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I did what?
May. 2nd, 2007 02:50 pmUm.... Huh. I think I kinda-sorta came out to my Mom as an atheist last night.
I know some of you will understand just how bizarre this is, but for the rest, here's the deal:
I'm out to my folks about pretty much everything -- bi, poly, kink, abortion access activism, drug use, you name it. This has been a conscious choice over the years, largely to prevent the easy slide into distance that can happen when you live in a different state from your family since you're 16 years old. I'm lucky enough to have a family I like, and that I want to maintain an honest, close relationship with, and that's generally meant that they've had to suffer through knowing somewhat more about my life than is necessarily always comfortable, because the too-easy alternative is to just avoid talking about those topics, even when they're the big important things in my life that are large on my mind. And that path leads to just not calling, rather than calling and trying to dance around what's big and important in my life. So aside from my personal and political preference for outness and honesty, it's been a particularly specific decision regarding my family.
It is very much worth noting that the reason I can do this is because my family is quite good at dealing with me as an adult, and at disagreeing on issues and ideas without getting hostile or threatening about it. And although my folks are pretty mainline protestant liberal, I'm a good, long, confusing way out from there, and they've done their best to understand, or at least accept, where I'm coming from. We still don't agree on everything, and we still have periods of hurt feelings after particularly rough conversations, but there's no sense of that being a threat to our relationship, and in fact my Mom, at least (who's much more talkative than Dad, so I know more about her views) has really come quite a ways on GLBT and poly issues, particularly. The early years involved a lot more of the "it's a phase" and "how do you reconcile that religiously" conversations, and sometimes it felt like we'd never get past that point, but gradually we have, and when I look back at that evolution, I'm deeply impressed.
Incidentally, I get my tendency for TMI straight from my Mom, no doubt about it. My poor, long-suffering father ends up reluctantly present at more bizarre family conversations than I can count. Mom was a nurse in labor and delivery, and I got my approach to sexuality, bodies, etc, from her. She's a lot of why I'm a very good match for patient-instructing. She's also been my model in terms of honesty about "family secrets" and mental illness. Her belief that closets aren't healthy certainly helped me a lot at various points in my life, as much as we've both scandalized plenty of people around us in that process.
I definitely got the rational, logical, scientific side of my personality from Dad. He's an Episcopal priest, and the Episcopal church has a pretty long-standing tradition of welcoming academic and intellectual study. I've always loved the way Dad approached religion, and I had excellent experiences growing up in the church, and not having offense taken at any of my questions. Dad's very much a geek at heart, too, and we very much connect on that. In fact, echoes of that are a substantial part of why I tend to be drawn toward people with a religious vocation (combined with intellectual study) in almost any religion, I think.
Religion has been the single hardest exception to my generally open approach to my life. Until I finally found my "perfect church", and it made it crystal clear that my real problems were with the underlying theology, it wasn't too much of an issue. I was intensely religious growing up, of my own volition, and my desire to continue that was pretty deep, and something I struggled with for a long time. But when that realization happened (sometime around 2001-2002, I think), I realized that it was no longer theologically honest for me to call myself a christian. I have too many problems with the core theology -- it's not actually about the queer issue, particularly -- it's mostly about evangelism, which is absolutely central to christian teaching, and much harder to argue out of than a few random mostly-ambiguous passages about what may be interpreted as queerness. I don't think I can be as thoroughly squicked as I am by evangelism (even the gentlest forms) and still be theologically honest in calling myself a christian. From there I wandered through a period of self-describing as an "agnostic episcopagan" (that the basic beliefs I wasn't sure I believed were of a more generic small-p pagan worldview than a christian one, but that I still had ties to episcopal ritual). And in the past few years it's become more apparent to me than I'm pretty clearly atheist, and it's just been taking me a while to get comfortable with that idea.
The single overwhelmingly hardest part of that, for me, is the family issue. I hate the idea of hurting my parents, either in terms of 'rejecting' the core, central beliefs and leaving them worrying about my immortal soul (although hearing my Mom's explanation of her view of her grandfather's atheism was helpful in that regard -- she thinks God's big enough to accept atheists, too), or, possibly even worse, rejecting Dad by rejecting what he's spent his life's work doing.
For a while now, I've taken the "I won't bring it up, but I won't lie if asked" approach that I often use in touchy situations. That's generally as far as I'm willing to go into a closet or deception except in situations where my well-being is unfairly threatened. And I've kind of wondered whether decades of "it not coming up" were at all likely in my family (generally not), and how I'd deal when it did, etc, etc. My folks certainly know I'm not attending church anymore, but last night was the first conversation where Mom and I really talked at length, and I pretty much acknowledged being an atheist. Amusing side-note: In the hour or more of conversation last night, we also talked a good deal about how I make my recreational chemical choices -- explaining to my very straight-edge Mom what I value about LSD is much less stressful for me than the religion conversation. The conversation came up because she and Dad have been at a clergy conference, and they'd been doing some work examining what they'd gained and lost in a lifetime of ministry, and what had gone well and badly. It started out with her talking about what the churches we each grew up in were like, and how I'd been the lucky kid in that regard, since my formative experiences were in a church that wasn't going through nasty political struggles (this is very true -- I definitely got a better draw than either of my brothers in that regard). Anyway, that got her talking about how she understood how I'd wandered away from the church, and how the GLBT issues affected things. I did stop her at that point and clarify the explanation I gave above, about it being the concept of evangelism, rather than the GLBT issue, that was central for me, although listening to decades of debate over my worth as a human being certainly wasn't fun. Anyway, the whole conversation rambled around, over most of what I've said above about my attempts to find a way to make christianity work for me, and my sadness and fears about "rejecting Dad" in my eventual decision. It was very good to talk about that -- despite my best intentions, it's very hard for me to be silent about things that matter to me with people I care about. And the conversation went remarkably well, and I'm very happy about that (although I have to admit to being somewhat more wishy-washy than I think is accurate about whether it's possible I may eventually find my way back to the church). I still don't know exactly what Dad thinks about all of it (he was driving while she and I were talking), and he's reserved enough I may not, without pushing harder than I'm willing to. But still, it was a very unexpected conversation to find myself in, and it went very well, all things considered. I'm very happy about that, if still a bit stunned.
In reading back over this, it seems I should make a few points clearer. It's not that I thought my parents didn't know that I was somewhere between non-practicing christian and agnostic -- it's that the jump to atheist is a pretty big one in my head, theologically. And a lot of what mattered about the conversation is that she really understood that I hadn't left the church because of bad experiences, or in rejection of her and Dad, but despite my deep love for the community, and my fear of hurting them. That the reason I left is that I couldn't be theologically dishonest in order to keep that as part of my life, as much sadness as that separation caused. I'm very relieved that she understands and respects that.
I know some of you will understand just how bizarre this is, but for the rest, here's the deal:
I'm out to my folks about pretty much everything -- bi, poly, kink, abortion access activism, drug use, you name it. This has been a conscious choice over the years, largely to prevent the easy slide into distance that can happen when you live in a different state from your family since you're 16 years old. I'm lucky enough to have a family I like, and that I want to maintain an honest, close relationship with, and that's generally meant that they've had to suffer through knowing somewhat more about my life than is necessarily always comfortable, because the too-easy alternative is to just avoid talking about those topics, even when they're the big important things in my life that are large on my mind. And that path leads to just not calling, rather than calling and trying to dance around what's big and important in my life. So aside from my personal and political preference for outness and honesty, it's been a particularly specific decision regarding my family.
It is very much worth noting that the reason I can do this is because my family is quite good at dealing with me as an adult, and at disagreeing on issues and ideas without getting hostile or threatening about it. And although my folks are pretty mainline protestant liberal, I'm a good, long, confusing way out from there, and they've done their best to understand, or at least accept, where I'm coming from. We still don't agree on everything, and we still have periods of hurt feelings after particularly rough conversations, but there's no sense of that being a threat to our relationship, and in fact my Mom, at least (who's much more talkative than Dad, so I know more about her views) has really come quite a ways on GLBT and poly issues, particularly. The early years involved a lot more of the "it's a phase" and "how do you reconcile that religiously" conversations, and sometimes it felt like we'd never get past that point, but gradually we have, and when I look back at that evolution, I'm deeply impressed.
Incidentally, I get my tendency for TMI straight from my Mom, no doubt about it. My poor, long-suffering father ends up reluctantly present at more bizarre family conversations than I can count. Mom was a nurse in labor and delivery, and I got my approach to sexuality, bodies, etc, from her. She's a lot of why I'm a very good match for patient-instructing. She's also been my model in terms of honesty about "family secrets" and mental illness. Her belief that closets aren't healthy certainly helped me a lot at various points in my life, as much as we've both scandalized plenty of people around us in that process.
I definitely got the rational, logical, scientific side of my personality from Dad. He's an Episcopal priest, and the Episcopal church has a pretty long-standing tradition of welcoming academic and intellectual study. I've always loved the way Dad approached religion, and I had excellent experiences growing up in the church, and not having offense taken at any of my questions. Dad's very much a geek at heart, too, and we very much connect on that. In fact, echoes of that are a substantial part of why I tend to be drawn toward people with a religious vocation (combined with intellectual study) in almost any religion, I think.
Religion has been the single hardest exception to my generally open approach to my life. Until I finally found my "perfect church", and it made it crystal clear that my real problems were with the underlying theology, it wasn't too much of an issue. I was intensely religious growing up, of my own volition, and my desire to continue that was pretty deep, and something I struggled with for a long time. But when that realization happened (sometime around 2001-2002, I think), I realized that it was no longer theologically honest for me to call myself a christian. I have too many problems with the core theology -- it's not actually about the queer issue, particularly -- it's mostly about evangelism, which is absolutely central to christian teaching, and much harder to argue out of than a few random mostly-ambiguous passages about what may be interpreted as queerness. I don't think I can be as thoroughly squicked as I am by evangelism (even the gentlest forms) and still be theologically honest in calling myself a christian. From there I wandered through a period of self-describing as an "agnostic episcopagan" (that the basic beliefs I wasn't sure I believed were of a more generic small-p pagan worldview than a christian one, but that I still had ties to episcopal ritual). And in the past few years it's become more apparent to me than I'm pretty clearly atheist, and it's just been taking me a while to get comfortable with that idea.
The single overwhelmingly hardest part of that, for me, is the family issue. I hate the idea of hurting my parents, either in terms of 'rejecting' the core, central beliefs and leaving them worrying about my immortal soul (although hearing my Mom's explanation of her view of her grandfather's atheism was helpful in that regard -- she thinks God's big enough to accept atheists, too), or, possibly even worse, rejecting Dad by rejecting what he's spent his life's work doing.
For a while now, I've taken the "I won't bring it up, but I won't lie if asked" approach that I often use in touchy situations. That's generally as far as I'm willing to go into a closet or deception except in situations where my well-being is unfairly threatened. And I've kind of wondered whether decades of "it not coming up" were at all likely in my family (generally not), and how I'd deal when it did, etc, etc. My folks certainly know I'm not attending church anymore, but last night was the first conversation where Mom and I really talked at length, and I pretty much acknowledged being an atheist. Amusing side-note: In the hour or more of conversation last night, we also talked a good deal about how I make my recreational chemical choices -- explaining to my very straight-edge Mom what I value about LSD is much less stressful for me than the religion conversation. The conversation came up because she and Dad have been at a clergy conference, and they'd been doing some work examining what they'd gained and lost in a lifetime of ministry, and what had gone well and badly. It started out with her talking about what the churches we each grew up in were like, and how I'd been the lucky kid in that regard, since my formative experiences were in a church that wasn't going through nasty political struggles (this is very true -- I definitely got a better draw than either of my brothers in that regard). Anyway, that got her talking about how she understood how I'd wandered away from the church, and how the GLBT issues affected things. I did stop her at that point and clarify the explanation I gave above, about it being the concept of evangelism, rather than the GLBT issue, that was central for me, although listening to decades of debate over my worth as a human being certainly wasn't fun. Anyway, the whole conversation rambled around, over most of what I've said above about my attempts to find a way to make christianity work for me, and my sadness and fears about "rejecting Dad" in my eventual decision. It was very good to talk about that -- despite my best intentions, it's very hard for me to be silent about things that matter to me with people I care about. And the conversation went remarkably well, and I'm very happy about that (although I have to admit to being somewhat more wishy-washy than I think is accurate about whether it's possible I may eventually find my way back to the church). I still don't know exactly what Dad thinks about all of it (he was driving while she and I were talking), and he's reserved enough I may not, without pushing harder than I'm willing to. But still, it was a very unexpected conversation to find myself in, and it went very well, all things considered. I'm very happy about that, if still a bit stunned.
In reading back over this, it seems I should make a few points clearer. It's not that I thought my parents didn't know that I was somewhere between non-practicing christian and agnostic -- it's that the jump to atheist is a pretty big one in my head, theologically. And a lot of what mattered about the conversation is that she really understood that I hadn't left the church because of bad experiences, or in rejection of her and Dad, but despite my deep love for the community, and my fear of hurting them. That the reason I left is that I couldn't be theologically dishonest in order to keep that as part of my life, as much sadness as that separation caused. I'm very relieved that she understands and respects that.
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