How Far Would You Go To Maintain Ties with Religious Family Members?

A separate account seems to be going pretty far. I could see it if she left all the other information blank, I guess (NOT saying Republican and Christian if she’s not). Another route is to friend them, but put them on a list that blocks them from her status updates and/or other areas that she wants to feel free to express.
A third option is to friend religious family and friends, but not get too vehement on one’s facebook page. That’s the route I chose. I don’t want to be a zealot evangelical atheist there any more than I’m happy with the fact that I used to be a zealot evangelical Christian; it’s annoying to be proselytized to in a social networking area regardless of the message.
I don’t entirely shy away from posting things that reflect my own values, but I put up vague things like “I like people” for my religious view etc. People can read between the lines if they want and notice that my posts tend towards the marriage equality/pro-science/rationality end of things, but it’s not “in your face”. I had one friend who spent some time in the hospital with a very serious illness who then spent the next month praising God for his recovery, and just once I added a comment that “I would like to offer thanks to the doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff who helped you out”, trying to remind them of that input without being confrontational.
I don’t think that makes me an accommodationist; it’s just that to me, Facebook is social, not political activism. When it is relevant I express my opinion as a rationalist, but I’m not pushy. I have it easy with regard to my family in general:religion hardly ever comes up in conversation because I live far away from them and our talks are always catch-up about our lives rather than general talk about everything. If it were more of a daily issue, I have to admit I’m not sure how I’d handle it.

I definitely wouldn’t go that far. I would be uncomfortable with lying about myself like that. I’m also really uncomfortable with the idea of “experimenting” on family or friends. It always ends badly when they find out (I was on the test subject end of that one once and I find it extremely distasteful).

What I would do in this situation is tell her I can’t promise it and just leave it at that. If the cousin chooses not to friend then oh well. There *are* other ways to keep in touch than Facebook 😉 I mean, if you really want to keep in touch with someone who “normally wouldn’t give me the time of day” in the first place.

I don’t see how setting up a fake account and lying about yourself brings you closer to your family. If they can’t accept you for who you are then that’s sad but accept it move on.

My cousin deleted me from Facebook, another ignores me when he sees me, and another lives 30 minutes away and we never talk (the last time we talked was at a family reunion more than 500 miles away from where we both live). It’s kind of hurtful initially, but really, I have decided I don’t need the kind of people in my life that don’t accept me for who I am. And now I don’t have to worry about buying a wedding gift for one of them!

I have found new family in some good friends. It’s better because I got to choose them and they are more like family to me than my own ever bothered to try. I agree with previous posters: don’t change who you are to please people who obviously don’t care enough about you to love you despite political and religious differences.

Now I admit to being a serious wise ass.

However, if a relative gets better and the family starts saying “praise jesus” or something like that, I’m not that big of a wise ass to say, “well you should be praising the doctors.”

Relationships are a two way street. The person is being disingenuous by faking an account. I’d say there are valid reasons why the family doesn’t want to have a relationship with this person.

Hmmm, where’s Richard?

If a Christian treats you like an enemy because of your beliefs, then that’s their sin, not yours. Why? That violates a very important tenet of Christianity. Love your neighbor as yourself doesn’t make exceptions in cases where politics and religion differ. Not only that, Jesus made friends of people hated by his community. I don’t think they would accept such a criticism though.

I don’t think it is worth lying about who you are to stay friendly with such a person. However, I don’t have a problem with keeping certain topics off the table if the topics are if they’re a cause of unnecessary tension.

Creating a new FB page is dishonest. I have to admit I haven’t added close family members because I don’t want to censor myself. I certainly wouldn’t make a whole other FB page and lie in it, though.

I know of several people who have two Facebook pages one personal, one professional one family fundy friendly, one atheist. I probably wouldn’t go as far as labeling myself a Republican Christian, but I can understand Tina’s motivations, while I usually don’t worry about people who write me off based on my beliefs, I could see the benefit in keeping up conservative Christian appearances for the sake of a loved one.

I say that if anyone doesn’t want to stay in touch with me because I’m an atheist, then fuck them!

If my family doesn’t want to talk to me because I’m an atheist, then I don’t need those types of superficial people in my life anyway. My family and friends are the people that act like my family and friends, and support me, if they don’t act like my family then I don’t consider them family.

I feel sorry for Tina that she feels the need to resort to such a dishonest practice to retain ties with family members. I don’t lie about who I am but I try to understand the pov’s of those who might not agree. This fall, the “9/12’ers” and Glenn Beck worshippers were really bugging me. I posted that they scared me, with a video I had found of the demonstration. My aunt, a strong Glenn Beck supporter, asked why. I had every intention of answering, but held back to think on my response for a few days and then realized it was the 15th anniversary of the death of her son. She had more important things to think about and I did not want to upset her at such a time. We both forgot about the incident entirely, and so we can make casual friendly comments to one another without an argument between us.
I don’t censor myself entirely, but I do give myself time to think about what I’m posting. Will it offend someone? Can I get the same point across without offending someone if I change the way I’m saying it? I try never to use a violent tone or swear when I do mention religion or politics. (I don’t always succed, by the way.) Then, if people can’t handle a calm, rational discussion between equals, it isn’t worth trying to maintain the relationship. Sometimes you have to allow people to drift away, much as it hurts. I try very hard not to be the one who chooses to end the relationship. This only closes me off from people who might, some day, challenge my thinking and make me a better person in some way. And I hope that those who close me off will one day come back wanting to repair the relationship.

I think Dale McGowan’s latest series on “silos” at http://www.parentingbeyondbelief.com could help a lot of us with this same issue.

Do you want to be friends with people like this? I know that family is often a different matter but would you want to associate someone who is so petty and fickle as to reject you because you don’t share the same belief in a god?

Being from a mostly non-religious family this hasn’t been a problem as far as family goes. They’ve all known for a long time that I’m an atheist, liberal, and skeptic because I’m not exactly quiet about it in person. Nothing I put on facebook should be a surprise to anyone who knows me.

What has been a problem are people who are more tangential than my family and close friends. My best friend took some flak over stuff I’d posted on facebook from her mother-in-law who is an ultra-conservative christian (not that it affected our friendship but was frustrating for her). Also had issues with former classmates I wasn’t close to and people I used to work with because I never discussed atheism or my political views at work.

Why should anybody sublimate who they are to appease the ridiculous bigotries of others? If anybody told me they’d only “friend” me on FB if I pretended I was straight or said they’d only associate with me if I refused to mention that I was an atheist I’d show them the door. They are the problem, and they need to realize their personal bigotries cannot continue to control the lives of others.

Pretty sure I would have responded to the Cousin with Conditions with, “ok, never mind, then.”

Most of my overly religious relatives don’t use computers anyway. Some of the Adventists think they’re from Satan.

I do have atheist in my FB profile under my religious beliefs, though. So if anybody wants to look, it’s right there.

I have two: one where I’m out about my sexuality and one where I’m not. Sometimes it’s necessary.

I bend a little bit for the sake of religious family members that I wish to maintain some sort of civil relationship with.

All of my family is Mormon (I left the church almost 13 years ago) and I do my best to avoid most conversations about religion with family. For a few years, it was all about “you are breaking up our eternal family” In the last few years, it’s been very civil because we’ve all learned how to converse about other subjects in life.

From a social networking point of view, I’m labeled as “Agnostic” on my Facebook page and I have many friends (and a few family members) that haven’t said anything about my religious preference. I’m sure they would if I changed it to say “Atheist”, which would send out a notify.

I prefer to find ways to not discuss religion as it makes it easy to avoid any points of contention.

I choose to never resort to creating another account just to appease certain people. If they don’t like my religious view, then so be it.

Most of my friends are atheist or ‘other’ – but there are a few fairly religious ones, more constant ‘Praise Jesus/God is Good/Glurge types than fundies. There’s a small branch (more a twig by now) of my family made up mpstly of Jehova’s Witnesses, and one of them de-friended me after I said something mildly critical of one of his ignorant statuses.

The other day one of my less-than-skeptical, praise-Jebus, born-again friends posted that annoying UL Einstein absence of God video and I pointed out that it was, in fact, not true. Almost immediately my friend’s friend started “yelling” at me (lots of !!!’s) that I was intolerant and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t true (o_O). My friend didn’t seem to mind, we’ve never agreed about religion and are fine with that, but this girl just snapped. She then claimed to be an atheist too, but that she’d never be as rude (?) as me.

The “you’re being offensive!” issue is a biggy in my family – particularly with my sister-in-law. When I changed my “religious beliefs” on facebook to “Atheist,” I received a long letter from her about how offensive I was being and how I was deliberately trying to destroy our friendship by attacking her beliefs.

Yes, that’s all it took. Nevermind that she’s had “Islam – the way of the One True God as told by his Prophet (pbuh)” as her “religious beliefs” status for years. But no, simply saying “Atheism” with no reference to it being the “One True” worldview is just too much.

I see it as a kind of hostage situation because the tables are so uneven. She sends me chain letters talking about the glory of Allah and his miracles fairly frequently. When I one day wrote back to her asking that she stop sending me these things, there was a big fight about how she’s just sharing her beliefs and she’s totally not trying to convert me or change my mind so why am I being so unreasonable and sensitive?

Now the question is, how far will we go to maintain a relationship with a family member in this sort of situation. Well, in the examples I’ve already given, I went as far as just not talking about anything even close to religion with her – which, unfortunately, is a very broad subject that touches on pretty much every one of our combined interests. So for a while, we could talk only about clothes, husbands, and the potential babies we might have. The amount of time we spent talking to each other drastically decreased.

It decreased even further when she decided that my husband (her brother) and I don’t really love each other because I don’t serve him, cook for him, and treat him like an emotionally fragile imbecile and because we don’t feel a need to spend 100% of our time together. This was bearable but annoying. Then the kids topic was soiled when she developed the nasty tendency to believe that she knows everything there is to know about parenting and that any deviation from her ideal is abuse (keeping in mind that she is not a parent). When I told her that her many lectures on what constituted abuse would label my mother – someone I love and who has been very kind and generous to my sister-in-law in the past – as abusive and that this offended me. Again, I was being overly sensitive and attacking her for her beliefs. So then that was out.

And clothes… well, I like sewing them and she likes buying and wearing them. She likes these tight little things with weird ruffles and oversized plastic jewellery while I like more “conservative” fare. The overlap is very small.

So I gave up and we’ve stopped talking. The problem is that we’re still in the same family and that means seeing each other at family events. This means that I am now restricted in being able to talk with family members I get along with better. For example, my father-in-law and I share an interest in evolution. Two weeks ago, as I was telling him about Dawkins’ new book (which I’d recently read and thought was awesome), my sister-in-law (who was at the other end of the room and talking to someone else) burst into tears and ran upstairs. She later told my mother-in-law that I was attacking her beliefs and bullying her and would she please talk to me about my offensive behaviour.

This has all been a very long and frustrated rant and I am sorry for subjecting everyone to it. It’s something I am still trying to work out because I’m very much of the mind that family is of central importance. Ordinarily, I would say that you ought to try just about anything to keep at least a casual friendship with all family members, but I am now wondering if it is truly worthwhile in some cases – particularly those uneven cases where the family member in question is not interested in reciprocating.

I’m not sure that the person in the post is quite there yet. It seems that this cousin is being overly sensitive, but as long as she just doesn’t want religious discussions between them and doesn’t mind the poster having religious discussions with others, I think it would be worth just keeping the one account and agreeing to make the topic off-limits. But if it’s a case where, like mine, this family member has decided that everything is offensive and a direct/personal attack, it may be best to just go for the “once a year birthday/christmas card” sort of family relationship. Why bother working so hard to keep a friendship with someone who is not interested in returning it?

I, for one, am curious about the results of such an experiment.