Every religious upbringing comes with a rulebook. Some of it is the famous stuff carved in stone. But the rules that really shaped a childhood were usually smaller, stranger and enforced with total confidence by adults who had never once checked where they came from.
We asked this question on the page and the comment section turned into a group therapy session. So here is a tour of the greatest hits: the rules a lot of us were raised with, why they existed, and why they look a little different from the far side of a deconversion.
To be clear, this is not a dig at the people who taught us. Most of them were doing their best with the instructions they were given. It is the instructions we are interested in.
1. No dancing. Anywhere. Ever.
For a lot of kids raised in strict evangelical or Baptist churches, dancing was a gateway sin. Not ballroom-at-a-wedding dancing, not even that. The theory was that rhythmic movement led to impure thoughts, and impure thoughts led to everything else.
If that sounds like the plot of a movie, it is. The small town of Elmore City, Oklahoma had a ban on public dancing dating back to before statehood, and when local high school students lobbied for a prom in 1980, much of the opposition was led by local church leaders. The fight made national news and loosely inspired Footloose (Wikipedia: Elmore City, Oklahoma). The kids won. The prom happened. Civilisation survived.
2. Dungeons & Dragons is a portal to the occult
If you grew up in the 1980s or 90s, there is a decent chance you were told that a game involving dice, graph paper and snacks would open your soul to demons. This was not a fringe idea at the time. The so-called “Satanic Panic” produced campaigns, pamphlets and even an advocacy group, Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, which warned parents about the game (Wikipedia: Dungeons & Dragons controversies).
The demons never showed up. What did show up was a generation of adults who are very good at maths, improvised storytelling and arguing about rules, which, now that we think about it, is excellent training for leaving religion.
3. Harry Potter will teach you witchcraft
The same energy found a new target around the year 2000. Some churches warned that the books were a recruitment tool for real witchcraft, and a few went further. In 2001, a church in Alamogordo, New Mexico publicly burned copies of the series, with its pastor reportedly admitting he had not read them (Wikipedia: Religious debates over the Harry Potter series).
A lot of us read them anyway, under the covers, with a torch. Not one of us can do a single spell. We checked.
4. Your records have secret messages from Satan in them
“Backmasking” was the idea that rock bands hid satanic messages in their songs that you could only hear when you played the record backwards, and that your brain would absorb them anyway when you played it forwards. It was taken seriously enough that in the early 1980s lawmakers in Arkansas and California introduced legislation about it (Wikipedia: Backmasking).
The rule at home was simpler: no secular music. Which led to a lot of children who could hum Christian rock that sounded suspiciously like the bands they weren’t allowed to hear.
5. Meat on Friday is a sin, but fish is fine
For Catholic kids, Friday meant fish. The tradition of abstaining from meat on Fridays, as a small act of penance, goes back centuries, and it still applies to the Fridays of Lent today (Wikipedia: Friday fast).
What made it memorable for many of us was the fine print. A fish fry with chips and a fizzy drink was penance. A ham sandwich was a moral failing. As a kid you learned early that the line between holy and unholy could be drawn exactly where the seafood counter started.
6. No coffee, no tea
Kids raised as Latter-day Saints grew up with the Word of Wisdom, a health code that, among other things, rules out coffee and tea (Wikipedia: Word of Wisdom). Plenty of ex-Mormons describe their first legal cup of coffee as an experience somewhere between a rite of passage and a minor crime.
7. Don’t ask that question
This one did not appear on any official list, but almost everyone recognises it. Where did Cain’s wife come from? How did the kangaroos get to the ark and back? If God knows everything already, why pray? The answer was usually some version of “we’re not meant to understand,” “have faith,” or a pointed look from the Sunday school teacher.
Of all the rules on this list, this is the one that did the most damage, and also the one that eventually backfired the most. A lot of people on this page did not leave because of anything an atheist said. They left because they kept asking the questions they were told not to ask, and the answers never came.
8. Sundays are for church and nothing else
No shops, no sport, no television, sometimes no playing outside. Depending on your denomination and your parents, the Sabbath could feel less like a day of rest and more like a day of waiting. Many of us remember watching the clock until sunset, or until Monday, so life could resume.
It is worth saying that plenty of non-religious people now deliberately keep a day with no screens and no work. The idea of rest is a good one. It just works better as a choice than as a commandment with a threat attached.
Why these rules stuck
Looking back, the strangest thing about most of these rules is not that they existed. Every community has rules. It is how certain everyone was. Dancing was dangerous. Dice were dangerous. Wizards were dangerous. Each rule was delivered with the same confidence as the big claims about God and the afterlife, and when the small ones turned out to be wrong, a lot of people started wondering about the big ones too.
That, more than any argument, is how many people on this page describe their path out: one ridiculous rule at a time.
Your turn
We know this list barely scratches the surface. No jeans for girls? No playing cards? Halloween banned but a “Harvest Festival” on the same night with the same sweets? Tell us the rule from your upbringing that makes the least sense now. The comments on the Facebook page are where the best ones live.