Dear Margo | 05/21/2009 11:00 pm
Dear Margo: Religious Fanatics on the Lunatic Fringe
How can I recover my daughter and keep her from hell? Margo Howard’s bright advice …
Religious Fanatics on the Lunatic Fringe
Dear Margo: Our daughter started college a year ago, and we’ve noticed during her visits home that she’s not the sweet, innocent girl we sent away for higher learning. We raised her with strong Christian beliefs, but lately she’s saying that she’s joined an atheist club on campus and is questioning everything we taught her. Now my husband refuses to let her in the house and is threatening to turn her in to the FBI. I’ve tried to cure our daughter and reconcile with her, but nothing seems to work. I’ve prayed over her at night while she sleeps, enlisted friends in a phone prayer tree and even spoken to my priest about the possibility of an exorcism. I’m at my wits’ end. How can I recover my daughter and keep her from hell? — God-fearing
Dear God: Whoa, dear. While I am sympathetic to anyone’s devotion to their religion, you need to realize that your daughter is a sentient being with the right to reject your religious views if she so chooses. Your husband is pathetically misguided if he thinks he can call the FBI to report the "crime" of your daughter joining an atheists club. Ditto for the exorcism. This young woman is not possessed, demonic or doing weird things; she is merely thinking and questioning the religion she grew up with. I would encourage you to understand that all people, your daughter included, have the right to think for themselves, particularly about something as meaningful as religion. As for hell, well, she appears willing to take her chances. — Margo, contemplatively
When the In-Laws Think They’re All Cordon Bleu Graduates
Dear Margo: I am devastated. My in-laws, without saying so, think I’m a lousy cook. Each time I invite them to dinner, my husband’s aunt and mother decide they have to come over and "help" me. At first I found this a lovely gesture, until I realized their "help" meant them taking over. I put two and two together and came to the conclusion that I must be a lousy cook. I asked my family to be honest, and they insisted that my cooking was very good. I decided to make dinner ahead of time. My in-laws barely touched their food. Some said they weren’t too hungry, others had "eaten before," all said it was "just wonderful." I decided to conduct an experiment. My sister-in-law reluctantly agreed to help me. I cooked a meal at my house, went to her house with the food an hour before the guests were to arrive, and it looked like she had cooked the dinner. The guests had seconds and thirds and raved about how delicious everything was. Now what should I do? — "Burnt" in Philly
Dear Burn: I think this is hysterical, and you should, too. For whatever reason, the in-laws want to think you can’t cook. Maybe they are nuts. As close as I can come to helping you understand what is going on is to remember an episode from my junior year in high school. I had been taking Latin for three years, and our class had to write one composition per semester (in Latin). All my submissions earned a C. I became curious about whether our teacher had simply decided I was a C student (no blonde jokes, please), so I asked Roy Sonderling, the reigning genius in the class, if he would write two papers and let one of them be mine. He said fine … and, in fact, he said he’d give me the better one. Well, I handed it in and it came back with a C. (His, of course, got an A.) So I would take it in stride, my dear. For whatever reason, they’ve put you in the "can’t cook" slot. I recommend that, in the future, whenever the in-laws come to your house, let them "help" and just think of them as caterers. Then relax and take it easy. — Margo, attitudinally
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Dear Margo is written by Margo Howard, Ann Landers’ daughter. All letters must be sent via e-mail to dearmargo@creators.com. Due to a high volume of e-mail, not all letters will be answered. To read more about Margo Howard, click here.
COPYRIGHT 2009 MARGO HOWARD
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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Dear Margo: When Dad/Gramps Just Ain't Interested
133 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment
They send their child off to get an Education. She gets one and realizes the story book her parents are trying to ram down her throat is full of BS.
Turn her into the FBI for having the ability to think and see clearly. LMAOROF!!!
If I had her address I’d send her my favorite bumpersticker…
I bet her parents wouldd love to see that on her car.
No one touched on the one thing that hit me when I read about the father’s response to his daughter leaving the church. Her mother may be worried about her immortal soul, but dear old Dad is all about control. He views his daughter (and probably his wife, given the usual nonsense preached by these extreme religions) as property.
If you take away the religious bumph from his statement, this guy sounds like a garden variety abuser and control freak. No doubt he’s been beating the Devil out of the kid and her mother - either physically or verbally, both are as damaging - for years. Now he sees that his property has a mind of her own and he’s having a meltdown worthy of a tired toddler at the circus.
Churches, especially radical ones (and I include all faiths), have a long history of mistreating women. The more rabidly "righteous" they are, the nastier they can be. One poster mentioned a family where the daughter was imprisoned to keep her from marrying - I actually know a family where their minister told them to do that very thing when their daughter wanted to go to university. It’s nothing new.
Hopefully the daughter realizes that the amount of contact she has with her family is in HER control. She doesn’t have to go anywhere near them if she doesn’t want to. Even if they’re paying for her schooling and cut her off, she’ll end up happier paying off loans and not having her miserable excuses of parents to thank for her education.
i agree - it is definitely about control and not about her soul.
that’s usually what religious arguments tend to center around nowadays.
Actually, the only thing Religion has ever been about, is about or ever will be about it is Control.
LW1 sounds like my MIL. I’m surprised she hasn’t gone after me for my beliefs (Catholic). Anyone who thinks the universe didn’t form in 6,000 years and doesn’t take the Bible literally is in a cult in her eyes.
Instead she goes after my husband - her own son. I kid you not she does her best to torment him because he refuses to put God in a box like she does. Persecution FROM Christians is alive and well folks, even against their own.
She constantly accuses him of having no faith in God (laughable), and makes underhanded digs that state the obvious - she thinks the way she’s a Christian is the way everyone else should do it, and she’s some superior authority on what God thinks and does. It’s so arrogant it makes me want to spit.
It’s not evangelism as she would like to think. It’s abuse, period.
My therapist has declared MIL as nuts and told me she wouldn’t blame me if I stay away from her for my sanity’s sake - which I do, happily. I can only hope this woman takes Margo’s advice to heart and changes her ways before her daughter receives similar advice from her own counselor.
As for LW2 - I agree, throw a few frozen pizzas at them and they’ll get the hint. Unless your kitchen would make Gordon Ramsay have a conniption your ILs have no reason to be such knobs.
All the responses to LW1 show how every religious denomination has its nuts, since the stories of intolerance and repressive upbringings seem to cross the spectrum. As a Mormon (LDS), I know that one of our central beliefs is that each individual has free agency to choose between right and wrong and that "unrighteous dominion" - the use of religious authority to compel people to do anything - is a terrible sin precisely because it interferes with free agency. God does not want unwilling followers. In fact, Mormons believe that that was Lucifer’s great sin, that he wanted to force everyone to obey God so that he could take all the credit for it. It was this rebellion against God’s plan, which was to let us choose for ourselves, that caused him to be cast our of God’s presence and become Satan.
So I taught all my children what I believe, tried to live it the best I could so I set a good example for them, and encouraged them all to ask questions and work on developing their own testimonies about God.
Having said that, I’ll also say that I have met a lot of Mormons who clearly do not understand that part of our doctrine clearly enough. And then they wonder why 4 out of my 6 children (all grown now) have remained in the church and the other two live good moral lives, but choose to do so outside the church. The more repressive parents tend to have few of their children remain active in the church once they reach adulthood.
As for lw2, I feel your pain. It hurts when people insist on maintaining a false picture of you and there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to set the record straight. I was in that situation with my own in-laws for decades, until they died, really. The approach that worked best for me was to tell myself that it wasn’t about me, it was about their own insecurities concerning their relationship with their son. If he liked eating something his mother had never cooked for him, she saw that as a rejection of her care for him as he was growing up. He never buckled under to her efforts to control his taste. It was a lot harder for him not to take it personally when she criticized me than it was for me to ignore it. After all, she was his mother and he loved her. To me, she was a rude, insecure person whom I treated with respect because she had borne and raised the man I love in spite of considerable hardships. I taught my children to love and respect her as well.
What made it possible to take the high road in all this was to live far enough away from them to make visits rare. Even the few years we did live near them, I gave up on inviting them to my house for meals. They refused to come anyway.
I think my mil had gotten so used to making negative comments about me (my looks, my cooking, my housekeeping abilities, my work ethic, etc.) by the time my children were grown, she didn’t realize she was doing it. The first time my oldest tow children visited her as adults, without my husband or me, she started in on her usual routine. My son stopped her cold by telling her that he did not accept anyone talking about his mother that way. I think it made her think, because she dialed it way back after that.
I have the same thing with my vegan sister and her partner now. I have gone to a lot of trouble to cook vegan meals, using fair trade organic ingredients, etc., and my sister’s partner simply will not eat it. I think it’s partly a hygeine issue ( she is a clean freak) and partly a "kosher" issue. She doesn’t want to eat food that’s been prepared in a kitchen where meat is prepared. At least, that’s what I tell myself to keep myself from being offended.
as a vegan, i apologize for snotty vegans across the board.
we are not all like that. ;)
We have an "ALL CALL TO PRAYER" when someone is in need. I have almost 60 people who participate on my list alone. They in turn reach out and request their friends to pass the request along to their friends and so on. We have seen many times that prayer works and we use our faith to help others. It saddens me that there are those that don’t believe in God, or believe differently than I do, but I always respect their choice. I can and do love and care for many people who have a different view than I, and because I don’t try and cram MY God down their throats, we all get along. I pray for all in my life, believers and non-believers alike, and as heartbreaking as it may be for a parent to watch their child "fall away", it is Gods will that we come to Him of our OWN choosing, not because we were raised in it or because our parents want or expect us to.
These parents need to take a few dozen steps back and look at WHY their daughter has walked away from THEIR faith. They might just learn something about her AND THEMSELVES.
BTW, I’m pretty sure the FBI has better things to do than to get their undies in a twist over the atheists. :)
is your religious belief a choice, or do you believe it because it feels right to you?
remember, all people feel the same about their beliefs as you do. they do not choose to think one way, they simply DO.
Invite the inlaws over "to cook dinner". That would be a wonderful way to handle it. I can hear it now. "How would you like to come by next Sunday to cook dinner and have it ready by 6:30?" Priceless.