A snippet from Impious

How is a Child Raised Without God?

Now that I’ve gotten those two stories off my chest, I’ll get back to the parts you may be more interested in. What was it like growing up without going to church or being taught to believe in a god?

We didn’t go to church, and the other side of the coin was that we weren’t given weekly lessons on how to be an atheist. We didn’t have a secret meeting place (or non-secret meetings for that matter), where we gathered weekly with other like-minded individuals and sang hymns to Satan or beastly characters. We didn’t listen to stories, parables, or sing the praises of any mystical figures.

Our reality was that we had a father and mother committed to discussing religion and gods, but not totally committed to advocating their personal position. They talked about right and wrong-giving examples. They served as living models of how to act like human beings in a very natural way. Now realize that I am not saying they or we were perfect, but my parents discussed the issues of a god and organized religion in a way that tried to help us find our own way. That’s probably impossible, but I think they did as fine a job as they could in their endeavor to not tip the scales. And, I am very proud of them.

I’m going to regress a little here and return to my beginning school years. My best memory of kindergarten was playing and taking naps in our half day. I’m sure we did some academic-type activities, but they were probably intertwined in our storytime and learning how to count in play activities. A couple of years after beginning my school career, I ran up against my most perplexing dilemma. I was presented with reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every day at the beginning of class. I will quote an article published on March 30, 2015, from WBRU News, which describes how In God We Trust became our national motto in the 1950s and Under God was inserted into the pledge of allegiance. Drum roll, please.

The words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase "In God, we trust" on the back of a dollar bill haven't been there as long as most Americans might think. Those references were inserted in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the same decade that the National Prayer Breakfast was launched, according to writer Kevin Kruse. His new book is One Nation Under God. I’ve provided you with the article below:

In the original Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy made no mention of God, Kruse says. 

Bellamy was a Christian socialist, a Baptist who believed in the separation of church and state. "As this new religious revival is sweeping the country and taking on new political tones, the phrase 'one nation under God' seizes the national imagination," Kruse tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It starts with a proposal by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic lay organization, to add the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance. Their initial campaign doesn't go anywhere, but once Eisenhower's own pastor endorses it ... it catches fire."

Kruse's book investigates how the idea of America as a Christian nation was promoted in the 1930s and '40s when industrialists and business lobbies, chafing against the government regulations of the New Deal, recruited and funded conservative clergy to preach faith, freedom and free enterprise. He says this conflation of Christianity and capitalism moved to center stage in the '50s under Eisenhower's watch.

"According to the conventional narrative, the Soviet Union discovered the bomb and the United States rediscovered God," Kruse says. "In order to push back against the atheistic communism of the Soviet Union, Americans re-embraced a religious identity. That plays a small role here, but ... there's actually a longer arc. That Cold War consensus actually helps to paper over a couple decades of internal political struggles in the United States. If you look at the architects of this language ... the state power that they're worried most about is not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but rather the New Deal and Fair Deal administrations in Washington, D.C.

Just my luck that I was one of the first kids to have to start reciting a pledge, a significantly altered pledge, at that, which pressured me to say the words under God in front of everyone in the school. I said the words—for years—until, as a young adult in high school, I finally mustered the courage to remain silent while everyone else said those words. I always resumed where the compelled words left off and recited the remainder of the pledge.

All of the little kids in the country's public school were compelled to say these words, and this verbal arm-twisting remains in our schools, sporting events, and political events today. These words were not inserted into our constitution by our Founding Fathers. They were added to the Pledge much later in our history, and to all our coins and paper money in the 1950s amidst a cold war with the officially atheist Soviet Union, long after our nation’s founding, and nearly two-century existence.

 Many atheists may concur with the 1983 words of retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, that slogans such as ‘In God, We Trust' have ‘lost any true religious significance.' To the esteemed Supreme Court jurist’s assertion, I would say, tell that to a five-year-old who was not brought up to believe in a deity; and was pummeled and compelled day after day in many different settings to say the words he had not been raised to believe.

The words are there.

They mean something and are insidiously inserted into a growing child’s brain.

The dismay I felt as a child was real, and painful to a certain degree. I was compelled to say these words-the words I felt uncomfortable saying. It is something I, and many others, have endured for years—stayed silent for fear of standing out from the crowd, from being isolated. It is human nature to want to belong, and when you don't, it hurts.

Long ago I realized that I was part of a minority in this country, and to too many so-called religious people, a despised selection of the population. A 2012 Gallup poll indicated that only 54% of Americans would vote for an atheist to be President. Let that sink in for a moment. Pause, pause, pause, pause.