laura.fo

I sometimes wonder if I'd be in this place had the mother who raised me been the same person she is now. Today my mom gives guest sermons to her congregation and leads them in religious retreats. Her closest friends are ministers and missionaries and all of them have a liberal humanitarian view of the world that goes hand-in-hand with their faith. They travel to Honduras, protest The School of the Americas, and fight to have their churches designated as "open and affirming," code for inclusive to gays and lesbians. Recently she began donating money to the YMCA in Palestine, but before signing a check she called their headquarters to ensure that her contribution would go to Muslim children as well Christians.

It was not always like this. My grandfather was an atheist, almost belligerently so, and thus my mother was raised in a climate of sarcasm and dismissal toward all things that reeked of godliness.

"See that thar steeple?" my uncle — my grandpa's brother — once asked as we were driving his rusty Studebacker to the post office. He pointed at some Mormon temple over in the distance. "It points right up to Brigham Young!" My uncle lived in the backyard canyons of Wyoming, which he liked, on the state's border with Utah, which he resented. We passed a car with a Utah license plate driving twenty miles an hour, a speed the Sudebacker was only barely able to best. "Goddamn Mormons," my uncle muttered, and then, approvingly: "My pa used to be a Catholic, but he whupped it."

I was sixteen at the time and envied my mother for growing up in such an environment. My mother did not spend her childhood rooted to hard wooden pews, wearing itchy tights and circling the vowels in church bulletins because under the circumstances it was the most compelling diversion she could find. She did not grow to hate the sound of organ music or dread the thought of Sunday mornings, when she would be arbitrarily robbed of several hours of her day for the pleasure of sitting still and liking it. Because my mother was not raised with religion she had little reason to identify with my own hatred for it; I believe she saw the very act of going to church at all as an act of independence, something she was allowed to do now that she was an adult and could make her own choices.

We started our foray into the land of the saved when I was three and we moved to a new house three doors down from the local UCC church. In pre-school I attended Sunday School and then church services; by seventh grade I was spending two hours at church on Sunday mornings, staying all afternoon for youth group, and had hour-long confirmation classes on Thursday nights (which I mainly remember as the reason I missed two full seasons of The Cosby Show). We went to Bible School in June, church camp in August, and various other programs around Christmas and Easter. Next to school, church was the place I spent the most of my time growing up, and mind you not one minute of it was done voluntarily.

Looking back I'm amazed that my parents managed to keep me involved in something I so thoroughly loathed for ten entire years, but somehow they did. I like to think my mother wouldn't have forced me to go through with it if she'd known how much being forced to attend church would eventually turn me off to Christianity entirely. (For my father, on the other hand, that was undoubtedly an irrelevant data point. Kids should do what they're told. Because I said so, that's why.) The only good thing I can say about the experience is that going to church taught me to endure the most excruciating form of boredom imaginable, which came in handy later both in school and at work. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, old enough that I might have gotten something out of the sermons, I had so effectively trained myself to ignore what was going on behind the pulpit — to just silently endure — that I wouldn't have known how to pay mindful attention had I tried. Luckily my church considered confirmed teenagers adults in the eyes of God, and I guess if that was good enough for God it was good enough for my parents, for after that point I was allowed to make my own decision. I turned fourteen, left the church and never went back.

A few years ago my mother told me that she regretted this. "I wish," she said, "that we'd either gone and took it seriously and talked to you about it at home, or not gone at all. It seems like we sent you mixed messages." Given the hours my family logged in the house of God one might think Christianity would have been a point of discussion at home, but in fact it wasn't. As a child I assumed the only reason we went at all was to appease the folks in our small town who looked askance at heathens. I think my father shared my opinion, but since he was a man long accustomed to getting up in the morning and doing things he didn't want to do, church was something he engaged in with dogged determination, if not quite enthusiasm. I was the only one complaining.

My mother's commitment ran deeper, something I only realized several years after I left home and she began attending church on her own, in another town. Clearly it was not something she was doing just to save face. She was going through a difficult time in her life and claimed she needed the community, and I'm certain that's true, but I wonder, too, if there wasn't a part of her raised-in-atheism self that was still unsure about admitting that she was there in part because she simply believed. It took her several years to emerge as a spiritual person, or, at least, several years to declare her spirituality openly.

What's interesting to me now is that both my mother and I rejected the religious beliefs we were raised with (or without, as the case may be). Most of my friends, religious and secular alike, agree that forcing dogma down a child's throat is unacceptable and that any child raised with an inflexible belief system is likely to abandon it in adulthood. Of course when it's phrased like that, how can you argue? Talk about "exposing" a child to religion (preferably a variety of them) is much more fashionable, but is that really so much better? Can a child learn, in the course of a church service or two, a trip to the mosque here, the temple there, enough about the deeper value systems of these beliefs to truly appreciate them? And if not, what's the point?

My mother wanted me to have a religious education but was politely silent when it came to pushing any of her own ideas on me, which I believe was her attempt at a compromise between those two extremes. And there were advantages to this. I never developed a shame-and-guilt relationship with God, didn't spend a lot of time lying awake worrying that I'd spend eternity in hell for the smallest of sins. Children are superstitious creatures by nature, ones who look to authority figures for cues, and I'm thankful that my parents didn't paint for me the picture of an angry, vengeful almighty before I was old enough to appreciate a forgiving one.

But in some ways I think my mother's silence did me no favors and I could have benefited from witnessing her evolving relationship with God. What bored me to the point of tears growing up is that I never knew why we were sitting there on those hard wooden pews. The Biblical verses we heard and the hymns we sang might have been relevant to my life had I been, say, a shepherd, but since I was in fact not a shepherd I couldn't see the connection between the questions posed by ancient dudes with beards in Babylon and my own life as a fifth-grader preoccupied mainly with the fact that I wasn't allowed to wear lip gloss or have friends over on a school night.

My initial attraction to Islam was, unquestioningly, its clear and easily articulated relationship to modern politics. I'd originally pegged my opposition to Christianity on my opposition to deism in general (well, that and the organ music thing), but as I learned more about Islam I realized I'd simply seen the notion of divinity as irrelevant to modern life. Among Muslims this connection was debated with a roaring sense of urgency, and I was excited to take part in such discussions.

And, in learning to appreciate Islam, I learned to appreciate Christianity retroactively. Talking to my mother, who was undergoing her own transformation, was a crucial part of this process; her expression of her faith, particularly in the wake of 9/11, was becoming less private and more political. A religion I'd once seen as a series of meaningless stories about guys who hung out inside whales or a twin who trades his birthright for a bowl of soup (huh?) became, in my eyes, like Islam, a value system that first and foremost rejected oppression and dehumanization, part of a Middle Eastern conversation with monotheism that has been going on for thousands of years. Fascinating stuff.

Still not cool with the organ music, though.