September 16, 2021
By far, one of the toughest things about deconstructing your faith and leaving religion is dealing with your religious family, if you have one. I dedicated an entire chapter of my book to this topic and I’ve written about it on this blog here and here.
It can also be quite hard to get good advice on how to deal with your religious family after you leave their religion because no two families are exactly alike. Someone else’s results may not look anything like yours. It’s highly individualized and it’s one of the aspects of deconstruction in which you may feel truly on your own.
In this article I want to discuss one outcome that I’ve seen a few times from people I know personally that I don’t often see discussed in online conversations about deconstruction. I probably don’t see it discussed often because it may be one of the “better” outcomes as far as religious families are concerned.
I call it “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
This is where your family—knowing you well and being perceptive—will notice your slow departure from the Church or changes in your behavior even though you’ve never explicitly said anything out loud about leaving or purposely distancing yourself from religion.
Most often, families who allow this to happen without saying anything about it are the ones who prioritize “keeping the peace” rather than everyone’s strict adherence to rigid church attendance. An analogy of this is an older guy who refuses to see a doctor for a check-up, explaining that, “If there’s anything wrong, I just don’t want to know about it.”
Deconverted Men who find themselves in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation with their religious families don’t ever technically lie about still going to church or believing in God. When their family asks them about recent church attendance, they simply say something vague before changing the subject to something else. Their religious family member is intuitive enough to know what this means, but just goes along with it anyway and doesn’t push back.
Since there’s no lying going on, I say if you find yourself in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation, then keep it up. In my opinion you’re in a much better situation than a lot of other recently Deconverted Men whose religious families aren’t handling their deconversion quite as well. Why rock the boat?
The thing about “don’t ask, don’t tell” is that it allows your religious family to use their cognitive dissonance to create a storyline that’s palatable for them. They are preserving their own comfort. No one is really being harmed by this, so I don’t see much of a problem. A surprisingly high number of people are okay with “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It’s a lot more than I would’ve thought.
If you’re in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation with your religious family, then it’s possible you could actually cause some problems if you do admit that you’ve stopped believing in God and going to church. If you explicitly state out loud and definitively that you no longer believe in God and you’ve stopped going to church, then you’ve disrupted their comforting storyline. It’s likely you’ll hurt their feelings.
The only exception to this I’ll note is if you’re the kind of person who absolutely must speak your truth out loud about having left religion otherwise you’ll feel unhappy or uncomfortable. In this case, you should probably go ahead and say something even though they didn’t ask. If you don’t, then you’d be prioritizing your family’s happiness over your own, and that isn’t going to work long-term.
If you’re in the beginning stages of your deconversion and your religious family hasn’t found out yet, I truly wish you the best and hope you can land in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation. It’s definitely one of the better options. But if you don’t, then things probably won’t be as simple. That situation is an article for another time.
Thanks for covering this topic. My husband and I are in this situation with his parents, but because of my close relationship with my mom and other family dynamics, I felt at the time that I had to tell my own parents, as if I owed them total honesty. However, from that point on, I have avoided discussing my own beliefs with them as much as possible. I am fine with them discussing their beliefs with me because I want to maintain some sense of closeness and normalcy on my side of the family. I think if I could go back in time, I would have chosen the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with my own parents as well so that they could have better peace of mind. The truth is, we don’t owe our parents the full details of our lives or beliefs, and they don’t owe us that either. It took me awhile to come to that conclusion. Either way, it’s painful to not feel I can be my full self with either my parents or my in-laws. They get to fully disclose their religious and political beliefs while my husband and I stay relatively vague so as to avoid conflict. It makes me feel like they don’t actually want to know us fully because they’d rather keep their “comforting storyline.” So yeah, they’re not being hurt, but it does hurt my husband and me because we feel like black sheep disguised to fit it. There doesn’t seem to be a good solution to this dilemma, and I see it often with the older generation not really wanting to know the thoughts of the younger generation. It’s disheartening, to say the least.
That sounds like a tough situation. I’m sorry that you’re going through it. Thank you for taking the time to share.