Letter From an Atheist Married to a Christian

I find it deeply troubling, that *after* he has married a Christian, your husband starts to see Christianity as evil. You see, the real reason, it seems to me, that racists needed there to be miscegenation laws was because, as long as no one marries a black person, it’s a lot easier for whites to dehumanize them. But to admit of the possibility of truly being in love with a black person—or in your husband’s case actively being in a loving relationship with a Christian, disallows us from sustaining without much constant cognitive dissonance the idea that being whatever it is we think it’s inferior to be really makes one so vile – so inferior – after all. Granted, as I’m sure he’d have no problem proudly affirming, he is descended from apes, perhaps it is the manifestation of an apish mind’s seeking to dominate his mate, just as Christian men are all too often inclined to use Scripture to justify their regarding of their wives as inferior—only, here, the book of the Scripture is called “The God Delusion,” and it says nothing about wives generally but speaks rather to the inferiority of believers, one of whom his wife just so happens to be. Of course, the motivations for his increased interest in opposing religious belief are surely more complex than this; yet I fear the effect, as regards your and his relationship, is, or will be, no different.

You see, we men have a strong tendency—and a fair degree of desire, inasmuch as it bolters our egos and feeds into our imaginings of manliness—to see ourselves as intellectually superior to women. While we may indeed do better, statistically speaking, at mathematical and spatial reasoning (among others, though this certainly not always the case, comparing any given man to any given woman), we are somewhat lacking generally, relative to women, in empathy. This not only gives us typically lower social intelligence, but also lower verbal intelligence. (And so, for example, while we might do well at spatial reasoning, this still can’t always help us get where we need to go when we fail to ask for or to follow directions. I like to think it kind of tends to even out in the end. And while we’re on the topic of things I like, I also like to grunt and point: it’s just so much easier than this whole “language” thing.)

All that to say—and, man though I am, I do have sufficient empathy that it pains me to say this—I think, somewhere deep inside, your husband really does think you’re stupid, and doesn’t want his son to be fooled.
It’s a serious matter, one that needs to be specifically addressed in your relationship.
Judging from what you’ve written, you’re clearly as sensible, intelligent woman, and your husband needs to respect the sort intelligence that you have—for instance, in your awareness of this spiritual crisis in your marriage (or as your husband might be more willing, if not more able even, to understand it, the impending devolution of emergent phenomena over interconnected aspects of your collective being)–even as it might be somewhat different from his own.

As for your last question: “I just can’t understand how someone who expects to have his views respected can show so little respect for others?”
See, for men, this is simple—we have, typically, a somewhat more limited capacity to understand this silly womanly inter-personal notion of respect you seem to have—his views have to be respected because they’re “right” (while being wrong, which the views of others’ are understood by implication to be, is an inherently unrespectable attribute). And how do we know his views are “right”? Because their “rational”, unlike such womanly notions. (Both men and women have this tendency to consider whatever makes logical sense to them to be rational, and to regard everything else as, by definition, simply irrational. For woman, however, it simply doesn’t matter as much, as you typically value more the truths to be found in interpersonal interactions compared to the truths to be found in personal internal mental actions. Thus, woman are somewhat more prone to “gossip”–that is, to chit-chat about personal relationships–while men, if they do indeed anything more than grunt, nod, and point, tend to discuss sports or other areas where claims are more fact-ish—that is, often somewhat more mundane, and more easily verifiable.)

I assume you’ve attempted to communicate: 1) how it makes you feel that he would email the pastor without first having shared his concerns with you, his wife and—at least in my opinion you ought to be (but I understand that every relationship is different)—his number one confidante; and 2) how his arrogance and condescension (as you refer to it in your other comment below) make you feel.

As for number 2 at least, it’s likely however that he didn’t really get the message. You may have to keep broadcasting that signal for a while before he really tunes it in—before it sticks.

But as for number 1 . . .
Well, as much as we may hate to verbalize them, men have feelings too—and clearly your husband has a strong feeling of, to put it bluntly, fear (don’t let the disdain fool you; hatred is but a more active response to fears) regarding religion or at least the Christian religion. And he’s reacting to this fear the way that men are typically programmed to: Men don’t admit they’re afraid—even to themselves; they can’t, because they’re supposed to be the protectors (that and being the providers are exactly why men have the greater average muscle mass, body height, etc.)

So here he is trying to “protect” your son. And let’s face it, if there were a bear about to maul your boy, the last thing you want is a husband who cries, “I’m scared!”
You also do not want him to pause for a moment to think, “Maybe I’d better discuss this with my wife first before trying to save our son who is in danger.”
No, you’d want him to act basically the way he did, the way he’s instinctively made to. The problem arises here, however, from his responding this way in a situation where it serves no one’s best interests for him to do so. He ought to understand this as something of a failure of evolution on his part. Times change, but men are still, well, men: to a significant extent, insensitive to emotions but hypersensitive to perceived threats.

And so it seems your husband’s a little sensitive around this issue; it doesn’t look much on the outside like that girly sort of sensitivity that men are often so quick to deride, but deep down inside I don’t really think it’s all so different. And when people are sensitive around an issue, they often respond less than fully rationally. And while I wouldn’t hold out much hope to hear him ever directly admit it, I think that’s exactly what the problem is here.

What more concerns me though is the problem behind the problem: what has made his so sensitive to the “danger” of religion? Certainly the things he’s been reading fuel his opinion in that regard, but it almost seems, from what you describe, that just as you develop a deeper interest in religion, so too does he develop a deeper disdain for it. And that seems a bit troubling to me. I’m hoping that’s just a mistaken perception of the situation here (and trusting that it couldn’t possibly be the other way around). But whatever the case may be, it seems to me the two of you need to get on the same page here, that there may be a substantial amount of communicating (in honest and heart-felt fashion) that’s gotten put off for far too long in this regards. Tempers may flare somewhat, but everyone’s just gonna have to try to be as patient as possible: hopefully, you will both prove equally committed to resolving the issues currently driving a wedge into your marriage. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, what do I mean by resolving? What should you expect to achieve? Well, the way I see it, is not that you will both necessarily see eye to eye, but that there will be a deeper understanding and appreciation, and from your husband’s side at least, a deeper respect, for one another’s perspectives and, more importantly, for one another personally. I feel that the key here is not allowing the labels of Christianity and atheism to define one another. Defining you is just something for people who don’t really know you to have to do in order for them to make sense of a world with you in it. But you two know yourselves and one another so much better than that. Don’t let a little word like “Christian” pin you down, and try not to box your husband in with your understandings of terms like “atheist” or “humanist”. And don’t let your husband do the same, whether to you, as a “Christian” (and thus whatever else that implies according to his way of thinking) or, equally importantly, as regards himself, however he might be inclined to define himself. (Not that we can’t adopt labels for ourselves by which we’ll identify ourselves to others, but we ought not to let them affect the way we relate to the ones closest to us.)

Now, perhaps the reason he emailed the pastor without talking to you about it was also out of fear, this time about how you’d react, which of course he would see as totally irrational on your part, which in turn is how he might easily justify it to himself. But things become much more difficult for him when he’s confronted with the dilemma of justifying this to you. I would recommend—though I first must warn you that I’m certainly no expert on relationships, nor am I any kind of psychologist or anything of the sort—that you not make him go through the tortured logic he surely would in an attempt to do so, but rather address this sort of thing under the framework of how it made you feel, and try to get him to share not merely what he thinks—I suppose you already know well enough what he thinks—but to verbalize how he truly feels. He will resist you at first; he may get defensive; he will try to maintain his delusion that he really is a rational being, and by virtue of his rationality, ultimately correct in the matter at hand. But if you go easy when he gets defensive, yet demonstrate a relentless resolve to pursue the matter in the interests of saving your marriage, then I suspect, one way or another, you’ll see within a week’s time where his heart is at: either he’ll let down his guard over his inner self in order to guard his family against relationship crisis (even though simply admitting the existence of such sort of crises is a highly unmanly thing to do, it might seem to him), or else he will demonstrate a disinterest on his part in regards to your relationship, in which case the best you can do, it seems to me, is to try to part on good terms (for the sake of the children as well as your sanity), before—God forbid—he may one day be found doing worse behind your back than exchanging emails with your pastor.

And don’t let him convince you you’re making a big deal out of nothing: If he cares about you and it’s a big deal to you, then he’s going to have to take it seriously. He’s going to have to accept that he’s no more the decider of what matters in relationships than which way the clouds go as they sail across the sky. And the heart of the matter here—the spiritual discord of which this exchange with you and your son’s pastor is just a symptom—is something I believe threatens the very being of your relationship.

If your husband proves himself up to the challenge of addressing the growing disparity in worldview and interests between the two of you, if you think your pastor will be up to the challenge, I’d encourage the three of you to sit down together at your pastor’s office to have a nice long conversation regarding everyone’s concerns, responses to one another’s concerns, etc. Or if your husband would be too uncomfortable with that, I think it would still be good if—this time with your knowledge, but without your direct involvement or supervision or anything—he’d continue an exchanging of thoughts with your pastor, provided your pastor has time and the knowledge of the rational basis of his/her faith that are likely to be necessary to make such an exchange fruitful. If not, perhaps he might want to try offering his insights into the error of our ways here on John Shore’s blog. I think it could be just the challenge he needs for him to come to have a deeper appreciation for the *rationality* of a Christian worldview (that is, any one of many, some of them more, some less, rational Christian perspectives); plus, the position of token atheist around here is vacant at present.
Besides all that, perhaps your husband will see the need to seek for (secular) marriage counseling.

Let me emphasize once more that I make no claim to being any sort of expert in such matters.

But allow, in closing, that I quote someone who does (David B., friend of John Shore), by re-emphasizing a couple of points from the original post that I think could use repeating here and that your husband too might benefit to hear, if not to learn by heart:

“Your marriage won’t fail over differences; there will always be differences. It will fail if you are not honest with each other, and lack respect for one another—spiritually or otherwise.”

“In a successful marriage, two people, who are different by virtue of being people, find the common ground on which they relate to each other, and use that as a foundation. They grow toward each other by learning about and respecting their differences, and then stay together by willingly meeting each other’s needs, whether they fully understand them or not. That last part, that really hard part—that’s love.”

Whatever path you choose, good luck to you, Wendy!

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There’s a risk he’s not respectful and IMHO, talking about will stop its fermentation in your mind. Just do it calmly!

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