We lived in a small town, 500 km from Porto Alegre (the capital city of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil). The church also has a social function because we are gregarious beings, and we need a group to support us. So I tried very hard do "fit", after all we had children and needed these relationships that a group provides. There weren't many options, actually.
But I was always different, I had different ideas, and worse, I talked about them. The result: I was "strange", "weird", and I never felt fully accepted in that town. It's the kind of place where everybody knows about everybody else's life, and if you are "marked", it will have a widespread effect, everybody joins. It wasn't so evident to me at the time, but nowadays I know that my kids were discriminated because of that.
Our kids went through Confirmation for my husband insisted on it. He always thought that it should be done as a formality, in spite of intimately being an atheist since very young. I know it wasn't a very pleasant experience for them, and I'm sorry for that. But the good thing about this is that nobody can say we kept them away from contact with religion and now they are all atheists in spite of that. Actually, our youngest son rebelled and refused to do it.
Eventually, the time came when I decided to withdraw from church, and I even suggested to my husband that we turn it official. He didn't agree, because he was afraid of people's reaction. Although he had always been more of an atheist than me, he had learned in childhood to disguise it so he wouldn't be a target. Considering the great prejudice people have, it's quite understandable. Only when we moved away, about 9 years ago, we finally got to withdraw completely.
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