Support Mt Carmel Christian Church
You heard me.
One hundred twenty volunteers from Mt. Carmel Christian in Atlanta constructed a drive-through nativity. Wednesday night the scene was severely vandalized. Over $2000 will be required to repair the scene before it reopens tonight at 6pm.
I hope and trust I am not alone in the freethought community in feeling outrage at this news. Whether or not you support the message of the display, vandalism and violence are completely out of bounds. I’ve sent messages to the Atlanta Freethought Society, Secular Coalition for America, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation urging them to take a quick public stand on this. I’ll shortly be contacting the other national organizations as well.
One of our most fundamental shared values — free expression — has been attacked. Secular humanist organizations and individuals should take an immediate and public stand condemning these actions. If nothing else, such statements would make an eloquent counterpoint to the stolen atheist poster in Seattle.
Article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution
Send a note of support to Rev. Seth Wortman
Name the Brazilians!
- October 07, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, diversity, fear, humor, My kids, Parenting, values
- 19
Most of the time, our family life is typical. But every so often, without warning, a Monty Python sketch breaks loose.
Connor (13) asked the other day why there are bad names for black people but not for others. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. Then I realized he meant exactly what he had asked.
It’s not the first time I’ve been made aware that he is growing up in a very different day-to-day environment than I did. I once asked him if middle school kids still told jokes about people who were different from them.
“Different how?” he asked. I assumed he was just torturing his liberal dad.
“You know…different races. Different nationalities. Different gender. Handicap. Sexual orientation. Hair color.” I was momentarily aghast at the number of categories that leapt to mind, not to mention the number of verbatim jokes I could instantly recall. And they kept coming. “Weight, intelligence. Religion.” I lowered my head. “Birth defects.”
“You told jokes about people with birth defects?” he asked incredulously.
“No! Not me,” I lied.
In fact, I was always the comedian in school. Dale needs to learn when it is time to be funny and when it is time to pay attention was a common report card comment — right next to the ‘A’, thank you very much. I protested that the official “time to be funny” never seemed to arrive. Having chosen comedy, I engaged all the genres of my tasteless time. Fat jokes. Quadriplegic jokes. Black hitchhikers and Polish lightbulb changers and Chinese shlimp flied lice. And yes, any and all birth defects.
This question was different but clearly related. “There are rude names for others,” I said, “not just blacks.”
“What about for white people?”
“Honkey,” I said. “Cracker. Peckerwood.”
He laughed. “What about the Chinese?”
“Chink, slant, gook. You’re telling me you’ve never heard those?”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “Never. I’ve heard Grandma talk about A-rabs,” he said, leaning on the ‘A’ — “and you can tell what she means.”
“Well, it gets a lot worse than that.”
“Like what?”
“Is…is this for a social studies report or something?”
“I just never heard these. It’s crazy. What else? I’m just curious.”
I looked at him sideways, finally deciding he was not pulling my leg. My teenage son was hearing his first genuine ethnic slurs not in the school corridors but from his dad. I thought about pretending we’d exhausted the list, then decided he could handle it — that hiding hateful stuff from him is less productive than looking them in the eye, giving him a chance to flex his own moral judgment.
“Well, some others for people from the Middle East are towelhead, raghead, camel-jockey.” I paused. “Sand nigger.”
“DAD!”
“I’m sorry, jeez, you asked! Did you only want the pretty slurs?”
He shook his head again, slowly. “What about countries? Like Germany.”
“You mean krauts?”
“What, like from sauerkraut?”
“I guess.”
“Italy.”
“Wop, dago, goombah…”
“You’re making these up!”
“…guinea, greaseball…”
“France!”
“Frogs. Or cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.”
He laughed so hard he turned red. “Why?” he asked at last.
“Well, some people think they caved in too fast to the Germans in the Second…”
“No, I mean…okay, I can see why somebody would make up rude words for people who are really different from you. Still rude, but I can see it. But the French?”
I thought about it for a minute. “Well, I guess it depends on whether you’ve been in conflict with someone, one way or another. We don’t have a name for Greenlanders, as far as I know, because our interests and actions don’t overlap. If they did, I guarantee we’d come up with a slur in a heartbeat. Some people resented France for costing American lives in the Second World War, and some get mad when they don’t support U.S. policy.”
“So we probably don’t have anything for Mexicans.”
“You’re joking.”
“Oh wait. Okay…yeah, I know some of those.”
There’s a large and growing Mexican-American population in Atlanta, which means an increasing perception of conflicting interests — most often groundless — and resentments stoked in part by angry talk radio.
“What about Brazil?” Connor asked.
I thought about it. Brazil. “Hmm. No…I don’t think we’ve ever had enough to do with Brazil to call them anything.”
Ahh, but the century is young. If that shoot-first devotee of Teddy Roosevelt makes it to the Oval Office, can a name for the Brazilians — and the Belgians, and just about everyone else — be all that far behind?
The Devil Goes Down to Georgia
I read to Delaney’s first grade class yesterday. She had prepped me for my visit like a military operation, reminding me at least five times of the exact time and S.O.P.
“There’s a chair you sit in, and I’ll sit right by you,” she said. “You have to bring three stories, but don’t be sad if we don’t get to all three.”
I promised to hold it together.
She nodded, then ran upstairs to rummage through her books. Five minutes later she was downstairs, beaming.
“First, you’ll read this one,” she said, handing me Rosie’s Fiddle, a great version of a classic folktale. “Then Crictor, the Boa Constrictor, and then”–she held up a finger, eyes closed– “IF there’s time…you’ll read Pete’s a Pizza.”
“Ooh, good ones,” I said, only really meaning it about Rosie’s Fiddle. The other two are nothing much, but Rosie’s Fiddle is the kind of story that can keep a roomful of six-year-olds perched at attention on the edge of their buns.
The operation commenced at 1330 hours.
“If Rosie O’Grady ever smiled,” I read dramatically, “no one but her chickens had ever seen it. She was as lean and hard as a November wind…”
The story goes on to describe the solitary Rosie playing the fiddle on her porch at night.
Folks said Rosie could fiddle the flowers out of their buds. They said she could fiddle the stones out of the ground. Folks said Rosie O’Grady could outfiddle the Devil himself. And that was a dangerous thing to say.
Oh…shit.
I flashed forward through the story in my mind, a version of Aarne-Thompson taletype 1155-1169 (Mortal Outwits the Devil). The tale has taken many forms through the years, but once a Russian folktale put a violin in Lucifer’s hand, the fiddling faceoff became the preferred choice, from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. And Rosie’s Fiddle.
“What’s the Devil?” one kid piped up.
Shitshitshit. I looked at Mr. H, Laney’s magnificently gifted and cool teacher, whose smile was unperturbed.
“It’s a kind of a monster,” offered another kid.
“No,” said a third, “the Devil is the one who curses you if you do something bad.”
Aw shit. Stupidly, this hadn’t even crossed my mind when Laney selected the book.
I turned the page to reveal a drawing of the Devil, horns and tail and dapper red suit, standing at Rosie’s gate with a golden fiddle. They exchange pleasantries, then he gets down to bidness. “I hear tell you can out-fiddle the Devil himself,” I said with a growling Georgia accent, for some reason.
Soon the inevitable challenge is made, and Rosie mulls it over:
Now Rosie wasn’t any fool. She knew what the Devil would ask for if she lost: it was her soul she’d be fiddlin’ for. But Rosie had a hankering for the Devil’s shiny, bright fiddle.
I see all of this as great folklore. But I also knew that if I’d walked into my daughter’s classroom and heard another parent reading a parable of the Devil casting about for human souls, I’d have laid a poached egg.
The kids were riveted — it is quite a compelling story — and Mr. H didn’t seem the least bit troubled. But I was glad to pick up the second book, leaving the world of Faust and Charlie Daniels in favor of a safe, dull story about a pet snake — pausing for only a moment to remember whether the damn snake offers anybody an apple.
Dissent done right 2
- September 01, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, Atlanta, diversity, fear, Kerfuffles, My kids, Parenting
- 7
I knew my kids would feel violated, angry, and afraid. Their own attitudes toward dissent are being tested and formed. So we did what we do. We talked it through.
I told them our sign had been taken from the yard. (At this point we hadn’t found it again.) Erin’s reaction was utter disbelief.
“Really?” she said. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Cause sometimes you joke. Really?”
“Erin, jeez, yes, somebody took our sign!” Connor said. “It totally stinks!”
She looked at the floor. “Omigosh. I feel like I want to cry.” She looked up at me with a worried forehead. “So people in our neighborhood are mad at us?” I could see the scared siege mentality forming on her face.
“Now wait a minute. How many people took that sign? It was probably one person walking by last night. That’s not everybody.” I really wanted to nip the generalizing assumption in the bud and had an idea how I could. “You know who would really be mad about this? Mr. Ryan.” Ryan is a neighbor of ours, a wonderful, soft-spoken guy. “And he wants McCain to win. But he doesn’t want it by cheating.”
They agreed, and Erin’s face relaxed a bit.
“So what do you think we should do?” I asked. “Maybe we should just…you know…not have a sign?”
All three erupted in indignation at the thought of being silenced. Exxx-cellent. I checked the box for moral courage on my mental list.
“But if we put another one out, it might be taken again by this doofus. What should we do?”
They started brainstorming. Connor wanted to put a sign out again and stake it out all night from his window. Erin wanted to put a sign at the top of our 30-foot tree. Laney suggested putting Obama and McCain signs in our yard so everyone would be happy. Erin suggested getting 100 signs, “And every time he takes it, boop! We put another one out. Like The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins!”
They all laughed. Finally we decided to put it out every morning and take it in at dinnertime.
By the end we had achieved everything I was hoping for. They refused to be silenced; they were referring to one perp, not a silent army; they were using their own creativity to get around the problem; and they’d relaxed and moved on to other things. I’ll let you know how it goes.
_________________________________
Side note…
Becca continues to simmer about it. Last night she said, “I hate to say this, but can you picture Obama supporters doing something like that?” I resist this idea too. My knee jerks, and I say, “Oh, I’m sure Democrats do it, too.”
Then I Googled these four phrases and got these hit counts:
Obama sign vandalized“: 309 hits
“Obama sign stolen“: 105 hits
“McCain sign vandalized“: 6 hits
“McCain sign stolen“: 4 hits
…and two of the McCain hits are from my own blogs. Also interesting: nearly all of the other McCain hits were during primary season.
Discuss.
Dissent done right 1
- August 31, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, Atlanta, diversity, fear, Kerfuffles, morality, My kids, Parenting, values
- 12
More than just about any other single value, I want my kids to get the importance of dissent. I want them to be willing to voice a reasoned minority opinion and to encourage the same in others.
When we moved to the red-state South, I knew (blue to the core as we are) that at some point we’d end up taking our lumps from one majority or another. No big brous-haha so far, just some minor fish-out-of-water moments: Laney having the occasional Huxley-Wilberforce in the school cafeteria; Erin coming to terms with her evangelical cousins; Connor’s outrage when his (beloved) seventh grade Life Sciences teacher assured the class that evolution is “just one guy’s idea”; Becca, in her first week as a full-time Georgia teacher, having one of her first graders say, “Mrs. McGowan, are you a Christian? ’Cause I’m a Christian. Are you a Christian?”; and my early palpitations over imagined church-state issues. Peanuts, really.
Now we’ve had our first somewhat chilling incident—not over religion, but politics.
Becca and I support Barack Obama. Thursday night, after his convention speech, we put an Obama yard sign under the tree in our Atlanta front yard. By Saturday morning it was gone. An hour after noticing it missing, we found it chucked in the street several houses down.
I’ve spent enough time dissenting from majorities to know what it gets you, so it didn’t ruffle me. But Becca, bless her Anne Frankness, is always thrown when people aren’t good at heart, or fair, or tolerant. I love her for being repeatedly surprised by that.
I also know that the occasional kook is rarely representative of the majority. I used to think pointing this out was about being nice, but eventually came to realize that recognizing that fact changes my world.
We hosted an Obama house party last month and put flyers in 200 neighborhood mailboxes. Fourteen people came. Six other neighbors mentioned it approvingly at the pool or the bus stop, including some who differ politically. And we received two scrawled notes in our mailbox informing us that Obama is a Muslim, that “the terrorists want him to win,” and that “you are helping to destroy the foundation of this country.”
It’s easy to generalize the nastiness in your mind, until every silent house on your street seems to harbor a family that wants you strung up. But then we remembered that the tally I just described was ten thumbs up for every thumb down. And as Louise Gendron (senior writer for L’Actualité) reminded me last year, angry people are at least three times more likely to make their POV known than happy or indifferent people. If she gets three angry letters for every one happy letter after an article runs, she assumes the reader response was about even.
By that logic, perhaps 3-4 percent of the folks in our neighborhood are likely suspects for the angry notes. But our limbic response pictures the reverse, and two pissy letters become the tip of a 96 percent iceberg of hate.
I found myself falling into the same dark assumptions during my dissenting year at the Catholic college where I taught. I naturally began to assume that every silent person I passed on campus was wishing me hives. I found out later that the opposite was true: the majority were either indifferent or were silently cheering me on. (Note to self: DON’T SILENTLY CHEER PEOPLE ON. DO IT OUT LOUD. Knowing how much support I had would have changed everything.)
I was also extremely depressed at the time by the angry criticism I had received for my activism (which, btw, I will write about soon). It took (philosophy professor and later PBB contributor) Amy Hilden to point out the obvious to me–that the goal is not to avoid making people angry, but to make the right people angry for the right reasons. If everybody loves you, you probably aren’t doing anything of real significance.
So I had expected the minority opinion in our front yard to provoke somebody into doing something stupid and rude. And I knew that the silent majority, even those who disagree with us politically, would not condone that stupidity. But I also knew my kids would feel violated, angry, and afraid. Their own attitudes toward dissent are being tested and formed.
So we did what we do. We talked it through.
i’ll give you something to scream about
- July 19, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, fear, My kids
- 16
I like to watch other people in horror.
–Delaney McGowan, age six, smiling while watching screaming riders on the GOLIATH rollercoaster at Six Flags Over Georgia
Now I know for a fact that she doesn’t enjoy genuine suffering in others, but Linky and I both like to watch other lunatics in the grip of relatively benign and self-selected terrors – ten story drops on a coaster or a bungee, for example, things neither she nor I would do ourselves, thangyavurrymush.
But my daughter hasn’t yet noticed the thing that really puzzles me: they aren’t actually “in horror.” They are, most of them, thoroughly enjoying themselves.
I don’t get it.
I don’t get it for two reasons. The first is that I don’t understand how one of our greatest naturally-selected fears – the fear of falling, of which rollercoasting is a (barely) controlled simulacrum – got itself converted to one of our greatest thrills.
Sure, I can rationalize it – something about confronting death and emerging victorious, I guess. But that’s neocortical stuff. When I find myself (usually as a result of succumbing to the shamelessly repeated lie, “Come on, it’ll be fun!!” from my spawn) plunging down a near-vertical drop of ten stories at freeway speeds, my neocortex is huddled in a corner of my skull, wetting itself. The limbic system naturally grabs the wheel, screaming something about the fast-approaching jungle floor.
It’s not that I’m not a thrillseeker. I yearn to be thrilled. We all do. The question is what thrills you. I happen to be thrilled by perfect comedic timing, a blow-your-hair-back argument on any side of any issue, long sightlines over water or wilderness, mutually great sex, devastating musical harmony, unforeseen movie plot twists, Connor’s inventiveness and Delaney’s machine-gun laugh. I can sometimes even get my mind clear enough to be thrilled to be alive.
Which is exactly why simulated death-defiance makes me really, really unhappy.
I don’t call it a phobia, since “phobia” is defined as an irrational fear. A paralyzing fear of Regis Philbin or of macaroni might be irrational. Fear of death, or of things that could lead to it, is not.1
Cut to a speedboat coursing over the Lake of the Ozarks last week. (It’s a family reunion that includes a half dozen sporty cousins of mine who water-ski, Seadoo, skydive, speedboat, parasail, and just generally court risk as avidly as I avoid it. I’m in my forty-fifth year of hearing “Aw, come on!” from them and feeling like a poodle in a dogsled team.) From the back of the boat runs a rope, taut and twanging like a string on a washtub bass. At the end of the rope is an inflated tube, across which is sprawled my thirteen-year-old son and his younger cousin.
The boat makes a quick turn and the tube is sent skittering sidelong over the wake. Though it’s been years, I have done this, so I know that moment. If the turn is fast enough and the water rough enough, the tube will gradually tip, then vibrate, and finally tumble wildly like a flipped coin, throwing the rider or riders into the water at 40 mph. If you’re lucky, you end up in the path of a drunk hillbilly on a Seadoo, and death comes quickly.
Okay, I’m projecting.
But here’s the thing. I looked back at the face of my boy, right in the moment of maximum instability, the very moment when my own face would be a mask of concentrated unhappiness, and he was smiling. No no, not just smiling: his face looked to be in danger of splitting wide open. At the exact moment I would be least happy, his joy was positively orgasmic.
Why?
I’ve always figured my dad’s death when I was thirteen had something to do with my risk-aversion. I certainly lost all illusions of my immortality that day. But I’ve since learned that PET scan research is turning up two very different neurological responses to danger. It seems that you are either wired to love or hate the experience of risk. So maybe I’ve always been wired to hate it. The question remains: why did natural selection endow anyone, much less a sizable whack of humanity, with such a rabid taste for it?
Yesterday was another risk-immersion experience for me: a family trip to Six Flags. We divided into two groups by wiring: Connor, a friend, and Connor’s awesome (and risk-okiedokie) Aunt Beth went one way…
…while Becca, her mom, the girls and I went another.
In our final minutes at the park, Erin and Delaney suddenly decided it was time for a bit of terror and pointed to Splashwater Falls. It’s the simplest of all log flumes. No futzing around with zigzag courses through faux mountains and animatronic mining camps. They simply take you to the top of a 50-foot water drop and send you hastily down.
“You sure about this one?” I asked Delaney, who has a history of screaming for release from rollercoasters in the seconds before departure.
“Yep!”
“Okay! I’m psyched!” I actually was. For some reason I love water rides, no matter how insane.
It was on the incredibly long uphill, during that unmistakable ratcheting for which you know you’ll shortly pay, that she started to lose it. Nooooooooooo, she moaned, then began sobbing hard. Noooohohohohohohoho…
I put my arm around her. “You know we’re safe, right?” I said. No answer. She was now no-kidding terrified. “You won’t even believe how quick it goes,” I offered, knowing that I could only have sounded like the ax-wielding executioner whispering to Anne Boleyn.
We left the top, dropped like a rock, and I felt – there was no mistaking it – a genuine thrill. We hit the bottom, sending a magnificent wall of water over the crowd on the bridge. I was laughing like an idiot.
Then I remembered. I turned to Delaney, who was soaked to the skin. She slowly turned to look at me, her eyes intense.
“Again,” she said. “Again.”
__________________________
1Even though the “irrational fear of death” has its own name, thanatophobia, it shouldn’t.
three koans at turner field
- May 27, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids, Parenting
- 14
We all went to see the Braves play the Diamondbacks on Sunday, our first trip to Turner Field since moving to Atlanta — and it was exactly as captivating as I had expected. Not a sports guy, you see. But in the stands, as one by one the kids joined me staring at the sky, wondering why baseball is called a spectator sport, I was peppered with questions so difficult to answer they were practically koans — those essentially unanswerable, Buddhistic questions on the order of “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “Is there another word for synonym?”
Here are three, each a perfect illustration of the asker. After reciting each koan aloud, sound the bell and lose yourself in contemplation:
KOAN #1 (Delaney, 6)
What makes gravity?
KOAN #2 (Erin, 10)
Hey, why aren’t there any girls on the baseball team?
KOAN #3 (Connor, 12)
Why is card-counting against the rules at casinos if it’s really just a way of carefully paying attention?
middle school kabuki
- April 30, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids
- 9
We live in a lovely subdivision of rolling hills. The parking lot of the neighborhood pool at the top of our block is the only relatively flat patch. I take the kids up once in a while so the girls can ride their bikes in a circle. Connor often comes along to take shots at the basketball hoop on the side of the lot. I drag along a beach chair, sit in the sun and watch the show.
A couple of days ago, our trip to the lot gave me the opportunity to watch a fascinating, age-old dance — the passive-aggressive kabuki play of middle schoolers exploring interpersonal ethics on the fly.
As Connor (12) dribbled the ball around the corner and entered the lot, a complication came into view. Three other middle schoolers were sitting on the curb by the basket — not under the basket, but juuuust off to the left, 5-6 feet from the drop zone. They saw Connor, paused for that telling second, then continued talking to each other. Connor also saw them, stopped dribbling for juuuust that telling second, then continued toward the hoop.
Anyone who thinks they greeted each other and proceeded to work out the emerging conflict of interest has neither met nor been a middle schooler. Neither did they come to blows. The three continued to sit, passively asserting one of the oldest and dodgiest rights in legal history (known various as squatter’s rights, “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” “I Was Here First,” or “You Can’t Make Me”) and silently daring the Boy to infringe on that right.
The Boy, on the other hand, was silently countering with the Greater Need principle, also known as “You Can Easily Slide Over, but This is the Only Hoop.” Both sides were relying on the obviousness of their respective claims.
He began shooting. The three continued talking as if basketballs were not landing inches from them. Connor did the best shooting of his life, since each successful two-pointer went straight down and could be recovered with a quick lunge before it brought things to a head (so to speak). At last one shot hit the rim and went wide left. Three heads ducked. Still no eye contact, though Connor smiled nervously as he ran for the errant ball (preparing himself for the “Heh heh, isn’t this a funny situation we’re all enjoying” defense).
Push, for some reason, never came to shove. After ten minutes and no ball-squatter contact, the girls were ready to go home, and we all did.
It’s interesting to guess what would have happened if someone had actually taken a ball to the head. Since both sides were showing a lack of common sense, outrage over the other’s failure to see what had been the “obvious” solution tends to be the only remaining option for both sides. Instead, it was middle school kabuki to the end.
Looking back…and it’s about time (1)
Guest column by Becca McGowan
Alright, alright…I admit I haven’t been reading Dale’s blog. He’s been blogging for about nine months – oh, a year? – but somehow I never get around to reading it. Oh, I hear about what he writes on occasion as the day winds down and he shares a response that a reader had to a particular entry…it’s just that I never get around to actually reading the blog myself.
Nevertheless, I’ve been invited to write an entry. I don’t even remember the last time I had to write something of this length that others would read. I can’t even keep up with an easy book journal. I find writing intimidating. But as I thought about writing an entry, I actually became excited and curious: What would I write about, who would read it and how honest would I be?
Here goes…
I find people’s personal stories fascinating. We learn so much about each other when we know something about each other’s pasts. So I’m going to start with my personal story, specifically my family of origin and the role of religion in my upbringing. I feel very strongly that our families of origin play a significant role, positive and negative, in how we ourselves parent.
My mother is the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister. Let me emphasize the Southern. My mother and her three siblings seem to have loved their father dearly. Their descriptions and my memories of him are of a very loving, generous and kind man. Our son is named after him.
My father was also raised in a Southern Baptist family, and his father was in the military. I don’t know how regularly they attended church or with what intensity their beliefs were practiced. My parents met at Oklahoma Baptist University, and when I was born, my parents attended First Baptist Church, Atlanta.
Since the word “Baptist” has occurred four times in two paragraphs, it’s safe to say I have a Baptist background.
But my parents eventually left First Baptist because of disagreements with church ideas and wound up at Mount Carmel Christian Church. Notice the missing denomination.
The change did not go over well with my mother’s parents.
My parents eventually divorced. When I was in second grade, I moved with my mom, sister, and new stepdad to San Francisco. This reintroduced the Baptist thread, because stepdad was a Southern Baptist minister. Or had been, anyway—he left the church when the church turned its back on him during his divorce. His feelings of rejection and church hypocrisy were intense. Soon after we moved to San Francisco, by his orders, our family stopped attending church.
Not exactly how my mother had envisioned our new life in California.
My stepfather eventually began playing racquetball on Sunday mornings, which gave my mom an idea: she could take us girls to church during racquetball time. He wouldn’t have to go. But another family dynamic comes into play here – one we definitely don’t have time to get into: Our family, he said, did things “as a family” or not at all. Either we all went to church, or no one went to church. Since he wasn’t going, neither would we.
What’s a well-intentioned Christian mother to do? Well, since Tuesday nights was our stepdad’s late night at work, we started praying before our meals on Tuesday nights. After the meal my mom would choose a passage from the Bible, read it to us, and try to discuss it with us. If we heard his car come up the alley, we quickly put everything away.
This went on for years.
During this same time, our family began going to Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco—but only for Christmas and Easter services. (My stepdad was raised in the Episcopal Church so perhaps he felt some desire to reconnect with that denomination.) Since Mom got to pick what we did on Mother’s Day, we went to church on that day as well.
So let’s sum up: We have the Southern Baptist preacher’s daughter who occasionally goes to the Episcopal cathedral and one night a week secretly teaches her daughters about Christianity. We have the former Episcopalian turned Southern Baptist minister turned church-rejecting stepfather. And you have me, the quiet, observant, relatively compliant teenager.
Decision number one: When I go to college, I’m going to church every Sunday.
Decision number two: When I get married, we’re going to pray before dinner.
I headed to UC Berkeley, and sure enough, began going to a local church. I don’t even remember the denomination. Even after spending a Saturday night at a boyfriend’s place (okay, that’s my first sweaty-palmed honest phrase…what if my mother reads this?!) I would get up on Sunday morning, put on my nice clothes and walk to church. I continued going to church during college and during grad school at UCLA. And all along, it had more to do with defiance of my stepdad than belief.
When Dale and I got married, we didn’t pray before meals but did attend Wooddale Church, a Baptist-aligned megachurch in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. We went to Wooddale for about five years and even participated in a commitment ceremony with our two-year-old son, promising to raise him in a Christian home.
But it was wearing on Dale, and one day, as we were driving home from church, he said, “I just can’t go to church anymore.”
Let me stop there for a moment. As an elementary school kid, I wanted to go to church to make new friends and participate in the social activities I remembered from our time in Atlanta. As a teenager, I was completely neutral towards the Tuesday night prayer and bible verses. I was more in love with the fact that we were doing something behind my stepfather’s back. As a college student, I was in control of whether I went to church. And now, as a married woman, I was going to church with my family.
So “I just can’t go to church anymore” didn’t sit well.
Looking back, though — and it’s only recently that I have looked back — I realize it still wasn’t about belief vs. disbelief. I was still “siding” with my mom against my stepdad, still fighting a battle that was long since over.
There’s more, of course…but why not leave you with a cliffhanger until next time?
[On to Part 2]
____________________
BECCA McGOWAN is an elementary educator. She holds a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley and a graduate teaching certificate from UCLA. She lives with her husband Dale and three children in Atlanta, Georgia.
labels
[continued from the open shelf]
“What does ‘humanist’ mean?” Delaney asked.
I swallowed. You’d think that, given my current work, I’d have sat myself down at some point and worked out guidelines for such inevitable moments:
CONTINGENCY 113.e
Requests for Definitions
iii. Term: “humanist”
Subset 2: Age 5-6
Children in this demographic cohort who make a direct request for the definition of “humanist” and/or any of its etymological class members (e.g. humanism, humanistic) are to be referred to Article 6, section D of the Humanist Manifesto, except in Arkansas and Hawaii.
Lacking such a road map, I simply answered her question. In retrospect, to my surprise, I even answered it correctly.
“A humanist is somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and that even if there is a heaven or a god, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.”
“Awesome!”
I should note that Laney (age 6) uses Awesome! to signify everything from “I find that rather astonishing” to “That’s something I didn’t know before, and now I know it!” The latter meaning was in play here, I think, the word Awesome! signifying a new piece of the world clattering against the bottom of the piggy bank of her receptive mind.
Later that evening, after she’d been read to and sung to and tucked and kissed, I went back to my study to close up for the night. Scattered on and around the recliner she’d been sitting in were The Humanist Anthology, Tristram Shandy, The Kids’ Book of Questions, The World Almanac, The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, The Simpsons and Philosophy, Cosmos, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. I reloaded the shelves and went to bed.
One week later, during our afterschool snack-chat, Laney informed me excitedly that there are nine different religions in her class.
“Nine, wow! How do you know there are nine?”
“We’re talking about different religions, and Mr. Monroe asked if anybody wanted to say what kind of religion their family believed.”
I was not surprised to hear of some diversity. There are lots of South Asian kids in the class. Compared to the demographic mayonnaise I had pictured North Atlanta to be, I’ve been thrilled with the diversity here. “And there were nine different ones?!”
“Yeah, nine…” She looked at the ceiling and began to rattle them off. “Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Baptiss, Jewish, Chains…” (“Chains” is probably “Jain,” one of the most benign and respectable religious traditions on Earth). She counted on her fingers. “Anyway, I can’t remember all of them.” She suddenly beamed. “And I was the only humanist!”
I paused for a week or so.
I am adamantly opposed to labeling children, or even allowing them to label themselves, with words that imply the informed selection of a complex worldview. Dawkins hits it right on the head when he refers to a long-ago caption on a photo in The Guardian. The photo was of three children in a Nativity play:
They are referred to as “Mandeep, a Sikh child; Aakifah, a Muslim child; and Sarah, a Christian child” — and no one bats an eye. Just imagine if the caption had read “Mandeep, a Monetarist; Aakifah, a Keynesian; and Sarah, a Marxist.” Ridiculous! Yet not one bit less ridiculous than the other.
That incisive analogy is Richard’s greatest contribution to secular parenting. I completely agree, as (I am increasingly convinced) do most nonreligious parents. Once a label is attached, thinking is necessarily colored and shaped by that label. I don’t want my kids to have to think their way out from under a presumptive claim placed on them by one worldview or another. So prior to age twelve, I won’t allow my children to be called “atheists” any more than I’d allow them to be called “Christians”–not even by themselves. (More on the ‘age twelve’ comment in a later post. Remind me when I forget.)
So my first impulse was to give the usual cautionary speech: Now be careful not to stop thinking. There are still too many questions to ask, too much you don’t know. Someday you’ll be able to make up your own mind on this, but it’s not time yet.
I looked at Laney, still beaming proudly through a mouthful of Nilla Wafers. At the time she had learned the meaning of humanist from me, I didn’t know she had said to herself, That’s me. She was obviously delighted to have had something to say when all the other kids were claiming their tribal identities, and clearly had no idea of the dark chain reactions set off in the fundamentalist mind by the word “humanist.”
“So what did Mr. Monroe say?”
“He said that was cool!” And I’m sure he did. He’s a great guy. No evidence of dark chain reactions in him, nor in her classmates.
“And he asked what a humanist believes,” she continues.
“What’d you say?”
“I said a humanist believes the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world.”
If she had called herself a secular humanist, I would have protested. But what is there about believing ‘the most important thing is to take care of each other and the world’ that requires more time and thought and study? Is she impeding her thought process by declaring this — or is this a value, like honesty and empathy, upon which she can build her search for an identity? There are, after all, both religious humanists and secular humanists. Erasmus and Paine, two great heroes of mine, were among the former.
Humanism has no connection to atheism for her. The definition I gave her even included the option of believing in a god and being a humanist. By calling herself a humanist in the broadest terms, she hasn’t bought into complex metaphysics; she’s simply embraced a concept that even a six-year-old can sign on to. And in the process, she introduced her classmates, and her teacher, to a new idea, and associated it with her smiling, eager, proud little face.
So Laney’s done it again — she’s taken my armchair abstractions and turned them inside out, making me realize that not all worldview labels are ridiculous or harmful for kids. Some can even serve as catalysts for the next stage in a child’s process of finding her place in the world. And the next stage, and the next.
photo by Paula Porter