We Now Discourage Our Daughter from Joining us for Church

The non-religious may not be able to relate to this story immediately. But in the end it is not about religion but about good parenting. For those adults who have embraced faith of any kind, it is a something we would like to pass onto our children as a true gift. For non-religious parents, I trust there are many who have embraced a set of values they would likewise want to confer as perhaps the greatest gift they can give to their children.

While faith and values are important to parents, it is an easy leap of poor logic to overly associate faith or values too closely to a particular institution. In response, our family has developed the following core value:

“Healthy Religion is Faith Shared, not Faith Controlled.”

For us it is a subtle but important distinction. At risk of stating the seemingly obvious, there is supposed to be something “sacred” about a religious environment. And yet so many people have been deeply violated in religious environments. I’m not merely speaking about the scandals surrounding prominent religious leaders. I am also talking about the far more common and far more frequent everyday violations. In an environment that is supposed to be about not judging people, people are judged with far more scrutiny than almost anywhere else. In an environment where one is supposed to feel accepted more than anywhere else, people experience extremely vicious levels of rejection. The list of such contradictions could go on for several pages.

With all that said, it is time to focus on Chloe’s experience. We’ve been taking her along with us her entire life. But the other day we witnessed what it has been like for Chloe. The girls close to her age included daughters of friends, as well as these daughter’s friends from elsewhere.

The church youth went to a haunted house together. There were four other girls close to Chloe’s age that night. When the adults learned that kids had to enter the haunted house in groups of four, the girls were told to break up into a group of two and a group of three and to let other girls from the line in to form two groups of four. The four other girls insisted on going in together, requiring Chloe to go in with three strangers. While the adults insisted this was unacceptable, the four girls made every effort to dodge this adult directive to the point where they were going to enter the haunted house without Chloe when their group got to the head of the line.

The other four girls had formed a clique and it became clear to Amelia that the clique was committed to excluding Chloe. It was as if by excluding someone, the girls doing the excluding felt closer to one another. In contrast, Philip is liked and respected by his peers within the same group.

So what do we do? What would you do? As the girls get older, there is only so much control we can exercise and even less we should exercise. We’d like the young girls Chloe’s age to be accepting towards Chloe as well as any girl who might visit our religious environment. And yet there is something right about letting them choose their own group of friends and to put a social boundary around that group. It is normal and healthy. The problem is experiencing such exclusion has no place in a healthy religious experience.

We think this is where many parents go wrong introducing faith to their children. When the religious institution of the parents’ choice is not working for a particular child, the parents double their efforts into making the institution work for the child which only leads to greater dissatisfaction, if not outright violation. So what is the solution? We’ve concluded the solution is not to fix the other girls’ behaviors. Instead it is to encourage Chloe to find “shared faith” in an environment where she also is accepted. Given Chloe’s popularity at Hermes Middle School among multiple groups of girls and boys, we do not think this will be terribly difficult for her. But it will take some work and some parental support. We do not know how it will play out exactly. But for now, we want to discourage our daughter from experiencing faith in an environment where she is not eagerly welcomed and accepted.