Hi all. My son is currently 3 months old, and the topic of baptism has recently come up with both my husband and I’s families. I grew up Lutheran and my husband grew up Catholic; I dropped the pretense of calling myself Christian when I was about 17, and while my husband has never called himself agnostic (he prefers the term “a religious skeptic” 😂) he is the least religious person I know and shares many of my thoughts about Christianity and religion as a whole. Before our son was born, we agreed that raising our son to appear to be Christian for the sake of our families wasn’t something we want to do. But as always, that’s easier said than done.

My MIL just offered to have a priest come to thanksgiving to baptize our son. My husband thinks it’s a good idea. He said it’s “for our son and for me” for him to be baptized, which doesn’t make sense based off of how my husband feels about Catholicism. I think 90% of this is him feeling pressured to conform to what his family wants, and the other 10% is perhaps a little bit of guilt for not raising his son the way he was raised.

I guess I’m just looking for some solidarity, maybe advice on how to confront this situation if anyone has it. It seems so silly and useless to me to have our child baptized into a religion we have no intention of raising him in. Neither of us have gone to church or cracked a bible in YEARS, and I don’t see that changing soon. We never intended to raise our child in religion, and I don’t think that’ll change just because he’s baptized, but my MIL has been relentlessly asking about it since my son was born, and my husband has never come out and said “we’re not baptizing him” which has landed us where we are now. Ugh. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far through my rambling 😂