A kid who went to everybody's church
I wasn't raised in a religion. My parents didn't belong to a church, and we never piled into the car on Sunday mornings. But for some reason, from about age six to twelve, they sent my brother and me to church with family friends and the parents of kids from school.
I've always joked that it was their way of getting a quiet Sunday morning. I also suspect some of those families offered because they were worried about us. I grew up in a small Wyoming town in the 1970s, and people noticed who didn't go to church. Back then, everyone was supposed to belong somewhere.
So I went everywhere. By twelve, I'd been to about half the churches in town, some of them regularly, like the Methodist and the Episcopal. When my grandmother lived nearby, my dad had us go with her to her evangelical church.
Without meaning to, I got an unusual education. I heard the same stories taught in different ways, with different emphasis and different delivery. I started noticing which teachings rang true to me and which didn't. I noticed that high-control environments felt suffocating. In the coffee room after my grandmother's services, I listened to the ladies talk about how bad other people were. Even as a kid, I could feel that it made them feel better about how good they were, and I didn't like it.
Oddly, I felt most at home in the Episcopal church. I loved its old ornateness, the ceremony, the way tradition was kept. Then, at twelve, I took communion without being baptized. Nobody had ever told me there was a rule. My family wasn't religious, so how would I have known?
The adults didn't treat it as an honest mistake. They treated it as a sin against the church. There was an uproar. I remember trying to explain myself to grown-ups who talked all the time about love and understanding, and noticing that what they were doing didn't match what they were saying.
That was the beginning of my questions, and of a lifelong curiosity about the world's religions. I wanted to understand both the beauty and the ugliness that can live inside those systems.
The moment the questions start
For me, the pressure came from my community more than my family. I think that's common, especially in small towns, where gossip controls the story and everyone knows where you are on Sunday. For many people, though, it starts at home. You're raised one way, then you reach young adulthood and start having experiences that don't fit what you were taught.
So you question, and questioning is deeply uncomfortable. It can feel like betrayal: of your family, your community, your church, even God. Those loyalties were planted in you early, and pulling against them hurts.
From what I've seen, people tend to go one of three ways:
Some push through. They find a way to keep spirituality in their lives, just on different terms.
Some get angry. They cut religion out completely, sometimes along with everything connected to it.
Some push it back down. They stop asking and return to what they were taught, because that hurts less than being at odds with the people they love.
I understand all three. But a lot of us get stuck in the middle, in that open, uncertain place where the old answers don't fit and the new ones haven't arrived yet. That middle place is a big part of what I wrote my book about.
Going home for the holidays
The holidays bring all of this to the surface. Many people go home after months away, and they aren't quite the same person who left. Maybe you no longer hold your parents' beliefs. Maybe you were raised in a high-control religion, and you already know the dinner table could turn into a minefield.
There's no single right way to handle it. Here are a few paths I've seen people take, and I think all of them are valid:
Keep it internal. You love your family, even if their beliefs don't fit you anymore. You know you're different inside, and you decide the holidays aren't the time to fight about it.
Share some of it. You let your family know you don't believe the same things anymore. If they're open to it, you might talk about it more over time.
Step back. For some people, home was a genuinely harmful environment. Choosing not to go is a way of protecting yourself, not a failure.
What matters is that the choice is yours. That's what I mean by an inner compass. Nobody else gets to tell you which of these is right. You get to discern it for yourself, and you can choose differently next year.
You don't have to give up the beauty
One thing people fear when they leave a tradition is losing everything good that came with it: the music, the candlelight, the feeling of being part of something old and larger than yourself. You don't have to lose all of that. You can start building rituals and traditions that fit who you're becoming.
If Christmas used to mean church programs, choirs, and organ music, you might look for a gentler congregation that offers the same things without the pressure. You might go to a candlelight concert, or a light show set to Christmas music in an old cathedral. You might start a winter solstice tradition with friends, or a quiet ritual of your own on the longest night of the year.
The point isn't to throw tradition away. It's to keep what still feeds you, release what doesn't, and make room for something new.
If you're in the middle right now
If you're heading home this year with questions you haven't said out loud, you're not alone, and you're not doing anything wrong. Questioning isn't betrayal. It's often the first honest step toward a faith, or a spirituality, or simply a life that's actually yours.
I wrote Inner Compass: Spiritual Life Beyond Dogma for people in exactly that place. It's about finding your own way through, keeping what's meaningful, and trusting yourself to discern the rest. If that sounds like where you are, you can read more about it here.
Wherever you spend the holidays this year, and whoever you spend them with, I hope you find some peace in it.