My mother thinks I’m going to hell. That it is a real place (though not, she would qualify, full of brimstone; her idea of hell is dark, and chaotic, and utterly without God). My grandfather, when he was in hospice care, said between labored breaths how glad he was that all of his four grandchildren had made their Profession of Faith. He said about his daughter-in-law, my aunt, “I believe she knows the Lord, but I’d like to be a little more sure.” My mother held very still, her face turned away, though not so sharply that it would seem deliberate. He was wrong, when he said four. He was remembering me the way he would like me to be.
At his bedside my mother prayed. Always a gifted speaker, even then, eloquent and quietly devout. They spoke of the funeral service: which verses did he want, and which hymns. She didn’t look at me. The room was too hot, kept that way for the thin patients, who were freezing to death in the damp May air, their hearts pumping more and more slowly. He’d been confused all day, mistaking me for my mother, and my mother for his wife. I have not made Profession of Faith, and my mother has stopped asking. When she prayed out loud she didn’t suggest that I join in, as though it hadn’t occurred to her, although maybe it would have in other families, with other daughters.
My mother is a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of America, a denomination of less than 300,000 members. Women in ministry are a relatively new thing in this conservative denomination, and the fight for her ordination has been my silent twin, alongside me from birth. When I was eight years old, I walked home from school and found my mother upstairs in bed, the lights out and the curtains drawn against the relentless California sun. She had a washcloth laid over her face, which she handed to me.
“Can you make this cold again?” she asked me. I didn’t understand. “Run it under cold water, then wring it out.”
When I brought it back to her I asked, “What’s going on?” My younger brothers must have been home as well, playing with Legos in their room, but I don’t remember them. It was my mother and me, alone in the dark vaulted space at the top of the house.
She had been crying. “The council decided,” she said, “that the time isn’t right. They aren’t going to let me preach.” She turned her face away. The air was dank and oppressive, as though someone had been lying sick for days. I breathed as quietly as I could, staring into the middling dark that was the limit of my mother’s power, amazed that someone could stop her from speaking, could tell her that her desire to serve her God was sinful.
When I say I grew up in the church, it’s almost literal. She was the administrative assistant and worship leader and organist, so when pre-school was over I would walk down the hall, to the office she shared with Pastor Henk, with religious cartoons on the door and green banker’s lamps on the desks. When I got a little older, she would have me proofread the bulletin before taking it to Kinko’s, a duty that I took very seriously. My childhood best friends were all from the church, and we grew up in one another’s homes, and in the leafy hidden patio at the side of the church building, and running through the Sunday School classrooms when the service was over.
In 1993, she had a miscarriage, her sixth. My brother and I were sleeping while she sobbed; my father was still at work, a train ride away in San Francisco. I don’t remember any of her miscarriages at the time they happened, though I remember being aware of them; it was years before I realized that miscarriages, that many and that far along, were not a part of ordinary motherhood. But when you’re young you think that everyone’s family is like yours. Everyone goes to church twice a Sunday; everyone loses pregnancies..
What I know, because I have been told, is this: while she was lying brokenhearted, grieving the loss of a child who never fully put on flesh, Pastor Henk arrived. He said that he’d felt the Holy Spirit telling him that he needed to come over there, now, that it could not wait. He said, “And I felt, I need to tell you that God loves you, and he won’t let you go.”
My mother told this story in church. Afterwards, people came up to her to tell her that they thought she was called to ministry. And years later, at her fortieth birthday party, as they streamed up our driveway, this is what they said again and again: that she had blessed their lives, that she should become a minister, that she would find a way.
She began taking classes at Fuller Theological Seminary, Greek and Hebrew. She and Pastor Henk formulated a five-year plan, in which he would give her every opportunity to explore her calling, and they would see whether it were outwardly confirmed. I was unutterably proud of her. Nobody else’s mother went to seminary. It was a mark of distinction. I might be the only child at my church who went to public school, but my mother had been chosen by God. We had been set apart.
She was thirteen years old when she felt the truth of Christianity, an incontrovertible fact, the grace and death of Christ that meant she was safe and loved and forgiven. She was raised in the church, and her father before her; her mother, raised Roman Catholic, converted before she was born. My grandfather was an elder. In 1972 my mother couldn’t even hope to be a deacon: a woman who wanted to serve God taught Sunday School, but only to the children. She had no other models for a womanhood devoted to the church, for a religious vocation, for taking on a man’s job and making it her own. And so for years she believed that her desire for ministry was selfish, personally motivated, something that a good Christian girl wouldn’t really want. A good Christian girl wanted to marry a minister, help out with the youth group, direct the choir, host potlucks. A good Christian girl never sang too loudly.
When I was nine, I decided that I wanted to take communion. This was unusual at the time: ordinarily, children of the congregation would make Profession of Faith sometime in their late teens. This would involve meeting with your minister and elders, and then a public ceremony during a regular church service, at which you are asked about your faith, and whether you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour. The congregation is asked to support you in your spiritual journey, and after this ceremony, you are officially a member of the church, able to vote and participate in communion.
So when I said that I wanted to take communion, despite the fact that it was largely motivated, on my part, by feeling left out, my mother took it as a call to arms. Another child from the congregation, a boy a year older than me, decided that he also wanted in, and so after an intimidating meeting with my pastor and another elder in my family’s dining room, he and I made the first Affirmations of Baptism ever conducted at Palo Alto CRC. Such things have become more commonplace now; my mother in particular is a strong believer in welcoming children to the Lord’s Table. She doesn’t want to leave anyone out.
One weekend a little while after this, my mother and I went to a mother-daughter retreat in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains. At the campfire, on the last evening, we had to stand up and say what we were most proud of each other for. I said, “My mom is going to seminary and she’s going to be a minister.” I knew it was a bold thing to say, and took secret joy in the saying of it. As though it were a dare to the other girls and their mothers, who had ordinary jobs, or no jobs at all. I can say with near-certainty that nobody there had encountered a female minister before.
When it was my mom’s turn to say what she was most proud of me for, I tried not to look overeager. An oldest child, I lived for praise, begged for scraps of it, subsisted on every instance my teachers told me I was bright like it was bread. She said, “My daughter was the first child in our congregation to make an Affirmation of Baptism and take communion.” I was so young. I never made Profession of Faith, in the end. I never made her as proud as she was then.
Eventually, taking part-time classes at Fuller was not enough. After intense discussion and prayer, my parents decided that we needed to move to Grand Rapids, Michigan, so that my mother could attend Calvin Seminary, the only seminary specifically for ministers in the CRC. They told me one day after church, when I was in the fifth grade; I sobbed in the living room for the rest of the afternoon. And then I stopped. We moved that summer, driving across the country for five days in our aging red minivan.
When she began studying at Calvin, in 1999, she was one of very few women ever to step through the doors. Women’s bathrooms were barely available. Some of her classmates were supportive. Some were not. At this time, an individual Classis, geographically grouped churches, could ordain women, but Synod, the governing body of the CRC, had not yet declared the word “male” inoperative. This meant that according to the official church order, “male” was the qualifying adjective tacked on to the description of a minister available for call. They had begun studying the issue of women in church office in 1970, but it took decades of deferments, committees, and setbacks until the word “male” was deleted in 2007. She moved across the country and began studying with no idea whether a job would be waiting for her on the other end. Most women, even now, end up as chaplains, or associate ministers, or leave the denomination entirely for one more welcoming.
My mother is one of the lucky ones: after she received her M.Div., she was ordained at the church we’d been attending while in Michigan. She served there for two years as a resident, after which she received a call to a liberal-leaning congregation in Waterloo, Ontario, where she has been for the last nine years. There is a perpetual shortage of ministers in the CRC, and a young male minister can generally take his pick, but my mother was fortunate to receive one call, and fortunate twice over that it has been a good fit. There is a lifespan for ministers; few serve beyond ten years in one congregation, but if my mother ever left this job, it is extremely unlikely that she would find another one. Even this call was not without contention, and one church in her Classis registers their official disapproval every time it is my mother’s turn to chair the meeting. A young female minister in my mother’s area was recently told, “When women preach, they spit on Scripture.” Change happens, even in the church, but it is slow and bitter.
Every summer of high school, I went on a week-long mission trip with my Michigan youth group. It was the first taste of independence we got as high schoolers: we spent a week without our parents and with kids our age from all over the US and Canada. During the days, we’d be split up into small groups and sent out to do various good works – I’ve scraped and painted fences for the elderly, worked in a soup kitchen, repainted a school, helped out with Vacation Bible School, and built a fence around a foster family’s decrepit in-ground pool. We’d reconvene at the central site, usually a church or the local Christian high school, in the late afternoon, where we would have free time, dinner, and worship.
The second trip I went on was to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I was fourteen, a year older than my mother was when she knew she was called by God. We drove all day in two huge white vans, racing down the highway, holding up signs to each other. My group was assigned to help out at the Salvation Army day camp, which largely served children whose parents couldn’t afford day care. The organizers brought us to what they said were quintessentially South Dakotan sights and experiences each day: we square danced, watched traditional Native American performers, and toured a buffalo farm.
A youth group from a church in Minnesota, whose social network was indistinguishable from the Christian high school, prayed throughout the week for a classmate of theirs who had leukemia and wasn’t doing well. On one of the last days, they received word that he had passed away. He was sixteen. That night at the worship service, we sang a praise song called “Blessed Be His Name.” I’ve never been able to hear it, since, without thinking about this boy. The final chorus goes: “You give and take away / you give and take away / my heart will choose to say / Lord, blessed be his name.”
And all I thought was, If God is taking a sixteen-year-old boy, I will not praise him for that. And if I am asked to believe that it’s His will, then I will not.
The youth leaders stood at the front of the room, ready to pray with any individuals who wanted to come up. The lights were dim, and high schoolers were crying in their seats, their arms around one another. I have never done anything like this before or since, but I went up to my group leader, and she put her arms around me and I sobbed wordlessly. She prayed for “whatever I was dealing with.” She was holding me up and praying for me and it meant nothing, those words in the dry prairie air. And my heart was breaking for the loss of that faith, and for the loss of the life that I was meant to have.
I told no one. I kept going to church and youth group; I had never been a rebellious child, and I would have lost too much. I was immersed in the culture, drowning in it, but didn’t know any other way to be. I never prayed in chapel but I didn’t mind singing along, and I was able to go on like this for a long time. Then came the story you have heard before: the religious child goes to a secular university and loses her faith. This is not the true story, and it leaves so much out, but it is one that, I think, serves.
I had barely admitted to myself that I wouldn’t go to church when I arrived there. Sleeping in on Sunday morning was like something in another language, one that I knew other people spoke but I could never understand. But this is how it has been: since I left my parents’ house, I have never been to church. I go when I visit home; I see my friends and steel myself for the awkwardness of sitting alone in the row while everyone else gets up to take communion. Often I’m not brave enough to stay, and know myself a fraud. But I am scrutinized, the child of a minister: once I swallowed my small cup of grape juice too soon, distracted and nervous, and after the service the church secretary came up to me and said, “I saw you!” And so I even sing along with the hymns, those old standards of faith and history and community, but there is nothing there for me now.
My mother and I have never spoken about this. She has never once asked me if I believe in God. For a few years in high school, she would ask if I had thought about making Profession of Faith, but after my younger brother and his now-wife made it in their last year of high school, she stopped asking. Once, before I started university, my father asked, “Does being a preacher’s kid make you more cynical about God?” The truth is, being a preacher’s kid makes me more aware of the fallibility of the church, something outsiders are quick to point out, but internally it’s fragile in a very different way. I know which creeds my mother disagrees with, and I know how much dissention there is within one small, already-splintered denomination. An institution like that could never hold my faith. If there is a God, this is not where he’ll be found.
The closest we’ve come to having this conversation was a sunny afternoon, the last summer I lived at home. I was dating a man, an atheist, whose background was Muslim. This pleased nobody’s parents, his included (“If you marry her,” warned his father, “her mother will want the wedding to be in a church”). My mother’s theology skews liberal, and she believes that Muslims worship the same God as Christians. And since there are vast regions of the world that will never hear or be hospitable to the gospel of Christ, she is unwilling to take on the role of condemnation. She has never felt that it’s her place.
“So I don’t know what will happen to them,” she said, “when they die. I prefer to err on the side of grace. But I do know what will happen to people who know the truth, and turn their backs.”
“Hell,” I said. I leaned against the kitchen counter.
“Yes,” she said, and looked away.
And so of course she has not asked, because she does not want to know. Every week she prays, researches her commentaries, procrastinates on writing her sermon, colour codes it and prints it out in increasingly large font. She visits elderly women and eats their cookies and counsels young couples who want to get married. She baptizes babies and takes terrified women to shelters and sits in family court and sees the best and the worst of people, every day. Her whole life has been bringing her to this; it is all she wanted, and faith is all she wanted for me. When I rejected it, I rejected everything: her dreams for my life, all the hope and the grace that she sees.
When she was young, she wanted more than anything to be a minister in a world that would not let her in. And all I have wanted is to be let out. I no longer worry about going to hell, but the same is not true for everyone in this world that I hold dear. To them, I am a lost soul. They may pray for me but it will never help, and I cannot grant them the comfort of an afterlife. My grandparents, my cousins, my best friends: they all believe that I am damned. That is a terrible burden to lay at their feet. And so for so long I have pretended, and not spoken of this, and let my grandfather die believing that my soul was safe. But it goes on for so long, and I am a tired and faithless child, and they will have to let me go.
Tags: atheism, christian reformed church of america, christianity, female ordination, laura cok, longreads, OOF, religion
This really resonated with me. My dad was ordained as a deacon when I was quite young (around ten, I think) and I remember asking him if I could be a priest when I grew up (possible, in our Anglican church, but not very common in the 80s) and I’m so grateful for him telling me that sure, I could do that, and by the time I grew up, he hoped it would be commonplace.
In the end, I never really felt ‘faith’ so I don’t know when I lost it, but I empathise with going through the motions, and going to church to make your parents happy.
It’s a pretty amazing thing, how passionate and strong your mother was (and still is, obviously!) I hope she can perhaps one day see that the life you lead, even if it does not include church or a god, is nonetheless a worthy one.
OOF is an extremely accurate tag for this piece. Wow.
Yep.
Ohhhh, I feel this down to my core. I grew up Roman Catholic but was (and am) certain I was called to be a priest. My local church was supportive, but obviously the larger church structure is not and eventually I couldn’t balance the conflict of an all-loving God and “NO GIRLS ALLOWED.” It still makes me deeply sad when I think about that thwarted calling and I can only imagine how much worse it must have been for your mother. Thank you very much for this essay! (I actually finally created a commenting account for this; your writing is so powerful!)
Aside from the mother who’s a pastor (the denomination of my background is even more strict), this sounded so close to my childhood. And today, my parents don’t ask. Or they don’t ask *pointedly.* But my therapist knows not to ever hand me faith-based materials, and my parents don’t ask my opinions of the church services when I go home to visit (like you, I attend when I’m home and endure).
I particularly understood this: “they all believe that I am damned. That is a terrible burden to lay at their feet.” This is perhaps what I feel most guilty about: that I am bringing worry and heartache to them.
No, you are not bringing worry and heartache to them. They do worry. They do have heartache. And I am truly sorry for their pain. But it is their own choice, not yours. We adults believe what we *want* to believe. It is their beliefs, not you, that bring them worry and pain.
Articles like these are partly why I love this site.
I am a faithless child, as well. I watch as my parents are consumed by a mega-church, very white, wealthy, and conservative. My father says he would lose his job as an assistant pastor if the elders found out he voted for Obama. I listen, horrified, and wonder what happened to the parents who raised me to be loud and brave and independent. I wonder if my departure from religion, decades ago, caused them to become afraid for their own faith. I wonder if that’s why they now let people tell them things they would never have accepted, years ago, before I told them (not of my own choosing, and only after invasive and insistent questioning) that I no longer believed in god. I certainly don’t feel any responsibility for their development into people I don’t recognize, but I do wonder what caused them to change.
I have seen this happen in my own family, too. I believe that feeling helpless about aging is part of it. As I’ve watched the relatives of my parents’ generation face health problems and physical limitations, I’ve simultaneously been watching them become addicted to a very commercialized brand of Christianity.
Yup. Fear.
My poor mother tried to raise four little Catholics and none of us stayed in the church when we grew up. I remember going to church during school breaks during my first year of college until one Sunday my mom just didn’t wake me up and ever since I’ve only ever gone on Christmas. We never talked about it either, she just figured it out I guess.
This is absolutely beautiful writing.
Seriously, this is incredible. Thank you.
Just gorgeous. That last sentence in particular hit me right in the gut.
Thanks for this.
I do not have anything to add, I just wanted to like this piece.
My mother was denied ordination because she had divorced my abusive father. She wrote up a document cataloging the abuse (super fun for all of us, I can assure you) and that still wasn’t enough. She told me she believes that once saved = always saved, and I think that’s the only reason she’s not more concerned about my lack of faith.
My dad was a pastor for the last 6 years of his life, and I was also his faithless child. Watching him pass away, in debt, and isolated from his family through is own doing, it was even more tragic believing that all of his religiosity was a waste. The whole thing seemed like a cruel joke.
Your piece was… hard to read for those reasons, but I’m glad you at least are connected to your family. Thanks for being brave and standing up for what you don’t believe.
This was terrific. It’s always interesting and a little heartbreaking and a little affirming reading others’ stories about moving away from the church. I see shades of my own path, and also the ways our paths diverge, and it’s amazing the milestones we faithless seem to have in common. Thanks for sharing this.
We faithless. I like that. This conversation does feel like home to me.
It wasn’t until I was composing a comment that I realized how many of the common interjections in English are God-based. “Oh my god,” “Jesus Christ,” and “holy cow” were my first three reactions to this piece. It was amazing and bittersweet and I’m so glad it was published here.
As the agnostic daughter of a diligently Methodist mother and stepfather, I can somewhat relate to your situation. My mother has been cagey when I’ve asked her about hell; I’m not sure how she actually comprehends it and who, if anyone, she believes ends up there. I’m very fortunate that she’s never hassled me about it, and yet there’s still part of me (the oldest child, desperate for praise part of me) that despises the fact that my lack of belief may cause her pain or disappointment.
Thanks again for sharing.
Your mother might feel pain or disappointment at your lack of belief. But it is not your lack of belief causing the pain or disappointment. Rather, it is her belief causing her distress, not you. I am sorry she hurts.
Thanks so much for writing this. I grew up always at a CRC church as well and can relate to a lot of what you say, although my faith remains important to me. It is helpful to read something so heartfelt to understand the ambivalence of some friends who grew up similar to me (and you) and don’t make church involvement a priority like I do.
Thank you so much for this, Laura! This is a fantastic piece that I relate to deeply. My mother was never a minister, but an elder and a Sunday School teacher, and our liberal-ass Presbyterian Church USA congregation was practically Unitarian, but it was such a core part of my upbringing. 90% of my social network until about halfway through high school was church-related. Hell, my youth group experience matched this to the point of a summer tour in white rental vans around Montana, complete with volunteering on a tribal reservation and camping out on a buffalo ranch. Apparently that’s a Thing? And when the church was so important to me, losing my faith was devastating. Not in a “I miss believing” sense, but just that so much of my support structure was unavailable.
Like you, my mom and I don’t really talk about this. We’ve learned the hard way not to. I think when I finally tell her I’m bi it’s going to go over better than when I told her I wasn’t going to church anymore.
“My grandparents, my cousins, my best friends: they all believe that I am damned. That is a terrible burden to lay at their feet.”
This is one of the things that pains me the most about my current (makes vague hand gestures instead of inserting a noun) with faith. I’ve left a belief in hell behind, personally, but I don’t want my family to have to worry for the fate of my soul if I wind giving up on Christianity altogether. Not in this regard, at least; if there were family members who thought I’m going to hell for being bi, I’d let them sit with that misery, but… not this.
Thank you for writing this.
ohmygosh my current (vague hand gesture) is EXACTLY what I think and feel
This resonates pretty clearly for me, as well. Fantastically written.
My mom and grandma ask pretty much any chance they get if I go to church. They know I don’t, so I’m not sure why. A little bit of “holier than thou” prodding? Thinking they can save me nearly 20 years after I stopped believing? I grew up Roman Catholic and went to Catholic school my whole life, but I figured out it wasn’t for me pretty early on. It was rough in grade and high school when all my friends were part of youth groups and I’d go just to hang out with them, but couldn’t actively participate in anything with any sincerity.
It’s a little on the light side for someone who’s been to seminary, but I sometimes recommend *Razing Hell* to people that have only been made aware of one Christian doctrine on hell. Baker is a professor who teaches religious studies courses at Messiah, but she reads as breezily as someone like Yancey, and my impression is that her books have made big waves in the Christian publications I read (Christian Century, mostly, with Sojourners and Christianity added mostly out of ethnographic interest).
http://www.alibris.com/Razing-Hell-Rethinking-Eve…
This is really, really lovely. Thank you for writing. I wish I were brave enough to talk about religion with my mother, but I think we both feel safer not acknowledging the differences between us.
> She was holding me up and praying for me and it meant nothing, those words in the dry prairie air. And my heart was breaking for the loss of that faith, and for the loss of the life that I was meant to have.
I am in tears. I am here with you. I am wearing this memory, different in the edges and the details but there in the truth and certainty. I was Southern Baptist, and then, now, I’m nothing, a secular humanist or whatever, and that pain and echo in the soul is so familiar and worn down.
It is eery how similar my story is to yours. My mother struggled through the 90s becoming an Episcopal priest, and followed God’s calling for her. I ended up an atheist-leaning agnostic in a family of believers. It is the shadow of my life.
Oof, this is very timely for me. My grandmother has just recently taken to asking me if I’ve found a church and if I will let Jesus back into my life. (I wasn’t aware I had kicked him out.) It’s incredibly frustrating because I used to love getting handwritten notes and cards from her, but now they invariably end with some comment about wanting me to be saved, which pretty much makes me throw them in the trash.
Most of my family is devoutly Lutheran (Missouri Synod, of course) and I created quite the schism with my same-sex wedding last year. My grandparents were the only members of the extended family to attend, but it seems that my grandmother has had a change of heart since then and believes that a) I can’t possibly have a relationship with Jesus if I’m married to a woman, and b) she will somehow persuade me to…get a divorce, which she also doesn’t agree with? I don’t actually know what her goal is, since I’m sure that by “find a church” she means “return to the teachings of HER church.” Never mind the fact that I haven’t been to church except on holidays/special occasions since I was about 13, when I got confirmed and my dad told me I was now an adult in the church and could make my own decisions. I’m firmly unreligious now, but even if I weren’t, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to give her the answer she wants.
Thank you for this piece, and your honesty.
Just hearing others’ stories helps make my own feel more real to me, so thank you for that.
Most of the time it feels incredibly surreal, to have set aside or walked away from what used to be such a central component of my identity, to still feel like myself but to know that others find my choices hurtful or damaging. To describe myself as a “former”.
I have been having a series of painful conversations with those I love. I will continue to do this for as long as I can take the pain, but I don’t know how long that will be.
This is a good piece, Laura. Thank you.
Laura would know this better but I wonder if Laura’s mother would say or think “I think my daughter is going to hell,” as the piece implies in the opening sentence. I would think her thoughts and words would be more along the lines of “I know God is merciful and good. I’ll let God worry about my daughter. I’m going to love her.” This would be I think the more standard response by Christian theologians and Laura’s mom sounds like a pretty thoughtful pastor. It is sad that the church Laura experienced growing up did not encourage voicing of doubts, intellectual reflection on how Christianity addresses senseless tragedy and suffering, and that the church is supposed to be and has been–admittedly sporatically–in the vanguard of supporting women and encouraging dissent, reasoning, science, etc. The center of the Christian tradition is that God loves people and wants what’s best for them. Church is supposed to be a community of compassion, not interminable boredom, ignorance, and condemnation. I think Jesus wouldn’t mind Laura’s barbs here.
It’s not really fair to try to speak for Laura’s mother. Since this story concerns the relationship between the author and her mother, I’d say the only person remotely qualified here is Laura.
You seem like a kindhearted Christian and a good, thoughtful person. And I get it if you want to defend your positive experiences with religion. But boy, “vanguard of supporting women and encouraging dissent, reasoning, science”… that’s giving me a crazy itch to argue and drag this topic way the hell off course 😉
All I’ll say is that the summary of Christianity (“God loves people and wants what’s best for them”), which you mentioned, comes with a corollary, which you did not. It has to do with all those people who aren’t sufficiently grateful for that unprompted and unwelcome form of love. Again, I’m sure you don’t subscribe to the worst beliefs about what should happen to such people.
Consider how the world might be different if we valued the love of human beings, with all its tender affection and messy imperfectness, above the love of a distant yet omnipotent patriarch. Consider how many nights I could have slept soundly, free of fear that my parents would have to choose between their love for me and God. (Luckily my parents turned out to be as decent and tolerant as you seem to be, unbeliever children are not always so lucky). Consider how much better off we’d be if we admitted to ourselves that this life and this world are the only ones we’ll get, so we had better enjoy them while we have the chance, and make sure our children can as well.
Ohhhhhh this was good. So good. It feels like my life. I could say a lot more but I don’t want to ramble and cheapen how I feel right now
Amazing writing and amazing piece. This has really done me in (mid-afternoon at work! Monday!) and resonates with me so strongly. My story is very similar in so many ways – while my mother is not a priest she was the admin assistant at our church for a very long time and as a family we were easily at the church 2-3 days a week for events, meetings, volunteering, etc. I also did the summer work camps and the youth group nights. I was a smart, awkward kid and the church provided at least some refuge for me from high school (along with encouraging my nerdiness by a deep study of the scriptures!).
My mom is a very loving, sensitive person and I would do anything in my power to keep her from being hurt. But my lack of religion is always between us. She’s finally stopped sending me links to churches and dropping little hints/questions about going back. But it’s still there. And like the other commenters, I feel terrible that I’m causing this totally irrefutable pain for her. But it also makes me angry at the church. . .a religion that separates you so fully from children who you love, that tells you you can do anything and everything for them but they’ll still suffer in pain in eternity? Fuck that church. Just another reason I don’t ever want to be part of it again.
Your mom is in pain. And I am sorry for that. But you are not the cause. It is her own beliefs that cause her pain.
As a twice-on-Sunday childhood churchgoer, this was both an OOF and a wonderful longread. I feel like there’s so much acreage between church faith and no faith and so much God between the double doors of the sanctuary and the places the rest of the world inhabits. It’s a very hard concept to explain to the people who fear for your soul and the people who fear you’re ignorant for believing in any god at all.
This was gorgeous, and hard, and beautifully written. For some reason, the bit that hit most for me was the part about printing off sermons “in increasingly large font.” Moms, man. Moms.
The thing that struck me the most about this post is your incredible compassion and loving empathy for your mother. It is a rare gift to be able to write with such sensitivity about another person’s experiences and beliefs when they are not only different from yours, but have become a barrier to the intimacy and closeness you once had.
That is a terrible burden to lay at their feet. And so for so long I have pretended, and not spoken of this, and let my grandfather die believing that my soul was safe. But it goes on for so long, and I am a tired and faithless child, and they will have to let me go.
This is so beautiful and wrenching, it feels like a gift you have made to us. Thank you.
Oy this…. yowch. I’m the granddaughter (on one side of the family) of VERY devout Presbyterians. The other side is Jewish, and I’m in seminary to become a rabbi. So I sit both in your mother’s place, in terms of feeling a very strong calling and having tremendous empathy for her if I were to imagine my own (future hypothetical) children moving away from the faith that is so important to me. But also in your place, in that my grandmother is so loving and proud but also, I’m pretty firmly convinced, thinks I’m going to hell. Families and religion, man. It’s hard.
This piece was beautiful. Even without being able to relate to the faith issues at the heart of this, the idea of respecting so much about the way your mother operates within something you reject really spoke to me. Thank you for sharing your experience.
It’s not worth getting angry at someone for believing that an imaginary sky bro will punish you in perpetuity for the crime of wanting better evidence. It’s just sad to be reminded of the harmful effects faith has on human beings: the unwarranted sense of righteousness and certainty in the truth of our beliefs, the sacrifice of personal happiness on the whims of arbitrary religious morals and customs, and the relegation of relationships between real human beings to second-class status, beneath relationships between human and deity. I’m lucky that my Roman Catholic father was open-minded enough to accept me despite my atheism, but hurt and angry every time I see a parent for whom belief is more important than love for their child. I’m so sorry your mother feels that way, Laura. She sounds like a genuinely decent person, if misguided. I hope she can convince her sect to become a bit more tolerant, for what that’s worth. I’m glad you were able to walk away.
Hi Laura. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and many parts of your story resonated with me. My father was an elder and my mother had always wanted to be a missionary, but the arrivals of my sister and me took that away from her. I didn’t leave the faith until my mid-20’s, but the separation was even harsher, because the Witnesses practice disfellowshipping, the cutting off of even family members who have left the faith. My parents and I didn’t talk much for over 15 years. The closest I came to a reconciliation with my dad was a phone call a week before he died, when he was in the late stages of dementia. I exchange the occasional email with my mother still, though more often I get CCed on emails sent to other people. That’s as far as her conscience will allow her to go.
I think people who haven’t been a part of these communities don’t really understand how hard it can be to break away. When you wrote about sobbing while with your youth group, I knew that feeling of loss. When I left the church at age 26, I lost not only my parents, I lost my entire peer group. I had to start over, make new friends, meet new people (all while going through a divorce, which perhaps explains why started going gray so young). I’ve never found the kind of closeness I felt in that church since, but I don’t regret leaving. It was what I had to do to be myself. But it might be the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I’m so sorry Brian. You sound like an awesome person, and incredibly brave. It goes without saying you don’t deserve what happened to you. There is something inhumanly cruel about forcing adherents to swear allegiance to faith above even love for their own family.
Thank you for this. I’m in a similar place- I grew up Mormon, served a mission and went to religious university and did everything I could to be the perfect daughter. I had a faith transition? break? crisis? several years ago, and eventually stopped going to church last year. My parents now though we try to never speak of it. And I try not to let them know anything that might hurt them, or cause them that deep anguish and fear. Tonight I got a text from my mom (because of a younger brother’s shenanigans) about how she’s depressed and feels like such a failure because of how things have turned out- three of five children not in the church any more. Because to them is really is like we’ve, I’ve, torn apart the chance of a forever family.
Anyways. It’s deeply painful to lose a faith you were once so tied to. It was a whole essential part of my identity, all my social circles, my family. I know I can’t go back and believe the same way, but also it’s painful to cause hurt and disappointment to all the people closest to me, and to have those relationships feel like they will always be a little broken. I mostly feel very alone in this loss, and while I don’t want others to feel it, I’m glad I could read the piece and all the comments tonight. Thank you.
I am sorry for the hurt you have felt and for what your mother feels. But your mother’s pain is not caused by you. It is her beliefs causing her pain, not your choices. She, like all adults, believes what she wants to believe. I am sorry.
I too was a Mormon RM, and seminary instructor, and the beloved of my home ward, when I realized it was all a steaming pile of authoritarianism. Leaving was an amputation, and I felt like the amputated part, not the body that had cut off the infected part.
At 38, nearly all my friends were Mormon, and I had grown up hearing my grandmother”s constant prayers pleading with the Almighty to soften the heart of my Aunt, who had joined an evangelical denomination. Every book in my parents’ home was church related, as were most things on the walls, such as temple pictures, proclamations, etc. nobody could have been more involved than my parents – we were 7-days a week at the church building for seminary, basketball practice, meetings, etc.
I know that they feel that they have failed as parents, with 3.5 of their 5 kids having left the church ( one sister is situationally involved. One is a true believer). After a few years, I have come to realize that I am not responsible for their fears for us. The institution is, and should be ashamed. Thank goodness I realized that I’m gay, because I don’t think simple rejection of their beliefs would even be understandable to them. Their bishop told them not to worry about me, and they are nothing if not obedient. My mom tries very hard to be accommodating of the new reality. For those amputating themselves, please believe me that you can survive it, the wounds will scar over, and you can build a new life, with new friends.
I went home early from work yesterday because I had a migraine, so I am just now seeing this article, but I want to say I fistpumped mightily as soon as I saw CRC. I was raised CRC until we moved down south and became Southern (and then Independent) Baptist, so even before reading this article I know I will identify with like 80% of it. Cannot WAIT.
ok off to read 🙂
My husband was raised in the CRC so I’m definitely familiar with the tradition. One of our good (female) friends is a CRC pastor. This is a beautiful piece. Reading the comments though, I am wondering if anybody here was raised in a church tradition they still belong to? I was raised evangelical and am currently still a Christian (but with liberal politics so…)
Hi Laura,
Thanks for sharing your story. I’ll bet it took courage to do that. I am a Christian and have personally experienced the peace that comes from knowing Jesus personally. I’m grateful that your story stirred many memories for your readers. Spirituality is an important component of how we were created. It needs to be expressed and your blog has provided a place to do so. I’m married and a father of 3. I can honestly say that I didn’t really fully understand how much God loved me until I had my own kids. It is an amazing thing. With that in mind, your mom loves you the same way. I’m sure you don’t doubt that. Although we are complete strangers, may I encourage you to start a dialogue with your mom about your feelings and experience. It will certainly bring you two closer. Both of you will be blessed by that.
I became a Christian as an adult in a CRC in Toronto. I felt called to ministry and can say that I had little to no support. I had been told point blank that I did not have the personality for it and I was refused a recommendation to seminary. I remember seeing Reverend Kok`s name and thinking that it was possible for women to go into ministry – that this calling was real and the time was right and that it was my own wretched personality that wasn`t being sanctified fast enough. I have since left the CRC and am starting to realize that maybe I`m not as horrible a person as I`ve been told – but I`m a little too `real` for this denomination. I have been affirmed in so many ways since I left. Laura has the courage of her mother. I pray that her mother will not be inflicted with ungracious comments that Laura`s words will elicit within the denomination.
This is very well written and does resonate a lot. Thank you for sharing it. The ending lines in particular are beautiful.
My dad was brought up in a Catholic family, although I don’t think he ever believed in God (he’s talked about feeling like there was something wrong with him as a child when he couldn’t feel any sort of spiritual presence). He is an atheist, as am I, my mum and my silbings. He still doesn’t like to think about death because he’s scared of us going to Hell.
Beautiful. Moving. A strong voice. Thank you for your courage. A bright future awaits you.
I grew up Lutheran (ELCA, which is very liberal) and the daughter of two ministers. My mother may not believe in hell per se, but I know that one of her deepest fears is that it is real in at least a metaphorical sense, and that her parents will spend eternity, if not in a burning pit of fire, at least separated from God.
I can’t bring myself to add to her fears that I might share the same fate. I stopped going to church long before I lost my faith, and as far as my mother knows I’m still churchless but a believer. Maybe she suspects at this point, but I will put off confirming that suspicion as long as I can. I still consider myself Lutheran, at least culturally. I still believe my mom, at least, was called to be a minister, and that she does good work.
All of which is to say thank you for this piece.
Beautiful writing. Despite growing up in an atheist/agnostic household and having no real reference point for most of the religious stuff, this really resonated with me. The worry about letting one’s loved ones down, I think, is pretty universal.
The ending, in particular, is a gorgeous punch to the gut. Breathtaking.
My vaguely-relevant story: My mom is a minister, although she came to it 30+ years later than her seminary colleagues. My dad is also very devout but not in a super-open way. And I, the oldest child, married a Jewish man and we are raising our daughter Jewish. On the one hand it has made me see how arbitrary religion is. We could be raising her Christian just as easily. So what does that mean about religion as a construct? I didn’t take any anthropology in college to know. On the other, some nights I lie awake worrying that my choice has condemned her to … something. That I chose wrong, and the God I’m not sure I believe in will be angry at me. Sometimes I think about converting, because it would be easier, but I can’t see doing that to my parents.
Add on top of that that I am a choir singer, always have been and always will be, and that makes it nigh impossible to get away from the Christian texts that have brought me so much comfort throughout my life. So even going to my normal Wednesday activity still pulls at me. I’d have to quit if I decided to be Jewish, I think, or find a different group.
You have made me aware of a dangerous sadness that belief in hell can engender. The believer is bitterly disappointed with the non-believer, but not just because they have chosen damnation. It is because the non-believer will be eternally separated from the believer who is in heaven. This must be acutely felt by parents when dealing with an atheist or agnostic child, and as your piece pointed out, a minister of the cloth must be doubly distraught at the sense of separation. And in preparation for eternal separation, the parent begins a psychological and emotional separation here and now, on earth, the minute they learn their child does not believe in God.. Think of the illogicality of it all: the parent will be experiencing eternal bliss in the presence of God, but they also fear they will be remembering that you are suffering the agony of eternal hellfire while they are up in heaven. The only other alternative is equally illogical: that in heaven they will forget the existence of anyone who did not make it to heaven, including their own children, so there will be no emotional pain at the eternal separation from those they once loved on earth.
How sad this belief in hell really is, and how damaging it can be in our real existence when families are torn apart over such a belief. Thank you for sharing this story, and I will be looking for more articles from you in the future. You are a wonderful writer and poet.
I kept reading the beautiful comments until I had to write my own story. Thank you so much, everyone. I haven’t felt this understood in a while.
My whole origin story is about Christianity. My parents met at “bible school” in Portland, OR. I was born in the mission hospital my parents worked at in Nepal. When I was two and a half, they were kicked out of the country for trying to plant churches. Our evangelical “home church” was started by my grandparents. Because of my unusual birth, I was often asked if I wanted to be a missionary like my parents when I grew up. I was the middle child who always knew the right answer was “yes.” In all those sermons about the need for workers to harvest souls, I think I felt a real calling. I knew in my core that I was given a special understanding.
Yes, I went to college and lost my faith. My father thinks I never truly believed, which hurts me. The sincerity of my young faith made me ask questions that made adults uncomfortable. After years of being put off, I stopped asking out loud, but I continued to pour energy into churches and bible studies in my college town. I lived in a Christian community house and hoped it would all make sense again. Like the author, I was intensely aware of the intricate schisms inside those communities.
My mom left my emotionally abusive dad, which through the paternalistic church model on its head for me, but I kept hoping god would appear again. Two years later, I had my one and only revelation. After a hard day, I looked up at the stars to ask him for help. He wasn’t there. I felt like I was falling or like my heart was breaking, but it was a relief to have certainty.
Two years later, I’ve told my dad but not my mom. I began a campaign of forcing my dad to understand that I am an independent-minded adult, whether it hurts him or not. I’m still afraid to hurt my mom because she’ll blame herself. I’ve declined to participate or attend to church, so at this point she must know. In the meantime, she is becoming involved with missions again and fighting for recognition as a divorced woman leader. I want to be supportive of her struggle for equality, but I also wonder why she stays with a community that’s denied her help over and over. I wonder if avoiding the topic is hurting our relationship more than the truth would.
Toasties, do you have experience in “coming out” as non-religious to your parents?
Thank you for writing this; while I don’t identify with all of it (my mother was never a minister), your explanation of your loss of faith is so similar to my own and it’s comforting to see someone else write that experience.
Thank you for writing this; while I don't identify with all of it (my mother was never a minister), your explanation of your loss of faith is so similar to my own and it's comforting to see someone else write that experience.
As a Christian universalist, I don't believe that anyone will go to hell eternally, if at all. I'm still wrestling with the notion of what "hell" even is, (it's not as clear-cut as some would have us think) and if anyone even still goes there at all (if it's even a "there" to go to.) At any rate; Either God already saved the whole world through Jesus and it's just a matter of how that's all going to play/ work out; or that isn't what happened at all, for anyone. Either way, we are ALL in the same boat, regardless of what we believe individually.