Agnostic Mom

DALE MCGOWAN is a writer, editor, and critical thinking educator in Minneapolis. His satirical novel Calling Bernadette’s Bluff has been called “an undoubted triumph of satire” and “wicked funny.” He recently completed Northing at Midlife, a humorous narrative of a midlife crisis encountered on the trails of Britain. McGowan is editor of Rumors of Peace, the international newsletter of Nonviolent Peaceforce, is a board member of the Critical Thinking Club, Inc. and has taught critical thinking skills in the college classroom, the corporate boardroom, and public venues.

Dale met Becca, now an elementary educator, in 1984 when they were both members of the University of California Band in Berkeley, CA. They live near Minneapolis with their three ethical, caring kids

I read on the Parenting Beyond Belief forum that you grew up going to church. What religion were you?

We attended a UCC (United Church of Christ) dutifully every Sunday, but there wasn’t much presence of religion in our home the rest of the week. I grew up in the sort of nominally Christian home that’s so common.

Your dad died when you were thirteen years old and that event was the catalyst to a long journey of trying to discover truth about what happens after death and whether God exists. When I say long, I mean it lasted until you were about thirty three years old. Is that right? Throughout this time did you lean toward believing or not believing?

It was at Dad’s funeral that I began to feel that questions about God were important and interesting enough to pursue. Over the next twenty years I chased the answers to five questions:

1. Can I ask these questions?

2. May I ask these questions?

3. Even if I can and may, are answers possible?

4. If so, do the answers matter?

5. Am I alone in my conclusions?

For the sake of the inquiry, I had to assume the answer to the first question was yes. I gradually realized that a decent God was unlikely to care if I was honestly wrong about him, which took care of #2.

Question #3 took much longer. At last I realized that “Is there a God?” was the wrong question. “Why do people believe there is a God?” – now there’s a question I could actually pursue. If it turned out that people had good reasons for believing, I too would be justified in doing so. It was the process of learning why people believe that took most of twenty years.

I began to recognize the terribly negative effects of religious belief in my early thirties, which answered #4, and discovered (through AN Wilson) the astonishingly rich and largely concealed history of disbelief, which answered #5. At that point, in my mid-thirties, I felt I could express my disbelief with a greater confidence in its reasoned foundation.

You attended nine denominations throughout your church-going days. What were they?

The experiences varied from a few visits to several years. Let’s see if I can do it from memory: UCC, Mormon, Unitarian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist megachurch (five years, please shoot me), Catholic, Episcopalian. I always forget one. Uh…Presbyterian!

Which played the most dominant role?

Unitarian. I attended Neighborhood UU Church in Pasadena, California for two years in high school and actually looked forward to the services. The minister (whose name I would swear was something like Reverend Lovejoy) would talk about life, actual human here-on-this-planet life! I felt challenged, inspired, and enlightened every Sunday.

Is your wife a nonbeliever and freethinker as well?

She was a mainstream Christian when we started dating and for about the first nine years of our marriage. And though I’d vigorously dissect the service on the way home from each ordeal at our Baptist megachurch, I never set out to change her views. But she’s wickedly smart (in addition to being perfect in every other way) and eventually began to question her own way out. She now calls herself a “humanist who prays ‘to whom it may concern.’”

Parenting Beyond Belief isn’t your first book. You’ve also written two novels. What drove you to switch over to nonfiction and write for secular parents?

The novels were written when I was a secular humanist professor at a Catholic college. They were satirical releases, born out of the frustration of that situation. Calling Bernadette’s Bluff was published in 2002; the sequel, Good Thunder, is finished but not yet released. I’m very happy with them, but I really think fiction is the aberration for me. My first love is narrative nonfiction, including a humorous travel narrative I wrote while living in England in 2004 (also pending release).

PBB came about because of the crying need for it, a need I discovered while editor of the Family Issues page of the Atheist Alliance WebCenter. I simply could not believe how little there was out there for parenting without religion, so I created PBB.

I realize the book hasn’t been released yet, but what kind of response is Parenting Beyond Belief getting?

It has been overwhelmingly positive – a kind of ripple-hallelujah from people who’ve been waiting for just such a thing. And word is spreading like wildfire. Googling the phrase “Parenting Beyond Belief” on January 1 gave me 49 hits. Last week it passed 12,000. I daresay we’re onto something!

Why is now the time to publish this book?

Ooh, I like that! Makes it sound like I sat on the project until just the right moment. In fact, this is when I got around to it. But I do think the timing is unbeatable, for three interrelated reasons:

(1) Publishers are ready. Ten years ago, no mainstream publisher would have touched it, but now disbelief is coming into its own. The enormous and recent success of the Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett books showed the publishing industry that nonbelievers exist in large numbers and that they read.

(2) Our numbers are increasing. In 1990, 8% of respondents to a USA Today poll identified themselves as non-religious. By 2002 that sector had grown to 14.1%. I don’t think 18 million people stopped believing during that time; for the most part, I think 18 million people started being comfortable with saying they didn’t believe. And that’s the point when we start getting comfortable sharing our disbelief with our children, as a value, not as the absence of one.

(3) Five years from now, with any luck, the book will have competition. At the moment there is essentially none, which makes this a better time!

Do you know how many non-religious families there are, and how this compares to estimates from years past?

This can only be guesssed from other statistics. The U.S. Census in 2000 counted 37.3 million households in the U.S. with school-age children. Assuming the same rough percentage of nonbelievers among parents as non-parents, these numbers yield a conservative estimate of seven million individual non-religious parents in the U.S. today, or roughly five million families.

What do you think is the number one reason for the boom in interest in leaving religious belief behind in our culture today?

The rise of fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic. When George W. Bush was elected for the first time, I found myself in a room full of long-faced humanists bemoaning the end of the enlightenment. “Chins up!” I said. “This is the best possible news for us.” And I was right, imho. It is difficult to get people to see religion as a cultural cancer when it is moderated and under wraps. Only when religious zealotry takes the reins of power does the evidence become overwhelming.

We’ve had a chance to see the true face of religious orthodoxy in recent years, from a president who says God wanted him to invade another country to a religious electorate that seemed willing to permit him any course of action so long as he said his prayers. We can’t see priests without thinking of the hundreds who abused their authority to molest trusting children. Nineteen devout young men perpetrated mass murder on 9/11. Some people, gratifyingly, are beginning at last to connect the dots.

Disbelief isn’t automatically morally superior. We don’t need to make such an arrogant claim to earn our place at the table.
All we needed was the removal of the assumption that belief granted automatic supremacy. Now that that is a harder argument to make, people can think for themselves — and more people than ever are thinking their way out of superstition.

Has there been any public criticism from the religious side or do you anticipate any?

Nothing yet, and a number of Christians who’ve read excerpts have expressed pleasant surprise. The book does not attack religion or attempt to “recruit” people away from religious parenting. It is intended to encourage and support those who have already made the decision to raise their kids without religion and simply want a little help in doing so. Our hope is to help create a world in which disbelief is accepted as a normal and acceptable choice. Reasonable readers of all perspectives should be able to accept that.

A major concern of AgnosticMom readers is dealing with social situations and people who may not want to associate with atheists and agnostics. Do you have a section that addresses this subject? If so, tell us about it.

It’s not a separate section, but a thread that runs through several chapters, popping up in discussions of church-state separation, “mixed marriage,” and the chapter of Personal Reflections.

Do you envision following this with another book or project on a related subject?

Yes indeed. Since this was the first major book on the subject, we couldn’t hope to accomplish everything in one fell swoop. We hoped to play out some threads that could be continued in other projects. I see three immediate needs: a book devoted to dealing with death and loss, another on being secular in a religious extended family, and a practical book of activities.