Louise Reeve here, continuing to share my thoughts! Here’s some thoughts on Father’s Day in 2024.

“I’ll be honest, I find Father’s Day a tricky subject to write a sermon for, since, to state the obvious, I can’t be one, although like everyone else, I do have a father – both in the strict biological sense, and in the more important sense that I had, and still do have, a Dad. I had the very good fortune to be brought up by two parents, both of whom did their best to provide for their children and nurture them into adults.

Tempting as it might be for me personally, turning this service into a talk about all the ways my Dad was a good Dad isn’t perhaps of the greatest relevance to everyone else present, so I want to share some thoughts instead on Father’s Day – and Mother’s Day.

I’ve referred to this part of the service as ‘uncertainty’ because here in 2024, we are still in the middle of one of those great ongoing social upheavals that occur every so often about social norms, morals, and what we can take for granted. Where previous generations grappled with questions of who should have the right to vote, whether people of different races deserved equal rights, whether women deserve equal rights, whether being gay is a normal part of being a human being, one of the most pressing issues of our age is around gender and gender roles.

Our own Unitarian movement has grappled with this, most recently when, in 2022, we debated the FOY Society’s motion on transgender rights. To quote part of it, it proposed that: “The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian  Churches:

1. Affirms with joy that each person’s understanding and statement of their own gender identity is a matter of conscience;
2. Affirms that transgender rights are human rights;
3. Joins the British Medical Association, the Trades Union Congress and others in civil society in urging the adoption of a self-declaration model for gender recognition by the UK and devolved governments.”

And those of us who are active in online Unitarian spaces have noted an ongoing debate about gender roles in worship. In particular, going back to that part of the motion about “each person’s understanding of their own gender identity”, we hear from people who don’t identify their gender as exclusively male or female, who describe themselves as being ‘non-binary’ or ‘genderfluid’, who find the emphasis in a lot of the wording of our more traditional hymns on ‘men and women’ as leaving little room for them, who do not consider themselves to be either.

I do think that as Unitarians, we are especially called on to grapple with these debates. We are not a dogmatic movement, which has a particular set of beliefs around gender roles and identity. We are a questioning faith, and that charges us with a particular responsibility; if we truly mean that “all are welcome here”, then are we willing to stand in the other’s sandals and hear how the words we use sound to them?

I was tempted to call this sermon ‘Do we still need Father’s Day?’, but that seemed to me to be a cheap way of catching attention and needlessly controversial. Even worse would have been something like “Should it be Parents’ Day?”, not because I think the idea of celebrating parents is a bad idea, but because posing questions like this seems to have become a way of starting arguments and encouraging people to divide themselves into different camps, rather than any sort of meaningful attempts at trying to understand each other’s points of view.

Some people actually have suggested having something like “Parents Day”, as a way of acknowledging that people who don’t describe themselves as male or female raise children. I first came across the idea of “Parents Day” in an article by the author Stu Oakley, who is a man married to a man, raising three adopted children, who commented that “in a two-dad family, you’d think Father’s Day would be like Christmas, but it can be a logistical minefield. Who spoils who? Who gets the lie-in? Who gets taken out for dinner? I’m hoping all this changes by the time the kids get old enough to be taking their ageing daddies out on the town!”

I very nearly included his full article in this service, but I was running out of space, so instead I’ll include the main point of what he wanted to say here, that in a family where two fathers are raising the children, it was very difficult for them to find support when it came to aspects of childcare that society seems to still regard as being done by mums – ‘mum and baby groups’, books on cooking for very young children being marketed as ‘perfect for mums’, and a general assumption that women do the childcare for young children. I will include this quote from his article in full:

“I’d love to see the language around parenting change to be more inclusive. Because really, it’s not that hard to swap the word ‘Mum’ for the word ‘parent’ without upsetting anyone in the process. Instantly your poster advertising a toddler club, or your book about weaning babies, doesn’t make Dads, or non-binary parents, feel like an anomaly and likewise, helps to break down the view that women are mums first and foremost.

The great thing about being a non-traditional family is that we get to make our own rules and not be weighed down by ‘tradition’ or archaic expectations around who does what. Yes, my husband and I both have different roles as parents, that’s natural, but these play to our strengths as people, not our genders.”

I’m reminded of a friend of mine’s Liverpudlian husband, who, upon having a friend remark to him “oh, you’re doing the babysitting?” as he took his children out for their various Saturday morning sports activities, replied “Nah – they’re my kids!”

If this sounds like I’m opposed to Father’s Day, I’m actually not. Whilst I’m a firm believer in acknowledging a wide range of different human genders, it would also be pretty foolish not to acknowledge that most of us tend to identify as male or female, and that if you’re a parent, you probably think of yourself as a mum or a dad. I’m in no way opposed to celebrating the hard work done by men who raise children.

What I would say is that one thing that I think has been a very positive development recently is that when having Mothering Sunday or Father’s Day services, we now give more space and acknowledgement to how complex people’s feelings around their parents are, how difficult these days can be for people who lost their parents young, never knew them, or had very bad, even abusive, relationships with them.

In the same way, I think we need to build on this to think about how we celebrate every kind of fatherhood, whether it’s the two dads raising their children and having debates over whose turn it is to do the laundry and how best to toilet-train a toddler, the father staying home with the kids whilst the mother goes out to work, or the transman giving birth to his child. Or, indeed, the man who stepped up to raise a child, as Brad Paisley movingly sings about in the song we heard earlier. When we celebrate fathers, let’s make sure that all are indeed welcome, and we also need to think about how we welcome all kinds of parents as well.  

Something I hold to when I lead worship are the words of a Methodist minister I used to know, that the purpose of all worship should be to help people answer the question “What does God want us to do?” I’m Methodist by background, I should add. As a Unitarian, I might now put that a bit differently, but I do try always to answer the question; in this situation we are considering, what is the prompting of our spiritual selves and how are we called on to live our values? Given my own religious background, I usually do return to the Bible, and for this service I was inspired by words from John 1, chapter 4:

“7 Dear friends, let us continuously love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born from God and knows God. 8 The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love …12 No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us …18 There is no fear where love exists. Rather, perfect love banishes fear, for fear involves punishment, and the person who lives in fear has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because God first loved us. 20 Whoever says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, is not telling the truth. The one who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love the God whom he has not seen. 21 And this is the commandment that we have from him: the person who loves God must also love his brother.”

We are charged to love each other, and so we must always continue in love, to live our Unitarian values, that all are truly welcome here. And on this day, we take time to value the hard work done by fathers with all its joys and pains, the love of children for their fathers, the pain felt by both fathers and children when fatherhood does not happen or love is absent, and that love, above all, is what being a father and a good parent is all about.”