When Leaving the Church Doesn't Include Your Children

"Leaving the Church means I can remove my kids from the community and make it so they never develop any loyalties to the institutional Church that I have to deal with."

Let's unpack that assumption.

My mom is from a Catholic family who has a complicated relationship with the Catholic Church. If pressed, that's what she would say her religious background is. She went to mass on her own when she was younger. I have memories of her taking me to mass. She stopped around the time my younger sister was born, and there wasn't much in the way of religious teaching that she ever tried to instill in us. It wasn't something that was important to her.

She had the assumption that if religious thought was something she didn't give to us, it was something she would never have to deal with. We'd be comfortably agnostic like her and that would be the end of it.

Dear reader. That was not, in fact, the end of it.

If there was a God, I should've been one of the last people to ever find out. Despite that, my religious beliefs have been in formation from the time I was a child, a tapestry of random things I'd gathered from the world around me. I've prayed and read scripture on my own without anyone forcing me to, having spiritual experiences in private from the time I was very young.

My mom said she didn't want to choose my religion for me, that she wanted me to pick my own faith. But I wasn't actually supposed to do that. I wasn't ever actually supposed to choose my own religious community, especially if it was different from hers. Once I did, this became a significant, ongoing source of conflict between us. If I wasn't going to be comfortably agnostic like the rest of them, why couldn't I have just been Catholic? She's asked me that before. That's a conversation for another time though.

Here's the salient point: you don't control the spiritual lives of your children. Your agnosticism, atheism, or secularism doesn't guarantee that's how they turn out, no more than your parents being believers meant that for you. Be okay with that possibility and decide ahead of time to respect their choices, or you'll end up doing as much damage to your relationship with your kids as your parents did to you by forcing you to conform to their beliefs. Never take the formation of your child's religious identity and make it about you. Because it's not about you. It's not about what you believe, want, think, or feel. It's about them. If you can't support your child in their identity formation separate from you, that's a you problem.

Your kid wants to get baptized or endowed and you make your grievances something they have to contend with? They want to serve a mission and you refuse to speak to them for most of the time they're gone? They're getting married in the temple and they already know your reaction is going to be explosive?

I'm telling you from personal experience that this doesn't become less abusive just because the person doing it is agnostic or an atheist. Have all the complicated feelings about your child being religious, especially if it means they're staying in or returning to a community you left. But deal with those feelings with a therapist. Don't take them out on your kids.