Ten years of Calling Bernadette’s Bluff
My 500th post goes back ten years to the beginning of my public freethought life, before Parenting Beyond Belief, before Foundation Beyond Belief…
Spring 2001. I’m a mostly closeted secular humanist on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota. It’s Friday afternoon, so I’m sitting with a small, sad knot of St. Kate’s faculty men at The Dubliner, a pub in St. Paul. Guinness in and bile out.
A sociology prof and good friend named Brian Fogarty tells about seeing two students on the quad earlier that day, having a pitched argument. No contact, but plenty of heat. As Brian slunk by the two, another student leapt out from behind a column and thrust a slip of paper at him:
WHAT DID YOU DO ABOUT IT??
“You know,” he sighed after describing it, “if I did stick my nose in, it would have been ‘a male thing to do.’ You just can’t win.”
He was right about that. The campus was laced with these double-binds. “Somebody has to write a satirical novel about this place,” I said.
“Yeah yeah, you always say that. So write it.”
“Wha…me? I was actually thinking of a writer.”
“Write one scene,” he said. “See what happens.”
That night I wrote an eight-page scene in which a faculty committee discusses what to do about the school song. The meeting is called to order by Jack Kassel, who is, by the most extraordinary coincidence, a closeted secular humanist male professor at a Catholic women’s college:
Well then, we meet again to discuss changes to the college fight song.” Audible gasps around the table. Jack’s eyes inflate as he realizes his mistake. “I mean, the college song,” he sputters in a rush. “The song. The Hymn to Saint Bernadette.”
Oh goody, he thinks. Now I get to start in a hole. Shit on a stick.
The next day I laid out the storyline. Jack is already at the end of his rope when his oldest partner in disbelief shows up — as the campus priest, no less — and he finally plunges over the edge when his ex-wife enrolls their brilliant young son in a Lutheran school and the boy begins quoting Scripture in response to Jack’s questions. Back against the wall, Jack starts to come out as a nonbeliever at what turns out to be the worst possible time — as visions of the Virgin Mary begin appearing on campus.
I wrote for ten weeks straight, a fun and feverish thing, finishing up ten years ago this month. After months of refining, I published it through Xlibris, and in January 2002, just seven months after Brian’s taunt, Calling Bernadette’s Bluff went public.
The book was stocked in the college bookstore and sold out repeatedly. The local paper did a nice feature, and reviews have been good. The resemblance of “St. Bernie’s” to St. Kate’s (and the presence of characters said to resemble actual carbon-based people on campus, including the president, the dean of faculty, and half a dozen profs) was duly noted. The dean of faculty even asked for a signed copy. What fun.
The next year…not so much. That’s when my slow-burning conflict with the administration began over free expression on campus, leading eventually to my disgusted resignation in ’06.
Hard to believe how much has happened in ten years. Along the way, in addition to the parenting books, I wrote Good Thunder, which picks up three days after Bernadette ends. But I didn’t release that one until last year for various reasons, then didn’t announce the release to anyone until now. There’s just been too much going on.
And even now, I’m mentioning it only in the context of Bernadette’s Bluff because Good Thunder would be incomprehensible without reading Bernadette first. Don’t even think about trying.
I’m really surprised at how well both books hold up for me as a reader after all these years. I usually hate who I was and what I did over nine minutes ago, but these still say what I wanted to say.
It helped that so many characters are based on real people. The deeply nutty aspects of Catholicism are on display, but (as several reviewers have noted) the strongest and most likable character is Genevieve Martin, the Catholic dean, who was based on the actual dean at the time. So when Dean Martin butts heads with spineless Jack, it’s hard even for nontheists to entirely know who to root for. Likewise Leslie, the militant feminist with the blinding Grin, manages to make sense and nonsense and to convince and infuriate at the same time. I don’t think I could have written that character convincingly from scratch. Fortunately I’d known her in person, and been convinced and infuriated by her for years. She was one of several people at St. Kate’s who helped turn me from a passive feminist to a deeply committed one. But she also showed me, quite unintentionally, just how silly it could get at times, resting as it does in human hands.
The weirdest thing about Bernadette is the fact that several things in the story ended up happening on campus the next year. My favorite: A construction project on the fictional St. Bernie’s campus unearthed bones, and the Lakota Sioux claimed they were sacred and halted the project. A year after publication, a construction project on the non-fictional St. Kate’s campus unearthed an underground spring. The Lakota Sioux claimed it was sacred and halted the project.
Like they say, you can’t make this stuff up.
20 Reasons to support FBB in July
Humanists like to have good reasons for what they do. It’s one of the most adorable things about us. That’s why Foundation Beyond Belief, a humanist charitable membership organization, is building its member/donor drive around 20 Reasons to Give or Join in July.
Maybe you’ll join or give because without a God, it’s up to us to make things better on this planet, or because we don’t keep a dime of your donations to the featured charities, or because our regular giving model appeals to you.
Maybe you’ll do it for the yummy dopamine hit or the pretty decent chance to win an iPad2.
There’s also the opportunity to confuse Arthur Brooks, who says the secular suffer from a “virtue gap,” or to make Dinesh D’Souza look even sillier.
Then there’s our new Volunteers Beyond Belief program to support, Andrew Jackson’s hair to celebrate, and fear, arguably the greatest cause of human misery, to overcome.
Start at our 20 Reasons page, select your own favorite reason, and share it on Facebook and beyond.
For the videogenic among us, there’s the 20 Reasons Video Contest. Make a short video (<60 seconds) about your reason for being a member or supporter of Foundation Beyond Belief -- funny, serious, 
animated, whatever — then upload it to YouTube as a response to this one by FBB board member Zach Moore. Share it, ask your friends to Like it, and we’ll do the same by posting it on all of our social media pages. The two videos with the most Likes at the end of July will each receive a $50 Amazon gift certificate.
It comes down to this: We’re really proud of what we’ve done so far, putting compassionate humanism to work by raising over $160,000 for outstanding charities worldwide, and we’re excited about what’s next. Our Volunteers Beyond Belief program launched today, with chapters in eight U.S. cities, and our ongoing humanist emergency response program will launch on August 1. We’re working hard to build a positive, effective expression of compassionate humanism. We need your help to keep it moving forward by donating, joining, or just spreading the word.
Thanks for doing whatever you can to make our July drive a success.
Screwing with Darwin – the final chapter
[Continued from Screwing with Darwin 2]
I had a passing knowledge of evolution in high school. Better than the average bear, but still sketchy. I majored in physical anthropology at Berkeley not for the dazzling job prospects but to fill in that sketch.
In addition to changing and deepening my understanding of what it means to be human, a fuller grasp of human evolution led me to wonder how traditional religion could in any significant way be made to fit with what we now know. (See earlier post.) And I remember wondering what Darwin thought about that.
He was seriously religious as a young man, even trained for ministry and annoyed his Beagle shipmates with fundamentalist pronouncements. If, after the Galapagos and the Origin and The Descent of Man, Darwin was still a conventionally religious man, I knew I must have really missed something. So I picked up Darwin’s Autobiography in my senior year to find out.
If I’d picked up the 1887 edition by his son Francis, published five years after Charles died and reissued many times since, I’d have been puzzled but chastened. He doesn’t get into religion much at all in that one, and when he does, he seems to mostly affirm his ongoing conventional beliefs. And I would almost certainly have never looked further.
Fortunately it was the 1958 edition by Charles’s granddaughter Nora that found me. As I mentioned in Part 2 of this series, Nora restored the bits that the earlier edition had expunged under pressure from Charles’s wife Emma. Nora was able to do this because all of the family members who’d nearly come to blows over what to leave in and what to leave out were now demised.
If I’d read the first edition, I might have imagined a man with religious convictions essentially intact:
FIRST EDITION (1887)
I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted.
Compare to this:
RESTORED EDITION (1958)
I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our creed must be fully accepted. It never struck me how illogical it was to say that I believed in what I could not understand and what is in fact unintelligible.
A 12-page section titled “Religious Beliefs” underwent the most vigorous edits. The bracketed and bold text was omitted from the first edition:
During these two years I was led to think much about religion. Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. I suppose it was the novelty of the argument that amused them. [But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.]
It’s sometimes fascinating to see what Emma insisted be struck out and what she allowed in. She allowed this passage but bracketed a portion (as I have below) for deletion. Francis obliged:
I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress [and have never since doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.]
It’s not even his conclusion but the strength of his confidence that apparently unnerved his wife. As for the damnation, she wrote in the margin
I should dislike the passage in brackets to be published. It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief–but very few now wd. call that ‘Christianity,’ (tho’ the words are there).
Tho’ the words are there. And 120 years later, the words are still there. I guess some books dodge the red pen more easily than others.
Francis oversaw an even more abbreviated 1892 American edition in which the entire 12 pages exploring Charles’s religious beliefs are replaced with a single bracketed fib:
[After speaking of his happy married life, and of his children, he continues:]
Mm. That Ninth Commandment is always the hardest, innit.
Yet if you look hard enough, in all but the God-Bless-America edition, you can find one quiet sentence in which Darwin is allowed to clearly state his actual theological position. Like Huxley, he utterly rejected belief in the claims and doctrines of Christianity, but said
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.
The distortion of Darwin’s views continued for years. One of the most galling attempts was by Lady Elizabeth Hope, an evangelist who published a fabricated story in 1915 claiming to have heard Darwin renounce evolution and embrace Jesus on his deathbed. Francis redeemed his editorial self brilliantly. “Lady Hope’s account of my father’s views on religion is quite untrue. I have publicly accused her of falsehood, but have not seen any reply. My father’s agnostic point of view is given in my Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I., pp. 304–317,” he wrote to a publisher in 1918. “I was present at his deathbed,” said Charles’s daughter Etty. “Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. …The whole story has no foundation what-so-ever.”
Etty’s niece Nora eventually put the pieces back together, but the genie never goes all the way back in. As of today, 6 of the 10 bestselling versions of Darwin’s Autobiography on Amazon are the Francis Darwin edition.
Thanks for trying, Nora.
Best Picture: The New Humanism
Parenting Beyond Belief was published four years ago this week. Since then, I’ve had hundreds of requests for advice of one kind or another. When I’m not qualified to answer the question, I either decline entirely or lateral to someone who is qualified.
In the process of those laterals, I’ve developed a pretty good sense of our strengths and weaknesses as a community — the areas we have plenty well covered, and the ones that are still cobwebbed corners. I’ve also developed a few favorite resources, and I’d like to give a shout to one of them.
This morning I got a request from Melissa, a recently-graduated RN who is currently in orientation as an Obstetrics nurse. The orientation group discussed cultural competency and the importance of providing patient-centered care. All of the usual cultures, ethnicities, and religions were covered, she said, but no mention was made of the nonreligious.
To her great credit, she spoke up.
“I politely informed my colleagues and our orienting nurse about the growing demographic of people who identified themselves as non-religious freethinkers whose goal was to live ethical, fulfilling lives, and use science and logic to make decisions about our beliefs, values, and lives,” she said. “The orienting nurse was shocked to learn about us and was not aware of the needs of the non-religious.”
The orienting nurse was entirely supportive of her self-disclosure, she said, and was interested in learning more about the nonreligious community. Melissa asked if I could recommend websites, articles, and other resources to help introduce this person to the community.
What a fantastic moment.
Now imagine yourself in the same position. Someone unfamiliar with humanism or atheism is interested in learning more — not so they can explore their own views, but to better serve the growing number who are in that demographic. There are currently more self-identified nonreligious Americans than African-Americans, after all — think of that — and five times as many nonreligious Americans as Jewish Americans. As more people discover that, this kind of request will become more common.
So where would you send someone for the best picture of our community?
My current favorite in that category is The New Humanism, an online magazine founded in late 2009 by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. A good 95 percent of websites with a freethought identity are defined primarily by their opposition to, or difference from, religion. Nothing wrong with that, of course — there’s a lot of ground to be plowed there — but it’s good to see a growing desire to also flesh out humanism itself, to explore our own values and issues, and (something we too rarely do) to challenge our own assumptions.
In the past 18 months, TNH has featured such topics as building secular communities, the place of emotions in humanism, humanist rituals, the difficulty of giving up the illusion of immortality, the double-challenge black humanists face, secular meditation, two articles reflecting on the common ground between humanism and Buddhism, whether humanists should join in interfaith work, a personal appeal for genuine inclusiveness, and a refreshingly honest recent article that attempts to shake the nonreligious community out of its obsessive focus on the intellectual, urging greater attention to the kind of comfort, care, and need that religion provides.
Here’s a passage from that last piece that ends with a simple, incisive question, completely reframing the conversation:
A friend of mine told me recently that she thought organized religion was for “weak and uneducated people.” Though I was a bit offended, my response was simply, “Well, what is the secular world doing for weak and uneducated people?”
Sift that provocative question through your head a bit, then read the article.
TNH even has an engaging article written from the perspective of a humanist nurse — something I was glad to be able to show to my correspondent.
I have a dozen favorite voices, but it’s hard to think of a source of humanist thought that quite matches The New Humanism’s blend of depth, clarity, and originality. The writing is both brilliant and accessible — a damn hard thing to pull off once, much less again and again. And (as you can see above) it raises questions that, for all their simplicity and power, are rarely or never raised anywhere else in our community.
Like anything worthwhile, TNH is not without its detractors. Many have rightly noted that these topics alienate hard core nontheists. This just in: Not everything we do has to be aimed at the hard core. They already have lots of nifty toys. The fact that 99.5% of those who share our worldview are not associated with us in any way should get our attention. How about giving them a place to stand, a way to be humanists? In my humble, TNH offers an opportunity to do just that.
So there’s my vote. Where would YOU have sent Melissa for the best picture of humanism?
“This just isn’t going to happen”
Late last week, as I sat down to write a post about Rock Beyond Belief, I received notice that it had been cancelled.
Quick summary for those who haven’t followed this:
Last September, an evangelical Christian rock concert called “Rock the Fort” was held at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Sponsored by the Fort Bragg chaplains, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and 20 area churches, the event was promoted as an opportunity to win souls by “[bringing] the Christian message to all of Fort Bragg and the surrounding community.” Ft. Bragg chaplain Col. David Hillis made it clear in a letter to local churches that “Rock the Fort is evangelical in nature…The concert will conclude with a clear gospel message.”
It worked. Event organizers claimed 700 on-stage conversions of soldiers and civilians.
Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State correctly stated that “the military has no business sponsoring a rally that is clearly designed to convert people to evangelical Christianity – or any other religion, for that matter.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation and Military Religious Freedom Foundation likewise weighed in with constitutional concerns. “Churches have the right to reach out to anyone to spread their religious messages,” Boston said, “but the government is not allowed to help them do it.”
The Staff Judge Advocate soothed worried brows with a letter promising equal treatment:
This was echoed in a letter from the base commander.
One soldier at Fort Bragg, Sgt. Justin Griffith, decided to take the base commander at his word. If the military is going to sponsor events of this kind, they must do so for other perspectives as well. Thus was born ROCK BEYOND BELIEF, a day of fun and entertainment featuring secular bands and speakers including Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker, Hemant Mehta, and Eugenie Scott (and me).
Justin was a class act from the beginning. He was determined to make the event a positive expression, not a poke in the eye. Every time someone tried to paint RBB as an anti-religious event or an attempt to “spread the atheist message,” Justin slapped it down. This would be a positive celebration of secular values, but never an attempt to recruit, convince, or attack. No de-conversion or de-baptism ceremonies. High road all the way.
He pulled together a volunteer staff and began the long approval process in November. Funding was a serious concern. But a Freedom of Information Act request by FFRF revealed that Billy Graham’s Rock the Fort event had received over $54,000 in direct support from the Dept. of Defense.
The next step was simple: the base commander had promised “the same level of support to comparable events,” so a request was made for a similar level of financial support for Rock Beyond Belief.
The approval was a no-brainer, and the base legal staff recommended that Rock Beyond Belief receive the same support Rock the Fort had received.
The last step would be the signature of the garrison commander. He “approved” the event per se, but added what Justin rightly called “crippling restrictions.” Instead of the outdoor post-parade ground that Rock the Fort had used, Rock Beyond Belief would be confined to an indoor theatre that holds 700. There would be no financial support of any kind. And unlike Rock the Fort, he required that all advertising carry a disclaimer that the event carried “no endorsement by Fort Bragg, the US Army, or the Department of Defense.”
Justin had no choice but to cancel.
The whole thing rang loud bells for me. Justin was attempting to hold the Army to its own stated principles, not to mention the US Constitution. And instead of progressing straight to court over Rock the Fort, he had chosen to request equal treatment. A promise of equal treatment was made, then withdrawn.
Eight years ago I tried something similar, albeit on a smaller scale. I was on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college that trumpeted an atmosphere of open inquiry and critical thinking in all of its public statements and recruitment materials. All points of view were said to be welcome in this vibrant marketplace of ideas.
The college also considers itself a feminist institution, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of feminist pioneers have been atheists or agnostics was never mentioned. So when an informal student humanist group I advised wanted to bring Annie Laurie Gaylor on campus to talk about feminism and freethought, I thought it a perfect fit with the college’s stated values. Annie Laurie wrote Women Without Superstition, the definitive book on the topic.
We reserved the room, clearly stating the nature of the event, paid the required fee, and received an approved contract. We advertised openly on campus and in the papers for four weeks. But 45 minutes before the event, a security guard arrived and locked the hall, “By order of the president.”
I called Sister Anita for an explanation and was told that I had not reserved the hall. When I replied that I had the reservation in hand, she was silent for several seconds.
“Look Dale,” she finally said, “this just isn’t going to happen.”
The next day, as word of the lockout spread, she sent a campus-wide email claiming that I had intentionally misrepresented the nature of the event. The day after that, the first student protest in the history of the college took place on the quad. Major media stories ensued, and I received some blistering hate mail.
I managed to stay three more years, trying to improve the climate of inquiry on campus, before nausea led me to resign and pursue my current work.
Though religion is in play in both of these situations, the principle applies to countless others as well. If a minority point of view is on the verge of gaining a fair hearing within the rules, someone in the majority will simply change the rules. The women’s movement struggled against the same kind of goalpost-moving, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 essentially said, “Okay, from now on we will follow our own rules.” The majority party in Congress regularly changes procedures to hogtie the minority. Rules are useful, goes the reasoning of the powerful, until they aren’t. At which point etc.
Some defenders of the garrison commander will surely point out that he didn’t cancel the event, Justin did. A bit like saying, “Sure, I shot you, but you’re the one that fell over.”
Eight years ago I was heartbroken that what could have been a simple, positive expression of the important place of religious doubt in our history instead yielded a melee of angry protests, accusations, and hate mail because someone decided their own rules were meant to be broken as needed. Now Justin’s attempt to create something positive is instead devolving into ugliness and lawsuits for the same reason.
The suit is justified and necessary (and, as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Mikey Weinstein put it, “a one-inch putt”) — but once again I’m heartbroken at the duplicity and the lost opportunity.
I hope I’d behave better than the garrison commander and Sister Anita in a position of majority power. But if I were to do otherwise, I hope the minority voices I trample on would shame me into integrity.
PBB in NYC!
I am delighted to report that I’ll be in New York City to give a Platform Address and PBB seminar at the New York Society for Ethical Culture this very weekend – Sunday January 9.
Long-time readers may remember me swooning at length over the Brooklyn Society after my visit there in April ’09. After visiting four others (Chicago, St. Louis, Bergen County NJ, and Northern Virginia), I’m even more 
convinced that Ethical Culture is the best articulation yet of a community built around shared values and principles rather than beliefs.
Housed in a gorgeous building on Central Park, the NYSEC is the mother ship of the Ethical Culture movement, founded in 1876 by social reformer Felix Adler as the first such Society.
So if by chance you’re in the New York area this weekend, pop over to NYSEC (2 W 64th St at Central Park West) for the morning address, the afternoon seminar, or both. I’ll try to be handsome and/or fascinating.
A holiday message from Tiny Tim (Minchin)
And you, my baby girl
My jet-lagged infant daughter
You’ll be handed round the room
Like a puppy at a primary school…
ERIN McGOWAN (12), singing under her breath while waiting for the school bus
I still get close to tears every time I hear this astonishing, lovely song. Tim acknowledges the complexities that swirl around the Christmas holiday for nonbelievers, then lifts deep and simple meaning out of that mess, expressing what this holiday has always meant to me. What a rare and beautiful thing it is.
Enjoy — and whatever you celebrate, however you celebrate it, have a happy and peaceful holiday.
White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin
I really like Christmas
It’s sentimental, I know, but I just really like it
I am hardly religious
I’d rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest
And yes, I have all of the usual objections
To consumerism, to the commercialisation of an ancient religion
To the Westernization of a dead Palestinian
Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer
But I still really like it
I’m looking forward to Christmas
Though I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I don’t go in for ancient wisdom
I don’t believe just cause ideas are tenacious it means that they’re worthy
I get freaked out by churches
Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy
And yes I have all of the usual objections
To the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions,
Are taught to externalize blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right and wrong
But I quite like the songs
I’m not expecting big presents
The old combination of socks, jocks and chocolate is just fine by me
‘Cause I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
And you, my baby girl
My jet-lagged infant daughter
You’ll be handed round the room
Like a puppy at a primary school
And you won’t understand
But you will learn someday
That wherever you are and whatever you face
These are the people who’ll make you feel safe in this world
My sweet blue-eyed girl
And if, my baby girl
When you’re twenty-one or thirty-one
And Christmas comes around
And you find yourself nine thousand miles from home
You’ll know whatever comes
Your brother and sisters and me and your Mum
Will be waiting for you in the sun
Whenever you come
Your brothers and sisters, your aunts and your uncles
Your grandparents, cousins and me and your mum
We’ll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Darling, when Christmas comes
We’ll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Waiting for you in the sun
Waiting for you…
Waiting…
I really like Christmas
It’s sentimental, I know…
The children of the revolution
One thing is pretty much guaranteed for any social movement that struggles against the mainstream: the children of the activists won’t understand what the big frackin’ deal is.
U.S. civil rights pioneers often end up with kids who (while enjoying the fruits of the struggle) ask their parents, “Why is it always about race with you?” Second-wave feminists spent their youth breaking glass ceilings, only to have their daughters (who’ve never known a time when they couldn’t vote or play hockey or run a corporation) roll their eyes with embarrassment at Mom’s “obsession with gender.”
Without putting myself anywhere near the same plane as those, I’ve started getting a taste of that second-generation thing myself. It’s a good thing for the most part, a likely sign that our own efforts have made it possible for our kids to transcend our obsessions, to find the next beast that needs struggling against instead of tilting with ours — or just to enjoy living in a better, saner world.
When Becca recently brought up the idea of starting a secular parenting group in our area, my 15-year-old son — a classic apatheist — said, “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“I kind of don’t get why you need something like that. Just don’t believe. Why do you have to get in a group with other people who don’t believe?”
“You don’t have to,” Becca said. “But some parents who aren’t religious find it helpful to see how other nonreligious parents handle the issues that come up.”
“Like what?”
I offered an example. “I just got an email from a mom this morning. Her family is going to church with her parents for the first time, and she wanted to know what her son should do during communion. You know, when the congregation goes to the front for the…”
“But that’s so obvious!”
“Oh? What’s the obvious thing to do?”
“You just do it! You’re in a church, so you do what the church people do. That’s respectful.”
I remember being fifteen, seeing things so clearly, constantly stunned at the density of others.
“Okay. Do you know what communion is?”
He paused. “Well…not really, no.”
“It’s a re-enactment of the Last Supper. Most important part of a Christian service. It’s a way of saying, ‘I believe in the divinity of Jesus, and here’s the moment I’m closest to him.’ So some people feel it’s more respectful to not do it if you don’t believe it.”
“Huh.” Another pause. “So you told her not to let him do it?”
“Well no, I said I’d explain to him what it means and let him decide what to do. He can see what it’s like to stay sitting when most people go to the front, or to take part in a ritual that means you believe when you really don’t or aren’t sure. It’s good experience.”
Two weeks later we visited my mother-in-law’s Episcopal church. I reminded the kids that they could choose to do whatever they wanted. They could sing or not, pray or not, kneel or not, commune or not. And if they had any questions, they could ask us.
Delaney (9) noticed the Stations of the Cross before the service. I told her it was the story of the last hours of Jesus’ life, and we walked the circuit. As a second-generation freethinker (in the lower case), she didn’t have to recoil or push against it. To the kid who was Athena for Hallowe’en, it’s just another cool mythic story.
During the service, Erin (12) was obviously pondering her choices. When the first kneeling moment came, she looked at her Grandma (kneeling), then at the padded kneeler, then at me (sitting), then at the kneeler again. She half-knelt, looked uncertain, then dropped back into the pew. The second time, with a deep breath, she went for the full kneel. Third and fourth times, she sat.
Trying something on for size is classic Erin, and she left the church knowing what both feigned conformity and sore-thumb honesty felt like. Much better than just yakking about it.
Communion came and went, and Connor stayed in his seat. We exchanged wry smiles. Yeah yeah, his eyes said, whatever.
New blog to support secular parenting groups
While writing and researching Parenting Beyond Belief in 2006, I went searching for secular parenting groups in the U.S. and found precisely one.
I certainly might have missed some, but the fact that a diligent search didn’t turn up more than one is a pretty clear indication of how few and far between they were.
Zip forward four years, and though we’re still a tad short of Starbucks-level saturation, the landscape has changed pretty dramatically. I’m currently aware of more than forty groups in North America ranging in age from three weeks to three years and in size from half a dozen to nearly 150 members.
As I’ve tracked the activities and growth of these groups, I’ve come to realize how isolated most of them are from each other. Most start from scratch, finding members and planning activities by trial and error. Wheels are reinvented — and they’re occasionally square. While some groups thrive, others disappear within a few months.
One of the original purposes of Foundation Beyond Belief was to provide a central source of information and support for these groups. We did some good work along those lines early in the year, conducting a large-scale secular parent survey and helping to birth about a half dozen new groups. But we kept running into a problem.
Me.
The IRS had expressed reasonable concern that a firewall be maintained between the non-profit Foundation and the for-a-wee-smidge-of-profit world of Parenting Beyond Belief. To demonstrate their seriousness, they brought the tax exemption process for FBB to a screaming halt when a staff blog entry on the Foundation website linked to a site that in turn included a sidebar link to buy my book.
That delayed our approval by six weeks.
So we were understandably skittish about ever so much as mentioning Parenting Beyond Belief, Raising Freethinkers, the PBB Channel on YouTube, the PBB Forum, this blog, etc. in Foundation communications. In other words, we could support secular parents as long as we avoided mentioning 75 percent of the resources for secular parents.
It eventually became crystal clear that this just wasn’t going to work. I am now in the process of building deeper support resources for secular parenting groups on this very website. And the first effort in that direction is a new blog called Parents Beyond Belief.
The blog is a space for secular parenting groups to help each other create effective communities for nontheistic parents by exchanging ideas and stories. If all goes well, you’ll hear precious little from me and tons from people who know what they’re talking about — the actual leaders and members of secular parenting groups. The first post is already up, and six others are on the way.
Don’t wait for an invitation! If you are currently in a secular parenting group and would like to submit a post about anything related to your group — finding members, naming the group, childcare issues, what to do at meetings, field trips, book clubs, play groups, food, dues, online presence, community service, resolving disagreements, you name it — just write up a brief description of your intended piece and send it to me for consideration. If it looks like a good fit, I’ll invite you to write the piece.
Guidelines for posts: Submissions must be relevant to the blog’s purpose, under 700 words, well-written and engaging.
A small group of reviewers will help me select entries in the early going. Contributors who have a few pieces accepted will be considered for a position as blog administrator. And once we have a few of those, I intend to step quietly aside and let y’all run with it.
A mindgasm of scientific proportions
This is quite simply one of the most astonishing, original things I have ever seen. Ever.
I’ve said too much. Set aside 15 uninterrupted minutes.
It’s filled with phrases that express what I often find inexpressible. Add your favorites to the comment thread.
(Profound thanks to my step-nephew Dan Nolan for this one.)
