Her name was probably something like Miss Dorothy, and she had the room at the end of the hall with the low tables.
She brought the snack from her own kitchen. Vanilla wafers, or bread with the crusts cut off, on a paper plate. She had a felt board and a box of felt pieces in labeled envelopes. She taught that class for free, every Sunday, for most of your childhood. She is also the person who told you about hell.
So. Was my Sunday school teacher wrong?
Yes. About that, and probably about a few other things. She was also not the villain. Both of those sentences have to stay in the room at once, and most of us would much rather pick one.
Where She Got It
She did not invent any of it.
The curriculum came in a box. It arrived quarterly, with the lesson already written, the memory verse already chosen, and the craft already specified down to the number of cotton balls. She had forty-five minutes, eleven children, and a page telling her what the point of the morning was.
Before that, somebody taught it to her. Probably in a room like that one, at an age like yours, by a woman who had also gotten it out of a box.
Last week we looked at the nineteen year old counselor at camp, and this is a different thing, though the two get confused. Camp was a week built to do something on a schedule. This is older and slower and nobody designed it at all. A belief gets handed down long before anyone stops to weigh it, and by the time it arrives in a classroom at the end of a hall it has come through four or five sets of hands, none of which examined it either. She was not the first person in that chain and she did not know she was standing in one.
None of which unmakes anything. It does mean that in a lot of ordinary cases responsibility is spread thin, across a teacher and a publisher and an institution and a tradition older than all three, rather than concentrated in somebody you could name. That is not true everywhere. Some situations have a specific adult or a specific institution that made a specific choice, and those should be called what they are.
Was My Sunday School Teacher Wrong? Yes, and That Is Not the Whole Answer
Two moves are available here and both of them are worse than they look.
The first is to excuse her. She meant well, she did her best, times were different. That sentence is true and it is also being used to make you stop talking. What it quietly requires is that you drop the part where something happened to you, and a great many people accept that trade because the alternative feels like an accusation they are not prepared to make.
The second is to convict her. She frightened a child on purpose, she chose the fire, she is the reason. That one is usually inaccurate. It also tends not to work, in the sense that people who reach it do not generally report feeling any better afterward.
What is left is less satisfying and more honest. She cut the crusts off the snack bread. She also believed she was saving you from fire. Neither one cancels the other.
People bring me her obituary sometimes. Folded, out of a coat pocket, years old. They rarely know what they want me to do with it, and I rarely know either. We usually just sit with it for a while, which is not a solution and is generally what the moment actually needs.
Harm Does Not Require a Villain
That may be the hardest idea in this whole year, and it is the one that makes the rest of the parenting possible.
If harm requires a villain, then every conversation about your childhood becomes a trial, and somebody has to lose it. Your mother has to be indicted, or you have to withdraw the complaint. There is no third option and both available outcomes are bad.
If harm can happen without one, the whole thing gets quieter. You can say plainly that being told about hell at six did something to you. You can say plainly that the woman who told you loved you and was doing what she understood to be her job. You do not have to reconcile those, and you do not have to choose.
My reading of this, and I will own it as mine, is that a great deal of ordinary inherited religious harm gets passed along by sincere people who believe they are being faithful. Cruelty exists and it is a separate matter that deserves separate handling. But the everyday version runs on sincerity, which is exactly why it is so hard to interrupt.
What to Say About the Adult Who Is Teaching Your Kid This Right Now
Because there is one. A grandmother, an aunt, a friend’s mother, a teacher at the preschool. Somebody is telling your child a version of this and meaning every word of it well.
One line is worth drawing before any of that. An adult believing something you disagree with is a different situation from an adult actively frightening your child, and the second is not a disagreement to be modeled gracefully. If somebody is telling your six year old what happens to people who do not believe, that is a conversation to have with the adult rather than a nuance for the child to carry. Week 49 gets into how to have it without ending the relationship.
Ages 3 to 6. Do not make the person the problem. Grandma believes that and Grandma loves you very much. In this house we think about it differently. A small child can usually handle two adults believing different things more easily than she can handle the idea that somebody who loves her is bad.
Ages 7 to 12. This age can take the actual principle, and it will serve her for the rest of her life. People can be kind and still be wrong about something. You can love somebody and disagree with them out loud. Give her a live example she already knows about, since a concrete case will usually land better at that age than a principle.
Ages 13 and up. Give her the whole thing, including the uncomfortable end of it. Teenagers are often well ahead of the adults around them at spotting adult failure, and that is a real skill rather than a phase to be managed. The work at that age is not forgiveness on anybody else’s schedule. It is learning to hold a person’s genuine failure and their genuine decency at the same time without flattening them into one or the other, and she may need years, and she may decide differently than you would. Week 11 covers the related question of what to say when she asks you directly whether God is real, and the same posture applies. You can be honest about what you think without requiring her to think it.
You Are Going to Be Somebody’s Sunday School Teacher
This is the part that tends to land late, usually in the car, some months after the rest of it.
You are handing your child a set of things right now. Some of them are considered, and some of them came out of a box you have not opened and examined. In thirty years she is going to sit somewhere and work out which of them she has to put down, and she will be doing it about you.
You will have meant every bit of it. That will not be sufficient, and it also will not be nothing.
Which is the whole reason for the position this series keeps taking. You do not get to be the parent who got it right. What you get is to be the parent who did not require her to pretend, so that when she works it out she can come and say so out loud, and you will still be there.
Next week we take on the question underneath a lot of this, which is whether the thing you grew up in was a strict church or something that deserves a harder name.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and raising children who never have to be afraid of God.
If you are raising kids after leaving the faith you grew up in, and you want a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and nobody has to pretend to have it all figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All