February 10, 2008
Sunday

Kathleen Deveny is an assistant managing editor at Newsweek magazine. She writes frequently under the banner of “Modern Family.” Her most recent column, “Talking to Kids About God,” begins by discussing her difficulties answering questions put by her seven-year-old daughter concerning the death of actor Heath Ledger. The child had asked if someone “ripped” his soul out. Deveny answered that the process of the soul  leaving the body is more peaceful than that, “like a burp.”

Deveny confesses that she made the answer up and doesn’t really know much about that or other matters of theology and spirituality. She calls herself a “practicing Catholic” whose practice seems haphazard at best. She can name only eight of the ten commandments and takes her daughter to church most Sundays “in the winter, at least,” a ritual she engages in because she finds it comforting to recall her childhood in this way. She also calls herself a “cafeteria Catholic” who does not accept all the tenets of that tradition. “I am never going to teach my daughter that evolution is a fraud, and someday I will encourage her to think critically, not doctrinally, about issues like artificial birth control, stem cell research and abortion.”

If Deveny is a cafeteria Catholic, it appears she’s been spending too much time at the appetizer bar. What makes her think the church teaches that evolution is a fraud? According to George Coyne, a Jesuit priest, astronomer, and director of the Vatican observatory, evolution, not intelligent design, is the fundamental church teaching. It is also the teaching I derived from my years as a Catholic, a teaching I carried into my adulthood along with the critical thinking skills I learned at school  and at home. And I have a suspicion that “thinking critically” for Deveny means that she hopes her daughter will adopt a stance less conservative than the traditional Catholic position on the issues she enumerates, a stance that probably reflects Deveny’s own position. (And why will this encouragement to critical thinking come “someday,” rather than right now? How is she encouraging the child to think now?)

Regular readers of this space probably know at least some of the history of my spirituality — that I was raised and schooled in Catholicism, a background I would not trade away for anything but which I have labeled “an easy piety and a facile theology.” My agnostic period lasted some fifteen years until, at age thirty-three, I began seeking spiritual renewal.

Ron is a practicing Catholic, a lot more firm in that tradition than is Deveny. Not only can he recite all ten commandments, he can name the twelve apostles in under two seconds, and he can still recite, in Latin, the responses an altar boy gives to the priest’s invocations. He is also a man of science who thinks for himself, so if he’s a “cafeteria Catholic” he’s pretty clear about what’s on his plate. I’m a “cafeteria Christian,” I guess, Catholic by personal history but practicing since 1993 with a Lutheran congregation, and we have raised Lynn in that tradition. We have encouraged her from birth to think critically. She supported George H.W. Bush against Bill Clinton because “his wife is very nice  — she teaches kids how to read” (Lynn was seven years old at the time) and in her first presidential vote in 2004 cast her lot with George Bush the younger, for reasons that are still unclear to me.

Lynn is finishing an undergraduate degree in biology. At dinner recently she said that she didn’t think she could be a Christian anymore because as a scientist she has to believe in evolution. What? She knew I’d attended most days of the Dover panda trial and knew what side I was on (the side of truth and science, the side that won). “Certainly no one at Tree of Life or Camp Nawakwa told you you had to embrace creationism,” I said. She’d been through Sunday school and confirmation classes, gone to the regional weekend winter youth gathering every January, to the international Lutheran youth gathering in 2002, and spent nine or ten summers at church camp, after which she’d festoon her room with the faith-affirming posters she’d made there.

She shrugged. “I guess not,” she said. “I didn’t pay that much attention.” I reiterated the position I have come to hold, that scripture is not a scientific textbook and that there need be no incompatibility between the science of Darwinian evolution and a belief in a divinity that created the universe that continues to evolve.

Unlike Kathleen Deveny, I’ve never been uncomfortable talking to Lynn about matters of faith and spirituality, nor sex nor politics nor anything else. I am forever grateful that I had five years of inquiry and study into my own values and beliefs concerning the divine before I became a mother. My thinking continues to grow and change as, apparently, does Lynn’s. I have confidence that I raised a child who thinks deeply and critically about important matters, even if she can’t pull up chapter and verse from Luther’s Small Catechism to support or refute what she believes.

Deveny thinks she’ll have an easier time answering her daughter’s questions about sex than about religion because she knows where babies come from but remains uncertain on the details about God. Educating children about sex requires more than just telling them the mechanics of how the baby gets into the mother. As parents, we must also transmit our values about intimacy, faithfulness, and the responsibilities one takes one when one chooses to engage in this way with another person. In the same way, educating children about matters of faith requires more than merely taking them to a weekly event (at least in the winter) and exposing them to the lists of the rules and practices of a single denomination. We must be clear about our own values and beliefs concerning our relationship with the divine before we can help our children develop an enduring one that gives them hope and joy in this sometimes harsh and lonely world.

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