January meme: Jan 6

seekingferret asked what we were doing/planning for E's religious education. (Warning: I expect this will be a somewhat unsatisfying answer, not least because I feel like every step brings up more questions, and I can't write forever.)

This is really (at least) a two-part question. The first part is the question: what are we doing with her religious education given my tortured relationship with faith? The second is the question: what are we doing given that I am LDS and D is Lutheran?

To partially answer the second question: E goes to two churches on Sundays. She goes to D's church with both of us at 8am for a one-hour service. Then she sometimes directly goes with me to my church (for 3 hours, often 4 when there is choir practice) and sometimes goes to Sunday School at D's church (where she is the only member of her class) and then goes to my church (where she is one of about seven children in nursery, and one of four in her year starting "Primary" (kid Sunday School) this year). (This year, my ward is starting at 1pm, and then she will go to both every week.) The vast majority of our social circle is LDS with a couple of Lutheran couples sprinkled in. All of her church agemates, as you may have been able to figure out from the above, are LDS. (There are several reasons for this. Demographics of the Lutheran church we attend are, um, heavily skewed towards older folks. Demographics of LDS always include loooots of kids. But also, I'm the one who does much of the social planning, and I'm quite frankly more comfortable with LDS folks than with Lutheran folks, simply because I grew up with them and understand them, and I understand much better how to navigate socially in the LDS world than in the Lutheran world.)

We'll keep doing this as long as we can. My expectation is that conflicts will be resolved on the LDS side, since a) I tend to be the one who is more committed to regular attendance/participation, and b) all her friends are there. But if she decides she will be committed to being a faithful Lutheran, I will honor that. (The big thing that I foresee at this point that could turn her towards Lutheranism is that she thinks her dad hung the moon. Also that theologically I have many fewer problems with Lutheranism than D has with Mormonism. And that he has fewer theological problems with Lutheranism than I do with Mormonism, for that matter.)

The first question: At this point, I tend not to talk that much explicitly about God, Jesus, and so on, except as it naturally comes up (which it does because of the 5 hrs of church/week, things church friends say, the fact that her nanny is LDS, etc.), and then of course I punted hard with the introducing her to death (though that of course was a relatively small part of her life). This is also how I was raised, for different though related reasons. We do have nightly prayer but not nightly scripture reading (which I did when she was very small, stopped for no good reason, and need to get back to).

I have made the conscious choice not to introduce any concept as "because God said we need to do it this way," because I really don't like it. (I consider as distinct the concept of "God has asked us to do this because this helps us become closer to God," which I think is perfectly fine.) I talk to her about caring about other people, and how we do acts of service because we care about other people, and how it is good to be nice to and care about other people even if we don't know them personally, and when she gets a little older we'll connect that to helping us become closer to God, but not explicitly because God says to do so.

Random recent occurrence to illustrate the heretical beliefs she's growing up with: I very much do not believe that God is angry with us when we sin, and informed both E and D of this fact in perhaps a very emphatic tone of voice when her (Lutheran) Sunday School class did David and Bathsheba (which, by the way, was hilarious, the way they tried to explain it on a kid level). (This is straight from some parenting book or other. Frustrated that the kid isn't doing what's best, sad, fearful for the kid's safety, even annoyed -- this I buy. That it may even appear to us as anger, okay. But anger is a secondary emotion arising from these, and I say that if I as an extremely imperfect parent am trying to disentangle all this, God should be past that.)

(...did I answer the intended question at all?)