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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a different poster but was also raised as an atheist. My family relocated from a larger city to a small town in the Midwest when I was 10. Basically everyone went to church. Kids went to youth group, sometimes multiple times a week. There were camps and slumber parties at churches and holiday things. I didn't participate in any of those things because my parents were not religious.

I experienced a lot of intrusive personal questions from adults (parents of friends, coworkers of my dad's, teachers) about my family's religion. Lots of attempts by parents, other kids, and several teachers to convert me to Christianity. Repeatedly being invited to church and then told that I didn't need to tell my parents about it. Friends who would say, "You should sleep over on Saturday and then we can go to church in the morning" without asking if that was something I was interested in or comfortable with.

From my side, as a weird kid who had always been interested in religion in general, I would probably have really enjoyed going to a lot of that stuff, particularly the social stuff that it felt like EVERYONE ELSE was doing. But there was no way in that town to just go to one lock-in - I tried that and spent weeks trying to get the girl I attended the lock-in with to stop proselytizing to me. There was a ton of social pressure to conform and people who didn't definitely heard about it.

As an adult, I can see the proselytizing as part of the mission of Christianity. I also don't and didn't think these people were bad people, nor do I think that most of them intended to be exclusionary and apply pressure in ways that felt bad. I understand that the intention was to be welcoming and enthusiastic. But the way I experienced those things, as a child, was not positive. It did not feel supportive and welcoming. It felt like in order to have community support, I had to become a Christian. I just did not believe, and I did not feel like it was okay to pretend that I believed when I did not.

I do not identify as an atheist at this time in my life, but I also do not believe in a god in the way that Christians do. I don't talk about this often because it makes Christians very uncomfortable to even call their god "their god" or "a god."[/quote]

Yes, we have heard the story of how you were tricked into attending youth group at a church and they had a band to lure the kids in. Just awful. And don’t get you started on the free doughnuts and coffee churches use to lure in unwary families…it’s extremely deceptive. One minute you are eating a doughnut- the next, you are being baptized against your will and your kids are singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” in a Sunday School classroom and being forced to collect pennies for hungry children in Africa. When will it end?[/quote]
I'm the one who shared my experience (on a different thread many months ago) about my friend's weird evangelical rock band service. I'm not PP here who shared their story above. I wasn't even raised atheist. I belonged to a Christian church, but I guess I just wasn't devout enough for my evangelical friend, who felt the need to try to convert me to her particular brand of Christianity.

As PP outlined beautifully, the proselytizing, even when it is meant with love and caring and welcome, can be alienating, especially for children who do not fully understand the ins and outs of the evangelical mission. It can feel like you are being attacked for your different beliefs (or lack thereof).[/quote]

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