I kind of battle with this. When I was a kid, church was pretty much everything. All of our spare time was actually church time. And then we switched from some pretty laid back presbyterian church to a southern baptist church, and we were there all the time, and they taught the kids that different world leaders were probably the anti-christ and we better be prepared, and taught us how to pray away the demon that was living inside of the bathroom stall's door, and other crazy things.

There were a lot of years that I avoided all churches at all cost. I've waivered back and forth over and over on God, and whether I believe in Him despite His insane followers. And I still feel like I don't have a good handle on that, but I'm hoping that it will come. I feel like there is a God. But I also feel like I, and probably everyone else in the world, have no idea what that really means.

When I had my first kid, I prayed a lot. She was in intensive care for half a year, and I felt like all of my friends and support melted away because I was at the hospital dealing with that. And then we were in a relaxed sort of quarantine at home after that. When she was better and that lifted, I took her to the park, and I saw this woman who had kids around the same time I had, and she invited me to a mom's group... at her church. I was starved for friendship and I said yes.

I go to church more now than I would probably care to, but it is where I've found friends again. So there's a family bible study time followed by about an hour of just hanging out that I go to, and the mom group, and there's a craft night I like. There are a lot of worries coming up with this plan, mostly centered around what I don't want my child to be taught. But I feel like going to the church for the sake of friendships is ok, although it does kind of require a game face, because I don't want to ever go in and be disrespectful in the church's home court.

There are a lot of conversations that I clearly have different views and everyone knows it, even though I tend to keep my mouth shut, and be polite and firm when directly asked. There are some people that want to make it a big argument and "retrain the way I think." There are people who just nicely coexist because I'm not making a big deal out of any of these things.

This has been going on for over two years now. I have some worries about how I will handle certain things in the future- mostly relating to my daughter, and how will I work around the indoctrination attempts, and the fear mongering, and the strong desire this church has for abstinence only education. How am I going to explain to her the hypocrisy of what I'm doing? How do I explain anything, really? I honestly don't see myself doing this forever. I mean, they've already told her that in order to pee in the potty she has to pray really hard to Jesus. Took about a week to fix that up.

Anyway, I don't know that there's a great answer. Whether you can/should go to a church that you don't like/feel comfortable in/whatever because of available friends and family there. I'm kind of taking it on a week by week basis, and in the meantime, I'm looking for friends outside of that circle, so that if I ever do decide their crazy is too much for my family to handle, I won't be in such rock and a hard place about walking away entirely.

I don't know if any of that is helpful at all.