When My Young Daughter Asked If God Is Just a Story, Here's Why I Said Yes
"Tell me about God," my daughter said one afternoon on the way home from preschool.
A minute earlier we'd been engaged in a very intense Taylor Swift sing-along, but there are no softball questions from this kid. "Well," I said, as I gathered my thoughts and turned down the radio, "God is a story some people believe, kind of like how Santa is a story some people believe." (That's right, we don't teach Santa at our house either.)
"Some people think God is a man or a woman who made the world and who sees and knows everything happening in it," I went on. An extreme oversimplification, I recognize, but it was the best introduction I could offer a 3-year-old in that moment.
"Do you think God is just a story?"
As an atheist leaning toward being an agnostic, I answered, "I do, but you can believe whatever you want, and that's totally okay with me."
My husband and I don't go out of our way to shield our daughter from religion - tolerance and inclusivity are very important to us. She attends an ecumenical preschool loosely affiliated with a Christian church (because their program is fantastic), she participated in her first Passover Seder days after her birth, and she volunteered with me not long ago to help clean up a mosque in our community after it was vandalized.
As she gets older, we'll continue to familiarize our daughter with various belief systems - the same way we make an effort to expose her to other cultures. And we'll support her no matter how her beliefs may evolve.
We live in the northern region of the Bible Belt, in a state where 83% of the population is "absolutely certain" or "fairly certain" that God exists, according to PEW data. We're asked from time to time by peers or acquaintances how, without the compass of religion, we'll teach our daughter to have character or act morally. But morality - whether intrinsic or extrinsic - doesn't hinge on the threat or promise of an afterlife or of being saved. In fact, if that's the only reason someone has for being a good person, that feels troubling to me.
We talk often with our child about what it means to care for others and for ourselves, what it means to be part of a community, and how our words and actions affect those around us. We talk about how to support others in need, and what it takes to be good stewards of our neighborhood and the environment. Likewise, secular moral frameworks like humanism and consequentialism have long countered the notion that we can't be ethical beings unless we believe in God as well.
But it's true that religion offers comforts I sometimes wish I could share with my daughter. My mom passed away a decade and a half before I became a mother, so when my preschooler asks what happens to us when we die, I'm tasked with teaching her how to find meaning in death without religion. "Our bodies return to the Earth," I've told her - something akin to science's version of reincarnation; I believe this is one of the small ways we perhaps remain connected to those we leave behind.
As she gets older and is inevitably faced with difficult realities like the mortality of her own parents, maybe that answer will be enough for her or maybe it won't. Our job will have been only to show her how to think critically about religion - and about everything else, too - and then to form opinions, based on what feels right, about those topics for herself.
