Jenell Paris shares her thoughts on what she is doing and not doing with her kids regarding religion. Great stuff here.
I'm heartened to see much of my fundamentalism left behind as if in a cake pan; I'll serve the best of my religion to my kids in large slices and leave behind the crumbs. Most of it isn't intentional, but when I engage the fundamentalism of my youth (on a summer visit back home), I see what I was taught as a child, but I'm not teaching to my children:
- that they're going to hell
- that God kind of loves them and kind of hates them
- that sex should be discussed with words like "filthy" "slutty" and "dirty"
- that rightful authority should be ascribed to James Dobson, Jim Bakker, Ken Ham, Bill Gothard, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell
- that conservative talk radio and cable news corresponds with conservative Christianity
- that whatever they're doing isn't good enough
- that their culture deserves their fear, judgment, and avoidance
- that the the world is 6000 years old and that God planted dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith
- that Jesus is going to return any minute and won't they feel ashamed because their beds aren't made
- that, as boys, authority over women is their birthright
- that if they question outrageous, violent, ethnocentric, historically questionable, or contradictory things in the Bible, their faith is weak
- that a single moral point may be derived from absolutely anything in the Bible
If you have advice about 4-year-olds accepting Jesus into their hearts, I'll take it. That's a live issue for me, but wow, how much more of my theology has died as I become more and more alive. That's wonderful to have in my heart.
via The Paris Project.
Numerous studies have shown that the greatest impact on a child's faith is not church, but parents. When what I call the seat of subjectivity moves from parents to peer group (in adolescence), the influence on religious belief changes there as well. But the influence of the parent never really leaves, even if the child does not appear to be affected by the parent at all. Aggressive nurture yields positive results more than any church will do.
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