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When I was a kid, my family didn't go to church. My parents were intellectuals whose estrangement from organized religion happened long before I was born. But when my only sibling, a brother nearly four years older than me, declared himself an Evangelical Christian at the age of 17, they took it as an attack, a betrayal of their liberal values. Seeking a place where they could nurse their wounds and maybe show him they were willing to meet him on his journey part-way, they joined a mainline Presbyterian church in an affluent part of town with a worldly, well-educated congregation.

Of the three of us, my father was the most reluctant churchgoer. If my mother slept in on Sunday morning or was out of town, he'd find something else to do, and it was rare that he had much to say about the service on the car ride home. He resisted becoming an elder in the church until the pressure from my mother was too intense. And most egregiously to me, he never sang. He wasn't musical, unlike my mother, my brother and me, but it still seemed so cold of him not to join in the hymns. In the midst of all of those other fathers with their unabashed baritones and basses, he refused to even move his lips silently to the words.

My father grew up with the harsh Protestantism of the Church of Scotland, which turned him off with its rituals and regulations and people wearing their religion "on their sleeve." The hucksters and moralizers he encountered when he emigrated to the United States and landed in the Bible Belt were no less distasteful. And yet even without faith, he became a gentle, caring father. He went to all of our basketball games and orchestra concerts, taught us to build model airplanes and read to us from Alice in Wonderland. He hugged us and told us he loved us and called us "pet" in his modified Scots brogue.  

I've never put much stock in manufactured holidays like Father's Day, never felt any more gloomy about losing my dad on that day than on any other. And yet, as I have reflected on where faith fit and didn't fit into my parents' lives, it seems a good opportunity to recognize how they were able to raise children with  moral compasses and compassionate hearts and strong senses of responsibility, even if they went about it in a less-than-conventional way. As a parent, I now know what a daunting challenge it is just to get kids to wipe their noses with something other than their sleeves.

My father was always true to himself. I should probably cut him some slack for never singing in church.