I met Sarah and Justin when I was working on In Faith and In Doubt, a book about marriages and other long-term relationships between religious and nonreligious partners. Whether to baptize (or christen) their daughter was their first significant disagreement over religious practices.

“I wanted her to make her own decision when she was older,” Justin explained, “without having to deal with a choice that had been made for her.”

“But I just couldn’t imagine not having it done,” said Sarah.

She talked to her pastor and learned that her church saw baptism primarily as a ritual to wash away original sin. “I was honestly taken aback,” she said. “I didn’t know that was the meaning. That seemed medieval to me. But I still wanted to have it done, and now I had to figure out why I wanted it.”

She and Justin talked it through. “Eventually I realized that it wasn’t even about the connection to Christ. I think that is a relationship that a person should enter into willingly, and it happens in the heart, not in a ceremony.”

She tried to imagine not having their daughter baptized, just to see what feelings it brought up. “And the funny thing is, my first thought wasn’t about Jesus. I probably shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. It was a simpler thing. My first thought was, ‘But I was baptized, and my mother and daddy were baptized! She has to be baptized! It’s what we do!’ So it wasn’t about salvation, or original sin, or connecting her to Christ. It was about connecting her to my family.”