How Do You Get Along With Your Family?

[LastKing]

How do you guys get along with your families? Can you still get along with them in spite of not being a Christian? Or are you facing problems because of it?

 

 

The other day I had a little family get together and secretly I was pretty depressed by the end of the day. I realized can't connect with them and felt I like didn't belong. With the expectation of my little Brother, I come from a very Republican family. I don't think there was signal point that anyone said anything that I agreed with or felt comfortable with.

 

The biggest thing that made me cringed the most was that they talked about how great it would be to move into the Bible belt. I'm currently living in south jersey with my mom and step-father and being a non-Christian is hard enough here. The idea of being surrounded by really hardcore bible thumpers made me sick. The truth is I want to move further north ware it is more liberal and Secular. I would like to live in New York City someday. It has lots of people and I've always like how culturally diverse it is. I think I would have a better chance of meeting people like myself there. My family on other hand wants to go Virginia or the Carolinas because it has more republicans.  

 

I always feel like they talked down on me whenever I do start to reveal what I really think. Like I don’t know any better or I’m going through some kind of weird phase that would pass and I would become like then again.  As a result I just don’t share my life with them. They never met any of the women I’ve dated or even know that I’ve dated outside my race, I’ve never told them about the time I visited my friends Shiki Temple or how I’ve participated in political activism against Creationism, Anti-Homosexuality and gotten involved with groups for separation of Church and state.

 

At times I even find myself kind of embarrassed by them. Some of the things my sister and mom have posted on Facebook have made me cringe because I afraid people on Facebook are going think I’m like them. This really sucks when you have a crush on a girl who’s rather liberal and is friends with your whole family on Facebook!

 

 

 

 

I just felt like a real stranger around them and it just hit me on how different from them I've become. Do you have hard time talking to your family since your de-conversion and if so how do you deal with it?

 

 

How do you guys deal with it? 

[ClaraOlive]

Are you going to be in a position where you could move on your own soon? If that's a goal of yours, I think you should work hard to make it happen, regardless of your family.

 

One of the best choices I ever made was to move far from my Republican Evangelical family. I have a similar relationship with my family as it sounds like you have with yours - there's not drama or meanness, but there's almost a complete lack of connection or commonality. When I talk to my mother on the phone, I'm uncomfortable and bored almost the whole time as she's talking about church, people from church, religion-related things she's doing. However, I don't make a big deal about it because she's not actively trying to evangelize me - it's simply that church and Christianity is her entire life and if she's not talking about what she's been doing at church, she literally has nothing to talk about. Likewise, she really isn't interested in or doesn't understand my career or my education, neither of which she has experienced herself. I feel a bit sorry for her because her friends have these Christian daughters who are settling down close to home, marrying Christians and giving them grandbabies. Since I can't do that and wouldn't be happy doing that, it's easier for us to have physical distance. It makes a good excuse for why we aren't closer emotionally.

 

I don't feel any need to tell my parents things like who I'm non-seriously dating or any involvement in specifically atheist activities. Even though the church is 95% of my mother's life, being an atheist is maybe 5% of my life. It's like being a specific height or not liking romance novels - it informs things I do, but in a fairly passive way. I don't go to church in the same way that I don't buy size X clothes - not to prove some kind of point, but because it wouldn't fit.

[Deva]

My situation is mostly the same as ClaraOlive. Distance helps.

 

Sometimes its tempting to tell them about my life, but since it doesn't center around Christianity, but rather the Dharma (which would hurt them) and other things, we really have nothing to talk about.  It is really too bad, but I can't see this ever changing.

[Voice]

Most of my immediate family are all pretty much cool, with my littlest brother walking the tightrope of the fundie's bottom line, "do you believe christ was raised from the dead."  Other than being hung up on that bit, he's mostly abandoned xianity like the rest of us, and he was a fundie for a time.

There is a branch, aunts uncles and cousins who are the right wing conservatives, fundies.  It's not that we don't get along, it's that we don't have anything to talk about.  It is a sense of not belonging, like you say, but only when it's at their house.  Outside or anywhere else it's a level playing field.

[wndwalkr99]

I don't go to church in the same way that I don't buy size X clothes - not to prove some kind of point, but because it wouldn't fit.

I like the way you wrote that. It is a lot more circumspect and accepting and non-aggressive than my reason, which goes more like "I don't go to church for the same reason I don't go to Star Trek conventions. They can go on for days about the mechanics of a warp engines but in the end it's all a bunch of made up bullshit about something that doesn't exist."

 

Yours is a gentler way of getting across a very similar point and a lot less likely to make people mad. Though sometimes I do want to make people mad.

[movingon]

I can relate top the feeling uncomfortable thing. I do my best to ignore it and just don't really comment. My family technically doesn't know I don't believe, but they could probably figure it out, with me living with my boyfriend, don't go to church, took my religious views off Facebook, etc.i'm sure they also think is just a phase. Me and Mt dad get along fine, we just don't really talk about religion other than his few moronic comments. My mom is barely speaking to me right now because I moved in with my boyfriend, but such is life.I agree with everyone who said move out. It really does help

[♦ Fuego ♦]

My fam is kinda strange in that most of them are fundies, but they forget that I'm not anymore. I came out with a thread on facebook and gave an argument in favor of atheism. There were some shocked responses, some of which were small book sized. Mostly they don't spend any time with me, and I'm fine with that for the most part. It makes me sad to see otherwise bright people caught up in thinking that their fantasy world is real. Others of them still write regularly and act as though they never heard my views and that I'm still in the sheep pen. We are still forced together occasionally for funerals and weddings, but that's it. I take out my frustrations by channeling it into writing.