How far would you go to get your kid in the right school? Would you espouse a religion you don’t actually believe in?
Apparently, it's happening in the UK, where lapsed Catholic parents are rushing to get their children baptized so they can enroll in overcrowded state-run Catholic school.
As a formerly-lapsed and now practicing Catholic, I'm of a couple minds about this. On the one hand, I don’t think you should join a church, or anything, if you don’t intend to really participate and make it a part of your life. Catholics consider baptism a sacrament.
On the other hand, what brought me back to the church of my childhood and, a few years later, caused my husband to convert was another life change -- that we were looking to get married in a church.
In my city, Catholic schools are closing all over the place and there is only one Catholic high school left and not very many grade schools. And since parents pay the tuition and bring the students that keep the schools going, local schools don’t ask much of them with regard to their faith other than refraining from jumping up and down yelling "ALL LIES" during religion class. Even ages ago, my best friend from my Catholic school high school wasn't Catholic. So it seems funny that there exists a Catholic school system that tries to screen non-Catholics out.
We serve on our church's baptism preparation team, made up of young families, to help people feel more welcome, make a connection, and maybe decide they want to participate fully in our community. It hasn’t worked as well as we'd hoped, but I'd rather be approaching people in welcoming when they brign their children for baptism, however old they are, and giving them a good impression of the church than holding the door shut until they prove themselves.
The church in the UK is declining, much as it is here, and if it's going to survive we need to be much more open to sort of our founding idea, that we're all equally deserving of love and redemption. Whether you can get your butt out of bed on Sunday morning or not.
