle of rural Mississippi and Debbie Kaufman of urban Los Angeles couldn’t be more different. When it comes to secular parenting and feeling isolated or integrated, alienated or enmeshed, suspected or understood, defensive or easygoing, aware or oblivious, there is a broad range. A lot will depend on where in the country one lives, one’s own personal upbringing, one’s educational and occupational status, one’s neighbors, and then some.

  But what else do we know about secular parenting? Despite the fact that millions of people raise their children without religious faith, the phenomenon of secular parenting has been almost totally ignored by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians. There is, remarkably, no established body of research on the raising of nonreligious kids.

  However, it does look like a zygote of research is just now starting to gestate. In recent years there have been a few studies shedding some rays of light on secular parenting. One key finding is that when kids are raised without religion, they tend to remain irreligious as they grow older. The data backs this up nicely; in his recent longitudinal analysis of various generational cohorts in the United States, Stephen Merino found that “those with religiously unaffiliated parents as children are significantly less likely to express a religious preference as adults.” Back in the 1980s, Hart Nelsen, a professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University, documented the clear influence that the secularity of parents has on their children. He showed that just as kids of religious parents almost always tend to become religious themselves, the same holds true for the kids of secular parents—they too nearly all grow up to become secular. According to Professor Nelsen’s analysis, among American families back in the 1980s, if the father was secular but the mother was religious, then about one-sixth of the children of such unions grew up to become secular. If the mother was secular but the father was religious, about half of such children grew up to be secular. And if both parents were secular, about 85 percent of their children grew up to be secular. This research was confirmed some years later—and quite glaringly so—by two sociologists in Scotland, Steve Bruce and Tony Glendinning, who found that children raised without religion rarely grow up to become religious themselves. As their survey results showed, “If someone was not raised in a particular faith, the chances of acquiring one later in life are small.” How small? “About 5 percent.”

  In addition to the demographic information above, one can find a smattering of other interesting studies that contain at least a little bit of relevant information about secular parenting. These are studies that focus on religious family life but happen to include some nonreligious folk in their sample. For example, in his impressive study of sex and religion in the lives of American teens, Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology and religion at the University of Texas, found that secular parents are generally more comfortable talking about sex with their teenage children, and end up providing them with better information about sex and safe sex practices than religious parents.

  Vern Bengtson, a professor of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California, has been studying religion and family life for thirty-five years. He has included secular families in his latest investigations, and he reports that most secular families exhibit high levels of solidarity and emotional closeness, and that secular parents are quite articulate about their values, with many being “more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious’ parents in our study.” And what are some of their values? Sociologists Brian Starks and Robert Robinson found that nonreligious parents are more likely to value and seek to cultivate autonomy in their children, rather than obedience. The latter tends to be of greater value to religious parents, especially conservative Protestants. Indeed, according to various national surveys, when asked what characteristics they’d like their children to exhibit, secular parents are far less like to list “obey parents” and more likely to list “think for oneself” than religious parents.

  The secular emphasis on cultivating autonomy in children bears impressive fruit; one recent study found that atheist teenagers were far more likely to agree that “it is not important to fit in with what teens think is cool” than their religious peers. And sociologists Christopher Ellison and Darren Sherkat found that compared to their Christian counterparts, secular parents were more likely to stress the importance of rational problem solving, not harming others, a
nd pursuing truth.

  Another study, by social psychologists Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer, found that atheist parents were reluctant to impose their atheism on their children. Indeed, atheist parents were much more likely to want their children to make up their own minds about what they believed. This was in stark contrast to believing Christian parents, who were far more likely to consciously and deliberately attempt to pass their religious beliefs on to their children.

  Professor Manning

  If there is an expert on secular parenting out there, it would be Christel Manning, a professor of religious studies at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, and the author of various articles and books on how secular parents raise their children.

  Christel’s academic trajectory has been quite similar to my own: she had been studying religious life her entire career, but then about ten years ago she too realized that very few scholars were looking at secular life. And nobody was looking at that most central aspect of secular life: raising kids. Recognizing just what a gaping lacuna this was, she took on the task herself, becoming the first person within academia to make secular parenting the main focus of her research. For more than a decade, Professor Manning has interviewed secular parents from all over the country, seeking to understand just how they do it and what goes on between them and their kids.

  Professor Manning’s research contains much that is insightful. For example, she has shown that there is a discernibly wide variety of types of secular parents—a spectrum including convinced atheists who are quite antireligious, agnostic types who aren’t sure just what they believe, and those who are simply indifferent; they don’t so much reject religion as ignore it. She also studied quite a few quasi-secular parents—those who are somewhat involved with religious life but don’t really believe the specific creeds and tenets of the religion they affiliate with, and only participate out of habit or tradition. Professor Manning’s research also confirms what I already broached above: that social location is key. Those parents, like Tonya, who live in highly religious enclaves are much more protective of their children, and as they raise their kids, they truly feel like a despised and rejected minority, while other parents, like Debbie, who live in nonreligious parts of the country don’t develop anything akin to such a defensive posture.

  Finally, confirming Professor Bengtson’s research noted above, Christel Manning has shown that secular parents are far from amoral. They may not raise their children religiously, but that does not mean that they raise them without values or ethical precepts. Some common, consistent moral principles secular parents impart to their children include valuing and obeying the Golden Rule, being environmentally conscious, developing empathy, cultivating independent thinking, and relying upon rational problem solving.

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  FOR MANY NONRELIGIOUS PARENTS, raising children entails a lot of cobbling, guessing, experimenting, and muddling. Sure, all parenting can be characterized this way. But for those who are raising their kids as freethinkers, there simply aren’t any set structures, long-standing traditions, or even clear guidelines. And yet despite this reality, millions are doing it nonetheless: raising their kids without religion. For instance, of Americans born between the years 1925 to 1943, fewer than 4 percent were raised with no religion; of those born between the years 1956 to 1970, 7 percent were raised with no religion; and of those Americans born between 1971 and 1992, almost 11 percent were raised that way.

  I asked Professor Manning to describe in her own words some of the more significant things that she has learned from all of her conversations with secular parents over the years. Is there anything that secular parents have in common?

  “A key pattern that I uncovered in my research—and this applies to parents from all over the country, and it held, overall, in all of my interviews—is that secular parents value the idea of having choices. This emphasis on having choices just really stands out. Secular parents want their children to have a choice about what to believe in and what to practice. And this makes them quite different from religious parents. You know, your typical Catholic parent will send their kids to CCD—catechism class—and Jewish parents will send their kids to Hebrew school, and what they want is to pass on their own worldview. But secular parents do not necessarily want their kids to turn out secular. Rather, what they talk about, what they emphasize is, ‘I want my son or daughter to be able to freely choose his or her own worldview.’ So many secular parents will even try to expose them to religion because they think it would help them make their own choices.”

  This last sentiment reminds me of a secular man from San Francisco I once interviewed. Once a month over the course of a year he took his ten-year-old son to a different church, as well as some synagogues and mosques, so that he would learn a bit about the various religious traditions out there in the world. After each service they’d go out for lunch and talk about the experience, reflecting on what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what they wanted to learn more about.

  As Professor Manning rightly notes above, for religious parents, passing on their own beliefs and values is generally an uncomplicated, straightforward endeavor. Religious parents typically find it a joy and duty to simply pass on their own religious beliefs and traditions. They don’t worry about unduly influencing their children’s belief system. Quite the opposite—you actively seek to influence your children’s beliefs in accordance with your religious faith. But many secular parents see this very process of passing on one’s religion to one’s kids as a form of indoctrination. They see religious faith as something that is directly and unfairly imposed on kids. They view young children as intellectually vulnerable, willing and perhaps even evolutionarily designed to believe almost anything their parents teach them about the nature of the world.

  The paradoxical situation many secular parents thus find themselves in is this: they don’t want to influence their children’s beliefs too much, and they want to provide an upbringing that allows for them to make their own choices, to develop their own ideas, beliefs, worldview. But they simultaneously know that this is not quite possible. Despite the best of intentions, parents simply can’t avoid shaping and influencing how their kids see the world. Socialization happens. Even if we don’t directly tell our children this or that, they observe us. They hear what we say on the telephone to friends or colleagues. They listen to what is said around the dinner table. They notice the books we read, the television shows we watch. They overhear the occasional arguments we have with our in-laws. Their worldviews will be influenced by us, no matter how hard we might try otherwise. It is inevitable.

  Beyond the fact of this inevitability, don’t all parents, as parents, actually want to influence their children’s worldview—even those secular parents who say that they don’t? No matter what some may contend, influencing our children is at the very heart of the parenting enterprise. It is a large part of what parenting is all about—to nurture and produce children whom we hope will eventually go on to exhibit the best in human potential. And not what someone else thinks is the best in human potential, but what we consider to be the best in human potential. And for most secular parents, when it comes to the best in human potential, freedom of thought is of unparalleled value. So how does one cultivate freethinking in one’s children, when the very process of that cultivation entails an unavoidable amount of parental influence?

  Being honest and discussing these matters openly and maturely with your kids seems to be the right place to start. As Professor Manning advises, “The first thing is to just be honest with your kids about your own relationship to religion, including whatever doubts you may have, and including how your perspective may change over time. And try to let your children make their own choices based on good information and critical, rational thinking. The best way to prepare kids for that is to encourage them to have questions and to really talk them through. And it is great to share with your kids your own thoughts on these things, rather than worry that you have to have a ready-mad
e answer. It is great to have authentic discussions about all of this.”

  For many secular parents, be they academics who live in Connecticut or stay-at-home moms who live in Mississippi, having honest, heart-to-heart, thoughtful discussions can be truly joyful: to share the reasons that cause one to doubt the existence of God, while simultaneously pondering why it is that others might actually find reasons to believe in God, and beyond that, to explore the very nature of credulity and skepticism, faith and reason, belief and doubt; to broach the possibility of there being no life after death, while simultaneously stressing that the most important thing is to focus on this life, this world, this time, for since this may be all that we have, it must be cherished; to grapple with the ultimate source of morals and ethics, and what it might mean to accept that these things do not fall down to us from the mysterious heavens but are cobbled together here on earth, over time, and with occasional stark disagreement. Such conversations are among the highlights of secular parenting.

  Ryan, His Son, and the Boss

  Heart-to-heart philosophical discussions are one thing, but what about actual rituals and traditions? How are these experienced or constructed by parents and children within secular culture? An obvious way that nonreligious people experience and enjoy rituals and traditions is simply by tapping into the plethora of nonreligious options out there.

  For example, consider Ryan Gorski. For him, it is all about the Boss.

  Ryan is forty-eight, married, with two sons. He grew up in Delaware but now lives in Philadelphia, where he is a successful civil attorney. Ryan has never believed in God. But ever since junior high, he’s believed in the musical titan from New Jersey: Bruce Springsteen. For Ryan, Springsteen concerts are moving, personal, and deeply transformative experiences. He’s been to over seventy of them.