Why Are This Many Atheist Scientists Taking Their Children to Church?

Hmm. I don’t know how the questions were phrased (the article is not available right now), but my atheist family attended six ‘religious services’ in the past year -four weddings and two funerals. It had nothing to do with wanting to share religious traditions, and everything to do with supporting our friends and families.

Hemant, you seem to forget that many churches and religious traditions wholeheartedly accept science. Many don’t force a dogma or specific belief system on the congregation. You always seem to feel the need to lump all religion under the category of “fundamentalism.” I love your blog, but I have to say that you have a close-minded view. 

My atheist father remained closeted even to his children (my sister and me) throughout our childhoods, and even dragged us to church even though we hated it. He was giving us a chance to make our own decisions, I suppose, but I’m not sure I gained much from it, other than a heightened hostility toward the church. Maybe that’s what he wanted.

Most, sure. But certainly not all. Again, you are lumping every church together.

Community – that’s what’s missing from most atheists’ world.  Every week, theists gather to support and strengthen their belief in superstitions.  But atheists usually don’t meet that often to support and the strengthen reliance on reality.  I’m a member of a Unitarian church and I have encouraged my fellow atheists to consider coming to this church, even if they don’t become members.  Most Unitarians are genuinely interested in discussing theology and reality and welcome atheists’ contributions to their converstions.

They’re an exception. (What are their beliefs?)

Is this “study” any more credible than the Duke prayer studies?

(I think it was a Rice professor who went toe-to-toe with a
 congressman in a committee hearing last week.)

Hemant, 

One of the gravest mistakes many freethinkers, atheists, and non-believers make is failing to imprint their kids with an evidence-based cosmology. 

My wife, Connie Barlow (an atheist science writer) and I have addressed more than 500 secular, non-religous, or Unitarian Universalist groups over the last decade. I’ve had literally dozens of humanists and atheists come up to me after one of our programs and say something like, “I raised my kid a good freethinker and now s/he is an evangelical! What’s worse, s/he’s raising my grandchildren as fundamentalists! What did I do wrong?!” 

What they did wrong (in most cases, I believe) was mistake imprinting with indoctrination.

See “Imprinting Is NOT Indoctrination”: http://thegreatstory.org/imprinting.pdf
My intro to the above: http://www.thankgodforevolution.com/node/2056
Podcast: http://evolutionaryevangelists.libsyn.com/webpage/32_imprinting_is_not_indoctrination

Keep up the great blogging!

~ Michael

Interesting. I just went out and did a quick study of the Unitarian Universalist church. They seem to be almost what I imagine a weekly gathering of Friendly Atheist minions would be like – a very diverse group eager to discuss morals, beliefs, and spirituality, but without ascribing those things to any deity unless you want to. Correct me if I’m wrong on that. Is God mentioned or prayed to during the sermons? I’m genuinely curious and not trying to set up an attack here.

There are seven principles which Unitarian Universalist congregations affirm and promote:The inherent worth and dignity of every person;Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Too bad there’s no vaccine for it.

I’m with you on this one. I don’t see religion as any different than homeopathy. I don’t wan’t my kids to “decide for themselves” about ideas that are clearly wrong.

Hear Hear ABN! You can imagine many other “ideas” that one would not want their children to be exposed to even in the fairness-of-disclosure mode of these 17%. 

Which is why I think it’s a great alternative to mainstream religion. All of the morals without any of the damage.

That explains Pres. Obama’s religiosity. It’s Michelle’s doing.

No. Just, no. This is what my parents did to me, raising me religious – why should they let me “decide for myself” when they already knew that every other idea out there was WRONG! Do you know what that does to kids? You have to let your kids grow up and make their own decisions, and while you can say “mommy and daddy think this and here’s why” you CAN’T say “and therefore you must think it too.” That will just end up badly for all involved. Please. Don’t do this to your kids. 

Ecklund has a history of not representing data on this subject very well. See e.g. www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/

They missed two of the most obvious; Weddings and Funerals. Most weddings and funerals take place in churches, with the full pomp and circumstances of religious services. Another reason is that they want to expose them to the religion so they can go home and discuss why the whole notion is as silly as the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Which is what I did.

I disagree.  As soon as they know enough about the scientific method and dilution to see that homeopathy is insane, go ahead and expose them to it.  

Kids should absolutely be exposed to wrong ideas that are prevalent in the world… as soon as they also have the tools to understand why those ideas are wrong.

That’s her problem.

Like most journal articles, it sits behind a paywall and is available only to those with institutional access, i.e. it’s locked in the ivory tower. You might try getting access through your local public library, many have online access to journal article databases.

I skimmed over the article and it isn’t pretty. As many comments point out, going to a religious service more than once a year tells us nothing about their actual religious practices. This could very well be Christmas and Easter to please the grandparents. The authors of the paper appear completely oblivious to this possibility, neither the word “Christmas” nor the word “Easter” appear in the paper. This alone is damning. Yet, as you will see, we should really be talking more along the lines of Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah.

The article is not positivist, but interpretivist.  They did not code the text of the interviews, they simply tell a story using quotes from them. There is no statistical analysis in the article to show that these quotes are actually representative. The only table in the entire paper is a set of descriptive statistics. This table is extremely revealing.  First of all, it tells us nothing about who is going to religious services. The quoted statistic about religious attendance is only included in the text of the article, the table is not broken down by parent vs. non-parents. They present descriptive statistics on a sample that includes 79 atheists, but their interpretation focuses only 34 of these 79 have children. So while I am going to precede to break down the numbers based on these 79 atheists, it is important to note that their conclusions about parents are only based on a sample of 34 atheist parents.

They do not ask the kind of religious services that the respondent attends, we can only infer the whether or not atheists go and the kind of religious services that they are going to based on their “current religious preference” in the descriptive statistics. Of the 79 atheists that they look at, only 3 are Christians (they measure atheism and agnosticism based on questions about beliefs, not self-identity, so it is possible to be an atheist Christian). On the other hand, 14 are Jewish. The numbers are slightly less lopsided for the 87 agnostics, with 18 Jewish and 16 Christian, but they are still primarily looking at secular Jews. Both the media presentation and the intro/conclusion of the article are presented in general terms. However, both the bulk of their sample and the bulk of the quotes they selected are Jewish. If the findings had been framed as such, perhaps they would not be so surprising, but that is not how they are framed.

The authors of this paper are either incompetent (my vote) or intellectually dishonest. Anyone with training in statistics can take one look at their one table of descriptive statistics and immediately spot that they are actually interpreting interviews of scientists who are primarily Jewish atheists. Hemant appears to have been had by the public relations folks at Rice University. He asks the question: “Why Are This Many Atheist Scientists Taking Their Children to Church?” The answer is that out of 79 atheists, there are only two who identify their religious preference as protestant and one that identifies as Roman Catholic. Because the one table they provide is descriptive statistics of their entire sample, not just the parents, it’s not clear that all three are parents, but even 3 out of 79 is not worthy of the question. Very few atheists are actually taking their children to Church.

Hemant, I want to preference my final comment with the fact that I love your site. Most of your posts are awesome. I appreciate all of the hard work you put into this site. But that said, you have consistently shown a lack of skepticism, a lack of scholarship, and a willingness to play fast and loose with academic research. As I point out in the comments here

(see Reality Based Community comments) you failed to be skeptical and failed to correct the record about another post you did on what in fact appears to be a made up study. You liked the story it told because it was flattering to atheists in that the made up findings that were not flattering to religious people, but you never actually looked for a publication of the actual research (at which point you should have quickly realized that it was fake). You’re like students of mine that do not read a book their research paper relies on, but instead work from book reviews (although, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never had a student work from a review of a made up article like you did). Similarly here, you do not appear to have actually read the article. As I said in my last post, “While I recognize that a blog post is not a piece of academic writing,
whenever you write about scientific experiments you venture into the
academy where you cannot cite Psychology Today. More to the point: as a
reader you should never trust a description of an experiment that does
not provide a citation to a peer-reviewed publication of the
experiment’s findings.” The same applies to press releases about studies by sociologists.

Your lack of skepticism regarding academic studies is a disservice to your readers. In both the case of the made up study and in the case of this study, you have updated the post telling readers that they should take the findings with “a grain of salt.” Simply put, you need to take the lid off of your saltshaker.

I usually just send money in a card. Can’t sit through that trash. Certainly wouldn’t subject my grandchildren to this either. Last funeral I went to was for my brother. No religious trash there.

Or, sadly, political necessity.

You’re right, they do appear to have coded whether someone made a reference to going to a religious service, but they never explicitly ask the question: “We did not ask respondents directly about their
involvement in religious organizations (or lack thereof). Rather this information was generally volunteered in response to questions about religious and spiritual practices as well as how religion comes up in their current families” (Ecklund and Lee 2011, 732). While I believe their explanation that it came up organically in the interview, it’s important to actually ask the question explicitly. From the questions they describe, the parents appear to have been asked more questions (questions about parenthood presumably being skipped for non-parents), so the finding could be entirely an artifact of parents having more opportunities than non-parents to mention religious services. It does not matter whether this explanation is true, only that is sufficiently plausible to represent a serious design flaw in their study.

More to the point, “strictly speaking” is the key word because they do not code the interviews for various statements on spirituality, spousal influence, and moral community to back up their claims about these categories.

News flash: 1 in 6 nonreligious scientists sometimes know people who occasionally get married or die.   Or 1 in 6 are married to a religious person who makes them go to church.  Ho-freaking-hum.

Hell, if funerals count, then I’d qualify, and I’m about as anti-theistic as they come!!!

We’ve visited churches with our kids, but I’d call it “research”.  My kids are growing up surrounded by religious believers, and the more they understand about what these people believe and what their churches are telling them, the better equipped my kids will be to deal with them.  I also consider a good knowledge of world religions as a good “vaccination”.  Someday when an evangelist tries to convert one of my kids by telling them how “special and different” their church is, my kids will probably just snort and talk about all the other religions that make the same claim.

Our UU has a sunday school program for the 7th graders called “neighboring faiths” which is a full year of studying world religions and visiting services.  Best thing ever, and I wish they’d offer it to the adults too, because a lot of them could really use it.

And I agree, in the sort of study we are taling about, none of this should count as “attending worship services.”

I teach ‘freethought’ to my kids.  They have freedom of thought.  It’s pretentious of me to think that my thought has any superiority over another just because I feel that I have scientific supporting evidence and logic to back it.  That is the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ argument and I just choose not to go there with my children or anyone else.  My children understand the foundation of living secular as this is how they were raised; however, now that they are teens they have a lot of questions and are becoming more ‘rebellious’ against what I’ve been telling them all these years.  Not because they don’t believe me because they WANT to decide for themselves.  They WANT it to be THEIR system of beliefs (or non-beliefs) and not just because mom told them this.  They don’t want to be indoctrinated.  I have to respect that.  And I do.  We attend various religious events – Christian, UU, and even Jewish.  It is educational for me and for them and then afterward we talk about it.  Regardless of the supernatural lining, the morality and values are similar to what we teach at home.  I am  proud of my kids for wanting to take control of it and not depending on my thoughts in which to decide where to base theirs.  THIS is FREETHOUGHT.

It really varies from congregation to congregation. My mom is an atheist UU, and I have been to a few services over the years. In her church, they generally focus our common humanity and avoid addressing theism vs. atheism directly, accommodating both.

But they sing (secularized) hymns — I hate that part.

Amen.