Parenting is among the toughest of jobs.  Living secularly in a religious world is among the most difficult social choices.  When these challenges are combined, and a parent wishes to raise children without religious influences, the difficulties are compounded. 

Despite the difficulties, a large and growing number of parents are rising to the task.  In 1990, eight percent of Americans identified themselves as nonreligious.  By 2002, that sector had grown to 14.1 percent.  The U.S. Census of the year 2000 counted 37.3 million households in the U.S. with school-age children.  These numbers yield a conservative estimate of 8-10 million nonreligious parents in the U.S. today. 

Despite these statistics, it’s easy for nonreligious parents to assume that every parent on their block, everyone cheering in the stands at the soccer game or walking the aisles of the supermarket, is a churchgoing believer.  It isn’t true.  All that's needed is to realize that others are making the same false assumption about them.

Religion has much to offer parents:  an established community, a pre-defined set of values, a common language, rites of passage, comforting answers to the big questions, and consoling explanations to ease experiences of loss.  For most secularists, these benefits come at too high a price.  Many feel that intellectual integrity is compromised, the word “values” too often turned on its head, an us-vs.-them mentality too often reinforced.  Religious answers are found unconvincing yet are held unquestionable.  And so, in seeking the best for our children, we chart a path around the church – and often end up doing so without a compass.

My books Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers were written to demonstrate the many ways in which the benefits of religion can be had without the detriments.  Just as vegetarians must find other sources of certain vitamins, minerals and proteins, nonreligious parents must find ways to articulate values, celebrate rites of passage, talk about death, understand moral development, and find consolation, meaning, and purpose, all without the usual religious context.

At last this isolation is ending.  Millions of nonreligious parents are beginning to find each other, forming supportive communities at every level.   Some have called it a “secular parenting renaissance.”  Dozens of new nonreligious parenting resources have come into being in the past two years—discussion forums, blogs, books, and local nonreligious parenting groups in twenty cities, including Colorado Springs.

But “renaissance” isn’t quite the right term.  A renaissance is a re-birth—and nonreligious parenting is not born again by either definition.  It’s the birth of a nonreligious parenting movement we are witnessing.  Not that nonreligious parenting is new, of course, but it’s only now that we are finding each other, forming a movement and a community, learning that we’ve been living all along in neighborhoods and cities filled with parents who are grappling with precisely the same questions we are.  Even better, we’re finding a consensus on how best to answer those questions—how best to raise compassionate, curious, bighearted kids without religion.

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Dale McGowan is the editor and co-author of Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers, the first comprehensive books on parenting without religion.  He was named Harvard Humanist of the Year for 2008.