Atheist Kids: A Guide For Religious Parents (Who'd Like To Keep Their Kid)
- Courtney Heard
- May 3, 2017
- 20 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
So your child is a heathen. A little hellbound apostate. A pint-sized infidel walking around your good Christian house, drinking your juice boxes, side-eyeing the crucifix in the hallway, and refusing, point blank, to say grace over the casserole.
What a conundrum. I'm glad you googled, "my child is an atheist, help!" and found me. That's step one, well done, parent! Your atheist kids will be glad, too.
Lucky for you, advice about raising atheist kids is not in short supply. It is, in fact, raining down from every Christian corner of your life like a particularly aggressive locust plague. The man with frosted tips on a Christian podcast has thoughts. The woman named Patricia who runs a blog designed only in shades of beige has thoughts. The pastor has thoughts. The in-laws have thoughts. The Christian aunt who has been waiting her entire life for a moment exactly like this one has, my god, so many thoughts.
With a million ways to handle this, how is a faithful parent supposed to know the right way?
While you're praying about it, I thought I'd give you some tangible answers. The kind you don't have to interpret from violent scenes in your Bible.
Hi. I'm Courtney. I'm an atheist. I write about secular living. I also have experience. My daughter is now an adult, fully grown, living her own life, ferociously nonreligious, ferociously progressive, ferociously herself. She is, in every measurable way, a person I'm wildly proud of.
She's also exactly the kind of "lost" child the Christian parenting industrial complex would love to tell you is broken, rebellious, deceived, or in need of saving.
She is none of those things.
She is a person. A whole one. And that fact, the fact that an atheist kid is just a person, full stop, is the thing the entire religious parenting playbook is engineered to make you forget.
This guide is about remembering.
In this guide:
Why Religious Parents Of An Atheist Child Panic
Before we get to the playbook, we need to talk about who designed the panic you're currently drowning in. Because, honey, you didn't come up with this on your own. You were sold it.
There is an entire industry, call it Big Faith Parenting, call it the lost-sheep economy, call it whatever you like, that profits, handsomely, from convincing religious parents that an atheist child is a five-alarm theological emergency. Focus on the Family. Answers in Genesis. The conference circuit. The Christian publishing arm churning out books with titles like Bringing Your Prodigal Home in serif fonts on cream covers, $24.99 a pop, sold next to the worship CDs. The summer camps. The "troubled teen" facilities. The youth pastor with a guitar. The pamphlets. The retreats. The Bible studies that double as recruitment funnels. An entire economy built on the premise that your kid is on the precipice of the Lake of Fire and only this product, this book, this camp, this $499 weekend in Branson can save them.
As atheists, we have a saying for this shit: fuck that.
It is kind of like the spiritual-parenting equivalent of the supplement aisle. Same bullshit. Same fear-vanity-disposable-income triangulation. Same deeply convenient conclusion that yes, you do need to buy something to fix the problem we just told you you have.
And just like the supplement aisle, the actual evidence (you know, the stuff that's been studied, the stuff that's been observed in real families with real atheist kids who grew up to be, say, me) points in basically the opposite direction of what they're selling you.
So before you do anything else, I need you to take one slow breath and accept the following: your child being an atheist is not an emergency. The emergency is what the industry has trained you to do about it.
Because it could cost you your kid.
What Not To Do When Your Child Is An Atheist
Let's clear away the landmines first. These are the moves Big Faith Parenting has been handing out for forty years, packaged as wisdom and love, and they will absolutely, 100%, send your kid sprinting in the opposite direction so fast they leave a Looney Tunes silhouette in the wallpaper.
Some pass this off as "different parenting styles." But, these are documented, observable, predictable failure modes.
Avoid all of them.
Don't Get Angry: Anger Is The Loudest Argument Against Your Religion You'll Ever Make
If anything, your anger will only prove to your godless kiddo that your religion is a load of bull.
Think about it for a minute. Actually marinade on it. If your religion has any weight to it whatsoever, and your god is worth worshipping at all, neither of them needs you to defend it. An all-powerful, omniscient, universe-spinning, galaxy-spawning deity does not need backup from a middle-aged Patty McGee in Saskatoon yelling at her seventeen-year-old for skipping church. He's god. He's got it, right? That's like, the whole deal, right?
So when you go nuclear on your kid for not believing, what you are actually telling them, telegraphing in flashing neon, in a font the size of the Hollywood sign, is that your god needs you to be angry on his behalf because he can't handle this himself. Which is, theologically, an absolute disaster of a position. You've just made the case for atheism easier, faster, and shinier than your kid could've ever made it for themselves.
The more irate you get, the weaker your god looks.
The distance between you and your hellbound offspring will expand like a chasm in the melting Arctic ice, and you will lose, guaranteed, any chance you had at drawing your child back in to your life.
Don't Shun, Disown, Or Kick Them Out
If what you actually want is for your atheist teenager to come back to god, really, genuinely, freely, of their own accord, making them homeless is a wild way to get there.
Shunning sends one message and one message only: my love is conditional. And the second your love is conditional, you have personally, with your own two hands, handed your kid Exhibit A in the case against your religion. Because your faith allegedly preaches a god whose love is unconditional. So if you, the believer, can't manage unconditional love for your own child, what exactly are we to conclude about the supposed source material? That god is also a flake? That his love comes with terms and conditions in tiny print at the bottom?
Your kid will conclude, correctly, that the whole framework is hollow.
And you know what else? Shunning does not, statistically, drive children back to faith. It drives them into estrangement. Into therapy. Into a permanent ledger in their head titled People Who Did Not Show Up For Me. Your name will be in that ledger. In ink. Forever. There is no rapture that gets you out of that ledger.
The clawing grasp of the fallen one, as you might say, doesn't hold a candle to the clawing grasp of I sleep in my car and my own mother put me here.
Don't Threaten Them With Hell
Damning your kid to hell is, statistically, a huge part of why they stopped believing in the first place.
Atheists, by and large, cannot reconcile the idea of a benevolent god with eternal torture. Benevolence and torture are not usually served on the same platter. They are, in fact, mutually exclusive concepts in basically every other context you'd encounter them. Nobody says "she's such a benevolent boss, she only sets her interns on fire forever." Nobody describes their grandmother as "lovingly torturing me until the heat death of the universe."
The phrase eternal conscious torment is, on its face, deranged, and your kid noticed.
Bless them.
So when you whip out the hell threat, you are reminding the freshly freed mind of your damned little one of exactly the reason they bailed in the first place. You are pouring the cement around their atheism. You are putting a little bow on it. You are tucking it in at night. Hell threats don't crack atheism, Ramona, they harden it.
You are the ad campaign now.
You're working for us atheists, so thank you!
But knock it off.
Don't Force Religion On Them
Forcing church attendance, mandatory prayer, religious school, Bible study at the kitchen table, Christian summer camp — none of it works. None of it has ever worked, on a population scale, on the people most likely to read this sentence. There are forty years of data. There is Pew Research after Pew Research. There is the simple, lived, observable fact that the most famously irreligious adults in your life almost always grew up in the most aggressively religious households.
All you are doing, when you force it, is deepening the disdain your itty-bitty apostate has for your faith. You are converting your child into a permanent case study in why religion shouldn't be coerced. You are training them to associate the trappings of your faith, the songs, the hymns, the smell of the wood pews, the lukewarm coffee in the church basement, with anger and powerlessness and being made smaller in their own home.
Coerced belief is a performance, not true faith. And kids, especially atheist teenagers, whose bullshit detectors are so finely tuned at this age we should harness it for lie detectors, can spot the difference between a relationship and a hostage situation from across a parking lot.
You cannot force a real belief into a real person. You can only force the appearance of one. And the appearance is going to evaporate the second they leave your house, plus interest.
Besides, the appearance of belief won't fool an omnipotent god.
What To Do When Your Child Tells You They're An Atheist
Okay. Deep breath. Now we get to the action plan. The one that is not for sale at LifeWay. The one that is going to feel weird because it does not involve doing very much. The one that actually works.
Talk To Your Atheist Child. Then Shut Up And Listen.
Ask them why they don't believe in god.
Then (and this may be more challenging than it sounds) shut up.
And listen.
Not listen-to-respond. Not listen-while-loading-counterarguments. Not listen-with-a-pamphlet-in-your-back-pocket-for-when-they-pause-for-air. Listen. Like a person. Like the parent of a whole-ass human being whose internal life you are about to be granted a pretty sacred glimpse into.
Stay respectful. Recognize that your kid is their own person, entitled to their own thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, and that their conclusions about the universe are not, in fact, an attack on yours. Any hint of sarcasm, any whiff of "I'm just asking questions" energy, any pivot toward apologetics, and your kid will (correctly) clock you as someone who is not really there to listen and is, in fact, there to convert. They will then quietly close the door on this topic for the rest of your relationship and possibly your life. They will be polite at Thanksgiving. They will not call you about the big stuff.
That is the worst outcome. Worse, in many ways, than the atheism itself, which I'll remind you is not actually an outcome at all, it's just a position.
Open, honest, judgment-free conversations build trust. Trust is the only currency that holds weight when you fundamentally disagree about the shape of the universe. If you have trust, your kid will tell you about their breakups, their job losses, their existential 3am questions, their wins. If you don't, you will get holiday cards. Choose.
Recognize There Is Nothing Wrong With Your Kid
There are no demons grasping for their soul. They are not stupid. No one "got to them." There is no Reddit rabbit hole, no shady atheist YouTuber, no manipulative friend whispering blasphemies at the back of math class. The Christian parenting industry will sell you all of these villains, in book form, for $19.99, but they are all fictional.
Your kid is not sick. They are not possessed. They are not angry at god. You literally cannot be angry at something you do not believe exists, the same way I am not, at this present moment, angry at Smaug. They do not "just want to sin." They are not "rebelling against god's rules." They have not "given themselves over to the world."
They simply cannot find a reason to believe in a god.
That is it. That is the entire content of "my child is an atheist." It is a single conclusion about a single question. It is not a personality. It is not a moral failing. It is not a prophetic fulfillment. It is not the fall of the West. It is one young person, looking at the available evidence, and arriving, in the privacy of their own skull, at a different answer than you did.
It's different from how you feel. Sure. But until a god is actually proven, none of us can really claim our way is the right way. We are all guessing. Some of us need to learn to guess humbly.
Let Them Walk Their Own Path. It Was Never Yours.
This is their journey. Not yours.
Maybe they will land on atheism for life, like my kid, like me, like millions of perfectly happy, perfectly moral adults. Maybe they will wander through Buddhism, agnosticism, secular humanism, the great big squishy "spiritual but not religious" tent, paganism, witchcraft, the Satanic Temple (which is, incidentally, atheist and largely about civil rights, but that's a whole other essay). Maybe they will, statistically improbably but possibly, come back around to a faith that fits them.
Your job is not to determine the destination. Your job is to keep the door open so they always feel safe telling you where they are right now.
If you’re questioning your own beliefs while trying to understand your kid’s, this is exactly the kind of messy, human territory I wrote about in my book.
Doors that get slammed do not tend to reopen on their own. You have to go drag them open with your hands later, and the hinges are usually rusted, and the conversation is awkward, and your kid has been an entire other person for several years by then. I have watched this play out in friend after friend after friend in the secular community. The reconciliation is always possible. It is never easy. The version where you just don't slam the door in the first place is much, much, much cheaper.
Love Them Exactly The Same. The Exact. Same.
If god is truly about unconditional love, and he oozes benevolence, and you are supposedly here to bring glory to such a being. It does not make a single lick of sense to hang the love of your child on the caveat that they share your exact metaphysical opinions.
If your god is as benevolent as you say he is, then there is no need to do anything but love your heathen kid as much as you ever did.
If your god requires you to love your child less because they don't believe, then I have some genuinely uncomfortable questions about your god, Rebecca, and I think, deep down, you do too.
Why Kids Become Atheists: The Reasons Religious Parents Almost Never Hear
Most religious parents of an atheist child or a child losing faith assume something happened. A bad influence. A teacher with an agenda. A boyfriend in a band. A YouTube algorithm. A Reddit forum. A college professor. Tumblr.
It's almost never that.
I have, over the last decade and change, talked to thousands of grown atheists who once were the kid in your house. The reasons they walked away are remarkably consistent, and remarkably absent from the Christian parenting books. Here are the actual, common ones:
They asked questions and didn't get satisfying answers. "Have faith" stops working as a response right around the age your kid figures out that "because I said so" is also horseshit.
The problem of suffering finally landed. It is genuinely hard to square a loving, omnipotent god with cancer wards full of children, with the historical reality of slavery, with the Holocaust, with the tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in 2004. At some point a thinking kid does the math and the math just doesn't work.
They met genuinely good people of other faiths, or no faith at all. And suddenly the "only true path" started to look a lot less only.
They watched the religious community closely and noticed it didn't act the way it preached. Kids notice everything. Every sermon on charity followed by stinginess at the family dinner table. Every sermon on love followed by a casual cruelty toward the gay kid in youth group. Every sermon on humility followed by, well, a megachurch.
Science clicked for them. Once you understand evolution, geology, cosmology, neuroscience, the supernatural starts to feel kind of boring. Occam's razor is a hell of a drug.
They couldn't reconcile religious teachings with their own moral compass. Especially around LGBTQ+ acceptance, women's bodily autonomy, the treatment of religious minorities, and the historical conduct of their specific denomination. Increasingly, the moral compass of a teenager in 2025 is sharper than the moral compass of the institution they were raised in. They notice. Bless them.
None of these are signs your kid is broken.
They are signs your kid is thinking.
The Christian parenting industry would prefer you experience your child's atheism as a moral failure on their part, because that is the version that sells books. The version that is actually happening is that your kid is using the brain you raised them to use, on the questions you raised them to think were important, and arriving at a conclusion you didn't see coming.
And now you feel like a failure.
But, honey, that's the system working exactly as it was designed to work.
You did not fail, I promise you. You won!
Congratulations! You have a thinker!
How To Actually Talk To Your Atheist Child (Without Detonating The Relationship)
Okay, so you've put down the pamphlets. You've cancelled the youth pastor's house call. You've stopped waxing fire and brimstone across the breakfast table. Now what?
Now you have a conversation. A real one. Here is what that sounds like, in practice, because "have a conversation" is the kind of advice that sounds simple until you're on the receiving end of a teenager's stink-eye and you can't remember how mouths work.
Start with curiosity, not concern.
"I'd love to understand how you got here" lands a thousand times better than "I'm worried about you."
The first one says I see you as a person whose thinking I respect. The second one says I see you as a problem I'm trying to solve.
Ask open questions and then absorb the answer like a sponge.
"What was the first thing that didn't add up for you?"
"Was there a specific moment, or did it just sort of happen?"
"What do you wish I understood about where you're at?"
Do you see how we're avoiding gotcha questions? We're not creating setups for a counterargument. These are the questions of a parent who actually wants to know their kid.
Resist (like, white-knuckle resist) the urge to defend. Every time your kid says something that lands hard ("I just don't think the Bible is that special, mom"), your nervous system is going to scream at you to launch into a defence of scripture.
Do not.
You did not raise this child for nineteen years to lose them in a single conversation about a book.
It's okay to say "that's hard for me to hear." It is not okay to weaponize that. There's a world of difference between "I love you and what you're saying is hard for me, and I'm going to sit with it," and "How could you do this to me, after everything I've done." One of those is a person being honest. The other is emotional blackmail. And there's a cross on the envelope.
Don't bring it up every time you see them. I cannot stress this enough. If every single interaction with you becomes another referendum on their soul, they will stop coming over. They will stop calling. They will become one of those grown kids who lives forty minutes away and only makes it home for Christmas dinner and even then is conspicuously busy by 8pm. You have, I assure you, more in common with your kid than this one disagreement. Talk about literally anything else. Their job. Their dog. The new restaurant. The show. Reality. You remember reality, right?
And finally (and this one's free) apologize if you've already screwed it up. A real apology. No "but." No "I just." No "you have to understand from my perspective." Just "I handled this wrong and I'm sorry." It works. It works miraculously. It works on grown atheist kids who have not spoken to their religious parents in a decade. The bar for repair is genuinely much lower than you think it is, if you're willing to lead with humility instead of theology.
What About Grandma, The Aunt, And The Entire Damn Church Group?
When your kid comes out as an atheist, you become the firewall.
Grandma is going to have thoughts. So is your sister. So is the church group. So is the woman from your Bible study who has been watching this whole thing unfold with the unholy glee of someone who finally has a tale to tattle to the Big Guy. The scripture will be quoted. The prayer requests will be scrawled. The casseroles will arrive bearing the unspoken question of whether Heather is, you know, still doing okay. The well-meaning interventions will be proposed. The unsolicited copies of The Case For Christ will start appearing in mailboxes like a more depressing version of the Jehovah's Witnesses' literature drop.
Your job, as the parent of an atheist child, is to stand between your kid and all of this. Most of these people aren't evil or have bad intentions. They're people who have been told, exactly the way you were told, that an atheist child is an emergency and that every faithful adult in the kid's life has a role to play in the rescue mission. They are, in their own minds, helping.
But they are, in your kid's reality, the reason your kid stops coming to family events.
Some lines that actually work, in roughly increasing order of firmness:
"We're letting them work this out on their own. Please don't bring it up with them at dinner."
"I know you mean well. The most loving thing you can do for them right now is treat them exactly the way you always have."
"I'm going to ask you, kindly, to stop sending pamphlets. They're going straight in the recycling and it's hurting their relationship with you."
"If you make this an issue every time you see them, they're going to stop seeing you. I'm telling you this because I love you both and I don't want that to happen."
"This is not up for discussion. They are my child. I've got it."
Your kid needs to know, beyond any doubt, in a way they can feel in their bones, that you are on their team. Even when it costs you something with your community. Especially when it costs you something with your community.
Because that is the proof.
That's the thing that gets remembered for the rest of their life.
My mom chose me over the church group.
You cannot put a price on that. There is no other action in this entire guide that will earn you more long-term relational capital with your kid than being publicly, visibly, unmistakably on their side.
A Quick Word For Secular Parents Raising Atheist Kids From Day One
A reasonable percentage of you reading this aren't actually religious parents at all. You're secular parents who Googled "atheist kids" because you're trying to figure out how to raise one without screwing it up, and you ended up here. Welcome.
Raising atheist kids from the start is, I can tell you from experience, both wildly easier than the Christian parenting books would have you believe and exactly as hard as parenting anything else. You are not, despite what Ben Shapiro will tell you, raising a moral wasteland. You are raising a human being.
You and I are both aware that morality doesn't actually require a holy book. It requires modelling, conversation, consequences, empathy, and compassion. Which is, conveniently, what good secular parenting is anyway.
A few things that worked for us, for whatever it's worth:
Answer their questions honestly, in age-appropriate ways. "What happens when we die?" gets a real answer. "I don't know, and nobody really knows, but here's what we think happens to our bodies and here's why I think the people we love stay with us in our memories" is a perfectly fine answer for a six-year-old and frankly more honest than most of what they'd hear at Sunday school.
Teach them how to think, not what to think. This is the long game. A kid who knows how to evaluate evidence, ask questions, and update their opinions in light of new information is going to be okay no matter what they end up believing.
Take them to museums, not churches. Take them outside. Let them be small in front of mountains and oceans and the night sky. The natural world is genuinely awe-inspiring without any supernatural varnish on top of it.
Don't be weird about religion. They are going to encounter it. Their friends will pray before lunch. Their grandparents will go to mass. Treat religion the way you'd treat any other widespread human phenomenon: explain it, contextualize it, let them ask questions, and trust them to draw their own conclusions.
If you want to go deeper on this, my book Don't Panic, But You Might Be An Atheist covers a fair amount of this ground (and many other corners of secular life), and Dale McGowan's Parenting Beyond Belief is the genuine bible, pun very much intended, of secular parenting.
The Bottom Line: What's Actually At Stake Here
No one can prove there is a god. No one can prove there isn't. No one can really prove there's an afterlife. These are, all of them, open questions, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
What we do know, what we have all the evidence for, is this life. This one. The one you're in right now, reading this on your phone in a parking lot or on the couch with the dog or in bed at 2am with your spouse asleep next to you. This life, this specific, finite, weirdly gorgeous, irreplaceable life, is the only one we have any actual evidence of. And the people in it are the only people we have any actual evidence of.
By shunning your child, or withholding your love simply because they don't believe the same wild origin story you do, you're running a very serious risk.
You're risking that this is all we've got, as we atheists suspect. You're gambling the one life we are sure we have, and all the people who matter in it, against your hope for bliss in a sequel that may or may not exist.
The real math: if your blissful afterlife turns out not to be true, and what really mattered all along were the people you loved in this life, and you went and threw it all away for an idea — you don't get any do-overs. You don't get your child back. You don't get the bond back. You don't get to redo all those lost years. You don't get the wedding you weren't invited to. You don't get the grandkid who never met you. You don't get the phone call that would have come, on the day they got the job, the day they got the diagnosis, the day they just needed their mom.
You're just gone. Lost in the void. Having lived out a small, angry life for a small, angry idea that turned out, in the end, not to be real.
Don't take that risk.
Love your kid no matter who they turn out to be. That is what any god worth worshipping would want you to do anyway. And if your god doesn't want you to do that, friend, I have some news about your god that I think you've already started suspecting.
Frequently Asked Questions From Religious Parents Of An Atheist Child
Is my child being an atheist just a phase?
Maybe. Probably not. Either way, treating it like a phase is a great way to make absolutely sure your kid never confides in you about anything important again. Take it seriously because they're taking it seriously. If it does turn out to be a phase, you'll have proven yourself trustworthy on the way through. If it doesn't, you'll have a relationship on the other side. Both versions are good.
What if my whole family is religious and we have no idea how to handle this?
Then your kid needs you on their team more than ever. You are the firewall between them and a hundred well-meaning relatives who wield threats of hell buried in sweet words. Your job is to absorb that pressure so they don't have to. See the section above on handling Grandma. It's not optional.
Can my child still be moral without religion?
Yes. Unequivocally, demonstrably, with a mountain of evidence behind it, yes. Morality predates every modern religion by hundreds of thousands of years. Pro-social behaviour exists in dolphins, elephants, and chimpanzees, none of whom have a holy book. Atheists are statistically just as moral as believers, sometimes more so, since we can't outsource our ethics to an ancient text and have to actually figure out what kindness looks like ourselves.
How do we handle religious holidays now that my kid is an atheist?
Keep the parts that are about family, food, tradition, and being together. Drop the parts that require your kid to perform a belief they don't have. Most holidays survive this transition just fine. Christmas is, famously, mostly stolen pagan tradition anyway, and Easter is even worse for it. Your kid will happily eat the ham. They just don't want to say grace over it. That's a workable compromise.
My child is an atheist and I'm a Christian parent, am I a failure?
No. You are a parent of a person. Persons have their own minds. The fact that yours has a working one is, on every metric that matters, a success.
You did great, mama. There is to be no guilt and only pride about it from here on out, okay?
The Christian parenting industry will tell you otherwise because they need you to feel like a failure in order to sell you the cure.
Don't buy it.
Literally and metaphorically.
*If you're a religious parent with an atheist kid, or an atheist who grew up in a religious home and has thoughts on what your parents could have done differently, tell me in the comments. I read every single one. And if you found this useful and want to support the work, you can grab my book Don't Panic, But You Might Be An Atheist or chip in here.
Sources for this post
Vern L. Bengtson, Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013)
Becka A. Alper, Patricia Tevington, Asta Kallo, and Jeff Diamant, “Why Do Some Americans Leave Their Religion While Others Stay?” Pew Research Center, December 15, 2025.
Joshua Coleman, Rules of Estrangement (Harmony, 2021)
Robert P. Jones, et al., “Exodus: Why Americans Are Leaving Religion—and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back,” PRRI, September 22, 2016.
Pew Research Center, “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious,” November 3, 2015.
Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” May 12, 2015.
Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Victoria Horner, J. Devyn Carter, Malini Suchak, and Frans B. M. de Waal, "Spontaneous prosocial choice by chimpanzees," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 33 (2011): 13847–13851.
Will M. Gervais et al., "Global evidence of extreme intuitive moral prejudice against atheists," Nature Human Behaviour 1, no. 8 (2017): 1–6.
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