Check in - Christian and proud. Sick and tired of these idiots who give us a bad name

[hunter]

87. My mom finds Paul much more than "annoying," and is outspoken about it.

When I was a kid discussions about religion, within our family, or within any Christian community our family hadn't yet been expelled from, were fraught with danger.

My mom is the sort of person who always says what she thinks to anyone. She'd argue with the Pope. She'll argue with God.

Many of her ancestors had landed in the U.S. "Wild West" because they were pacifists and heretics escaping Europe and the U.S. Civil War. They ended up being non-Mormons in what became Mormon territory. My mom's dad, went so far as to be a Conscientious Objector during World War II. They gave him a choice: prison or building Liberty and Victory ships. He was a welder, he built ships. He also got beaten by the police for protesting the Japanese internment.

I live in a very matriarchal family. My great grandmas were Wild West fierce. The men in our family respect the religion of their wives.

Starting school I was a Jehovah's Witness. My mom was fiercely rebelling against the Catholic Church at the time, she'd once wanted to be a nun, but an encounter with a leering, smoking, drinking priest turned her away from that path. She met my dad, they married, and had lots of kids.

Being the kid who sat out the Pledge added to my aura of weirdness. My fourth grade teacher went so far as to use me as an example of religious freedom in the U.S.A.. I think she meant well, but all those eyes on me, I had to run away.

My mom got kicked out of the Jehovah's Witnesses for her outspoken participation in politics, and then we were Quaker. Quakers could listen respectfully to my mom and then move on without fireworks.

I live in a liberal Catholic Community. Our Parish was strongly against the war in Iraq and is very strongly supportive of immigrant's civil rights. My wife and I raised our kids Catholic and I don't feel bad about that. As adults our kids are the same sort of heretics as everyone in our family because they were never taught to respect certain sorts of "authority" or to passively accept any kind of punishment, either real, or as a threat.

"Questioning authority" in our family has never been a sin.