Playdates and Conversations about Religion

I had a playdate at my house today. I posted on meetup as well as facebook but only one other mom showed up this time. We had a nice time. She has a five year old and a 7 month old. I had met her previously at other meetups but this was the first time we’d really had time to talk one on one. We talked mostly about the usual child-related topics that come up when you have kids, but inevitably IT came up. (I can’t even remember how exactly, I think we were talking about what we were doing for Easter.) 

“How about you? Are you religious? Do you go to church?”

I was actually pretty impressed that she asked me IF I went to church instead of asking “which church do you go to?” which is usually how it’s phrased.

“No,” I said. “We’re not religious at all and we don’t go to church.” 

This turned out to be one of the more positive times this question has come up. She went on to tell me how religion is a topic she feels very confused and conflicted about and that she doesn’t feel like she knows enough about it. She was raised Catholic and was trying to decide if she wanted to put her kids in religious programs similar to what she experienced as a child or not.

“I feel like they need it for moral instruction.” She said. “I got that as a child and if I hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t be as moral.”

“No” I replied, "You don’t need religious instruction to be moral. You can definitely teach them that on your own."

This is so cliché really. It’s one of the most ubiquitous assumptions, that religion is necessary for morality, and if they just stopped to think about it for 2 seconds they’d realize it’s nonsense. In fact, immediately after I said that to her, she began to backtrack on that assumption, (probably realizing the implicit offensiveness of it.) “I didn’t mean that you can’t be moral without religion of course, you understand...”

As I said, this was actually a pretty positive exchange. I told her how I do online debates and stuff and how this is a subject I actually really like talking about. I tried to make it clear that I wasn’t going to judge her or make religion a big issue though. I specifically refrained from using the “A” word during this whole thing, referring to myself as “non-religious” instead because I thought it would be less intimidating then “atheist”. She seemed genuinely interested in my perspective and not particularly threatened by what I said.

I mainly bring this whole thing up to illustrate the point that I DO NOT go around seeking discussion of these kinds of topics (at least not in this context). Religion is ubiquitous in this area and other people invariably bring it up. And, if it’s not that, then it’s something else like anti-vaccine, alt medicine, pseudoscientific nonsense that gets brought up instead. There is no avoiding it. So, I guess I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. Not bringing controversial stuff up, but not hiding my opinions either when stuff does come up.  And if that results in me being labeled an “offensive, intolerant, argumentative, atheist/skeptic” again, then so be it.