Look at the Bird
And now…the third and final winner of the first annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition: Robbin Dawson’s “Look at the Bird.” Thanks again to all who participated!
Look at the Bird
by Robbin Dawson
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. —Richard Feynman
“What’s the matter, babe?”
We were at a bowling alley for the birthday party of my son’s friend, Joe. My son, Ethan, was walking toward me with tears welling.
I met him halfway, scanned him for goose eggs, then began examining his fingers. When 7 year-olds are bowling, there are some things in the alley that can break.
“No, it’s not that!” He wrenched his hand from mine. I followed him to some nearby chairs. He crossed his arms over the back of his seat and rested his chin atop. A few tears slid down his cheeks.
We sat quietly for a few minutes.
“Joe said I’m not his best friend.”
Wow…hmm…really?
At that time, Joe and Ethan were inseparable. Their usual mode of greeting involved Joe running across the playground screaming, “Eetthhaaaaaannnnn!” before they tackle-hugged. The two would then thoroughly vet each playscape while sharing the milestones that had occurred since their last meeting.
Certainly, they each had other friends. Certainly, friendships changed and shifted. I just hadn’t seen this coming, and neither had my son.
“He said that,” Ethan sniffled and blew out a breath. “He said that Jesus is his best friend.”
Ah. Now that made more sense.
I picked quarters out of my purse and motioned toward a vending machine in the arcade. While Ethan chugged his cold drink, I selected a pool cue from a rack on the wall and rolled it across a table.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m judging how straight this cue stick is.” (It wobbled across the felt like a lady wearing one stiletto.) I was just about to challenge Ethan to a game, when he appeared at my side with another cue to test.
I explained eight ball, taught him how to hold a cue and helped him break. There is something inherently satisfying in the sound and feel of breaking. I racked the balls several more times for him, ostensibly for practice.
Two turns in, I tested the waters. “Joe seemed to like the Bionicle you gave him.”
“Yeah.” Ethan’s tone was matter-of-fact. “He’s been wanting Toa Hordika Vakama for a long time.”
“Oh. I guess that’s something a friend would know.” I paused to prepare my innocent, casual tone. “I wonder if he’ll let Jesus play with it.”
Ethan looked up from his shot, one eyebrow raised.
“What?” I shrugged. “I share my Bionicles with my friends.”
“Mama! You don’t have Bionicles!” He resumed lining up his next shot with entertaining concentration.
“True. But if I had Bionicles, I would let my friends play with them. My bug collecting boxes, too. I might even let them play with that goop in a jar that makes farting noises.”
We giggled. Then we talked about what makes our friends our friends. Enjoyable conversation, shared interests and helping each other out were high on both of our lists.
I was just about to bring the talk full circle, back to Jesus, when Ethan did it for us.
He laid his pool cue on the table. “I know I’m still Joe’s best real friend—you know, his best people friend. It just made me feel bad when he said that I was second.”
Several months prior, he’d asked me to refrain from hugs and kisses in public. Alone in the arcade nook, he accepted both without complaint.
We continued our game. In between helping him visualize angles and realizing that my skills had atrophied to embarrassing, I did my level best to explain the notion of a personal god and why anyone might refer to a god as a “friend.”
“Do you believe that?” he asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Me either.”
“Oh?”
“No. I mean, you can’t see God, and you can’t hear God.” A light bulb flicked on. “I’m going to try praying tonight.”
I sensed a chance to inject methodology. “What would your hypothe…”
“I got one!” he yelled. He had indeed managed to sink a ball in a corner pocket.
“Great shot!” I did not point out that the ball was mine, or that the cue ball had followed it.
“Mama, can I go back now?”
“Of course.”
I couldn’t help but smile. We would get to fuller explanations of others’ religious beliefs. We would visit places of worship. He would eventually decide for himself.
At that moment, though, watching the bird and seeing what it did seemed the most age-appropriate, educational approach possible.
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ROBBIN DAWSON lives on a tiny mountain in upstate South Carolina with her illustrator/cartoonist husband and their two fabulous kids. She bid farewell to corporate accounting in 2004 to home school her children, and co-founded an inclusive support group. When she’s not out exploring the world with her kids, she’s usually reading or spending quality time with her computer.
MoL Flashback: Where thanks are due
(First appeared on November 19, 2007.)
Thanksgiving — one of my very favorite holidays — is mentioned twice in Parenting Beyond Belief. “There should be no difficulty in secularly observing a holiday dedicated to gratitude,” I wrote in “Losing the Holy and Keeping the Day” :
“We can express to each other our thankfulness for each other, for our good fortune, and for life itself. No eavesdropping deity required. There is an additional opportunity to note that the Puritan pilgrims were pursuing the kind of freedom of religious observance to which secularists should be devoted – fleeing harassment and religious persecution in England and heading to the New World where they were free at last to burn witches. Okay, leave that part out.”
The book explores the issue of gratitude a bit further, naming it one of the “Seven Secular Virtues”:
The most terrible moment for an atheist, someone once said, is when he feels grateful and has no one to thank. I suppose it was meant to be witty, but it’s pretty silly. Nonbelievers of all stripes should and do indeed feel enormously grateful for many things, and I’m not aware of any terrible moments. Whereas religious folks teach their children to funnel all gratitude skyward, humanists and atheists can thank the actual sources of the good things we experience, those who actually deserve praise but too often see it deflected past them and on to an imaginary being.
We have no difficulty reminding the four-year-old to “say thank you” when Grandma hands her an ice cream cone, but in other situations – especially when a religious turn-of-phrase is generally used – we often pass up the chance to teach our kids to express gratitude in naturalistic terms. Instead of thanking God for the food on your table, thank those who really put it there – the farmers, the truckers, the produce workers, and Mom or Dad or Aunt Millicent. They deserve it. Maybe you’d like to lean toward the Native American and honor the animals for the sacrifice of their lives – a nice way to underline our connection to them. You can give thanks to those around the table for being present, and for their health, and for family and friendship itself. There is no limit. Even when abstract, like gratitude for health, the simple expression of gratitude is all that is needed. No divine ear is necessary – we are surrounded by real ears and by real hearers.
Group prayer of any kind, including religious grace, has always bothered me. It’s coercive, for one thing, and one person speaks for everyone, assuming a uniformity that is never really accurate. After the “amen,” I always want to submit a minority opinion: “I consent to clauses 1, 2, and 4, but dissent from 3 and 5 for reasons as follows…”
On several occasions, I’ve even seen group prayer used manipulatively (“And may the Lord bless and protect those among us who have been making unwise choices lately” [all eyes go to cousin Billy]).
BUT…the options to religious grace can bring their own problems. The old “moment of silence” can feel hollow; others can seem a bit forced (humanist meditations with Baptist intonations); while some, even if accurate, seem both abstract and forced (“thank you to the truckers and turkey wranglers and assembly-line workers”).
The best option I’ve ever heard just arrived in my inbox yesterday in the form of a short story by Wisconsin author/educator Marilyn LaCourt (The Prize, 2004):
Thanksgiving Ritual
by M. LaCourtLast year I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s house. I arrived just as we were being invited to take our places at the table and I felt a little awkward because I didn’t know a number of the other guests. I looked toward the kitchen expecting someone to bring on the food. It sure smelled good, and I was hungry.
Imagine my confusion when my host looked around the table at each of his guests and asked, “Who wants to start?”
I knew there was supposed to be food, but I still didn’t see any, not even a relish dish or a breadbasket to pass. What were we supposed to do? Pass imaginary bowls filled with imaginary mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkey and cranberry sauce? No one spoke.
Finally my host’s eyes settled on his seven-year-old niece.
Cindy stood up, cleared her throat and smiled at her brother. “Thank you, Jimmy, for teaching me to play games on your computer.”
Jimmy blushed and said, “You’re welcome.”
Eric, a nice looking young man with bright blue eyes was next. He thanked his parents for giving him his first telescope when he was ten, and for the many hours they spent encouraging his appreciation for the wonders of the universe. I learned later that Eric had been accepted into a post graduate program to study Astronomy.
My friend, Ron, the host, said thank you to his wife. “I really appreciate the way you put up with my complaining, your understanding and patience with my cause fighting. I love the wonderful meals you prepare for me everyday, your companionship and your sense of humor. Thank you for being my wife.”
Liz smiled and answered, “You’re welcome.”
I was beginning to get the picture. I had some thank-yous of my own and was getting heady with the whole idea, but I decided to watch and listen a bit longer.
“Thank you for taking care of me when I had such a bad case of flu last winter, Rose. I know how terribly unpleasant that must have been for you, and you were so kind to put your own life aside for a few days to stay with me.” Gina’s eyes were damp when she looked at her daughter. “You were such a comfort.” Then she turned to her son- in-law. “Thank you too, Karl, for fending for yourself and the kids while she was taking care of me.”
“You’re welcome.” “You’re welcome.”
Then Rose stood up and walked over to where her husband was sitting. She bent down and gave him a kiss. “Thank you, honey, for working so hard and supporting us and giving me the opportunity to be the stay at home mom I’d always hoped I could be.”
Chuck thanked his friend Bob for all the wonderful tomatoes and other produce Bob gave him during harvest time. He also thanked Jerry and Judy for teaching him how to make the world’s greatest apple sauce.
Jean thanked Patty for listening when she needed a sympathetic ear.
Juan thanked his grandmother for the loan and told her he had put the money to good use. Sonja thanked her neighbor, Dorene, for the wonderful homemade mayonnaise and other goodies. And on it went.
I was thinking about all the wonderful people I wanted to thank. I guess I was drifting off in some sort of a trance when I heard the next person mention my name.
“Thank you, Marilyn,” she said. “You helped my daughter and son-in-law through some rough spots in their marriage.”
I waved my hand in a never mind gesture. “I was just doing my job.”
Ron nearly knocked over his water glass as he stood to interrupt me.
“No, no, no. That’s not allowed.” He shook his pointer at me. “These are the rules. You only get to say ‘you’re welcome’. If you explain it away you discredit the message and invalidate the sincerity of the person saying thanks. You just got a sincere ‘thank you’, Marilyn. Now, say ‘you’re welcome’.” He sat down and fiddled with his napkin.
“Oops. I’m sorry. I mean…” I looked at the woman who’d thanked me and said, “You’re welcome.” Then I smiled at my host and hostess.
“And thank you, Ron and Liz, for inviting me to share in such a beautiful tradition.”
Ron grinned. “You’re welcome.” Liz nodded, “You’re welcome.”
It took a full thirty minutes to get around the table and all the thanks-givings. When we finished Liz excused herself to put the finishing touches on the food and Ron poured the wine.
Secular Homeschoolers — guest column by JJ Ross
You think YOUR secular kids face some tricky issues in Christian-branded society? Ha!
Picture a homeschooling family. Do you see a bible in the picture, prominent in the foreground — perhaps on the kitchen table around which six or seven modestly-dressed children do their lessons, while their denim-jumpered mother bakes bread and solemnly applies her righteous rod to strays?
Kathleen Parker’s column this week about the GOP might as well be about homeschooling:
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch…is what ails [us] and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
You could say I’m a “constituent” of homeschooling, but in a radically different picture from the evangelical right wing oogedy-boogedy branch. Heck, not just a different picture, a whole different story, written in another language.
Last week Dale said of secular parent blogging:
“Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ‘em, read ‘em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.”
He can picture secular homeschool parent bloggers as a friendly neighborhood in that community. So if homeschooling, like Harvard, had a Humanist of the Year Award — and why don’t we, come to think of it? — Dale would deserve it. 🙂
We’re just starting to find ourselves and each other in the blogosphere, a search made more challenging by the fact we don’t know what to call ourselves. (Homeschoolers Beyond Belief?) Secular, inclusive, rational, atheist, freethinking? The online homeschooling community fights over the word “homeschool” itself, never mind the weight of all those adjectives hung around it like baggage on a skycap’s cart.
Some of us are trying Thinking Homeschoolers and Evolved Homeschoolers on for size. The main lesson I’ve taught myself so far is that it takes real thinking — knowledge work if you will — with plenty of detours through link farms and those insipid generic “about homeschooling” blurbs, to discover solid secular homeschooling resources that endure.
Three comprehensive favorites:
National Home Education Network with discussion forums (now read-only) on thinking topics such as networking between religious and not-religious families
Sandra Dodd’s Radical Unschooling and her “merrily unschooling” family blog
A secular network of trustworthy — preferably jaded — independent homeschooling parents doesn’t just connect us with the good stuff; it helps steer us around the bad. There’s the HSLDA to get to the bottom of, of course, which I won’t link because those patriarchs blot out the homeschooling sun without any help from me. Then there’s an elaborate online con game in which an individual (with many names) sets up a fake but believable show of influence as homeschool leader and authority, quoted by reporters, selling products and running private schools, sometimes from dozens of intertwined sites very unlikely for one parent to suspect, detect or connect.
It takes running down rabbit trails and then networking in controlled chaos, to share what we learn in places innocent newbies are likely to find it, and save them starting all over again — real education! I would give you three infamous names to prove the point, except then Dale would get indignant letters threatening legal action. (That’s how they operate. See why you probably won’t hear about them without some networking?)
Email lists were the hot ticket when we started homeschooling in the 1990s. For years they were my lifeline. Ten years ago the secular National Home Education Network (NHEN) was born of and built on email lists. But — maybe in a form of punctuated equilibrium, or would it be climate change? — it’s not the same today. My blog partner Nance Confer and I still operate Parent-Directed Education for a static membership, 28,000 archived messages dating back to the summer of 2001.
If you’re just burning to roam the archives of a particular list, it may be worth joining. State and local email lists often thrive; I hear two good examples are VA Eclectic HS with Shay Seaborne and Stephanie Elms (see her bloglink below) and Ben Bennett’s Indiana Home Educators Network (IHEN).
And there are tightly focused mentoring lists, for new unschoolers say, or college prep advice. But generally I no longer recommend email lists, for any homeschool parent comfortable in the blogosphere.
So think blogs, maybe find a couple here that speak to you. Then see who comments there, and who’s on that blog’s blogroll. Follow at your leisure, to infinity if you like. The universe is expanding, not contracting. 🙂
This has worked better for me than searching for atheist or rational, plus homeschooling or school choice or education freedom, etc. Oh, yeah, here’s a tip — don’t assume “rational” means merely logic and thinking. It can indicate ideology more than analysis, code for Ayn Rand discipleship as an “Objectivist” and sometimes coupled with an extreme brand of libertarian homeschool politics that uses Founding Father quotes and defend-the-constitution rhetoric to forward its fascist fringe beliefs. There is one blog for example listed on every “rational” homeschool blogroll I see, that’s anything but. So I don’t go back to that blog. Just sayin’ — it would be RATIONAL to vet your links more thoroughly, ahem, unless you too actually believe Obama is Jesus and Hitler all rolled up into one Marxist plot to overthrow America.
With that [drum roll please!] here’s a grab bag of 15 smartly secular homeschooling blogs, from my own little corner in my own little chair, just right for my home and hearth:
Home Education, Religion, Politics & Eclectic Stuff (HERP&ES)
Unschool Days
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JJ Ross blogs about thinking parenting and secular homeschooling at Cocking a Snook!
Grandmas Gone God-Wild
This guest column by Robyn Parnell is one of three winners in the first annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition.
Grandmas Gone God-Wild
by Robyn Parnell
What defines good or evil? Can moral authority exist without divine dictate? If there’s no god, who pops up the next Kleenex? These questions are pieces of existential cake for secular parents compared to dealing with Grandmas Gone God-Wild.
Our family recently attended my husband’s (H) family reunion. As is her custom after such visits, H’s mother (MIL) wrote to our children. As is their custom upon receiving snailmail, my daughter (D) and son (S) handed their respective notecards to me, requesting translation (“I can’t read Grandma’s handwriting.”)
The notes seemed innocuous, if gushier than usual. Grandma thanked them for coming to the reunion, praised their characters, and effused about the pictures she’d taken: “D, You are a beautiful person, inside & out; it’s fun to see your smile!”
D, who loathes family photo sessions, lasered me an I-know-what-she’s-doing-and-it-won’t-work! look. We both giggled, then gasped, as the notes’ closings caught us off guard: “We didn’t discuss it when we were with you but we are still disappointed & sad that you all have rejected God. He is really a loving God – so hope you get to know Him sometime! We love you!”
“All that stuff about the smile and being a beautiful person – ick,” D sputtered. “She was buttering me up!”
“Just when I thought this conflict was over….” S spoke as if narrating a horror movie. “It’s back from the grave with an icy hand!”
Years ago, our family realized that our naturalistic world view isn’t compatible with religion. We neither concealed nor proclaimed this fact, although our car’s accumulation of freethought-friendly bumper stickers (“What would the Flying Spaghetti Monster Do canadianviagras.com?”) was a likely pointer.
During a summer visit, MIL noticed our de-churched Sundays and questioned H, who confirmed her suspicions. It brought out a side to the heretofore moderate, MYOB Lutheran lady that neither H nor I anticipated.
At first she confined her Save-An-Apostate efforts to H. Then, during a Spring Break trip to my in-laws’ home, out of the breakfast table blue MIL asked H and me why we’d “rejected God.” (“It was weird,” said S, who’d overheard the conversation. “The calmer you and Dad stayed, the more upset Grandma got.”) And after yet another family trip, MIL sent H a four-page letter on the subject. One good thing has risen from this situation, she wrote: her faith is stronger, and she prays for us daily.
“The last thing we intended by leaving religion was to create a religious fanatic,” I chuckled. H concurred, and drafted a reply. Which he didn’t send. He told me he didn’t want to encourage “that kind of relationship” with his mom.
Prior to the reunion trip, our children told me they dreaded Grandma harping on “the religion thing.” “It’s like she thinks we’re a problem she has to solve,” D moaned. MIL’s notes provoked more than indignant laughter from her grandchildren — disappointment, anger, and betrayal flashed in their eyes. So now, I told H, you have a problem to solve.
Letters, phone calls, “witnessing” books – what MIL says and sends to us is extraneous to the issue at hand, which is that she must stop sermonizing our kids. Professions of love are irrelevant. She loves them? Duh; she’s their grandmother. She needs to love them as a grandparent should: unconditionally and uncritically.
She noted their fine qualities — was that sincere? Aside from being in better moods come Sunday morning their essential natures haven’t changed since our family became religion-free. They remain the “intelligent, wonderful, helpful, kind” children she’d extolled; they haven’t started kicking blind beggars or tearing legs off flies. The only discernible change is her attitude toward them.
D & S are well aware of Grandma’s views on religion. Offering unsolicited, critical comments about their views is presumptuous; also, she’s setting herself up for not being taken at face value by her grandkids, who have experienced her not-so-hidden agenda. Praise, compliments, and (biggest ick of all) declarations of love are now seen as set-ups for the altar call. I assume MIL wants love and respect, not toleration, but she’s heading toward “Just smile and nod, you know how she is,” territory.
H rose to the occasion and sent a letter to his mother, analogizing the Serenity Prayer (nice touch, I thought) to warmly yet firmly request that, if she feels she must proselytize, she should pick on someone her own size. MIL replied with more professions of love, declaring she’d merely intended to share “the facts” with us. She did not acknowledge his request.
“We haven’t heard the last of this,” H sighed.
This calls for another bumper sticker. Perhaps I’ll append one I’ve seen elsewhere: “Lord, save us from your followers. Or just Grandma.”
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ROBYN PARNELL is a writer and secular parent living in Oregon. When not working on innumerable fiction projects, she searches for worthy additions to her bumper sticker collection, which includes family favorites “God Told Me To Embarrass My Kids,” and “Jesus is My Co-Pilot, Buddha is my Navigator, And Vishnu Will Be Serving Drinks Once We Reach Cruising Altitude.” Parnell shares life with one freethinking husband, two children, and an assortment of pagan pets (cats, reptiles, spiders, dust bunnies).
Blog on, ye secular parentals!
When first I turned the key on the Meming of Life, I poked around the Internets a bit to see who else might be blogging about secular parenting. I found four: Noell Hyman’s Agnostic Mom, The Atheist Mama, Atheist in a Minivan, and Humanist Mama.
I started writing The Meming of Life in March ’07, two weeks before Parenting Beyond Belief was released, expecting to blog for about six months, just to see the book launch through. Still at it, 255 posts later.
In the past two years, a number of blogs have appeared with a significant nonreligious parenting focus, each helping to open that closet door a wee bit wider. Here’s an attempted timeline:
AUG 2005
Agnostic Mom
NOV 2005
The Atheist Mama
AUG 2006
Atheist in a Minivan
FEB 2007
Humanist Mama
MAR 2007
The Meming of Life
Belgian Atheist
AUG 2007
The SkepDad Blog
NOV 2007
Raising Three Thinkers
FEB 2008
Humanist Dad
APR 2008
A Secular Parenting Blog
Science-Based Parenting by Skeptic Dad
MAY 2008
PhD in Parenting
JUN 2008
Skeptical Mom
JUL 2008
Domestic Father
AUG 2008
Humanist Mom
SEP 2008
Rational Moms
OCT 2008
Atheist Dad
Our greatest deficit — the lack of a connected, mutually supportive community — is slowly being erased. Equally important, this chorus of voices helps us to build consensus about the best practices for nonreligious parenting. So visit ’em, read ’em, comment and link up — and let me know who I missed.
[Watch for a post next week featuring secular homeschooling bloggers.]
As the Right fights…
After dominating the country’s politics for years, the conservatives’ grip on power was quickly fading. The Chief Executive was already enormously unpopular when a financial tsunami struck. Over a million homeowners ended up in foreclosure. Unemployment soared. To avert economic disaster, the government poured billions into a bailout of the financial sector. But it was too late. In the next election, voters expressed their lost confidence in conservative leadership, and the liberals swept to power in a landslide victory.
You’d be forgiven for thinking I’m talking about the past two months in the US. In fact, I’m describing the UK in the 1990s. The British Conservative Party held the reins for 18 years, then was trounced by the liberal Labour Party—at which point the Conservatives went through a “struggle for the soul of the Party” — precisely what’s now happening in the U.S.
They eventually split into three factions: the centrist “One Nation” Conservatives, Free Market Conservatives, and The Cornerstone Group, social conservatives whose motto “Faith, Flag and Family” says it all.
Because compromise is a longstanding element of British politics (and British life in general), the three elements remain under a single party identity, struggling for dominance of the platform. But infighting among the factions is credited in part with keeping the Conservatives out of power for over a decade.
Republicans in the US have a similarly mix of the sane, the selfish, and the sanctimonious, and it’s becoming ever clearer that these bedfellows are heading into a bloody civil war. Because compromise is seen as weakness in American culture (and religion), I don’t see it ending in a three-winged party. The big red tent can no longer hold Colin Powell, Pat Robertson, George Will and Sarah Palin. I think the GOP will split in half. And (in case you were wondering about relevance) this will open a completely new way of looking ideology in the US—including religion.
The new parties:
THE NEW REPUBLICAN PARTY (NRP)
The New Republicans are intelligent advocates of small government, limited social engineering, and fiscal conservatism. They are furious at having their party hijacked by the mindless lunatic fringe and their moralistic obsessions. The NRP will merge with Libertarians to revive Goldwater Republicanism.
THE CHRISTIAN AMERICA PARTY (CAP)
Populist, anti-intellectual, ultra-nationalist and über-religious, The CAP will finally have a party unfettered by compromises with the real world. Informed by American exceptionalism and fundamentalist Christianity, it will be in essence an American fascist party.
I use “fascist” here not as a cheap epithet but as a literal political descriptor. The historian Robert Paxton defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
Political theorist Roger Griffin adds that “The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.” A perfect description of the Religious Right.
The Christian Americans will front a candidate for President in 2012 by the name of Sarah Palin.
Freed from the unwieldy social obsessions of the Religious Right, the New Republicans will have more in common with Democrats — not everything, but more — than with the Christian America Party. It would be in the interest of the Dems to work with the NRP to keep the CAP from exerting undue influence.
But if Democrats have become too blindly allergic to the word “Republican,” they may fail to recognize the transformation of the Republican brand, driving the NRP back into the arms of the Religious Right. Which would be bad.
And now the point.
This new fault line in American politics might help dissolve another strained coalition in American life: the big tent of religious faith. Progressive religious believers have long been uncomfortable with those on the wingnut fringe of their worldview but are often compelled to defend “faith” in general because they are under that same big tent. That has made bridge-building between the nonreligious and progressively religious difficult. And that’s a shame, because as I never tire of pointing out, liberal religionists have much more in common with secularists on a wide range of issues and attitudes than they do with fundamentalism.
As Bruce Bawer (author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity) has noted,
theological liberals of every denomination have found that they have more in common with one another than with the conservatives in their own denominations. Responding to the research of biblical scholars and the ”historical Jesus” movement, they have de-emphasized doctrine.
Meanwhile leaders of the religious right have preached that salvation depends on believing the correct dogma, even as they have succeeded in reducing the considerable doctrinal distinctions that once divided evangelicals, fundamentalists and charismatics.
As a result, American Protestantism is in the midst of a major shift. It is being split into two nearly antithetical religions, both calling themselves Christianity.
These two religions — the Church of Law, based in the South, and the Church of Love, based in the North — differ on almost every big theological point.
I would simply add that Bawer’s “Church of Love” also has much more in common with the nonreligious than with the “Church of Law.”
You can see this in my August post about the Belief-o-Matic Quiz. A secular humanist shows a 60-75 percent overlap with mainstream-to-liberal Christians, while an evangelical shows only a 20-40 percent overlap with mainstream-to-liberal Christians.
The coming fracture on the right can help to isolate and more clearly define the anti-intellectual, fundamentalist side of religious expression in the US. I think that now is the time for the nonreligious to get over our allergy to the word “religion”—to begin opening dialogues and building bridges of common interest and common values with the sizeable non-insane segment of religious believers in this country.
[UPDATE: AHA! I have apparently convinced Christine Todd Whitman.]
[UPDATE: And now Kathleen Parker!]
My future kids-in-law
ERIN (10): When I get married, I want to marry somebody just like you.
DAD: Like me? Aw, what a sweet thing to say, B. And why is that?
ERIN: Because of the way you care so much about Mom. It’s totally obvious how much you love her. I want somebody to treat me just like that.
[DAD makes mental note to blog about this.]
DAD: Well you deserve it, B. Don’t settle for anything less.
DELANEY (7): And I want to marry somebody who believes in God.
DAD: Really? How come?
DELANEY: ‘Cause then we can talk about how we believe different things, and we’ll always have interesting things to talk about.
Congratulations, Dr. Ann
There are countless congratulatory messages for President-elect Obama this morning, all well-deserved. The most remarkably gifted presidential candidate of our time managed somehow to negotiate an unimaginably grueling campaign, and we, despite ourselves, managed to elect him. Shout-outs all around.
But I wanted to take a moment to recognize one of the people who by Barack’s own account helped make him what he is — his nonreligious mother, Ann Dunham.
It should be a matter of no small pride to nonreligious parents that the next President — a man who has been praised for his ethics, empathy, and broadmindedness — “was not raised in a religious household.”1 It’s the other, undiscussed first in this election — the first black President is also the first President with a completely nonreligious upbringing.
“For all her professed secularism,” he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.” And even as she expressed her deeply-felt outrage over those aspects of organized religion that “dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety [and] cruelty and oppression in the garb of righteousness,” she urged her children to see the good as well as the bad. “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example,” said Barack’s half-sister Maya. “But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”2
Ann recognized the importance of religious literacy and saw to it that her children were exposed to a broad spectrum of religious ideas. “In her mind,” Obama wrote,
a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part–no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.3
Maya remembers Ann’s broad approach to religious literacy as well. “She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”4
In this and several other respects, Ann Dunham was a nonreligious parent raising a child in the 1970s according to the exact philosophy of Parenting Beyond Belief — educating for tolerance and empathy, lifting up those religious ideas that are life-affirming while challenging and rejecting those that are life-destroying, and seeking the human foundations of joy, knowledge, and wonder of which religion is only a single expression — “and not necessarily the best.”
Barack went on to identify as a Christian. Whether this is a heartfelt position or a political necessity is less relevant than the kind of Christianity he has embraced — reasonable, tolerant, skeptical, and non-dogmatic. His examined and temperate faith is something he sees as deeply personal, possibly because he had the freedom to choose and shape it himself — precisely the freedom I want my children to have. It is difficult to picture this man forcing his religious opinions on others or using this or that bible verse to derail science or justify an arrogant foreign policy. It’s not going to happen.
It is impossible for me to picture this man claiming God has asked him to invade [insert country here] or that ours is a Judeo-Christian nation. In fact, when he lists various religious perspectives, there is an interesting new entry, every single time:
(Full speech here.)
Is it a coincidence that a child raised with the freedom and encouragement to think for himself chose such a moderate and thoughtful religious identity? Surely not. And if my kids choose a religious identity, I’m all the more confident now that they’ll do the same. Just like Ann Dunham, I don’t need to raise kids who end up in lockstep with my views. If our kids turn out anything like Barack Obama, Becca and I will consider our contribution to the world pretty damn impressive, regardless of the labels they choose to wear.
Neither do I think it’s a coincidence that the man who has inspired such trust, hope, and (yes) faith is the product of a home free of religious dogma. This is what comes of an intelligent and broadminded upbringing. It’s one of the key ingredients that have made him what he is.
So thank you, Ann, from all the nonreligious parents following in your footsteps. We now have a resounding answer for those who would question whether we can raise ethical, caring kids without religion:
Yes We Can.
________________________
1Audacity of Hope, p. 202.
2Ariel Sabar, “Barack Obama: Putting faith out front.” Christian Science Monitor, 06/16/07.
3Op cit, 203-4.
4Op. cit.
Two ways blind
Someone please pull this video out from under my eyes. I’m riveted and repelled. I can’t stop watching it, analyzing it, pausing and advancing it, trying to learn something from it. It somehow holds the key to…something. In just one minute, this woman manages to illustrate the intersection of blind faith and blind intolerance more succinctly and powerfully than I’ve ever seen:
[SIGH. Careful what you wish for. The production company has pulled the video from under my eyes. Go here to see it. You’ll have to wait for it to load and go to 8:25 to see the segment in question, but it’s worth it. I hate stingy copyright holders.]
It’s not like I haven’t seen the combination before–it’s not exactly rare–but I’ve never seen such a richly-illustrated portrait of the way faith and intolerance can, and often do, spoon. Watch her eyes. Listen to the cadence of her voice. Catch the suppressed violence in her last sentence. Most of all, watch that smug, self-satisfied blink/head-toss combo that appears first at 0:17, then again in some form six more times, in each case following a declaration of blind faith or blind hatred.
If you aren’t yet convinced that religious moderates share more in common with the nonreligious than with a wingnut like Ms. Kerlee, share this video with your religious moderate friends and watch their reactions. Recognizing our shared outrage over ignorance posing as “values” would be good for both groups–and who knows, might even get that long-overdue bridge-building underway.
(via Pharyngula.)
Cross purposes
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, B.”
“I want to wear something to school tomorrow but it makes me feel weird to wear it. I don’t know if I should.”
It’s completely in character for Erin (10) to open with a “should” question. Erin is as tightly concerned with values questions as the other two are with empirical ones. Most of all, she is intrigued, fascinated, curious, and ultimately repelled by the dark side.
I wrote last year about her long-ago entrée into this ambivalent dialectic, watching Snow White at age four:
Her epiphany came as Snow White entered the deep, dark forest, fleeing the wicked Queen. The Queen had certainly gotten her attention, but Erin’s eyes didn’t pop – and I mean POP — until Snow White fled into the storm-whipped forest.
“Daddy, LOOK!!”
“Oooh, yeah, look at that.” The whipping branches of the trees had transformed into gnarled hands, which were reaching ever closer to Snow White as she cowered and ran down the forest path. I looked over at Erin, whose dinnerplate eyes were glued to the screen.
“What ARE those?!” she asked, breathlessly.
“Looks like some kind of evil hands, B.”
“Daddy,” she said in an intense hush, “…I want to BE those evil hands!”
(For the record, she now talks about pursuing a Pre-Med course of study in college, with only a minor in Evil.)
I wasn’t surprised to hear that she was puzzling over the morality of clothing choice, pondering the implications of spaghetti straps or a too-short skirt. It’s her stock in trade. But this time, there was a twist.
“What is it you’re thinking about wearing?” I asked.
She slowly revealed a pendant necklace, and dangling at the end, a cross.
I remember when she bought it at the dollar store on a Florida vacation last year, selecting a cross of pink plastic beads from a huge display of hundreds of cross necklaces. (I remember the sign over the display reading ALL CROSS NECKLACES $1. I’d added a line in my mind: Jesus Saves—Why Shouldn’t You?)
“Why does it make you feel weird, B?” I assumed she was feeling out the reaction of her secular dad. And there was a time I would have frozen like a moose in the headlights at such a thing, unsure of the right response. But this isn’t some church-state issue. This is about letting my child explore the world for herself. I don’t have to engage anything higher than the brain stem for these situations anymore. But it wasn’t about my views–it was about hers.
“I feel weird wearing it when I don’t really believe in god. Like I’m not being honest. But I just like to wear it.”
“It’s fine, sweetie. It’s a pretty necklace.”
She paused. There was more, I could tell.
“It makes me feel good to wear it.”
Uhhh, okay, there’s at least one unfortunate way to read that sentence. “You mean it makes you feel like a good person to wear a cross?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It just…” She smiled sheepishly. “It makes me feel good to rub it.”
I’ve been ready for that sentence for years, but the context is all wrong.
“When I’m worried, I rub it with my fingers and it makes the worry go away.”
Aha, okay. It’s a simple talisman. And Erin does spend more time worrying than she ought to. I told her about the jade worry stone I carried in my pocket throughout middle school. Same deal. It did make me feel better. Her cross has no more connection to God than my worry stone. In fact, her concern is that people might think it did when it didn’t.
I asked if I could feel the cross. The pink beads are threaded on two axes and revolve pleasantly beneath the fingertips. “Hey, that is nice,” I said. “Better than my rock!”
She laughed. She’s worn the cross for a week now. And if I know my girl, the compulsion to explain what she does and doesn’t believe is eventually going to surface. It’ll be a conversation starter for her. I could have found a reason to disallow it — something about disrespecting the beliefs of others, perhaps — but I wasn’t fishing for a way to disallow it. On the contrary, I fish for ways to allow things. Here’s a chance for her to engage and think about issues of identity and belief and symbolism. Why miss that chance?
Most important of all, I know it isn’t likely to cast a spell on her—in part because I didn’t treat it like fearful magic, and in part because I know my girl.