Faking it

I came across the following article on the Freakonomics Blog today, and the title alone was obviously enough to intrigue me: “We Pretend We Are Christians.”

Here is an excerpt from a reader who admitted to "faking" a pretty significant aspect of her life:

We are agnostics living deep in the heart of Texas and our family fakes Christianity for social reasons. It’s not so much for the sake of my husband or myself but for our young children. We found by experience that if we were truthful about not being regular church attenders, the play dates suddenly ended. Thus started the faking of the religious funk.

It seemed silly but it’s all very serious business down here. We don’t go to church or teach or children one belief is “right” over another. We expose them to every kind of belief and trust that they will one day settle in to their very own spirituality. However, for the sake of friends and neighbors, we pretend we are Christians. We try not to lie but rather not to disclose unnecessary information. As the children are getting older, this isn’t so easy for them and an outing is probably eminent.

We are not the only ones. We have found a few other fakers out there. I would love it if you ever explored this subject in a future book. I should mention that the friend who recommended Freakonomics to me is the head of the bible study at her church. Interesting.

I am interested in hearing similar stories from readers. I would not be surprised if political ideology is another vibe that gets faked once in a while.

This makes me wonder about myself: how much of my own idealogies might I "fake" to a certain extent, or at least (pardon the expression) bullshit? Despite priding myself on my open-minded liberal humanitarian values and (my consciously ironic) moral relativism, I sometimes cringe at my own reactionary and even--dare I say it?--ahem, conservative judgments and assumptions. When you have to sometimes remind yourself of your values, how much are they natural and how much are they contrived?

Sometimes I also "fake" not liking children. In fact, I have, even recently, told people that I hate children. Hate. I don't hate children--far from it. I am in love with my nieces and nephew, my little cousins, and my friend-since-grade-five Amy's daughter Hailey. But I can't stand, as a relatively newly married, healthy young heterosexual woman who is financially, emotionally, and romantically stable, that everyone assumes that my partner and I want to have--or worse, should have--children. And so I have perhaps exaggerated my opinion of children in order to deter would-be child-pushers from commenting on my choice not to automatically spawn.