A story written over at Slate a couple of days ago had me doing a double-take. It’s not often you read a first-person account of a parent who has lost religion personally but is raising her kid to believe.

I mean, I’ve always known it happened. My own research has borne that out. (I wrote about the phenomenon here, for instance.) But to glimpse inside the head of one such parents was new for me. The current headline over the Slate story reads: ‘Why Hold a Child Hostage to My Own Doubts’: The confusing, complicated desire of parents with no religion to raise their kids with faith’.

Writer Ruth Graham describes how she was raised evangelical but later turned away from faith. She calls herself “religious but spiritual,” a reference to her reverence for the rituals of church.

The truly interesting part comes at the tail end of the essay, when Graham writes:

For Nones (and None-adjacents like me) who had positive experiences with religion growing up, winding their way back to church, synagogue, or mosque for the sake of the kids has an… obvious appeal. The trouble with children, of course, is that they want to know what’s real and what’s just a story. I dread the day when my daughter asks me if the stories in the Bible are true. My real answer is that some of them are and some of them sort of are and some of them aren’t and that even the ones that aren’t at all are still important because they are our stories. That should work for a 3-year-old, right? A couple of issues with this. First, Graham frames a child’s desire to know the truth as a problem; it’s not. The truth can be disappointing, yes. It can be aggravating. It can cause hurt feelings. But the truth itself is not a problem; it is a solution. Just as distinguishing facts from stories is not a problem; it’s a rite of passage, a part of growing up. Second, Graham claims that all Biblical stories, even the ones that aren’t true, are important because “they are our stories.” Where to start… I know where Dan Arel would start, and that would be somewhere around Sodom and Gommorah. Because THAT’S a story (among so many others) that every kid wants to hear is theirs! But I’m also interested in this idea that Biblical stories somehow belong to a child, that a child is being asked to take ownership of them somehow — to treat them as important, even if they’re not true, even if they’re nonsensical, even if they’re homophobic or sexist, even they’re mean-spirited. Now, I wouldn’t be talking about this if Graham believed the Bible was the word of God; there would be no point. But coming from a woman who doesn’t personally believe in a great many of these stories — it’s a conundrum, no? Graham sums up her feelings with this: