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Notes -
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
What does your wife think about Christianity and about your disagreement with her family? You have not mentioned it, but to me it seems that it might be important when it comes to figuring out the best approach going forward.
Maybe their idea of the unspoken agreement was different from yours, that is if they even thought of there being an unspoken agreement to begin with. For me, going to church for holidays and letting people splash water on my children would already have probably been too much. I really dislike most rituals. Put that dislike together with my agnosticism and it's just like, no way man. It would be very hard to force myself to go to church and I think that religious people splashing water on my children would make me feel uneasy. To be fair, I have no children so perhaps I am missing part of the picture.
It seems that you have to some extent been living a lie with these people. Well, we all live a lie to some extent, so that is not unusual. I wish you success in dealing with these relationships.
My wife and I are on the same page. We've had essentially no conflict around religion, after discussing it deeply before getting married. We're comfortable communicating about it.
I sincerely appreciate the sentiment. The good news is, I don't have a significant amount of conflict with my in-laws and this was a minor blip in a largely successful decade. As my wife put it, the host of the gathering (another catholic in-law) would probably have been mortified at this breach of etiquette.
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