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How Can We Get Along with Our Religiously Conservative Relatives? October 2, 2005 The Reverend Roger Fritts Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church Bethesda, Maryland When I was a child, my maternal grandmother would send me money for my birthday. On the card she would include a statement of her religious faith. She might write “Roger, remember that in Christ, we are reconciled with God.” The next year she might write “Happy Birthday! By the same power that raised Christ from the dead, we may be saved from sin to follow Christ and to know the fullness of salvation. Love, Grandmother.” The next year I might read “Through the gift of God's saving grace, we are empowered to be disciples of Jesus.” My grandmother lived to be 103 and died in 1987, but when she was alive she worried that I would not make it to heaven. When I was ten, I had an awkward and uncomfortable conversation with her about religion. After trying unsuccessfully to explain to her about the Unitarian church to which my parents were taking me, she said, “Roger, do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior? If you do not, when you die you will not see me in heaven.” That day I was no Thomas More standing up for my beliefs. I abandoned, for the moment, the Unitarian Universalist teachings of my parents, the teaching that Jesus was a great moral leader, but he was a human being and not God. To make my grandmother happy I told her that I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I like to think that today I am more courageous, more willing to stand up for what I believe. Like Thomas More I have religious principles, although my principles are liberal Protestant ones, while his were conservative Roman Catholic. For example, I support the right of women to have an abortion and the right of gay men and lesbian women to marry. These are strongly held convictions. On the other hand, I also have an interest in my relationship with my relatives and not all of my relatives share my beliefs. I want to stay in touch with my extended family. I want my extended family members to invite me to weddings, graduations and memorial services. I want to hear news from my cousins. These ongoing relationships are important to me. Still, they sometimes become entangled with religious differences. When my grandmother told me that I needed to say that I accepted Jesus as my Savior and Lord, implied in her request were other messages such as, “If you love your grandmother, you will say yes. If you respect your grandmother, you will do as she says.” After all, my grandmother was feeding and sheltering me while I visited her. So the issue of the identity of Jesus was entangled in my relationship with her. If I were to take a firm Unitarian position that Jesus was a human being and not God, from my grandmother’s point of view, I would be showing to her how little I cared about our relationship. Painful cut offs occur in families over such religious debates. For example, more than fifty years ago my aunt, my mother’s oldest sibling, cut off from the rest of the family. This happened when I was a young child, and now almost everyone involved has died, so I will never know the details. I do know that in the 1930s at the age of twenty-two, my aunt, living in a small, strict, conservative farming community, had an affair with her cousin and got pregnant. There was a wedding march. My oldest cousin was born in September. About fifteen years later my aunt broke with her mother and father. She stopped communicating. She stopped visiting. She forbid her husband and her children to have any contact. One way to characterize this cut off in my family, would be to say it represented a break caused by differences about religion. My aunt had violated the rules of the conservative Christian religion in which her parents had raised her. Over the years she grew tired of their disapproving words and stares, and she made a choice to cut off from them. To understand these family conflicts better I have studied the family systems theory developed at Georgetown University by Dr. Murray Bowen, who died in 1990. One of Bowen’s students was a Bethesda Rabbi named Ed Friedman who died in 1996. Ten years ago, the year before his death, I spent nine days in a class taught by Rabbi Friedman. He talked about how religious belief can divide families. The Rabbi read a letter a Jewish mother sent to her son after learning that he intended to marry the non-Jewish woman he had been dating: Dear Herbie, Well, if you want to commit suicide, I guess there is nothing I can do. But I can’t tell you how much this business is hurting your father and me. I don’t know if you realize that this will hurt us financially. We will probably have to leave town and I will certainly have to give up my job teaching Hebrew. Your father is sick over this – you know he hasn’t been well. All I can say is that if he dies, I will hold you responsible. Mary may say that she loves you, but have you told her that we Jews think of Jesus as an illegitimate son? Love, Mother Perhaps you have had a similar experience in your own life. Perhaps your parents, or a brother or a sister, or one of your children is alienated from the rest of the family because of religious differences. Rabbi Friedman studied such conflicts for thirty years while working as a therapist in Bethesda. Besides working with couples in which one person was Jewish and the other was not, he worked with couples where one person was Protestant and the other Catholic, or one person was Greek Orthodox and the other was a Russian Orthodox, or one person was Buddhist and the other Protestant. In all, he said he worked with more than a thousand couples in interfaith marriages. He was surprised to find common patterns in all these families, despite religious background. Rabbi Friedman came to the conclusion that the problem in these families was not really differences about religion. Instead he came to believe that most of the time when people fight about religion, the religious issues serve as the medium through which family emotional processes are worked out, debated, and sometimes avoided. The Rabbi said that we should not assume that the theology of the religion is the issue. In certain situations the content of religion can tip the balance, but generally religions affect on a family's emotional processes is something like the paint on a canvas. Religions are like the paint that families place on the canvas. For example, one member of the family will declare that people who use blue are going to hell. Another member of the family will declare that blue is their favorite color, and pick up a paint brush and start painting with blue just to prove their point. Of course we clergy do not like to think about religion simply as colored paint that people fight about. I spend considerable time and energy proclaiming that the sky is blue and therefore in our rational Unitarian paintings we should paint the sky blue. Anyone who wants to paint it in a different color is wrong. We treat them with respect, but still they are wrong. You can substitute any of the big religious issues of our culture, such as abortion rights or gay rights or evolution, or the right to die, or global warming, in place of the word blue. I care deeply about these issues. I think they are important.
Still Rabbi Friedman found that most people choose their religion not because of issues, but because of the emotional processes in their families. After many years as a therapist here in Bethesda he came to the conclusion that the most important factor in our choice in becoming a liberal Unitarian Universalist, or a conservative Southern Baptist, or a liberal Jew is our family dynamics. People stay with the religion of their parents when they can develop separate identities in their families without changing religion. People move to another religion when they become adults if they are struggling to be separate from their families. Joining another religion is one way young people separate from their family of origin and develop their own sense of self. This need to break away happens most often to the oldest or to children who are the only child in a family. If Rabbi Friedman is correct, my aunt, who was the oldest child, cut off from her parents as a way of separating, to develop her own identity. It looked like a dispute about religious teaching, a child leaving behind conservative teaching. However, something else may have been going on. Perhaps violating the rules of her conservative Christian upbringing by getting pregnant was a way for my aunt to try to extract herself from her family of origin. When this turned out not to be enough, she cut off contact completely, moving to California with her family. Perhaps some of you have joined our congregation not just because of our beautiful church grounds or because of our incredibly wonderful church music, or because of our fantastic religious education program, or because of our church’s committed involvement in social action, or because of our use of reason in religion. Perhaps some of you have joined our church, leaving behind your childhood Roman Catholic Church or Methodist Church or Jewish Synagogue because joining our congregation helps you separate from your family of origin. In family systems therapists call this “differentiation of self” or “self-differentiation.” If this theory is correct, when our own children do not remain Unitarian Universalist, but instead select a different religion, they may be doing so as a way of separating from us. How does this theory help us get along with our religiously conservative relatives? Rabbi Friedman said that in conversation with such relatives we should not focus on religious issues. For example, we should not spend energy trying to prove the validity of evolution or point out the problems with the creation account in Genesis. Friedman found that family members’ rigid religious positions are more likely to change when the emotional processes of the family change. The key is to shift the focus of the conversation away from a debate about religion to a discussion about relationships. If through a trick of time-travel Rabbi Friedman, now deceased, and my aunt, also deceased, could have had a conversation when my aunt was a pregnant twenty-two year old, the Rabbi might have said, “Write a letter to your mother. The letter would say something like this: ‘Mother I know you are upset about my pregnancy and the wedding, and you have a right to your position. But you are still my mother and I believe you owe me one more thing before the wedding. We have never talked frankly about sex. What has been the secret to your marital success?’” In my mother’s family of origin such a letter would have been like setting off a bomb. Still if they discuss it, it might have turned the conversation away from a discussion about Christian morality to a discussion about relationships.
Sometimes an adult child says to a parent: “You may not have any contact with your grandchildren because I don’t want you to influence them with your religious beliefs. If they start to believe the things you believe, they will not go to heaven when they die. So you may not see your grandchildren.” One possible response to this difficult cut off is to try to refocus the conversation from a discussion about religion to a discussion about relationships. A reply might be:
Raising children today is very hard. I know you are trying to do the best you can. I will bet even thinking about the possibility that they might not turn out the way you want them to is scary. I want you to know that I am really proud of the fact that you have children and that you are trying to do the best you can as their parent. Perhaps words like these will open a conversation about relationships. The key is not to take the bait and get caught up in a discussion of religion. Instead, turn the conversation to or about relationships. This is where the real issues are. People sometimes say to me that they deal with the religious differences they have with relatives by avoiding the topic of religion. I think this may be a wise decision. We may avoid talking about religion because we intuitively know that we can gain nothing by arguing about theology. In fact when people argue about religion each side often becomes more dug in. The conversations where common ground might be found are conversations about relationships.
• Conversations about how we can preserve our individual identity and simultaneously have a partner in marriage,
• Conversations about how we can raise children who are part of the family and yet also have their own individual identity. A year ago during a trip to California I had dinner in San Francisco with my oldest cousin whose mother broke away from the family more than fifty years ago. My cousin had become a teacher and is now retired. We talked about what had happened, both of us realizing that we will never know all the details of the cut off. Still it was good that we could get together. We at least were able to move beyond an old family conflict and connect with each other. Both of us know that family relationships are precious. We value our relationship. Based on my own family experience, I have found that it is important to get far enough away from the other members of my own family so that I can define myself, so that I can define my own values. But then I have also found that it can be wonderfully rewarding to stay connected. So I try to go to the weddings and the memorial services, and the reunions. I try to keep in touch focusing on the relationships not on the religious ideology. How do I get along with my religiously conservative relatives? I define myself. I keep in contact with others and focus on relationships, not religious ideology. |
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