This is part of a series of guest posts on the topic of mixed faith marriages (MFM) from a variety of mental health professionals, coaches, podcasters, counselors and regular readers offering advice from their own experiences.
Guest post by Amy. Human Being. Mother of Two. Deep Thinker. Granddaughter of a Philosopher. (Main image by Smart on Unsplash)
Table of Contents
Traditions, structures and gender assignments go out the window during a faith transition.
The “I’m in Charge” Paradigm
What matters from my story is that I lost my faith in the existence of God, and so faith in God-related topics (anything one bears testimony of at church) was also lost as collateral fallout. At best, I hope for many things (including the existence of God and an afterlife) and try to make informed decisions based on (and limited by) that hope.
With God maybe/maybe not around to be in charge and have the final say in a lot of details, I was left in charge of myself as the judge & jury of decisions on trial and the change agent in how I lived my life. To paraphrase Dennis E. Taylor, I was left to be the project manager, project janitor, and project go-for of my life (a serious “The Bob” fan here, not gonna lie).
I’m the one with the greatest amount of skin in the decisions I make, not God. Funny enough, according to our theology (and my heritage), I had always been in charge of myself. So this should have felt like another Tuesday rather than a massive paradigm shift.
The first rule I came up with was, “God May Fail, but Charity Never Faileth”. I chose over and over again to make charity the center of the conversation – I was charitable towards myself in not judging myself or making decisions prematurely. I was as charitable to others as I could be, deliberately reaching for common ground and understanding that my apparent betrayal was a threat to their existence on some levels. I looked for opportunities to be a good human and serve others as a potential way to get to know God better (rather than the reverse situation of my commitment to others being the fruit of a commitment to God).
We are cautioned to judge righteous judgment, but I no longer think we know what that means. The older I get, the more righteous judgment looks like taking others at their word, that they are sharing a truth with me that has important information I should take literally. Righteous judgment looks more like informed consent and there are larger areas of people’s lives where I am not called to make value judgements or get involved. Righteous judgment does not innately equal an across-the-board boundary enforcer.
“She’s In Charge” Paradigm Shift
For my spouse, “Who’s in Charge?” was the valid question.
The nature of my faith transition made it clear that in my perception, “God wasn’t in Charge” was the framework for a feature of my narrative, not a temporary bug.
My husband had a previously unchallenged, unstated cultural assumption that as the presider he was in charge of me, as the head of our household [with the caveats that “Amy is bossy” and that Amy wouldn’t actually obey him just because, explicitly stated and re-stated as needed] . There was an unchallenged assumption that holding the Priesthood endowed him with increased decision-making accuracy that made him right in standoffs between him and me (except in the areas where of course because he was a “dumb male” to be pampered and tolerated for hardheadedness and stupidity [that aren’t clearly defined in real time]).
In a sense, my husband married me because I was bossy and confident (and a nice-looking redhead). He married me because I could be in charge of myself and take care of him (while also being presided over properly). NOTE: He is still around and I am still bossy and confident (mostly) after the post-faith transition. I am now closer to a brunette than the redhead of past hair-dying days. I am also flirting with going all gray/silver, like an ageless wise one (the gray is coming in already so…).
We are further into the differentiation phase, where his narrative doesn’t need to read my faith transition as “Amy is rebelling and won’t do the religious things, when will she be back to herself?” and can accept the narrative that “Amy can’t do religious things because of rational reasons”.
It took an intertwined faith transition and a mid-life transition (formerly labeled crisis) to assert to me the weight of choice & accountability and how much I needed to to identify, codify, and re-frame the most important values and themes for my personal narrative.
“We’re In Charge” Paradigm Shift:
About Us
My husband accidentally added insult to injury after one of our more brutal fights in the early days of my faith transition. As part of the relationship repair process he shared with me that God had told him to stay with me. He meant well.
He was trying to say, “I was so stubborn that it took what I perceive as an act of God to create a catalyst to change my thinking, change my ways and repent”. But what I originally heard was, “It took an act of God” (aka a leap of faith that Amy the heretical doubter/skeptic cannot make anymore) to bring my husband back to the conversational table (with an implied question, “what about next time?”).
In all honesty, I still fear the “what if God doesn’t deliver next time?” question. I console myself that my husband and I are in charge of creating a relationship where God doesn’t need to intervene BECAUSE I am uncertain about the nature of God being an entity existing to intervene. We can do the work ourselves with human tools just in case God doesn’t/won’t/can’t be relied on to intervene. We can empower ourselves rather than waiting around for God to pour down power, revelation, and inspiration to us.
I think the shift in the balance of relational power that a faith transition like mine imposes is hard on a lot of marriages. It is scary letting go of the known power dynamic and knowing who is in charge, and shifting to we’re the ones left in charge – how are we going to better our fates ethically in the here and now?
The Parents
For us, my faith transition is nestled about 18 months after the birth of our youngest (she’s 7 now), about 5 months after we started getting information from the child development experts about our oldest (now 14) with an atypical developmental calendar, and at the same time as my husband’s biggest bout of depression to date.
Sometimes back then it felt like we were patching the airplane we were flying with parts that were already on fire. And there have been many “you have got to be kidding me” points when we compared the dumpster fire in front of us with the pristine instructions on that theoretical instruction page that is the church handbook or the “what worked for me” chats (that weren’t built for our model of airplane for sure).
For the most part, things have cooled down so that the parts we are playing with aren’t on fire anymore (thank you worldly counseling!). The set of instructions we follow now was mostly written by ourselves, and marginalized individuals like us who wrote a few tips and tricks about brain wiring, trauma, and neurodiversity.
I wish I could point you to a master reference of most useful things – but I can’t. We learned that behavior is communication from my child’s social worker. We got a referral to a good counselor from a case manager. We collected a series of acronyms (like Pokemon – only cooler) that offered useful tips. We found multiple models of different frameworks for making decisions that myself and others in my family used to cope with circumstances. Robert Fulghum’s and Brene Brown’s writings. I got my business administration degree in healthcare management – and the classes on “Ethics” were actually super helpful to me defining a lot of values for me personally. I have worked at creating an environment of “Informed Consent” that equalized the power dynamics in how I approached conversations with my children.
The Kids
We are teaching our children that they are in charge (with us) of our family in a weave of intentions, actions, thoughts, imagination, meaning, individuality and community. Another blogger at this site put it best in a blog post entitled, “Kids These Days”:
“… we taught our children to respect themselves, to draw boundaries, [and] recognize abuse…”
“They believed us when we told them they were valuable–too valuable to let abuse masquerade as fidelity.”
“They see the mess and, instead of fighting each other to get to the top of the heap, they opt out of the scramble.”
“Why don’t we… work on consent, community, and care in our real lives?”
I can say that I am explicitly teaching our children to respect themselves, to draw effective & meaningful boundaries, and to call out abuse.
I can say that I am shouting to our 14 year old from the rooftops about their personal priceless value and that I want them to move past abuse and traumatic situations, not pick up habits of abusing others, and learn to react to abuse appropriately. The cardinal sin I am committing here is listening instead of telling. I bait with brother-of-Jared-like “How..” questions instead of God-like towering etched stone commandments.
My child impresses me with the number of times they engage in the situations calmly with words of “I think this is what happened”… in elevated, frustration-saturated situations. My child is co-cleaning the mess instead of getting into the fight (or holding onto the fight. Fights contain information identifying “high stakes” in progress). My child is opting out of the scramble for who’s right in those situations.
My children and I are new to the explicit work of consent, creating community, and taking care in our authentic, intertwined lives. It’s messy here – but it’s the mess of creation, not the mess of destruction. To be fair, the line between creation and destruction is a moving target recalculated as the value of what the creation costs are is defined and subtracted from the value of what is created.
As for my husband, he is embracing his inner nerd, and entering into his roles as genius wizard co-creator and sensitive master of ceremonies who is married to a bossy, smart, topic-oriented walking database/subject matter expert, and familial architect.
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This post is part of a series about navigating Mixed Faith Marriages. Find more from this series here.
7 Responses
Beautiful essay. Thank you.
“work of consent, creating community, and taking care” I love that you explicitly listed all of these important aspects of good family relationships. It really sums up a huge part of the “what do you do?” part of parenthood. Those have also all been topics that are on my mind as I’ve interviewed at a start-up company and they want to begin with a positive culture.
I’m in the middle of reading “Tabernacles of Clay” by Taylor Petrey. I think the hardest part for me emotionally has been to see how the church was deliberately advocating an authoritarian, patriarchal model of family living as the ideal. High pressure to conform to community ideals, no consensus building. It takes time to learn and name other ways.
Bryan Brody’s original post had that framework that left an impression on me. I was also listening to and thinking about K.C. Davis’s “The Art of Keeping House While Drowning” that introduced the framing of “care tasks” and “community tasks” instead of “chores”.
Some “chores” are actually “care tasks” (community and/or interchangeable with self) that may require a degree of that most precious commodity – “attention”. In this case, changing my language about “what my children need to do/to pay attention to” was to become more literally accurate, and changed the focus of those conversations.
My children have a love/hate relationship that they get “community task credit” for going to the library and participating in the activity or as well as taking out the trash, “care task credit” for bathing or setting out their clothes the night before. They hate that I ask them “what do you need to reregulate yourself, to take care of yourself” when they want to “talk trash” or “tattle” to get their sibling in trouble, and/or get into arguments with me (and of course their siblings).
They are morally outraged that I am dissolving the “purity of their opinion” with the “lovingkindness focus on self-care” and community care”. We have so many conversations that go, “You are 100% accurate in your assessment AND we don’t necessarily have to say that out loud because what is in your accurate assessment isn’t something that is something they can change right now (sibling hasn’t developed that far yet, for example) – and you have to figure out how to co-exist with that”.
Bryn – not Bryan, sorry!
I loved reading about your journey and your insights. Like you said, it is hard when authoritative structures crumble and you’ve got to carve out new understandings of ethics and relational power. “Mess of creation” is a lovely way to put it.
Thank you for exploring the mixed faith relationship journey from your perspective of a female whose faith has changed. It seems we don’t hear as much from this angle and I appreciate your sharing your experience, your approach, and your insights.
It seems that a female can sometimes be in a particularly vulnerable place when she undergoes a faith transition and is vulnerable to the possibility of a divorce she doesn’t want or didn’t expect, with sometimes devastating financial consequences for her and sometimes her children.
This is particularly an issue in a religious setting where women have historically been encouraged to remain home with their children or work in less demanding (and often lower paying) jobs so they can be available to their children and husbands.
(Young women in the church are still encouraged in their meetings to choose careers that don’t pay more or outshine those of their potential husbands—this may not be part of their official curriculum, but it is definitely taught, without correction, in many areas.)
Much gratitude to you for sharing your experience.
I agree about the financial dimension. In my personal circumstances, I am the primary breadwinner and the executive function mover & and shaker for my family, so that didn’t matter so much.
The overarching concept of “gender based self-sacrifice” is intriguing to me. How much can an individual “be available” for others? What does “repayment” for that “availability” look like? How specialized should our “caregiving be” [From school individual education plans, to youth group background checks, to what we expect from and compensate our teachers for, etc. – and that’s just the schooling for kids – not including doctors, counselors, and a variety of professional fields.]