Buckle in for what is probably going to be the weirdest book review you’ll get from me for a while. I loved this book. Bringing Up Kids When Church Lets You Down: A Guide for Parents Questioning Their Faith is an empathetic work of solidarity meant to encourage parents who have deconstructed from their childhood faith traditions. In particular, Bekah McNeel speaks to former evangelicals who still love Jesus but aren’t sure how to talk about faith to their kids.

Remember how Noah’s Ark—the genocide of all but one family—was plastered on your church nursery wall? It seemed cute then but it creeps you out a bit now. Or maybe you grew up terrified that the Rapture was going to happen and you’d be left behind. Or maybe your parents believed that it was sinful for babies to cry. From the ridiculous to the traumatic, there’s a generation of young adults who have left their childhood faith but are now left unsure of how to teach their own children about God.

After a short introduction, McNeel walks readers through the “why” of the book. In her words, “We walk through the cost of certainty-based, perfectionistic faith and parenting and set ourselves up to comb through the numerous twists and turns of ‘what’ and ‘how’ we might do things differently.” The chapter Sleep Training for Jesus takes readers through the history of Christian parenting and the how the 1970s culture wars over the definition of the American family led to popular patriarchal and authoritarian models of Christian parenting.

The second part of the book—its bulk—talks about the areas of theology and Christian practice that have been at the heart of deconstruction: how to read/interpret Scripture, hell, racial and gender issues, marriage, sex, war, guns, and so much more. McNeel inserts a lot of herself in Bringing Up Kids When the Church Lets You Down, telling both the story of how she was raised and the story of how she’s tried to raise her kids differently. For some, these are chapters of solidarity. For others, with younger kids, they will be chapters of preparation. How do I talk to my child about hell when I’m not sure it exists? Do I tell my kids that their bad behavior is sinful (when developmentally they may not have the ability to control their impulses)? It’s good discussion. Unlike the other parenting books, McNeel doesn’t offer a blueprint or a guide, but rather a hug and a voice that says you aren’t in it alone.

The final part of Bringing Up Kids When the Church Lets You Down moves into a discussion of changing paradigms. And this is where things get weird. Not because of Bekah McNeel’s content—but because some parts of the book have been censored based on where the book was printed and meant to be sold. With some states enacting draconian censorship laws and banning books from libraries, Eerdmans has responded with an auto-censoring program called ICIP (Intelligent Censorship Ink Program). If the program detects pages with material considered controversial/questionable/undesired/etc, that whole page is not printed. My hard copy of Bringing Up Kids has sixteen pages missing—and you know that’s the good stuff. The irony of how the censorship is based on conservative authoritarianism in a book about breaking the cycle of conservative authoritarian parenting isn’t lost on me. The ebook, however, had no problems. So I guess buy the ebook and skip the printed version unless you can verify you’re getting the full product.

This book made me feel better about my own parenting and made me feel less alone in struggling to guide my kids spiritually. If you feel alone and uncertain of how to do differently than what you had done to you, here is a place to start.