Sigal Samuel writing for Vox’s Your Milage May Vary advice column is asked the question in the column titled: I left my religion. Should I still raise my kid with it?

I was raised evangelical Christian and was very devout until my 20s, when I moved away from religion. Now I don’t believe in the Christian dogmas I was raised with. But I think being raised that way did give me something very valuable — a scaffolding for spirituality and morality. It allowed me to develop values like kindness and charity, to help others even when it’s not convenient.
Now, I’m pregnant with my first child, and I’m worried that I don’t know how to instill morality in a kid if they don’t have a scaffolding for it. Should I raise my child as a Christian even though I don’t actually believe in Christianity anymore, and just let the kid figure it out over time? Or can you get the positive effects of being raised in a religion without actually being raised in a religion?

If the title of the column was the question by itself, I’d think the answer should simply be a “no”. If someone has spent enough time within a religion to, first, identify with it and then, second, come to dislike it enough to leave it - what possible other thoughts would even ask that question. But - the question above is more thorough.

Once being in a rather fundamentalist version of evangelicalism, I regularly heard the lie that Christianity was the only source of morality or the only valid system of morality - as if there is no morality to find in any other religious system at all. At the time though, I couldn’t have known that this was not true as my ability to find out that other religions had morality that was both similar and different, while there were also morality frameworks separate from religion all together.

Sigal Samuel points their asker in the direction of humanism. The American Humanist Association’s The Ten Commitments is a great place to start. The Satanic Temple’s Seven Tenets has some similarities, and a great list to check of non-theistic practices too.

Christianity has plenty of variations, but the one that I grew up in required the belief in the religion’s bible as the infallible word of the creator of all of the universe - every word is literally true and unquestionable. I’ll tell you, in my opinion, that any kind of Christianity that requires that belief is not a religion that is something to raise a child up in. The god of the Old Testament commands genocide, kills arbitrarily, and requires ignorance (see the Garden of Eden myth). Things in the New Testament are a bit better, but when morality leader Jesus is asked as to how to treat one’s human beings owned as property (re: slaves), the man isn’t recorded as saying anything that sounds like “Don’t have slaves!” Paul, the author of the majority of the New Testament, absolutely does not see women as equal to men (no real change from the Old Testament takes), and is anti-democracy - god is responsible for governments, not people.

Sigal Samuel’s response is worse reading all the way through, but the conclusion speaks to an eclectic practice that I appreciate - build your own:

So even as you build your own scaffolding, try to keep an eye out for old materials that may be worth incorporating. You don’t have to entirely reinvent the wheel.