transitions and non-religious upbringing

This is from a email I sent recently to a Mormon friend who asked how I was handling things with Little FTA, and how he transitioned out of the church.

As for Little FTA...He was almost 3 when we stopped attending church. So he'd been to nursery, but never primary. In nursery, he didn't get much religious-training, since the nursery in our ward was more about making sure the wilder kids weren't beating up the others. But other than that, we prayed with him before meals, showed him pictures of Jesus, I told him "remember Jesus" during the sacrament, we celebrated Christmas as the birth of Jesus, etc.

As we left, it never, ever occurred to me that we would stop being religious or stop being Christians. So as we stopped attending the LDS ward, we started shopping around to other churches, and we took Little FTA with us. We went to Catholic, Islamic, Episcopalian, Quaker, Unitarian Universalist, and Congregationalist churches. The UU was easily the most comfortable for me, so that's where we went most often the summer after leaving (the last time we went to the ward was April, '05). Little FTA being still quite young, he was more interested in how fun the playtime was at church. Most churches either don't have children's classes during the main meeting at all, or had a separate nursery during the main meeting. So he preferred the places he could play with toys, of course, which meant the UU and the Quaker. He loved it also when the UU meeting had a special Children's Sermon at the beginning; it made him feel special to go up front and have the pastor speak directly to the children. But for some reason, he hated the UU nursery teachers, and started to protest about going. By the end of the summer, it also became apparent to me that my husband was more fond of staying home on Sundays than going to meetings, so I started to go alone. Not every week, just every once in a while when I felt like it. Once grad school started, though, I found I was too busy most of the time, and preferred to spend my time on fun outings with my husband and son. A walk in the woods on a Sunday became just as satisfying to me as a church meeting. Since then, whenever I ask Little FTA if he wants to come to UU with me, he says no, and I don't push it. I did take him to a Christmas Eve service last year, at the congregationalist church where our exmo friends have attended. He enjoyed seeing his friends in the nativity play, and the dog and goat that were part of the production. But the rest was lost on him, and I'm okay with that.

At first, I was really concerned about finding a replacement church and a religious community in which to raise my son. I couldn't conceive of a moral upbringing without religion. I mentioned this to a Mormon friend of mine who is married to a man who was raised atheist (and still is). It made sense to her, but then she brought it up once when we were all together, her husband included. As she said it, it struck me that here this man was, a great person, a wonderful husband, a perfectly moral, ethical man, who had been raised without religion. And I knew it was possible, and that religion was not necessary to being good.

Little FTA hasn't missed church, though there have been a couple moments where I could see he was making the transition. Once, a few weeks after we stopped attending, when we were walking around a Divinity School lawn, I told him what people there do (learn about Jesus, etc). He said, "I don't know who Jesus is." It struck me profoundly, certainly more profoundly than he meant it, and I answered simply, "I don't either, Little FTA. I don't know either." I was having major doubts about the divinity of Jesus at the time.

I want Little FTA to be aware of religion and religious traditions, though, and he's freely asked questions about his Jewish/Christian/Muslim friends, and understands that some people do this or that because of their different religions. I tell him Greek myths, Bible stories, etc., all with the same attitude: they are old stories that try to teach us something. Holidays are the same; Christians do this, Jews do that, there's also Yule and Kwanzaa, etc., and isn't it fun?

He's still a little confused about some details, but he's young yet. For example, he thinks "grandma and grandpa don't drink coffee because they believe in God." I correct him on such things, but don't push it. I have no problem with his religious education coming later rather than sooner. We will not allow him to be baptized into any religion until he's an adult and can make his own decision if he likes. We will make him aware why we've chosen not to be Mormon, but that he also needs to be respectful to his relatives who are. For example, we tell him he need not participate in relatives' meal prayers, but he does need to be quiet during them.

He's really, really into science, and questions about where he came from and what happens when he dies come up--and he's perfectly at ease with the scientific answers, at least so far. He thinks it's great, for example, that the hydrogen molecules in his body were present 14 billion years ago at the Big Bang ("I'm 14 billion and 5 years old!") and that when things die, their bodies "return to the earth and fall apart into lit bits" and those molecules will be around in the universe until the end of the universe. When I read him children's stories that imply a heaven or afterlife, and he asks, "What does that mean?" I explain how we always remember people who die, in our heads and in our hearts, so in those moments, it's like they are with us again, and how some people call that heaven, and some people think that there is a heaven, too, where people really are when they die. Currently, he doesn't believe in God, and I'm okay with that for now, but when he's older, I'd like to him really explore the options. I could see myself taking him to UU services, for example, because I really like their youth program. For one year, when they are teenagers, they learn about a bunch of other religions and take the youth to those churches so they really know their options. I like that a lot. UU is also really good about helping people find their own spiritual path rather than defining the right one for them, and people in the congregation range from atheists to theists, Jewish, Christian, pagan.

Whoa, I've gone on for a while, haven't I? I guess I needed the chance to clarify these things in my own head, so thanks for asking the question! We've been making it up as we go along, really, as I think most parents handle a lot of things.