Today's Second Religious Question

Let's say you have a couple of people who have a child. This couple are atheists. But their parents are actively-believing Christians -- Catholics, to be precise. So you have parents who are atheists, but grandparents who very much want to see their grandchild baptized. Should the atheist parents allow their child to be baptized?

(No, Mom and Dad, we're not pregnant. This is just a hypothetical. More accurately, it's someone else's problem, a problem that interests me.)

Normally, I'd think, "Dunking the kid's head in water is a ritual, nothing more. Won't hurt the kid. Wipe the kid's head off with a towel, grandma and grandpa are happy, and that's the end of it." But the ritual of baptism is aimed at the parents (and godparents) of the child, as well as the child herself. The parents and godparents have to publicly promise to raise the child within the tenets of Roman Catholicism. So what the baptism is really doing is forcing the atheist parents to raise their child to be a Catholic.

Now, one option would be for the parents themselves to opt out of participating in the ceremony, and allow the grandparents to stand in as godparents to the child. The grandparents make the promises, the parents don't participate. That mitigates it a little bit, to be sure. But it also of necessity involves the grandparents in that case promising to interfere with their children's decisions about how to raise the kid. And it may start with a baptism, which is a harmless enough ritual, but then it turns in to confirmation and first communion and then going to church every Sunday when the kid ought to be watching professional football like a good American should.

In mitigation, I think that the promises made in a baptismal ritual are not the sorts of promises that are widely expected to be followed. Most people understand that this is a ritual with words and phrases left over from the medieval period and they expect modern ideas about child-rearing to prevail. That includes substantial deference to the parents on matters of instruction about religion and morals. So maybe to them, it's just a nice ritual, a benchmark ceremony to denote the beginning of their grandchild's life. In which case, why not?

But it would seem not, if the grandparents are insistent on the ceremony. They must attach some meaning to it, or they wouldn't be pushing for it. What the grandparents are looking for, if they don't take the promise seriously but do attribute meaning to the ceremony, is "soul insurance." For Catholics, this means that if something happens to the child between its baptism and young adulthood, the child is accepted by God into the family of Christians in heaven rather than being relegated to limbo, with other unbaptized souls. (Actually, I think limbo is now out of Catholic theology again, but the point is, if you're baptized, you're better-off than not.)

Now, I've always thought Protestants got this one right as compared to the Catholics. Given a) the existence of a soul and b) the need for that soul to be redeemed via baptism, it seems that an adult baptism, made as a result of a conscious choice, would be more virtuous and worthy of recognition than something done to an infant, who obviously has no choice in the matter. As an atheist, I question both predicates, of course; but if those two are taken on faith rather than subjected to rational analysis, the Protestant tradition of adult baptism makes more sense than the Catholic tradition of infant baptism.

The thing is, for a Catholic, the promises to raise the child to be Catholic are still there and an integral part of the ceremony. In a very real sense, dunking the kid's head in the water is irrelevant. The promises of the adults to see to it that the child is inculcated in the mythology of Catholicism is the operative and important part of this ritual. It is not, at the end of the day, an excuse to say that people don't expect others to follow through on those promises. The promises are made and if the ritual is taken seriously, then so are the promises that are incorporated into it.

Allowing their child to be baptized is giving license to other people, mainly the grandparents, to interfere in the way the parents choose to raise their child. So on balance, I think the parents of the child should a polite but firm way to tell their own parents to back off and respect their wishes about the kid. It's not that dunking the kid's head in water matters -- it's what that represents, and it's what it portends for the future. I can understand how awkward saying "no baptism" might be, but if that line is going to be drawn, better that it be drawn firmly, clearly, and early.