President Barack Obama's Mom Did Religious Education Right
Obama was taught to treat religion as 'a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.'
You may love or hate President Barack Obama, or, like me, perhaps you acknowledge his faults while still appreciating his good ideas. Either way, one thing is certain: his mother knew what she was doing when it came to teaching him about religious matters.
Right after I graduated from UC Santa Barbara with my degrees in English and Religious Studies, I got a job in downtown Los Angeles at a legal newspaper. For the first few months, I commuted from S.B. to L.A., which was about three hours each way. I listened to a lot of audiobooks on those drives, and one of them was The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Obama.
The part that stood out most to me, as someone who had recently obtained a degree in comparative religious studies, was when Obama was describing his spiritual past and the evolution of his Christian faith.
Obama says he “was not raised in a religious household,” and emphasizes his mother’s skepticism when it came to the faithful.
“My mother's own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of the world's people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal damnation—and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary.”
So, from this, one may conclude that Obama’s mother taught him only negative things about religion. But that’s not true. He continues:
“This isn't to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world's great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part—no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways—and not necessarily the best way—that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.”
THIS IS IT. This is the best way to handle religious education of children, in my humble opinion. Of course, it’s possible that your child will end up religious. But if they do, they will be educated, understanding, and informed about their options. This is exactly what I tried to do with the publication of my first kids’ book series, made up of The Belief Book, The Book of Gods, and The Book of Religions.
Stay Reasonable!
David G. McAfee
This should be the default. I'd have had a much different childhood had that been the case. Thank you for sharing.