My Father’s Example
on Appreciating Paternal Influence in the Right Direction
I’m not really sure what my dad believed. He was a Christian, though one I think more of commitment than conviction. A Protestant, he couldn’t have conceived of being a Catholic or even an Episcopalian or Lutheran, no more than I as a New Englander could conceive of being a Yankees fan. For the last twenty-some years of his life, he was an elder in a congregationalist-style church, heavily involved, but then he was the pastor’s best friend.
My parents started going to church when I was eight or so, I think for the usual middle-class reasons. They wanted help raising their children, and they saw going to church as the respectable thing to do, something people like them did. At least my mother did. She had grown up in a family half-secular (grandfather was an active Mason) and half irregularly practicing Methodists (grandmother was a Methodist). My father’s family had not gone to church at all.
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