How do you feel about your childhood experience of religion?

[nomorespaghetti]

Growing up in the 90s I went to a very white C of E primary, went to church & Sunday school, but we weren’t super religious at home. As a child I didn’t get a lot of comfort from Christianity, my main takeaway from the experience was that god knew everything I thought, and I should be ashamed of basically everything I did/thought, and I would go to hell if I wasn’t “good”.

When I was maybe 8 or 9 my mum mentioned that some people believe different things, and some people don’t believe in god at all. It was an absolute revelation - I never knew that was an option! It took me a while to accept that I didn’t believe (and a lot of guilt/shame), but basically I realised I was an atheist.

My kids are having a very different experience. Me and DH are both atheist. Kids school is not a faith school, and around 75% Muslim children. We’ve talked a lot about why different people observe different festivals, and DD7 knows more about Ramadan, Eid, Diwali than e.g. Easter. I’ve explained that daddy and me don’t believe in god and we don’t have a religion, lots of other people have different religions, and that they can decide when they are grownups if they want to join a religion or not. We celebrate Easter and Christmas as spring and winter festivals, not religious festivals.

I overheard DD saying to her friend last week that she doesn’t have a religion or believe in god (friend was a bit shocked and came to check with me that she’d heard right!) I’m really glad she doesn’t seem to have the guilt/shame hangups that I did as a child.

It made me think a lot about how Christianity being taught as fact to me at school as a child was really not good for me. I’m interested to know other people’s experiences of religion in childhood, and how they’ve influenced them as adults, or how you feel about those early experiences now?

Raised in a Calvinist/Presbyterian household. Services three times on Sunday and several times during the week. Really could have done without the constant ‘you’re a sinner and any joy is sinful’ it gives your self confidence a bit of a hit! But on the other hand I had a massive extended Christian family which I’m still close to in my thirties.

I went to a Catholic primary school. Loved all of it, Mass every Wednesday morning, taught by nuns, felt very secure and happy. I suppose it was mainly white but lots of different nationalities, Irish (mainly) Police, Italian, Spanish, Greek Orthodox as well as I suppose a Catholic school was closest they could get to their denomination, a few Caribbean kids and rarest of all English kids with English parents (only knew one family where both parents were English.)

Then went to a very multicultural grammar school, a nun from local convent came in to do RE with Catholic girls, we had our own Catholic assembly with some Catholic teachers, Rabbi came in on Fridays for the Jewish girls and an Imam came in for the Muslim girls at the same time. We had Mass in the school hall at the end of every term. It was very inclusive and tolerant and I think very ahead of it's time for the 60s.

As one poster mentioned, raised to live in fear of God and also hours/days each week spent setting up for religious events, attending church meetings and cleaning up afterwards

My mum was a staunch atheist. Dad was catholic but lapsed as he'd been abused by a priest as a child.
We didn't go to church.
I am agnostic, kids go to a secular school. DH's family (pretty sure this is 'just in case' though 🤣)
Very happy that way but happy to be friendly with religious people and listen to them, just don't want it in my house

As a child I went to a very welcoming and laid-back Methodist church and C of E schools - my parents weren’t particularly devout, but they did enjoy the cultural/community aspect of it. I feel very nostalgic for it all as a belief and community - I was confirmed around 14 and then promptly lost any religious faith (I began reading philosophy around then and that did for it rather). But it was a very positive, community-oriented experience of religion - very much the opposite of the kind of thing some posters describe above. I’m sad that we seem to have lost a lot of that default cultural Christianity, which I think was often a positive social bond. There’s something to be said for that kind of default Anglicanism/low church social religion which isn’t evangelical, but more about tradition and communitarianism.

We’ve talked a lot about why different people observe different festivals, and DD7 knows more about Ramadan, Eid, Diwali than e.g. Easter. I’ve explained that daddy and me don’t believe in god and we don’t have a religion, lots of other people have different religions, and that they can decide when they are grownups if they want to join a religion or not. We celebrate Easter and Christmas as spring and winter festivals, not religious festivals.

@nomorespaghetti I think you are doing a brilliant job. I wish more parents were like you. So many atheists just won't countenance any balanced discussion about religion. There is another thread where the atheist OP's DC has never seen a crucifix. I can't believe that the child has never walked past a church or even seen a picture of one.

Raised liberal Anglican in a vicarage and both my parents remain very involved in church though neither of them came from religious families. Went to church schools where, despite living in a very mixed area, it was 99% white as the Muslim children didn’t get in to the schools. Which meant they didn’t get to go to the best performing schools either :(.

kept up weekly Sunday attendance in similar churches (slight dabbling with evangelical folk in uni and early twenties made me realise that was not for me) through my teens and twenties (ie when it was not cool).

brought my eldest (nearly 11) to church regularly and he was baptised but realised more as I was explaining religion to him that I just didn’t believe it any more. If I ever did. My subsequent children aren’t baptised.

Easter feels very odd without the rhythm of worship I was used to and have led. And I just don’t understand what atheists mean when they say “happy easter” and “happy Christmas”.

Great thread topic!

My parents were both atheists in reaction to extremely heavy catholic upbringings (the full works) -one in Ireland and the other in uk.

But I still went to church quite a lot - whenever I was with either grandmother, which was often. School assembly was still structured around Christian beliefs then. And my sister and I even went to local Sunday school for a while - a lie in for our atheist parents?!?!

The two things that stand out are: being present in church but excluded from communion due to my parents’ choices had a much deeper impact on me than I realised. Given the times, both grandmothers also had shame about my predicament. I was the first grandchild for each of them - which they were proud of. But not part of the prescribed timeline - for which they felt shame and I picked up on that.

The second: I gained a natural and easy belief/faith from the ‘culturally Christian’ side of things at school. Also a moral framework to live from.

I think the baby got thrown out with the bath water somewhere along the line due to political correctness wrt daily/morning assemblies at school. It was an amazing way to start the day and gave me security, upliftment, and food for thought, especially in my teenage years when my ‘first start’ to the day involved getting myself up and out of an alcoholic home.

Easter feels very odd without the rhythm of worship I was used to and have led. And I just don’t understand what atheists mean when they say “happy easter” and “happy Christmas”

I think for non religious folk, these things are a comforting tradition and/or a seasonal festival. They’re cyclical celebrations that break up the year, that we have ‘always done’. Think ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’.

My parents always celebrated Easter when we were kids despite being completely atheist and very much opposed to the Catholic Church. Mind you, that might have been more to do with the 1916 Uprising! .

My CoE secondary school showed me in no uncertain terms how religion and religious institutions are designed by and for predators. They are a cancer on society, as is being shown in these unregulated academies, madrasahs, schuls etc.

I have only got angrier about it since. I would happily add every religious ‘school’ burned to the ground, and anyone involved in running them investigated for perversion.

I've never said "Happy Easter" to anyone, but if I say "Merry Christmas" it means "Have a good time with your family/friends eating food and opening presents on the 25th December". I don't think it's that hard to de-code.

Went to C of E school, brought up as a Christian, now would consider myself as a cultural Christian. Childhood experience of religion was good, as were the values we were taught.

I was brought up surrounded by the non-confirmist Christian faith, especially Methodism and the Salvation Army. It was nothing but positive, loving and enormously supportive for me.
Both religions have a strong emphasis on prayer and on helping others and community work, doing all the good you can in all the ways you can, to whoever you can for as long as you can. Many of the people who were part of my childhood experiences of faith had kindness shining out of them and I fully believe that they're now with God. I am enormously grateful that this was my experience of Christianity.
I really appreciate it wasn't that way for others who were made to follow a religion or who were subjected to awful things in the name of religion, but for me it was a wonderful grounding in the real meaning of loving others and I still try to adhere to that.

Went to Catholic schools and raised Catholic but my parents (dad really as mum doesn't drive) didn't bother with mass.
Unfortunately it wasn't until my oldest went to school that I realised how actually I don't believe in God and how uncomfortable I was with my children being taught that Christianity is fact. I would hate if my children felt they ever had to hide or feel ashamed of who they were because of an idea that they were "wrong"
I get the feeling of guilt, I still think it's not something you can really say out loud here, that you don't believe in God, even the hypocrites would judge you 🙄 those who proclaim but don't exactly practice if you know what I mean.
My oldest 2 were christened CoI (we're in NI) but my youngest isn't.
Unfortunately in NI all schools are faith schools and Christianity is part of the curriculum for primary school so there is no way to avoid it.
My children know that I don't believe in God, and as far as they are concerned too God isn't real, although some people do believe in God so we have to respect their opinions. Bible stories etc are examples of how people can be kind etc.
We celebrate Christmas and Easter as Santa and chocolate eggs.

I went to a Catholic school, made my communion and confirmation and my parents called themselves Catholics. We never went to mass other than on Christmas Day, never prayed, never really discussed religion much that I recall.

I never had any guilt or shame, just realised as I got older that none of it made any sense. I don't think I ever thought too deeply in to any of it.

Happy. My parents are Christians, as are we and bringing up our children in the church too. We are in a different denomination from my parents but I would still see my upbringing as a good experience. Lots of love from the church family, singing and music a big part of life. Obviously the thread was looking for bad experiences as they are more interesting, but we are just quietly enjoying our life of faith, with all its ups and downs.

Protestant upbringing which to be fair was less about god (bloody autocorrect keeps adding a capital g - even autocorrect has a pro religious bias) and more about hating Catholics (again!). Lots of Sunday school and children's bible story books. Singing hymns every day at school. Atheist since I was 9 or 10 when it dawned on me that it was all bollocks and just one more lie to be filed away with stories about Father Christmas and the tooth fairy. Strangely though I have religious friends who try to get me to church or even tell me I'd make a good Muslim. I've also been told that I'll grow out of it or its a phase. It turned out to be a really long phase. WTF, just because I try to be a kind person who behaves ethically. Your religion does not make you a kind or ethical person, that has to come from you! Daren't tell family that atheist DP was raised... Catholic. The shame 😀

I had a great experience of religion tbh. I went to a very white rural C of E school, but in retrospect we learnt loads about a whole range of religions. I went into secondary school with a lot more knowledge about other religions and cultures than peers who went to other schools.

My family are mildly religious, so we'd go to church fairly often but not every Sunday. I can't say whether my mum really cared what I believed or didn't believed - my mum would probably describe herself as more vaguely spiritual than strictly religious I expect.

I only really got "into" religion at uni when I did a fair bit of theological study. I would broadly call myself a Christian but I am probably more spiritual than anything else. I have lots of Muslim friends who I love to talk about spirituality with.

Went to a standard English primary school with hymns and prayers in assembly, went to a CofE Sunday School, mostly I think to give my mum a break, as soon as I said I didn't want to go I stopped.

I remember being in assembly, could only have been 7 at the oldest as I was in the infants, and wondering why all the teachers who had their eyes closed were pretending to believe in God. I think I saw God in a similar way to Father Christmas and worked out he wasn't real at quite a young age.

Yes went to a convent, went to the happy faces club at the baptist church across the road and CofE Sunday school so we could get into the oversubscribed CofE Secondary school. My parents were not religious and didn’t go to church😂

I am atheist now but it didn’t do me any harm, in a way it was good to make my own decision based on experiencing religion. I chose to send my own kids to a CofE primary but not Secondary. They are both non believers of their own choice.

I'm in NI, so religion was everywhere, even if not much at home in my case. My parents weren't particularly religious, although most of my mum's social activities were church related and we were officially Methodist. My siblings and I were sent to Sunday school and our primary school was steeped in religion. I found out when I was a teenager that my mum had been brought up Catholic in a mixed marriage household and was keeping it to herself as we lived in a predominantly Protestant area. I became very involved with a fundamentalist church at around 14 and it was my whole life for a few years. My parents weren't exactly over the moon about it, but I suppose they thought it was better than me hanging around the local park drinking cheap booze🤣 My sister thought I was ridiculous and laughed when I used certain God related expressions, saying I sounded like an indoctrinated robot. I grew up terrified of going to hell - not because of anything my parents said, but because of school, church, Sunday school, summer camps, friends, friends' families etc. So I felt as though I was taking control of my fears by attending church by choice as a teenager and immersing myself in the whole 'born again' aspect.

I stopped going to church at around 18 and gradually left it all behind and ended up an atheist. I'm 56 now, so 35 plus years of atheism! My children are not religious at all, even though there's still a fair bit of it at school. They know my views, but they also know that if they came home and announced they were born again Christians or wanted to embrace any other religion, then that's ok because it's their choice. I honestly can't see it happening but you never know.

I’m Irish. Enough said.

My voluntary work is with vulnerable people who are largely despised by quite a large sector of the community. Can I just say how absolutely wonderful the Salvation Army have been when my organisation has reached the limits of what we can do? I have the greatest respect for them.

To be fair, I have found the faith based charities to be the most helpful and non- judgmental of all the organisations that we have to reach out to when our service users leave our area or we don't have the resources to help. It's another reason that I get frustrated by knee jerk attitudes from some of my fellow atheists. There's a lot of spectacular work and generosity of spirit coming from the religious communities and organisations. Their members will drop everything to help at any time of day or night where the secular organisations (like ours) tend to (quite reasonably) work office hours and have waiting lists.

I feel very strongly about the issues it creates around sex and teaching children how bad and shameful it is (when half the people in the church are having affairs, anyhow) only just recently realised this and am trying to work through my issues. Very unhealthy and have honestly thought I was asexual until I heard of religious trauma

They are offering a salute to the passing of the seasons couched in terms familiar to everyone in a historically culturally-Christian country. Surely it’s not that difficult to grasp? I suppose people could wish one another a happy Yule or Eostre.