An Agnostic Talks to Her Children About God

I am a religious Jew, married to a rabbi and active in my congregation. I am also a research psychologist of religion and an agnostic. I realize this may sound confusing (or confused), but after years of deliberations, I made my peace with God’s possible nonexistence.

Then three children entered the picture, and peace flew out the window.

“Mommy, where did God hatch from?” Yarden asked after learning in preschool that all living things are born. Noga, my first grader, came home upset from school, saying: “Dina said God didn’t make people. Her daddy told her people came from monkeys. I told her maybe she came from a monkey but I sure didn’t. Wasn’t I right, Mommy?” The simplest yet most challenging question came from Ma’ayan, my eldest: “Mom, do you believe in God?”

I was perplexed to find that my usual parental truth compass was not so helpful in replying to these questions. For one, I don’t know the truth myself. For another, I’m not sure if it really is all about truth: Is a 3-year-old capable of understanding intangibility? Can a 6-year-old accept randomness? Should I spare my 9-year-old the journey I laboriously traversed?

Moreover, I know that kids’ questions about God can be driven by various motivations. While children often really do want to know, at other times they are seeking reassurance that their theory-building attempts to explain the world are acceptable. They may also ask about God out of a need for comfort, especially when stressed. While the first motivation may prompt sharing knowledge and the second listening, the third could involve bracketing one’s personal truth. I remember sitting as a camp counselor with an 8-year-old whose mother, a single parent, was dying of cancer. The child asked me what happens to people after they die. Complex theodicies or religious doubts were not in order; the child needed to know that she wouldn’t be left alone in the world. So I told her that friends and family would be there for her as would her mother and God, and hoped I was right.

But when my own children came along and I found myself encouraging them to pray and anthropomorphizing God, I realized my own needs were at work too. For many doubters, the further we move away from childhood, the more we yearn for innocence, that unspoiled state of trust in the world. Since many of us have lost that option for ourselves, we may try to find it through our children. Sometimes we teach them things we don’t believe in just because we want so badly to see that sweet innocence at work and experience unquestioning faith, if only by proxy.

I’ll never forget how excited I was when Ma’ayan lost her first tooth. In my eagerness to provide the full experience, I wrote her a glitter-covered letter from the tooth fairy. Ma’ayan replied with fervent request for a pair of wings. As I found myself embroiled in a correspondence under my fairy alias, I began to wonder why on earth I was lying to my daughter. It seemed an almost sacred duty to make her believe in something I knew well to be nonsense. The inevitable corollary: is God a sort of cultural tooth fairy that adults pass on to their children once they can no longer hold on to him themselves?

Recently, I spoke to first graders about God, and asked them to write down questions. Their cognitive sophistication ranged from “Do you have suction cups?” (they had been learning about octopuses) to “If you are a spirit, how can you make things which people can touch?” Uncertain where to aim my answers, I offered none, instead describing ways in which people throughout history have attempted to handle these questions. The children didn’t seem to mind the lack of definitive answers at all. It was asking the questions that mattered. I realized that by relinquishing the need to answer children’s questions about God, even the most conflicted doubter can discuss God meaningfully. And some bonus benefits can crop up, too.

Noga recently said to me, “I’d like to ask God if in the whole world there is someone who is only good and if in the whole world there is anybody who is only bad.” I told Noga that was a beautiful question, and then realized I had an answer. I don’t think there is, I told her. The first – that no one is wholly good – makes us human. The second – that no one is wholly bad – makes us Godly.

And that shared moment of enlightenment was as close as I think I have ever come to believing.

Dr. Nurit Novis Deutsch is a clinical psychologist and a researcher in psychology of religion. She is currently a visiting professor at UC Berkeley and conducting a study on God concepts and pluralism among Bay Area religious individuals.