Were Your Parents Religious?

[Max]

I was reading through the testimonies, and it seemed to me that there were two general groups of people here: those who were raised by very religious parents, and those who got almost no religion at all at home, but really got hit hard when they finally found it otherwise. Myself, I was brought up from as long as I can remember hearing the "fire and brimstone" radio preachers, going to Sunday school and church every week, Bible school, revival, youth groups... I don't think I'd have ever wound up in xtianity if it weren't drilled into me from such an early age. In fact, I remember at some point thinking what a blessing it was that I had been exposed at an early age, as I surely would not have been "saved" otherwise.

 

So, did others experience anything like this? Would your experience have been different if your parents had been something different from what they were (religiously, that is)?

[Unknowing1]

Dad wasn't overly religious in fact never mentioned too much about religion. My mom was more religious, God was an important part of her life, she was born catholic and attend catholic schools all the way through high school. But, she stopped going to church on a regular basis, however, my sister and I went every Wednesday and Sunday. She said she didn't go because she couldn't stand the non-latin mass. Lame excuse for someone who claimed to be as religious as she. Mom was catholic and dad was greek orthodox. In the eyes of the church, mom lived in sin from the time she married until the time she died, I think I'd avoid going somewhere that would tell me on a regular basis what an evil creature I was just for marrying someone outside of my church. I can't imagine the guilt that someone in that predicument feels.

[Deva]

Max, my situation growing up was much like what you have described. My parents are Baptists. I would say that my mother was the more religious. My dad would attend the service on Sunday but wasn't much interested in Sunday School. My mom was a Sunday school teacher and we had to attend church three times a week. Since my dad retired he has become much more religious. He is now a Baptist deacon. As far as I know, they have never questioned their own beliefs.

 

Nothing about this way of life seemed unusual as a child. Sword of the Lord newspaper, J. Vernon McGee on the radio, revivals, camp meetings, vacation bible school, etc. I just accepted most of it as being the right way to live. I am absolutely sure that if my parents had not foisted it on me that things would have been different.

[HoustonHorn]

I was raised as a Christian in name only. We considered ourselves Christian and I had a children's story book of the Bible, but we never went to church aside from one Easter and for weddings and I have no idea what denomination we were considered.

 

My dad, as I found out later, was raised very religious. My grandmother still is. And my mom was raised somewhat lukewarm Christian. But when they got married they stopped going to church, and I've heard that each set of my grandparents blamed the opposite child for it - my mom's parents blamed my dad and vice versa. Truth was that neither wanted to go.

 

Now that they're divorced my mother has become more openly religious, but more in a theistic "there is a god" type way and not "Jesus died for our sins". I think part of it is that her mother-in-law (she's remarried) is hard-core Baptist. The first thing that her MIL does in the morning is read her Bible. Although my mom's religious level depends on who she's around. She talks religion with my wife and her MIL; but with the rest of us, including my two fundamentalist atheist uncles, religion doesn't come up.

 

My dad on the other hand appears to be agnostic, or at least never makes mention of religion other than when he slips in a joke about JW or Mormons coming to his door.

 

As is the case with most other parts of my personality, I'm more similar to my dad now.

 

My wife was raised Church of Christ and is still openly religious. What I found funny is that one day she told me that I had a harder time staying in Christianity (this was after I left) because I wasn't raised with it and had I been raised with it the Bible would make more sense to me and I wouldn't question it as much.

[Max]

Max, my situation growing up was much like what you have described. My parents are Baptists. I would say that my mother was the more religious. My dad would attend the service on Sunday but wasn't much interested in Sunday School. My mom was a Sunday school teacher and we had to attend church three times a week. Since my dad retired he has become much more religious. He is now a Baptist deacon.

 

Are you sure you're not seeing MY parents?! Except that my dad became a lay minister after he retired, they sound like the same people.

[Amethyst]

My mother was very religious until the day she died. She was the one who influenced me the most. She literally believed in all or at least most of it. My dad was (and is) casual religious. I don't think he really believes most of it anymore, but he continues to go to church with my stepmom (who is also casual religious) because their friends are there.

[Ex-COG]

My parents were not big church attenders for the majority of my childhood. They did attend more regularly when my older siblings were little, but something happened in the early 50's which angered/insulted my father, so they stopped going to that particular church (at least that is what I've deducted from bits of information. My parents are not very talkative on the subject). I was born in the early 60's, and only have snatches of church memories when I was a toddler. I briefly attended church when I was 5 or 6; when a couple would pick me and some siblings up for Sunday School. Then a few years later, my mother finally learned to drive, and we (not my Dad) started driving to neighboring town to attend the fundamentalist church my Mom grew up in. This was where my strongest church memories were formed, and all I can say is thank goodness that Mom didn't make us conform totally to everything they thought you should do. Strict dress codes, no TV...typical holiness fare. My parents were believers (at least my Mom was) but didn't really show it. I rarely saw my Mom read the Bible, though I think she did; just in her bedroom and not out in front of everyone. We didn't pray before meals unless someone was visiting. Mom would sing religious songs around the house, but then she would also sing secular songs too. Occasionally, my Mom would say things about how the world was getting worse and worse and was headed for THE END, this was usually in response to riots and wars and all the other troubles that were occuring in the late 60's and early 70's. I was probably 13 or 14 when I stopped going to church. I think it was a combination of my Mom backing off from driving so much (she was a nervous driver) and that I was older and questioning whether all this stuff was really what God and Jesus wanted...plus I hated getting up early on Sundays! Once we hit the teen years, my Mom had allowed us to make our own decision as to whether we attend church or not, so I dropped out. Overall, to answer the original question, I would label my Mom as casually religious. I do think she held some deep religious beliefs, but she didn't try to force anything on me, other than making me go to church with her in my late childhood. That was pretty bad though, as they were very fundamentalist and taught lots of weird things and got me scared about the END OF THE WORLD for a while. So my background was a mixed cocktail of being allowed to develop my own ideas and not having religion forced on me, which was blended with unhealthy chunks of fundy church indoctrination. All of which set me up for my adulthood roller-coaster ride from religious indifference to born-again evangelicalism to agnosticism, believe me, some of the loops were doozies!

[Astreja]

I was another Christian-in-name-only, baptized in the United Church of Canada. My father doesn't discuss religion at all. My mother very occasionally comments on it, but without professing any faith. She went to church once or twice during my childhood, suggested once that I get confirmed in her church (Anglican), but didn't push the matter when I showed no interest. I went to Sunday School a couple of times on my own initiative, because my best friend went there, but we wound up in different groups and I dropped out.

 

If their feelings on religion had been different, I suspect my childhood would have been wildly different. (And, as it was, it was plenty weird without religion bogging it down. )

[Piprus]

Although I answered "not at all", the truth is my father and grandparents were agnostic, while my mother was a "casually religious" southern baptist. She had long rejected most of the fundie doctrines. It was actually my grandmother on my mother's side that introduced me to the baptist church. She was deeply religious, though quite liberal by SB standards. Small wonder then that after I became a hardcore born-again fundie, it didn't last very long. There just wasn't much to reinforce that view in my home life, in fact just the opposite. I was taught to question things and think for myself, and to not be so quick to accept what others may say.

[OldApostate]

My laptop battery died as I tried to respond to this before, so I'll try to recreate.

 

My family was very casually Christian. I remember a Methodist Sunday School when I was very young, but I was told that my mother was encouraged to leave that church because she was single with children (my father abandoned us in the 70s). Nevertheless, my mother remained Christian in name. Currently she is what I call a "Disney Christian." Nothing negative. Pretty female angels save you from burning buildings or spinning cars. Her religious beliefs are heavily influenced by modern Country music. She knows nothing about traditional Xian doctrine or what's in the Bible, and she only goes to church on the occasional holiday, and usually only for a music program or some kind of extravagant pageant put on by one of the megachurches.

 

I became a devout Southern Baptist on my own at about 13 (Mom did not attend my church). One of the local SBCs was very active in recruiting youth, essentially preying on their desire to belong. As a fatherless, gawky and incredibly insecure teen, I was easy prey. I attended youth group activities three nights a week, bible study twice a week, and one or two services on Sunday. In addition, I did a lot of missionary and charity work. Of course, I wasn't a "true Christian," oh nosiree. In my senior year of high school, all of the inconsistencies started becoming apparent and I started having personal conflicts with some of the doctrines. For example, one of my dearest friends came out as gay, and I refused to regard him as worthless to me as urged by my mentors. In college I became a liberal Christian and then rejected a god belief altogether as I started to study classical civilization and Ancient Greek.

 

I definitely believe that it would be far more difficult to leave had my family been more serious about Xianity. I think that many lifelong Xians have an ingrained belief in God as a fundamental fact of the universe, rather than a conclusion -- almost as if a law of Physics. For me, it was a conclusion I reached as a teen, so it was open to attack on an evidentiary and logical level.

[Ouroboros]

My parents were religious. My siblings were religious. My cousins, grand parents, ants, uncles ... all of them religious. I spent most of my time in Church. Had most friends in Church. Very few non Christian friends. Most of my work places where at "Christian" companies.

 

Did it effect me? Yes, most definitely. When I started to do work for non-theists and atheists, I was extremely shocked how kind and giving they were. It was one of those first wakeup calls.

[R. S. Martin]

My first experience with a nontheist was a professor. Like you, HanSolo, I was shocked at how kind and self-sacrificing he was. I was in my forties at the time. So far as I know, all my ancestors were Christians back to the pre-Christian era in Western Europe. Most Caucasians on here probably share a common gene and religious heritage when we go back that far. But in recent centuries and generations, yes, very seriously religious.

 

Mu aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings belong to a variety of Mennonite churches, and one family of cousins if Catholic, one is Pentecostal. I don't know what all their children are. So far as I know, I'm the only apostate from Christianity.

[Lycorth]

Mine were casually religious, but it did make a huge difference to me, as I ended up taking their casual religion seriously during my rebellious phase as a youngster. Sadly, that made for a difficult deconversion years later, much more so, I suspect, than if I would've just given into the brief doubts and problems I had with Xianity in my younger years.

[The Sage Nabooru]

My mother was religious in a passive, gutless sort of way. That is, she believed that nobody but Lutherans went to heaven, that God was seriously concerned about what language you used in the Liturgy, which version of the Bible you used, and guys making out with each other, and that I'd better give myself over to Jesus and believe literally in the Creation and all that. But she's always been spineless, and religion was no exception. Just as she was willing to accept it without question, she never had it in her to share it with others or push it onto anybody except our own family. Of course my brother and I were expected to be perfect die-hard Lutherans, and she tried her damnedest very, very hard to put us into that mold, to make sure that we never permitted anything other way of thinking to enter our minds. She compelled my father to play along as best she could, although I think she always knew deep inside that he was just playacting to make her happy, and didn't really care. My mother thought our absolutely disgustingly money-grubbing pastor HAD to be perfect, as a man of God, whereas my dad saw right through him.

 

My father was and remains an atheist. But he is also incredibly immature and egotistic, and now that I am no longer under the Christian fold my mother wants me under he has no reservations in dismissing anything that I or my mother or anybody else, for that matter, believes in as absolute bullshit simply because he doesn't want to even consider the possibility that it could be otherwise. He's closed-minded, arrogant, and condescending towards anything even remotely spiritual. He'll call you an idiot, a moron, a faker to your face and consider his work done. He is not at all interested in promoting any kind of dialogue or tolerance towards anything. But, to give you an idea about how this all ties in with his personality, this additude towards religious belief did not stop him from using my religious upbringing against me. That is, even though he did not believe in it, he would support instilling a fear of hell and punishment in me and constantly reminding me that God was pissed off at me, if it gave him complete control over me. His own self-interest manifested in both his complete and utter disdain and rejection as acceptable of any opinion other than his own yet was still willing to use religious fear as a tool to control others, if it proved useful. He found my mother's instilling of religious values in me to be ridiculous, yet did not say so to my face, instead he used them as a controlling mechanism. I had better do as he say, or I was violating the Ten Commandments and I'd be punished by God. Since he, however, did not believe in the Ten Commandments himself he felt absolutely no compulsion to respect his parents in any more than a superficial way.

[starelda]

My parents are atheists and never talked about religion. The first time I heard of Christianity was when I started school and we all had to sing hymns and say grace before lunch. I just figured it was another thing that the teachers were supposed to teach me and so I stuck with a kind of wishy-washy Christianity which I didn't really understand. As I got older I threw myself into it more and became quite a conservative Christian. It was my atheist husband that brought me out of that phase and eventually away from Christianity. He didn't say or do anything. Just one day, I was watching him from across the room and it dawned on me "hang on...according to the bible, he's going to be in hell after he dies simply for not believing the right thing...and likewise so will the rest of my family...that's not right". That thought fuelled questions and other questions sprung form those. It was something I'd avoided thinking about but eventually I found that I had to think about it. I became more liberal until I eventually questioned whether god even existed.

 

If things were different, if my parents were theists, then I guess I have been introduced to religion earlier and I think it would have been a lot harder for me to leave it behind. It's been hard enough as it is to put it all in the past, I still find myself pondering it from time to time...wondering if I've done the right thing and have headed in the right direction. If my parents were theists, I'd also be fearing what they would think about me leaving the fold. Maybe if they and/or my husband were theists, I would have never found myself forced to think about the injustice of hell and would still be believing and dragging my butt to church every Sunday.

[bluewizard]

My parents were both very religious and still are, they made me go to church when I was a kid and unfortunately my Dad still does to this day even though I'm an atheist now. I really wish there was someway I could get them to even question Christianity but that doesn't seem possible, they have ridiculous reasons for belieivng in God and will neevr ever accept the fact that I'm an atheist until they're dead, and they don't even realize how intolerant, close minded, and controlling they're being. It's mainly my Dad now,m my Mom would like me to be a christian, but she wouldnt make me go to church past the age of 18. my Dad on the other hand tihnks if he keeps making me go "God will speak to my heart and I'll become a Christian", he doesnt realize it's not that easy. My sister is afraid of Hell herself when I told the famkily I wish everyone in it would deconvert or at least accept I dont believe and she said "I dont want to go to Hell". They're all Southern Baptists by the way, every one of them, I'm the only non Christian in the family.

[trashy]

My parents were and still are. When i was born my dad was in Seminary. As of right now he is a 'part-time' minister to senior citizens in a large urban church. He has been delivering sermons regularly, probably averaging twice weekly, since before I was born. Southern Baptist, the conservative, inerrantist, creationist kind.

 

After 30 responses I think the poll is showing a trend with the majority of ex-christians having been raised in very religious homes. Interesting.

[Kalidasa]

My parents are only casually religious. The last time I was taken to church on a regular basis was during 1994, and the only reasons I got sent to Christian school for 6-12 was because my mother didn't like the principal of the local high school, the local selective high school is a good half-hour drive from home, and the local grammar school is so expensive in terms of tuition. Odds are, if they'd sent me to public school, I'd still be a Christian - it was going to a Calvinist Christian school that sparked off my deconversion.

[Taphophilia]

My parents were not all that religious until they were "saved" when I was 14. My mother told me that her grandmother, my great-grandmother, didn't like Christianity and thought the Bible was sick and perverted. Obviously, she'd read it. No one in my family is religious except my parents. There are a few liberal Christians here and there, but most don't want anything to do with it.

[Robbobrob]

My parents were not overtly religious. My mom had converted to Anglican from Catholic to marry my dad. His mom never liked the idea of him marrying a catholic (though in later life she became a catholic...go figure). We never went to church...they liked sleeping in on weekends too much.

 

My mom's siblings is very religious to this day....very catholic (even have a deacon and deaconess or two). But their children run the gambit from very religious to "I beleive just because I was brought up that way". Pretty sure I was on their naughty list for a long time when I dated and married a jew (and I imagine rejoiced when we later divorced). Now that they all know I was married in a church to my current wife (hiding under the cover of Unitarian Universalism is great), I'm sure I regained most favored nephew status.

 

Belief in God and Jesus was taken as a given. Never talked about, just assumed when I was growing up. When I wanted to learn about religion, sometime around Jr. High, the New Testament (without the OT) was the first and only religious book I got. I so wanted to understand and believe.

 

Lately, my mom has been sending me religious e-mails. She knows where I stand...or at least she should, but I think she just does not want to acknowledge it. My dad is still as pragmatic as ever, he accepts because of Pascal's wager, but does nothing to promote it, and rarely talks about it (good stoic Scottish/English blood in him).

 

Of the three, it is me who goes to church regularly and even holds a committee membership. They only go to church for weddings and funerals. Yet, I am the Apatheist Agnostic, and they both still believe.

[Clearview]

Both of my parents are devout Catholics. We prayed the Rosary as a family nightly and on any trip in the car that took more than 15 minutes. I never missed a Sunday Mass or Holy Day of Obligation until I was 18 and not living at home. They attended anti-abortion marches, sang in the choir, and are both lay ministers (meaning they're allowed to fork over Christ Chips at snack time during Mass.) My mom even takes Jesus Flakes to the old people in the nursing home. They are getting slightly softer in their old age. For example, Mom wanted my boyfriend and I to stain her deck last week, and my only available day was Sunday. She said my dad wouldn't have work done on a Sunday. I said that her deck might go unpainted, then. It didn't.

[I Broke Free]

Except for going to a liberal protestant church until I was eight years old, we were not religious. My parents never prayed or read the bible or encouraged me to, they never discussed religion or faith with me or my siblings.

 

My mother would sometimes quote some scripture when she felt it would bolster her position, but I learned quickly that the quotes were handed down to her from someone else and were not in the bible at all. I never once saw her read from the bible.

 

My father was mute on the subject of religion until after my mother died. Then one day the topic came up during one of my visits and I learned that he was just as much of an atheist as I am.

 

IBF

[Islington]

I was born and rised in a very catholic city by two moderate evangelistic parents. But xtianity is moderate in Germany anyway. I went to childrens service in our Church and had friends and much joy there. I got confirmationed eventually in an other town and still like my Pastor as a person. When I left xtianity I did it in a way that I had no haterd for it. (it might have been if my parents would have been more into xtianity) I have a cousin and he was a nice person until his parents started to be jehowas witnesses but even then I got along with them. We did not met often. But they started to argue about money with us on the burial of my grandmother we all had loved. Couldn't they wait at least untill we left the Graveyard? I haven't talked to them since then and I have no intresst in doing so in the futur.

[☆ TexasFreethinker ☆]

I was brought up in a very religious Southern Baptist home. Most of my extended family as well as our family friends were also very religious fundamentalists. We attended some function at church at least four days a week.

[SilentLoner]

My parents weren't, well, directly religious but allowed the influnce of those who were to teach me.

 

My female parental unit was from a non-religious muslim family. Once she married my dad she tried to fit in with his family by going catholic. Since then she has always used the "personal relationship with god" and and "spiritual" excuses, but anyone could see that she was really into the xtian mindset at times.

My male parental unit pretty much left catholicism long before I was born but unfortunately replaced it with a nearly as bad new age type of religious group and he's almost as bad as a fundie now.

 

My male parental unit's side of the family is strictly catholic, although I don't know if I would describe them as fundies. My grandmother (dad's side) was the ultimate religious influence in the family and neither of my parents argued with her in the matter. She installed a decent fear of god in me when I was a kid.

 

On the other hand, my female parental unit's besft friend was a total fundie. She would make me attend her friend's classes. Her friend took pride in holding classes in her home for kids in the neighborhood and teach us xtian values. It was through her I first learned about issues such as abortion and homosexuality. I'd rather not repeat excatly.

 

Looking back its pretty amazing I didn't become like them.