When Religion Comes First

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I posted something on Facebook this week that stirred up a bunch of controversy. The statement was simple — and to my mind obvious — but the interpretation of the following relies heavily on one’s confirmation bias:

If you love your religion more than you love your own kids, don’t be surprised when they grow up to reject the thing you always cared about more than them.

And because of the controversy, I thought I’d take a minute to explain.

I know that for believers, God comes first, and that’s simply taken as the default.

The issue is that this "ideal" that one must love God/the Church first, and give that first priority in your life, while making theological sense on paper, doesn’t exactly work out that way in real life. What it ends up doing in many cases is metastasizing into something where apostolate becomes more important than family time, devotional acts are prioritized over the wellbeing of children, the expectation of maturation in faith and piety imposes undue burdens on adolescents, and so on.

A theme I’ve touched on in the past is how Catholicism can become an idol, and how it was that for me:

[T]he only way to really fight for the thing I was raised to believe in was to safeguard the rules and regulations, the doctrines and the laws. To fight for orthodoxy was to go deeper and deeper into an ever-narrowing spiral of "doing more for God." More reverence. More sacrifice. More observance. The Church was an idol, and her web of legalisms her sacraments.

I have become increasingly convinced that much of Catholicism is, essentially, a kind idolatry of religion. Since God is perceptually absent/distant/nonexistent, the Church and all her countless rules and rubrics and rituals swell to fill the space left by his absence.

We begin to worship the means of worship because the object of worship is inscrutable and inaccessible.

Worship becomes indistinguishable from the rituals that comprise it. Which is why (according to my theory) those rituals take on more and more significance in the minds of those who feel that they must always go deeper and seek more reverence so that they can try to commune with God.

And while this is certainly not relegated to traditional communities — I was not raised in one, but certainly experienced this growing up — I think it’s accentuated there. I wonder if most liturgical purists, like the Latin Mass traditionalists I was so deeply involved with for nearly twenty years, are really just chasing a relationship with God they struggled to experience by trying to be increasingly perfect and exacting in the deference and reverence and supplication they show him through ritual, liturgical action. As well as the complex web of theology, devotions, penances, apparitions, and so on that seem to always accompany this life.

Whatever the case for others, I think that was what I was doing. I was afraid of the God I couldn't find, experience, or love, so I sought to placate him by being the obedient child who performatively sought his approval. I was afraid to face his wrath, so I leaned into being his zealot.

But I never actually loved him. I was just doing the thing that I was taught, both by word and by action, to prioritize.

This is all still kind of inchoate in my head, and I’m not proposing it as some fully fleshed-out thesis. I only know that in my childhood home, religion was more important than anything. It’s why I wrote about the dangers of heavy-handed faith:

Some people who saw my original comment asked me for examples. These are difficult, because they’re personal. I'm not really on speaking terms with my family these days. I don’t want to exacerbate that situation, but I have repeatedly caught myself avoiding talking about things publicly that have deeply affected me. Certain pivotal experiences are perhaps the only way for me to explain important aspects of how I wound up where I am. So I risk damaging things further by writing about it, but I risk allowing wounds to fester by not doing so.

As I said, I’m not exactly in the family group chat these days, but I was recently told by a third party that these days, three of my five siblings are also no longer practicing Catholics. This means that only 2 out of 6 of us still go to Church, despite the fact that we were raised in a home where “being Catholic” was clearly more important than anything else.

As I mentioned in the essay linked above about heavy-handed faith, I once had an argument with a Catholic woman over her demand that her daughter, who was 13 at the time, exhibit "holiness." For diplomatic reasons, I didn’t mention at the time that the woman in question was my mother, and the daughter my youngest sister. My mom saw “holiness” as my sister *wanting* to voluntarily engage in acts of worship and devotion even when they were not obligatory. I was in my early 20s, but even then I could see the danger. I told my mom that if she kept up that attitude, my sister would surely leave the faith.

I was right. I just never expected to follow suit.

And when I did ultimately leave, my parents never called to ask if I was OK, or what happened, or anything. Still haven't. One time, when we were still talking on the phone occasionally, I asked them why they had never asked. (It had been about a year at the time since I’d begun openly talking about my struggles with faith). They told they didn't think I would want to hear their opinion. (They certainly didn’t seem interested in mine.) Me, a 43 year old man at the time, with 7 kids of my own, still being treated like I was just a disappointing child who wasn’t saying his prayers correctly.

That conversation didn’t go much further into depth, so as far as I know, they still have no idea what my story is on this. It certainly doesn’t seem like they particularly care, because when you care, you take steps to rectify things.

I have no idea if my parents ever read this Substack. I have no idea if they know how much their utter lack of outward concern for me hurt me. As I’ve gone through what has been the most difficult time in my life, I have received more love and support from strangers — a great many of them, who reached out to me when they saw the pain and loss I was experiencing — than my own flesh and blood. (In fact, only my little sister, who left before I did, took the initiative to contact me to speak about it.)

I honestly don’t even know how to process this. I got out of the shower this morning and was stopped in my tracks once again by how dumbfounding it is. If any of my children went through something similar to what I have, you’d need an army to keep me from making sure they knew I was there to talk and to support them through it. There would be no question over whether I cared more about their membership status in a particular religion than about their personal wellbeing.

But then again, I pulled free of the cult thinking. The kind of thinking that generated an anecdote I used to see making the rounds about a mother who would pray that if her prodigal son were ever in the State of Grace, God would take him at that moment rather than allowing him to ever commit another mortal sin.

To the religious mind, this looks like sacrificial love. “She would give up her son whom she loves if she could just ensure that he reaches heaven.”

To the purely rational mind, it seems psychotic. “She would rather her son die and be gone from her life than that he have the opportunity to exercise free will and grapple with his own sins.”

It’s a way of placing of the spiritual above the human that can have profound repercussions.

And if I’m being honest, I used to be guilty of this same kind of thing. When I was running 1P5, I constantly put my “calling” ahead of my family. I didn’t even realize how much I was doing it. But my wife still speaks bitterly about all the family dinners I missed because I was working late, and all the time I spent caught up in the world of my “apostolate” when I should have been with my young family. I had become convinced that my crusade to defend the Church was the most important thing I could be doing, and that my priorities were rightly ordered. But my wife always felt that I was married to the Church, not her. That she came in a distant second to my fidelity and sense of mission.

This did not strengthen my marriage, my children, or our unity as a family. I put religion first — synonymous in my mind with putting God first — and in so doing, neglected those who legitimately had the first claim on my time and attention. (A similar problem arises when men with families earn sub-standard wages, falling into poverty and inadequate provision because they believe they are “called” to teach the faith, or do evangelization, or some other apostolate.)

Looking back, none of this surprises me. Being uber-Catholic was just about the only thing that seemed to have currency in my world growing up. It was the thing that garnered the attention and approval I so desperately wanted. My entire network of extended family and friends cared about their Catholic identity more than anything else. Me being articulate and insightful about Church affairs as a teenager is what earned me a place at the table with the men of my family. It made me feel like I mattered. It made me think God would approve of me, too — or at least, not be too hard on me — as long as I kept doing everything I could to work for him and his Church. Having a difficult relationship with my own father, I sought surrogate father figures who would be proud of me, and I though I found that in Catholic priests. It’s how I wound up so involved with the Legionaries of Christ. They encouraged me, saw leadership capabilities in me, and gave me a sense of mission in purpose in how to act that out.

My family isn’t anomalous. As I was writing this, I found myself recalling a conversation I had with a young woman at Steubenville whom I'd met before she enrolled through my involvement in Regnum Christi, which her parents were quite actively involved in. I had a bit of a messiah complex in those days, always feeling like I needed to save everyone from themselves, and I was worried about her when I saw the way she was dressing and acting. She had fallen in with the party crowd, and I could see she was headed for trouble. When I tried to talk to her about it, the hurt surfaced immediately, along with resentment and indifference. She said something to me about how the only thing her parents cared about was apostolate, so what difference did it make what she did?

I think there are far more stories like this than people think.

And I think when we grow up and begin coming to terms with our childhood wounds, the recognition that something was more important to our parents than we were creates a rich substrate for resentment. The analogy that springs immediately to mind is Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off coming to terms with the fact that his father loves his classic Ferrari more than his son. The emotional transformation he goes through as he takes out his rage on the Ferrari is exactly what I’m talking about:

I come at this topic from a place where I feel that my faith was forced, and in some very important respects damaged me more than it helped.

Many of you may feel differently about faith, but nevertheless want it to have a proportionate role in your life. You don’t want your kids to grow up and want to burn the Church down. But you do want them to believe.

I can’t give you a prescription for that.

One of the side effects of my growing conviction that if there is a good and loving God that there cannot be eternal conscious torment for rational, beloved souls is that there’s room for a certain amount of laxity.

I covered aspects of this in the “Heavy Handed Faith” post linked above, so I won’t re-hash them here.

But I do think with all the obligations under pain of sin that Catholics in particular face, there is always a tension between forcing your children to do the thing and avoid the sin (or ‘obtain the grace’) and the recognition that in so doing, you may very well destroy any desire to live that faith the minute they have the freedom to choose something different.

It seems better to me to love them first and foremost, to break the rules (even the supposedly unbreakable ones) when necessary to prove that the God you believe in is big enough not to be offended by their struggle, and to encourage them to really only embrace faith of their own free will, not because they’re going to be punished — either temporally or eternally — if they don’t.

I can tell you from experience that being forced to believe and fulfil obligations out of fear of punishment does a lot of damage in the long run. Realizing you’ve lived your life for something not because you chose it, or truly believed it, but because you were taught that it was unacceptable not to believe it and you would be penalized for choosing something else is a source of profound resentment. The realization of decades of lost autonomy, of realizing you never allowed yourself to think critically out of fear…there’s so much here to be wary of.

Err on the side of gentleness and understanding, and don’t ever let them doubt that they, along with your spouse, are the most important thing in your life. Naturally, every parent recognizes this inclination.

And if your religious sensibility is warning you that this is wrong, because your obligation is to put God and Church first, and everything else after that, maybe take some time and question if that’s what you really believe.