Do I Send my Kids to VBS?

What happened when my kid was asked to youth group

The first time I became aware I may have religious trauma was when my kid got asked to go to youth group at church. Deep in the throes of deconstruction, questioning the faith of my upbringing that led me to some harmful experiences, I was triggered into a panic attack. Parenting is not for the faint of heart, and for those of us who have been born again, giving birth to offspring propel us quickly into the born again again. 

I didn’t have the language to understand that I was triggered by my religious trauma when that first incident happened. All I felt was that a simple invitation had been extended, and then I started drowning in fear and panic while everyone else remained calm. My body knew what I could not verbalize for myself and blared the warning signals: CAUTION STRAIGHT AHEAD. My body didn’t feel safe because I had not been safe when I was an adolescent spending every weekend at youth group. It was there that I learned to shame myself, become entrenched into toxic relationships and patterns. It was then that I was indoctrinated. The thought of my own flesh and blood being exposed to the same harm threw my body into overdrive and panic ensued. My body needed safety and once it came back up to the surface and joined everyone else’s unsettling calm, I remembered I am no longer an adolescent, but the parent of one. There are two children who need parenting at this moment, one who lived and breathed 20 some years ago, the vulnerable kid who experienced religious trauma through Saturday Night Bible Studies. And the kid who just got asked to go to youth group. I knew the only way to love the kid before me well, was to love the kid inside of me. I needed to parent both those kids but it was important that I remember they are not the same kid. I am a parent with religious trauma but I am not raising a kid with religious trauma. That’s why I struggled to breathe and my kid was nonchalant about the invitation to youth group–why they stayed calm on the surface while I slowly suffocated beneath the panicky undertow. 

In the born again again, some of us may have children who are at every age, stepping on landmines of our religious trauma triggers. If you prayed the prayer at six years old, maybe your child being asked to pray the prayer at six will trigger you. My religious indoctrination began at adolescence, so my kids reaching that milestone is a doozy for me. Parenting in the born again again is a constant grief-relief sandwich; getting the opportunity to watch our children be parented with what the child in us deserved is a profound relief followed by profound grief of what we did not receive. Parenting with religious trauma is a dance of parenting the child before us and the child in us with our utmost love. Fortunately, love is not scarce and there is plenty for both. Dole it out with abandon. While our children should never be responsible for the healing and recovery of our trauma, they are often the catalyst and the witness of our rising. 

There is a temptation to shield our children from the thing that most harmed us. We ingested poison so we take extensive sniff tests before we let our kids go near VBS, youth group, or the Southern Baptist neighbor’s house. We vet summer camps, double check the religious school’s policies and discipline protocols, and we police their friendships. We are afraid they will relive our nightmare. The problem is that this poison is in the air and if we want to protect our kids from it, we’d have to keep them locked up in an airtight cage. They will suffocate, or go and seek out the air and hide their intoxication. 

There’s nothing wrong with being protective, using our super spidey senses to detect fundamentalist influences. In fact, if more people paid attention as we did, we’d be making more progress in society. We can and should do better for our kids, advocating and fighting for the right for our kids to live in poison-free spaces. But the way we’re going to do this work isn’t to keep our kids caged under our watchful eyes, the way we’ll do this is two-fold. Inside the home, we’re going to inoculate our kids from poison, and outside the home, we’re going to dilute the poison with fresh air.

Indoctrination is manipulating a child’s mind into religious constructs. It crushes the shape of a child into one that fits the shape of orthodoxy. It tells a child who she needs to be, instead of asking the child who they are. The opposite of indoctrination isn’t a vacuum of constructs, it is the choosing of them. Little kids don’t dream of becoming an astronaut because they conjured that up from a mystical, internal source. They dream of becoming an astronaut because they read a picture book of an astronaut, or they looked up at the stars and imagined flying toward the sky. We don’t need to be afraid of offering our children constructs, of religion, faith, values, career aspirations, gender roles, and relationships. The minute our kids are born they are making out the shape of their primary caregiver’s faces and bodies, hearing these strange sounds coming out of their human’s mouths, and learning complex linguistic and social constructs with remarkable dexterity. Your baby is immediately a son, a brother, a citizen of a nation. That’s the nature of being human in society and we need not be afraid these added labels on our child will necessarily harm them. What we do need to be mindful of is that they are not then limited by the constructs, as if what they’re born into is static, and that there is only one way a child should go. Indoctrination tells a child, this is your way. Inoculation asks the child, which way is yours? 

These are the things I believe in:

The scientific process of discovering our world.

The inherent dignity of human beings regardless of color, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, and ability.

People are good and will do well if they can.

Everything is political because policies and systems impact people most, in spite of individual acts of kindness. 

Sex positivity liberates us for pleasure and prevents abuse.

Water heals.

I haven’t always believed in these things and I will likely change my mind, or at least evolve into further nuance as I live more years on this earth. But at this moment, these are the values I impart to my kids–I don’t give them nothing, I give them what is authentically mine now. Instead of expending a lot of energy sniffing out poison in the air, I inoculate them by giving them these values, and I ask them, which way is yours? 

When I tell my Gen Z kids stories of my born again past, they often look at me in disbelief and horror. I used to believe homosexuality is a sin, for example. “Mom, who are you?” They look at me like I’m a monster. I look to their father for validation, “What? That was just our world! In our community, everyone thought that.” We all settle in for a chuckle, as if bigotry were a quaint story from our bygone years. Homophobia, that poison is still in the air, but we’ve inoculated our kids by sharing our values, that gay people are inherently worthy and equal. We don’t protect or shelter them from bigoted people, we trust they’ll believe love wins, and they do.  But we do not get to take all the credit for our kids’ acceptance and inclusion of people on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. If anything, they often school us on our internalized bigotry, and educate us on changing inappropriate terms and how to speak in a vocabulary that does less harm. And that is because our children have influences from far more than just their home life. They have youtube, TV shows, movies, their peers and other adults. My son is the one who introduced me to She-Ra, one of the gayest animation shows on Netflix. At the same time we are inoculating our kids from poison inside of the home, the air outside of the home is fast changing in composition. Thanks to queer activists and artists like ND Stevenson, the creator of She-Ra, bravely showing up and consistently telling their stories, they are injecting fresh air and diluting the toxin. But we cannot assume progress comes from passage of time, that each generation will naturally be more progressive than the next. It takes work, courage, organization, and persistence to be on the right side of history. If we want our children to be protected from the poison in the air, we can do our part to clear it for them, and with them. 

In the born again again, we no longer parent out of fear of outside influences. We don’t cage our children in our small ideological bubble, even if we are sure we are right this time. Our kids deserve to be given space to explore, to go out into the risky world and make connections with people, some of whom we may not approve of. They are their own people and they should be trusted to make their own decisions. Not because we don’t care about them getting hurt, but because there is no life without risk. Vulnerability to pain, heartache, and yes even indoctrination compels them to keep their hearts wide open. I was so easily evangelized when I was a young woman precisely because I took my tender heart and held it out with open palms as a naive offering to those who would take advantage of it. The indoctrination was an offense against me, but my vulnerability was and remains what makes me human. If out of fear that they will be indoctrinated I rob my kids of their vulnerability, what am I doing to their humanity? 

But fearlessness doesn’t mean lack of caution, and it doesn’t mean we don’t speak the truth. We aren’t afraid to send our kids into the toxic air but we can give them our religious trauma lenses to see clearly where the toxins are the thickest. When my kids are invited to fundamnetalist spaces, I expressed my fears with openness and honesty, “I’m afraid you’ll be evangelized.” And then, I let them go. I trust in my inoculation inside and I trust they’ve chosen to breathe fresh air outside, enough that they can be fully vulnerable as well as fully vigilant. It reminds me of the sign I have at my writing desk: Do no harm, take no shit. 

My kid goes to youth group and they were underwhelmed. “It was alright,” they reported with a shrug. I am honestly relieved because as much as I want to be very brave and release them into the world, I am really only a little bit brave. 

“You think you might want to go again?” I ask.

“Probably not.” They said.

“Okay. You know we raised you to be quitters, right?” As a born-again, I was taught to persevere with long-suffering, even if it was killing me inside. I don’t raise my kids like that.

“Yeah, I know, Mom.”