Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Why I’m telling my son about the sky fairy

Richard Dawkins says bringing children up Christian is a form of abuse, but I believe they are natural deists

After we were married, my husband and I went on honeymoon to Mexico. We drove across country east to west, then north to Mexico City, to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe where I prayed for a baby. My husband, the least judgmental of atheists, sat happy in the babble of ladies all talking loudly, conversationally, to God. In April this year, with a vomity newborn on my shoulder, I made a nightlight out of a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe and some fairy lights. Now, eight months later, as we begin each evening’s slow, hopeful descent towards bed, I take the stout and opinionated baby to say goodnight to her. Goodnight Virgin Mary I whisper, and he leans forward, rips the battery pack out of the fairy lights and lets it fall, clattering on its wires. Routine is vital, I’m told.

He’s starting to recognise words now, ordering his world into dog, duck, car, and I’ve recently found myself hesitating for a half-second in front of the nightlight. It’s one thing to choose a faith for yourself, to muddle, as I did, from uncertain Anglicanism, through atheism into crazy-seeming Catholicism and find yourself inexplicably at home. It’s quite another to introduce a pantheon of invisible beings to a new human. Dog, duck, car, angel, saint.

Richard Dawkins, whom I admire in many ways, says that to bring up your children Christian is to abuse them. When the kid realises that the ‘sky fairy’ doesn’t exist, he’ll be hurt and angry, says Dawkins. I have faith in the sky fairy but perhaps the baby, when adult, won’t. Will the midget look back and feel betrayed? Will I be able to look him in the eye and say: son, this is really what I believe?

This Advent, as I’ve worried away, forgotten strands of my own childhood have floated back.

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