Conflicting opinions on children and church

[MrsGiraffe12]

Hi all
Basically I'm a Christian and have found a church Iove. My nearly 6 year old has been coming along with me and loves it and really enjoys the Sunday school and had a "favourite" hymn. It really makes me happy he enjoys coming.

However, DH isn't a
Christian and doesn't have any faith whatsoever. He has recently started saying to DS "do you want to go with mummy or stay with daddy? I bet it's boring" by which point DS says he'd rather stay with DH. This saddens me as DS had a lovely time when he's there. And I argue with DH that he can't be that against religion or we wouldn't be sending DS to a C of E school.

Should I enforce DS to come with me on Sundays, even if he says he would rather stay with daddy? He only ever suggests staying at home if DH asks him, so isn't something he thinks about if that makes sense. As I've said before he enjoys it when he's there.

Thanks for reading this rambling post x

Something that I read on another thread here, a long time ago comes to mind here. It was that children need to be raised to understand that sometimes it's not about what you (they) want but sometimes we do things just because it makes someone else happy.

You'd like him to go to church so IMO he should go sometimes. For the same reason DH should encourage him to go sometimes. I don't think it's necessary for him to go every week for him to learn whether or not he wants to be a Christian.

Let him be the atheist he was born as. Keep the slate clean - he can decide when he is older if he wants to believe or not rather than indoctrinate him when he is young.

In my experience there are few "born atheists" children have a natural appreciation of the beauty and wonder of life - they don't automatically think "and there's no point to any if it, we are random molecules grouped together randomly for a while and then it's over".

You don't need to believe in god to have a sense of wonder at life.
Children are not born knowing that some people believe in god, it is something that they learn.
Children are born atheist. Atheism is the absence of belief in god, there is no atheist doctrine or agenda.

mrsgiraffe can you talk to your dh about this?

I take my dc to church on a Sunday morning, they do age appropriate fun activities and I go to the service. dh who isn't a fan of organised religion uses this time to sleep, get jobs done etc.

superbagpuss I have tried to but he says as he's not a believer he doesn't think his children should go. Which, theoretically means as a believer my children should go.

It's a tough one. I think because I've only been going regularly to church for about a year (new town) he's found it hard to adapt xx

I think the issue is that you weren't a practicing Christian (I'm just assuming this because you don't mention having discussed it previous to having your son) so you've made a big change in your life - which is brilliant for you but you are now wanting to change how you're bringing up your son which involves both of you.

He's only 6 - take turn about. He doesn't have to go every week. If your husband thinks it boring & doesn't believe in God then he can't lie about that. I go to Mass the odd week, my husband doesn't (he doesn't believe in God any more), sometimes the kids go, sometimes they don't, sometimes I don't.

You do need to have a proper talk with DH about this. You have to sort out if DH is opposed because he is atheist (I would be) or because he thinks you actually are pushing DS to do something boring for him.

I know you feel DS is enjoying it and he might be, but then it all looks lovely to you right now so you need to ask yourself if a third party would think so.

You might want to consider what else DS would be doing if he didn't go. Is this cutting into time with DH, into time watching TV or what?.

If his objection is strictly about the religion then it gets tricky. Ask yourself if you would be perfectly happy if DH was converted to Islam and wanted to take DS to the Mosque instead. Can you honestly say you would be perfectly ok with that?

The bit that concerns me is the I bet it's boring.

Religion aside, it's belittling and almost hints DS 'should' be bored by those things (e.g. like "boys don't..."). The focus is on 'stay with mummy or daddy' NOT religion - you say so yourself in the post.

Does DH feel left out at weekends? Does he want more father/son time?
Does he (like many who were perhaps dragged to church as kids) assume mass is just boring and an early morning - forgetting that it is important to you on a deeper level? Perhaps to him it's like a weekly lecture, put on your uncomfy shirt/tie etc' like in The Simpsons.
You need to talk it through - it's not good enough to put it purely down to religion.
More like a bit of a lack of empathy and wanting the child to be with him/like things he likes.... for example if a dad took a girl to the football and a female relative mentioned it to her as 'cold' or 'loud' (i.e. things little girls don't like) why not stay in the warm with mummy?

If it was to do with your husband concerning himself with free choice /belief, I'm not sure it would be approached like that (FWIW, I am Christian and my DH is fiercely athiest... he gets very angry about 'silly Christians' memes claiming to be pre-Dawkins on tinterweb as he feels them illogical and smug... exactly what he, as a rationalist, dislikes about some Christians and most religious institutions).

Let him be the atheist he was born as. Keep the slate clean - he can decide when he is older if he wants to believe or not rather than indoctrinate him when he is young.

Oh, don't be so silly, deepinthewoods! If you took that point of view over everything then you wouldn't introduce your dc to any sport, hobbies, reading, writing because they can't do any of those things when they're newborns! 'Oh, I'm not going to take little Johnny to football as that will indoctrinate him and what if he wants to play rugby when he's older'? Bonkers.

As parents, we take our dc to things that interest us - whether this is church, football matches, bird watching, pond dipping, motor racing, castles or anything else.

OP believes in God and wants to take her dc to church and that's absolutely fine.

OP - have a chat with your dh about how you feel and ask him not to undermine you or your beliefs in front of your dc. Church is an hour a week! He can have plenty of dh and dc time the rest of the weekend.

Could you compromise on church every other week, and doing something with dad every other week?

I'm an atheist who was married to a vague believer in some kind of higher power who still had a vague attachment to the rituals of the CofE he was brought up with, so he occasionally went to Sunday services. If he had wanted to take the DCs now and then I would not have objected, though in fact he never did.

However, I was brought up as a churchgoer myself, but was consciously atheist from the age of 7 or 8, and seriously resented being dragged along to church for a couple of years after that, so I would suggest you make sure you are sensitive to your DS's views and don't try to push him into anything.

squizita is spot on I think - it's the undermining of you and manipulating of your son by your DH that is the problem here. I think you need to find a middle ground and stick to it, so if it's just term time, or every other week or whatever, if there's a party in Sunday school or whatever in a week that isn't his week you don't try and talk him into an extra week and your DH also doesn't try to talk your son out of going on his weeks.

I have friends at church in a similar situation whose husbands don't believe (I just don't happen to know anyone whose wife is the nonbeliever - I am sure it happens, this isn't a gender issue) and some just enjoy the time, some make life very difficult on a Sunday morning and suggest Mum is stopping them from having lovely days out together - if you feel at that end of the spectrum you maybe have a deeper issue in your relationship?

cocktail Your sporting analogy doesn't work because the issue the nonbeliever has with church is the lack of evidence for the belief. The sports you mention we can all see and experience, but there's no proof for any god so it's a false analogy.

The sports you mention we can all see and experience, but there's no proof for any god so it's a false analogy.

But an obsessed fan can appear pretty irrational and faith based unwavering faith in Reading FC is one of my DH's few utterly illogical traits. From the POV of one person is passionate about something beyond logic, the other is completely not, it works (although not on the same scale).

I stick by my assertion that this isn't so much to do with serious differences in belief systems as 'daddy time' and him not realising/caring that this is a 'big thing' to the OP emotionally, not just a weekly trip out.

Ah and playing devil's advocate... what if (and this has happened in RL with friends of mine who self-identify as rational atheists) a male child was made to play rugby because football was common and overly commercial? And their DD was forbidden from Rugby, which she wanted to do at school, as it's too competitive and rough?

This did raise a wry smile on my part, they hate indoctrination of dominant ideologies. Except class and gender.

Nothing to do with this debate except to say that many people see indoctrination in ideologies they live outside of, but are totally oblivious to their own. ...and for some reason sport can bring these to the fore.

Football is hardly an ideology.

We are talking about faith here. Sport is hardly a comparison.

Deep ah, but firstly the OP's DH doesn't seem to realise the depth of faith hence in his world...

And a dominant ideology doesn't have to be a known faith. A huge number of them, we don't realise we have.
Although football or sport aren't religions, they can be windows to the world on a person's extremely deeply held ideologies to do with gender, physical attributes, class, national identity, social tribe identity and other things which have been indoctrinated. It can be highly significant in self-definition.
It can also be very short sighted of people who do not have a faith to assume they are logical have no indoctrination of their own to deal with, and something my DH (as an atheist), as I have said before, finds irritating and amusing in equal measure. I just used sport as an example of that.

Don't buy it i'm afraid.

But nobody says 'play football and my god called will do xyz for you' or 'if you play golf my god will let you into heaven' . Church goers aren't just going to church to see their friends. They maintain that a supernatural being likes them going to church and is watching them and communicating with them. That's the nub of the issue.

Head (1) in communities where everyone's the same religion you very much do get people who attend church because everyone else does (tribe membership - mostly social, it's what everyone does). Far more in parts of America than here (hence the ongoing jokes in the Simpsons where everyone is sleeping etc').

(2) The dominant ideology thing isn't something I've just made up. It's pretty much a given that we all have indoctrinated ideas of what it means to be 'normal', however much we wish otherwise. And a lot of this is tied up with cultural markers (religion being one of them, but food, customs, gender/relationships, morality etc' also being greater and lesser parts) which can include sport.

But all this is completely aside from the crux of the matter. DH isn't having a philosophical or sociological debate about choices to be made or creationism and education... he JUST wants his son to stay with 'Daddy' for fun lads' time not do 'boring' sterotypically sensible things with mummy. He wasn't asking DS if he believed in baby Jesus: his attitude to religion is ambivalent not anti. It was about him wanting more weekend time with his son and unlike many posters here, he FORGOT that to many religion is a big deal... to him, it's just a boring old thing like going to the supermarket. So the opposite of a serious choice for the child: DH assumed it wasn't a big deal to anyone, that's how he offended the OP!

Yes but the OP has "moved the goalposts" with regard to the familys parenting. It's not a faith issue, it's a parenting issue. The family including the OP weren't regular church goers, unless I've completely missed something. The OP finds a church/ congregation she feels very happy with - brilliant, but that's not the way they had been bringing their child up previously.

Church is boring sometimes, I'd rather be doing something else some days, so I skip it. My husband doesn't believe in God anymore, I do, the kids don't overthink it. If we want to go to chapel, we go, if we fancy going away early on a Sunday for the day we do that instead.

as an aside all schools in the UK are faith schools so your husband has no choice in that. All schools have to include an act of worship.

your child is six and wants to please both his parents, which means you need to pull together. He likes being with you and to see you having fun. Doesn't mean he has any understanding or belief.

You need to sort this out between you when he isn't around.

my feeling is that children have no place at any religious activity. They should know about 'what people believe' but should not go until they are old enough to decide for themselves. And parents should respect their decisions rather than being hurt by them.

Wow this has turned into an interesting post since I last posted!!

wigglesrock I have actually been a christian since around the age of 13, I'm 27 now. It just so happened before we moved to out new town and my new job I had to work weekends so never had the opertunity to attend church before now. Until I started to attend church DH and I just agree to disagree so to speak on each other differing beliefs and has never been an issue

backonlybriefly I know DS has been enjoying it as he has told me so. He has also said he likes going but will stay at home to make daddy happy - maybe feels caught in the middle ie) going makes him and mummy but upsets daddy?? And as for the point of DH "suddenly converting to Islam" - I've been christian since I was a teenager and DH has never had an issue with it, it's just since I've been able to attend he's had issues. But of course, if he found religion, no matter what one, I'd of course be happy for him to attend his worship, and take DS along IF DS wanted to go. And in reference to the attending church impinging on family time - he takes DS to football all day every saturday whilst I work and then sleeps till around 11am on Sunday so only really misses an hour of family time by the time the service finished

squitza I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's the undermining of my beliefs that I'm most uncomfortable about - he doesn't need to persuade DS that church is boring, he's an intelligent child and has no issues telling us other things are boring, why would this be any different?

exexpat we've actually tried the compromise as in I take DS every other week, but on "my" week DH plans something he knows DS will enjoy so he doesn't go. Then on his weeks it seems to be just lunch in pubs etc :-(

I think I've covered all the main points :-)

I don't see how your DH can undermine your beliefs op? They either stand or they don't.

headinhands I meant undermine my beliefs in front of DS obviously!