..to not have a christening?

[BabyCub]

(My first thread, so please be gentle with me!)

I am pregnant with DC number one (due in August) and during banter with friends a few have said ?Oooh, I hope I get to be godparent?. Their response to ?we?re not going to have DC christened? was ?but you must!?

Must I? I don?t believe in God. I don?t go to church. I am uncomfortable with organised religion. DH shares my views, and we didn?t get married in a church for those very reasons. I personally feel hypocritical taking vows in front of, or making promises to a God I don?t believe in.

DH & I are very much in agreement that we won?t be having a christening. We are looking into other options ? a secular / humanist naming ceremony, or a welcoming party of some sort. With ?mentors? rather than godparents. Something informal & relaxed, in our garden perhaps. We want our family & friends to be able to celebrate the arrival of our DC, and to feel involved, but without the religious stamp.

If DC feels the need to explore religion when they are older (and able to make their own, informed decision about it) then I have no problem with that. In fact, it is exactly what I did ? I wasn?t christened as a baby. My best friend whilst I was growing up went to church every Sunday with her parents, quite often I went with her. I explored Christianity for a fair few years, I was christened and confirmed. I eventually realised it wasn?t for me.

AIBU? Or did my friends & family react that way because it is ingrained in our society that christening your child is the ?done thing? (even if you are not a churchgoer).

[hogsback]

Scholes34 - could be. I live in a very rural area and by the look of it, the average age of the congregation at the church in the nearest village is about 93.

I don't know anyone locally under 50-60 who is religious, it just seems to have died out (or of course people may become religious as they get closer to the end of their lives.)

The craziest thing is (and I've moaned about this on MN before) the junior school in the village has church attendance on the entrance criteria, although luckily it is not oversubscribed so it's not really an issue.

I imagine it is different in big towns and cities with larger immigrant populations who tend to come from more religious countries.

[Ballyxxx]

Dp and I didnt get our DS's christened. We arent married but when we do it willl be a civil ceremony. Sil couldnt believe we wouldnt get them done and kept asking us why so I said 'Well why did you get your children christened?' and she said 'well...um...i dont know...just because its the done thing!'

[CheerfulYank]

Really hogsback ? Reading Mumsnet would never give me the idea that you're an incredibly religious country.

[GrimmaTheNome]

Its more that the state is anachronistically religious but most people aren't.
The US is the opposite.

[somewherewest]

As a Christian I don't think you're being unreasonable at all. If you aren't Christian and don't intend to bring your DCs up as Christians then it makes no sense to christen them. To be honest I have a lot more respect for your position then for people who go ahead with Christenings even though they don't believe in anything

[somewherewest]

PS Hogsback,rural areas aren't necessarily representative. Here in Oxford I can think of one city centre Anglican church with an average attendance of one thousand spread across three services a Sunday, almost all students and twenty/thirty somethings (I'm 31 and the congregation at their main Sunday evening service makes me feel ancient!). There are several other churches in the city orientated towards young people / young families with attendances well into the hundreds. Oxford is a little more churchy than average (ditto Cambridge - the Oxbridge student body has more than its fair share of Christians for some reason), but I can think of lots of equally big under-forty congregations in plenty of other cities. The three-old-ladies-in-a-musty-church school of rural Anglicanism isn't terribly representative of anything.

[CheerfulYank]

That's interesting...both to Grimma and Somewherewest .

[Seona1973]

dh's family seems to do christenings for the sake of it as none of them go to church - him and his siblings are christened and his sister has had her 5 kids christened. I wasnt christened and neither of our children are either.

[artymoo]

Hope that you have made your mind up not too have one after all the comments! We felt exactly the same and ended up having a flower service, not religious!, where everybody brought a flower. Most flowers have a meaning or message and we pressed ours for our son to have in the future, along with peoples messages that came with them.

[CheerfulYank]

Oh, that sounds beautiful artymoo . :)

[hogsback]

somewhere that why I said sometimes it feels like I live in a parallel universe :) I wonder why it is though? Generally you would think the countryside to be more conservative and therefore more churchy.