how does a churchgoing agnostic talk about religion with his kid?

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This summer, I’ve taken advantage of my 9-month contract with the University of Kentucky to have lots of adventures with kiddo while my spouse (who has a 12-month contract) continues at her job. It’s been a real delight! A couple of Fridays ago, we drove to Danville, a town in Central Kentucky where I spent a summer as a high schooler but haven’t been back to since. We bought her a book, me some amazing chocolate mint tea, and had a great time exploring fun shops and public art in adorable downtown Danville. More recently, we spent a Friday driving over to Louisville to visit the Kentucky Science Center. We hadn’t been there since kiddo had been way too young to appreciate it, but thanks to a local summer reading program, we scored a free ticket, so we made our way back there to try the museum again and then meet up with a local colleague for some delicious ice cream.

This morning, I suddenly remembered a moment during our Louisville trip that I wanted to hold onto—and am therefore blogging about. There was a neat activity on the top floor of the museum that encouraged visitors to think about things as existing on spectrums (spectra?) rather than as being binary phenomena. To emphasize the point, there was a touchscreen where visitors could represent their own experience by dragging a marker to any point on a spectrum between “male” and “female,” “liberal” and “conservative,” “urban” and “rural,” etc. Kiddo paused a bit when she got to the spectrum between “atheist” and “deeply religious,” which is to be expected: Her mom’s an atheist, and her dad goes to church (well, via Zoom) most weeks and tends to bring her with. After a beat, she slid the marker more toward the atheist side. Then, perhaps afraid that I would disapprove, she turned to me and said “don’t worry, Daddy, I still enjoy going to Zoom church with you.”

I didn’t feel any disapproval, of course. In fact, my only objection is the way that this particular spectrum was set up, since I’d prefer to see theism and religion on two different dimensions. I’d wager that I’m “more religious” (i.e., I read the Bible more often and attend church more often) than a lot of “America is a Christian nation” types, but I’m also far, far less theist than they are. As the title of this post suggests, I think of myself a churchgoing agnostic, and that’s a category that isn’t readily captured in the spectrum as it was presented in the museum exhibit. Besides that, my spouse and I are equally committed to making sure that kiddo gets a chance to chart her own religious path as she grows up. I do want to share some of my religious tradition with my kid so that she can choose it if she wants to, but I’m also not going to be upset if she follows after her mom’s path—in fact, I changed my religious tradition to one that I felt would better support those family priorities while still holding onto what I loved most about the religion I grew up in.

In fact, for months now, I’ve been meaning to write something about a different experience that I had with kiddo and religion. Pretty soon after Easter, kiddo finished a worksheet quickly at school and did what she normally does and started drawing something on the back of it. With Easter services fresh in her mind, what she chose to draw this time around was a Christian cross with the caption “Christ is risen.” Now, I love Easter (even if I’m not sure I believe in a literal resurrection), so I was happy to see kiddo connect with it, but my first reaction was actually that I wasn’t sure how I felt about my kid being the one who draws Christian iconography on her worksheets at a public school.

All of this is to lead up to a single point: That I have no idea how to introduce my kid to my churchgoing-but-agnostic approach to religion. Religion is important enough for me to be really committed to my current church, but I’m also wary of religion as it is often practiced. If I only held one of those commitments, I feel like it would be easy to talk to kiddo about religion. Because I hold both, I don’t know how to balance them. I know there are good resources (even within my own denomination) for striking this balance, but it takes more work than the approach spouse and I would have taken if we had continued in a Latter-day Saint path. I think that work is worth it, but it’s been enough of an obstacle that I haven’t really done much with it recently.

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