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I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
And this here is yet another example of strife caused by the crude mockery that Westerners have made of marriage by treating it as a contract between two individuals instead of as a bond between two families. What your future in-laws will be like makes up a big part of what your married life will be like unless you jettison those links, but even doing that has a cost on you and your spouse. Hence you need to select on this axis too when deciding on your long term life partner and your failure to do that here has meant unnecessary pain.
Now you might well say that you and your wife got married knowing about this fundamental difference and you accepted this as a negative but still believed the combined package of everything meant marriage was still worth it for you two, in which case fair enough but equally then you can hardly claim to be surprised when your in laws behave in ways concordant with the beliefs you knew they held. If you didn't take this into account and just thought that what extended family are like should have zero bearing on whether you and your wife should get married then you just got burned by having false beliefs about human relationships, no different to a dullard who entered a lion's den at the zoo getting ripped to shreds because he thought they were vegetarian.
And before you say that I have no idea about your relationship dynamic with your wife and thus am unqualified to comment about it know that I am not talking to you at all here. You are irrelevant, it is too late for you, you have already married into this household and now have to live with the consequences. My advice can do nothing for you. I am talking to the other readers here who are yet to make the plunge, they can easily save themselves from a lot of future anguish by just making sure the beliefs of their fiance's family are not too wildly divergent from their own instead of following the modern Western mantra of "you're marrying them, not their family".
For whatever it's worth, I completely understand and agree with your last paragraph.
It may not seem like it, but I agree with this as well. I knew what I was getting into, and I think it would take a "dullard" to pretend otherwise.
I do find the tactic of approaching my father instead of me distasteful. I can handle myself, but putting my parents in the uncomfortable position of speaking for me is inexcusable in my book.
Even from a Christian perspective, it's pretty damn questionable whether they can speak for you in principle. I'm not an expert on Catholic teaching, but I don't think they let you convert people against their will.
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