It’s *your* child, dude. Only *you* and the mother get to decide how to raise this child.

It’s none of the mother-in-law’s business how you raise him.

When they try and open a dialog, tell them why. Set firm boundaries, including that “even a hint of violating the ‘no preaching’ order will cause permanent denial of access”.

Nothing less.

My son is 9 and he does Religious Education at school. I’m a firm believer in not indoctrinating children into anything, but rather giving them the tools to come to their own conclusions so when my boy came home talking about the son of god I was a little unsure how to go about addressing it. So we had a little chat, I asked him to tell me all about what he learned and periodically I asked things like “how does that work?” “why did it happen like that do you think?” etc, which forced him to consider what he was being taught. We also regularly talk about other faiths and how they celebrate religious holidays and what they think with regards to various issues. He had a muslim classmate last year and she explained to the class how her family celebrate ramadan, which was really enlightening for him too. We also talk about current world issues a lot at home, things like various wars, natural disasters, terrorism, what the Cold War was etc, so he is very aware of the reality out there for his age.

It was a couple of weeks ago now, I think they were discussing Noah’s Ark in RE and obviously my efforts to teach him logic and critical thinking paid off, because he came home and told me that he’s happy to play along at school for the rest of the year, but he’d rather not do RE next year because none of it made sense, god probably isn’t real, or at least not the god they’re talking about and he’d rather play maths games on the computers (a much better use of his time, I agree).

That said, I’m glad I enrolled him in the RE class so he could learn and figure it all out for himself. I found it very rewarding to figure it out for myself when I was young, rather than just following what my folks believed (which wouldn’t have been too bad anyway, at best my folks are agnostic).

My advice to you is unless your daughter is very young (under 6-7 years) I would let her continue to see Grandma so that she can learn, and then talk about it all with her. Perhaps even have a round table discussion with Grandma. Discuss god, what faith means, where god stands in the various issues in the world today. Kids have great B.S. detectors, when the best answer to ‘why does god let so many innocent children starve in Africa’ she can come up with is ‘we can’t pretend to understand god’s plan’ I think your daughter will see the light, so to speak.

But make sure you keep giving her the tools she needs to think, no one else will teach her! Best of luck to both of you.