Mitchell - Growing up Godless: a parents guide to raising kids without religion

In autumn of 2005, I floated the idea of a book on nonreligious parenting to my agent. He said he wasnt convinced there was a market for such a thing, but he was willing to shop it around to publishers.

Unfortunately, most of the publishers said the same thing. When asked why they thought there was no market, their reasoning was impeccable:

If there were a market, there would already be books for it.

I was stunned. I wasnt trying to convince them to publish Antique Dental Drill Collecting for Left-handed Capricorns. I was proposing a title aimed at the fastest-growing belief segment in the United States. Even conservative estimates suggested that the population of nonreligious Americans had grown to about 40 million by that time (about 12 percent of the overall population), and no fewer than 810 million were raising children without religion. But they were doing so with virtually no published resources, largely because publishers saw the lack of existing books as a reason not to publish new ones.

Contrast this with a dozen major titles on Jewish parenting, despite the fact that only about 2 percent of the U.S. population (roughly 6.5 million people) identifies as Jewish.

Eventually, we did find a publisher for Parenting Beyond Belief. It became one of their best-selling titles ever, along with the 2009 sequel, Raising Freethinkers. Nonreligious parenting was finally on the map.

Since then, theres been an explosion of secular parenting blogs, websites, discussion boards, and local groups. But aside from Andrew Parkss Between a Church and a Hard Place, a unique personal narrative, weve gone back to almost complete radio silence on the bookshelves.

Thats why I was delighted to hear about Growing Up Godless, Deborah Mitchells thoughtful and intelligent addition to the conversation. Though there is overlap, our approaches are not identical. She covers many of the same issues Ive addressed but brings a fresh perspective, new angles, and different solutions. There are the same struggles with parental objectivity, grappling with morality and mortality, extended family, helping kids deal with pressure from religious peers, and generally helping the family find its way in a religiously inflected world.

Nonreligious parents tend to read skeptically. They arent looking for authoritative pronouncements to follow word for word; theyre looking for ideas and suggestions from people whove encountered the same issues and thought carefully about them. They arent confused by differences of approach. On the contrary, it gives them more options to consider, which is always a good thing.

Of course, its also great to see the ways in which our approaches are hand-in-glove, like our shared enthusiasm for the idea of teaching religion in schoolsone that tends to raise quite a few atheist eyebrows. And Deborahs reasons for liking the idea are right in sync with my own. It has to be done right, of course, and thats a tall order. But its not a coincidence that the UK has religious education in schools and is highly secular, while Americans can be breathtakingly ignorant of the tenets of even their own religions, not to mention other religionsand tend to be deeply faithful. Knowledge is a good thing.

So welcome to the secular parenting bookshelf, Deborah. Heres to adding even more voices in the years to come.

Dale McGowan