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THE FAMILY ISSUES INTERVIEW: JUNE 2003
This is the ninth in an occasional series of interviews with freethinking parents. Daryl L. L. Houston is the founder and editor of an outstanding website for atheist parents, called (astonishingly enough) AtheistParents.org. FI: Okay, let's start with life story. DH: Well, I was born and raised in eastern North Carolina, where I grew up playing in the woods and spending weekends at the beach fishing with my parents. (I'm interested in retrospect in the fish as a religious symbol, and I chose the fish symbol with an ironic wink as my logo when I first started the site.) FI: I thought I caught a whiff of irony there -- or maybe it was just fish. So your parents, were they particularly religious people? DH: They were of the United Methodist religious persuasion -- pretty devout -- and I grew up believing in the lord and praying for all the things a boy could want and many of the things, like world peace and an end to poverty, that a humanitarian might request. I wanted to believe and did believe, and when various tests I put god to were failed, I tried even harder to believe. FI: Such a clever system, isn't it? DH: Yes, that's sort of the nature of faith, right? If you don't feel god in your heart, it's not a sign that god doesn't exist, but a sign that you're doing something wrong, not trying hard enough. Boy did I try hard. Midway through my high school career, my family moved across the state, where I became a brooding teenager less and less convinced that there was a god. My mother had suffered an injury that prevented her for some time from getting out of the house when not absolutely necessary, and I went to church with my father for the first year or so after we moved. I had no particular interest in going, but I felt bad that he was having to go by himself. I went for his sake. After surviving those tumultuous years, I found myself at a respectable university in North Carolina. I continued to brood and performed poorly at first. I almost dropped out, in fact; I was fortunate enough to have parents who had scraped over the years to pay for my school, and I decided midway through my sophomore year that I had better start making their investment worthwhile or drop out and quit wasting their money. I settled on the former after taking a class in English Literature, which ultimately led to my earning a degree in that subject, with a minor in Creative Writing, with highest honors. It was also about midway through college that I decided at last to declare myself an atheist. (Oddly, I was interested in the work of John Milton.) I knew I didn't believe in god, but because I had grown up in the cult of Christianity, it was difficult for me to take that step and brand myself with the label. After graduating, I moved to Tennessee to be with my then-long-distance girlfriend, who is now my wife. I took a job as a copy editor at a small newspaper and have since managed to find myself working as a Web developer. FI: And somewhere along the way you founded AtheistParents.org. So what was the inspiration, and when did you start it up? DH: My wife and I have wavered over the past few years on the issue of children. At one point, during the height of our poverty (recall that I was working dreadful hours as a low-wage copy editor), we became convinced that we'd have children very soon. That was about when the site started up. I began looking for resources on the Web targeted toward atheist parents, and there didn't seem to be very many. The site really began as a vanity site that contained some of my initial thoughts about being an atheist raising kids. Among my first little essays were one about being open minded about religion (or not being open minded) and another about the church as a social marketplace and an advantage that secular children didn't have. The site began as a repository for little blurbs containing my initial thoughts about how I thought I might raise the children I then thought I'd be having pretty soon. I'm lucky enough to have free hosting through ibiblio.org, and in the beginning, I was hosting the site as a nothing more than a subdirectory under another site I had hosted there. I was actually afraid that if my heathen subdirectory was discovered, I'd be asked to remove it. I am, and ibiblio is, in the bible belt, after all. FI: Uh oh. I can't stand the suspense. Did they find it? DH: In fact, one of the administrators at ibiblio found it and invited me to make it a site proper. That's not to say, of course, that ibiblio endorses my opinions, but they're a great resource, and they happen to be in favor of an open exchange of ideas. I can't praise them enough. I registered the domain about two years ago, and that's when the site started to move in the direction of flourishing. It's on its third design, and I've had a pretty healthy community of forum contributors for the last year or so, the last few months inexplicably in particular. I add articles when I can, and I encourage tolerably well-written folk to submit articles to me, but the lifeblood of the site has really turned out to be the forums. FI: Not being a parent yet yourself, how did you come to have such a serious interest in the topic? DH: Ah, yes, the underlying hypocrisy of the site. I feel a little guilty about running a site about atheist parenting when I'm not a parent myself. I'm an Amish person teaching the world about computers, a blind person unfurling my opinions on the visual arts. As I mentioned above, the site began as a compendium of resources and thoughts in preparation for my becoming a parent. While I plan on becoming a parent in the next few years, it just hasn't happened yet. I was a little trigger happy when I started the site. I do know atheists who struggle with the demands of the job. These are usually first-generation atheists who have family baggage to worry about. When I do sire my litter of heathens, I'll struggle with some of the demands. My struggles won't be within the nuclear family -- I'm lucky on that front, at least, as my wife and I see eye to eye on religion (and on most things). Rather, I'll struggle with the grandparents, who will want to teach the Christmas story as truth and who will want to take my infidel brood to church when they visit. I'm sure I'll have to deal with discrimination against my children on religious grounds, and I'll have to teach my children to adhere to a higher standard of morality than the children who will deride them. Bearing the label atheist unfortunately means bearing the inaccurate stereotype of atheists as immoral baby eaters. FI: Yum yum. So you do see yourself being a parent someday, then. DH: Definitely. Somebody's got to help keep the rationalist population from thinning out too much, right? I say that only half jokingly. FI: What are the most significant issues you've heard raised by atheist parents since starting the site? What advice and/or discussion has been generated around each of those issues? DH: Probably the most troubling issue I've run across is mixed marriages. That is, when one parent is a devout Christian and the other is an atheist, there's an almost epic conflict of interest. The religious parent feels a personal responsibility to raise the children in god's divine light, while the atheist parent minimally wishes to raise freethinking children and, more toward the extreme end of the continuum, wishes to instill in children an antipathy for all things irrational and unevidenced. This ties in also to my concern about the grandparents of my children, of course. Advice is mixed. Some people on that extreme end of things suggest that all religious contact should be of a debunking nature. Others think that religion is a useful tool with a valid mythology for conveying lessons about morality. I think my approach will be to teach religion as mythology and to teach my own flavor of humanism and rationalism as a worldview. Another issue I'm very conflicted about (and I don't think I'm alone) is that of Santa Claus and the other innocent myths that it's so easy to condone while shunning the god myth. I grew up with Santa Claus, and as with all positive experiences we grow up with, it's hard for me to put that story aside and not adhere to the Santa tradition. But one of the reasons I'm going to discourage my children from entertaining religious beliefs is that I believe they're false. How, then, can I justify lying to them about Santa Claus? This is the sort of issue that really prompted me to start up AtheistParents.org. I'm confident in my ability to teach my children a godless morality. It's the twisting of convention -- the being different from the mainstream -- that's hard for atheist parents, and that's really the sort of problem I want my site to help people discover the answers to. FI: You mentioned the grandparents of your eventual children. Any religious issues there right now --- I mean, between you and your parents or in-laws? DH: I'm probably as concerned with being an atheist child as with being an atheist parent. While a lot of people are vaguely religious, my parents really believe the stuff. I mentioned that we moved across the state while I was in high school. I did not relish this move and responded very poorly to it. And they knew I would. When they explained the difficult decision to me, they did so in biblical terms. They had laid out a fleece, they said. They were referring to the passage in Judges in which Gideon puts out a fleece to see if god intended him to save Israel. If the fleece had dew on it in the morning and the ground was dry, Gideon would take it as a sign that god did so intend. I forget what my parents' fleece was, but they thought they had a pretty sure sign from god that we were intended to move across the state. Only now does it occur to me how amusing and appropriate this particular analogy was: My father worked in textiles for many years and was in fact moving to a new job in the industry. The point I'm coming around to is that with parents as earnestly religious as mine are, it's hard to own up to being an atheist. I've never officially done so, in fact. When I was in college, my mother stumbled across a series of letters I had put on the Web in which a friend and I were debating the existence of god. I wasn't quite won over to the dark side yet, but I was pretty far gone. I think my mom knows I'm an atheist. I'm not sure my dad knows. He may know that I'm not on a particularly spiritual path right now, but I suspect he thinks it's a longish phase and that I'll come around eventually. My dilemma, of course, is how to be an open atheist without hurting their feelings. As much as I disliked the prospect of moving across the state as a junior in high school, they dislike a thousandfold more the prospect of my roasting in their hell. This brings up another issue: What if I, as a staunch and open atheist, have children who wish to be religious? I think I'll have an easier row to hoe than my parents if this is the case. For my children at worst will subscribe to a belief system that has in its history a murderous deity, bucketsful of philosophical and historical inaccuracies, and a legacy of heinous crimes committed in that murderous god's name. At best, they will have found a fairly benign New Testament faith that makes them feel significant and encourages them to treat others kindly. I think that if my children lean toward religion, I'll try to demonstrate that it's an unnecessary inclination, but I'll understand if they wish to lean on that crutch. We all have crutches to lean on. Another interesting issue: I claim the dubious title of godfather. My mousepad has a picture of my nephew/godson on it and says "'da boy loves 'da godfaddah." Maybe I shouldn't delight in the ethnic stereotype. My nephew means a lot to me (as does his younger sister). My sister married a marginally Catholic man. When they were about to have their first child, he, like many, decided to take a more visible interest in the church. She converted to Catholicism after their rather liberal priest told her she could interpret things like transubstantiation metaphorically. FI: Ah yes. God bless the American nudge-nudge-wink-wink version of Catholicism. But I digress. You were talking about godparenting. DH: Well, to Catholics, the installation of godparents has a significant history. Theoretically, were both my nephew's parents to die, I'd be bound to raise him. And I would gladly do so. (My ex-brother-in-law's sister, who is my nephew's godmother, and my wife would perhaps object to our marrying to form a new parental structure for my nephew!) FI: How traditional of them. DH: The catch, of course, is that by agreeing to be a godfather, one supposedly agrees to raise the child within the clutches of the Catholic church. At my nephew's christening, I mouthed these vows rather than vocalizing them. I'm not sure what that's worth. To my credit, I emphasized to my sister when she asked me to be godfather that I was an atheist and that I could not in good conscience raise her son in the church if so called upon. Whether this is a reflection on me or on my sister and ex-brother-in-law or on the archaic institutions of the Catholic church I'm not sure. FI: Anything further to say about AtheistParents.org? DH: My primary disappointment with the site is that it's not as parent-centric as I'd like. At times, it's a rant site, and while I'm proud not to have a section dedicated to hate mail, as many atheist sites do, I sometimes wish I had more time to focus on and more contributors interested in atheist parenting rather than anti-Christianity or atheism at large. I suspect that once I actually have children, I'll be in a better position to provide anecdotes and impressions about atheist parenting. |
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