Dear Abby: Evangelicals in my wife’s family don’t respect my beliefs

[lemonsharks]

 His own family isn’t very religious, so man resents his in-laws’ prayers for him and questions about his relationship with God.

DEAR ABBY: I am having trouble dealing with my wife’s extended family, who are mostly evangelicals. My family isn’t overly religious and some are atheists. Her family doesn’t think twice about asking me if I have a relationship with God, and have even declared that they are praying for me and my children. I chafe at these comments because I feel they do not respect our religious beliefs, as I do theirs.

This has been going on for all of the 40 years we’ve been married, and I’m ready to disassociate from them altogether. I do not want to be negative about their beliefs, but I should be entitled to mutual respect. Can you help, please? — LOSING PATIENCE IN CALIFORNIA

DEAR LOSING: I can try. One of the tenets of the faith of evangelicals is evangelizing — in other words, spreading the word about their beliefs. They feel that by doing this they are following their religion. When you are asked whether you have a relationship with God, your response should be that your relationship with God is as close as you need it to be, thank you — and please do not ask again.

When they tell you they are praying for you and your children, say thank you again. A little prayer on our behalf hurts no one, and may make them feel better about their own lives. Limit your exposure if you must, but shunning your in-laws isn’t the answer if your wife wants to maintain a relationship with them.

Comments

[lemonsharks]

Gotta say, if it was me in the LW's shoes there is a greater than 0 chance that I'd be taking every opportunity to make them as deeply uncomfortable as I possibly could. Trolling up to 11.

(Note to self, if possible do not date people who are still in contact with their evangelical family.)

Context: I grew up evangelical Christian and characterize Christianity as my abusive ex boyfriend.

[minoanmiss]

*snickers darkly and quietly fist bumps you*

[lemonsharks]

"I'll pray for you (to convert to Christianity)"

"Thanks, I'll make an offering to Zeus and pray for you to get better at hospitality"

[feldman]

*pours out a libation for this response*

[azurelunatic]

*raises a glass of something distinctly Bacchus-related*

[cereta]

A fellow student in one of my grad-level rhetoric classes wrote a very convincing paper that compared the language of the Bible to the language of abusive situations. The odd thing was, she was an evangelical who had clearly been mistreated in the name of religion, but had never seemed to cut the cord with that particular tradition. When asked what she would like to see happen as a result of her paper (a very common question in rhetoric classes), she talked about being able to respond to God's abusive language. A few of us suggested, as gently as we could, that maybe the answer was either (a) a less literal, more historical/rhetorical interpretation of the Bible and/or (b) maybe rethinking her conception of God (we all sensed that she wasn't nearly ready for "if being a Christian causes you so much pain, maybe don't be Christian anymore"). It was a deeply weird but very enlightening class session.

[lemonsharks]

Yeah, that's pretty much how my own deconversion went.

[minoanmiss]

heh, I think I wrote that essay in eleventh grade and then stared at it for awhile...

[jamoche]

"When you are asked whether you have a relationship with God"

They are looking for one specific answer, and anything else just encourages them.

[mommy]

Following this advice will only ramp things up, possibly to the harassment level. A new response that provides pushback against them means they've gotten a reaction from you, and that's just encouragement for them to shove their views at you even harder. Disassociating from the in-laws is the safer route.

[laurajv]

I am happy to ignore others praying for me/my kids/whatever....when they are doing so out of kindness. Like the department admin at my old workplace, who prayed for my brother when he was sick. It did no harm and was sincerely and kindly meant.

I feel like Abby is conflating THAT kind of praying for someone with the much meaner-spirited kind, where you basically tell someone you think they're a bad person who is going to hell but they'll pray for your mean ol' bad evil heart to be turned towards their God.

I'm an atheist raised atheist and have no notable spiritual life. I don't think either of the above prayers does anything. But the first kind is rather sweet and I think well of people who offer it; the second kind is nasty and I think poorly of people who offer it.

[fox]

As a half Jewish/half Puritan Unitarian with a Catholic side job, I agree with this comment.

[azurelunatic]

Yup.

[melannen]

LW, a lot of people who do that kind of evangelizing sincerely believe that if you do not share their faith, you are condemned to eternal torment, and that if they don't to everything they can to save you from that, your eternal pain is their fault.

There is no "I respect their faith and I'd like them to respect mine" in that situation. If you truly respected their faith, you would understand their fear for you, and let them work to convert you. If they respected your faith it would mean willingly condemning you to hell forever, which would be contempt for *you*.

With people who believe that you can't make them stop short of making them despise you enough that they're happy to see you rot in hell; the most you can do if you're lucky is get them to agree to only pray for you when you aren't around. (Sometimes you can do that, but it requires actual respect for the part of their faith that requires them to convert you. You have to come at them something like "I know you are trying to help me, but *reason* means that people evangelizing to me makes me more hostile to it. If you truly want me to convert, please stick to asking your God to bring me to faith some other way." and be willing to engage with their response to that. And even if you can pull that off it doesn't always work.)

And you can't respect their faith without agreeing with them that they have a duty to try to convert you. Their faith is built that way on purpose, to not allow peaceful coexistence with nonbelief. Accept this. You don't have to respect that part of their faith. Stop trying to show respect when you don't. When they get offensive in their attempts to proselytize, make it awkward as fuck, make it unpleasant for them. Either they'll stop doing it around you, or they'll cut you off and save you the trouble of doing it yourself.

[cereta]

*points up*

I've spent a lifetime studying the Bible and Christianity, both in school and independently (I like to say I read Biblical scholarship for funsies, but it is actually the truth). I also, frankly, enjoy a good argument up to a point. So I've had a LOT of arguments/debates/whatever about religion online. My very first flame was being called the Whore of Babylon over...something. Exodus, I think?

Anyway, I've run into this attitude a lot. One person likened it to seeing someone playing on the train tracks as a train approached. If they told you they didn't believe the train would hurt them, you wouldn't just say, "Oh, well," and walk away. You'd do everything in your power to get them off the tracks.

Now, of course, you can't physically compel someone to have faith the way you can pull them off of train tracks, although I sometimes wonder if some evangelicals would if they could. And part of me has a certain amount of sympathy for parents who genuinely believe that their child is going to hell for being an atheist/being gay/having an abortion, whatever. And much like the classmate I talked about above, rethinking how they view God and what they've been told are sins and the fate of people who commit those sins is just...not available to them. Like, even if they idea occurs to them, they reject it because they've been taught that those thoughts are infernal temptation and doubt.

So, yeah, some sympathy for the thoughts. Still get really annoyed by the action. I had a co-worker who was a Jehovah's Witness who kept trying to sneak stuff about Jesus into everyday conversation, and no amount of, "Yes, I know that story. So, how 'bout them Diamondbacks?" got her stop. I finally had to just snap at her, to let my aggravation show and tell her in no uncertain terms that I didn't want to discuss religion with her.

So, yeah, I disrespected her religion, because a core tenet, the core tenet of her religion is evangelism.* But that tenet was completely incompatible with my core principle of not wanting or needing to be preached at. She was disrespecting me, and the only way I could get her to stop was to stop respecting her.

*Which I've always thought was odd, because they also teach that only 144,000 people will make it to heaven, and I think these days they mostly believe that all those slots were full, so IDEK.

[lemonsharks]

Apparently the Watchtower Publishing House has been removing people from the 144k List in order to make room for their current and incoming Leadership Mans.

[minoanmiss]

you can't physically compel someone to have faith the way you can pull them off of train tracks, although I sometimes wonder if some evangelicals would if they could.

That depends on how hard one is capable of beating one's child, or how explicit a committment one is willing to demand of the starving man before feeding him. And so on.

*offers grain of salt to be taken with all my opinions on evangelism*

[cereta]

True. And you can certainly compel the performance of faith.

[melannen]

>> If they told you they didn't believe the train would hurt them, you wouldn't just say, "Oh, well," and walk away. You'd do everything in your power to get them off the tracks.

Yep.

Also complicated by the fact that the people doing the evangelizing often *do* get mean-spirited about it after awhile, not because they actually think you are a bad person who deserves hell, but if someone you cared about was standing on the train tracks, and every time you tried to get them to leave they rolled their eyes or acted like you were the one causing a problem by warning them, you, too, would probably get tetchy with them after awhile.

avoids a deeply inappropriate reference here about a single-plank bridge

I mean the actual problem is that they are part of an organization that is designed to isolate them from everyone that doesn't share the faith, and the best advice is probably to treat them the way you would anyone else you knew who was trapped in an abusive situation they weren't ready to admit was abusive. But you don't need to respect their faith as part of that process. You can respect them, and you can respect their right to practice their religion as they see fit, but you don't have to actually respect the parts of their belief system that cause harm and discord.

[green_grrl]

All I had to do was read the headline to know, “No, duh.”

[oursin]

Well, you can't really have a civilised debate about mutual respect in that situation. I am a bad, bad person and would roll my eyes and fluff out my hair and go full William Blake at his most batshit prophetical in The Everlasting Gospel:
THE VISION OF CHRIST that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.
....
He left His father’s trade to roam,
A wand’ring vagrant without home;
And thus He others’ labour stole,
That He might live above control.
The publicans and harlots He
Selected for His company,
And from the adulteress turn’d away
God’s righteous law, that lost its prey.’
Was Jesus chaste? or did He
Give any lessons of chastity?
(It goes on, it's quite long)