I never said that having religion around in a family represents shackles. Shackles are things that tie you down. They make it hard to escape. Things like the threat of social ostracism, shaming family honour, physical punishments for apostasy. The Catholic Church is relatively benign (though I would never had dared tell my gran that I wasn't a Catholic any more - she'd have been devastated. My dad isn't too happy with my stance on belief either. Paths of least resistance can be shackles too), though not as benign as the CofE. I know a family in which one parent is a devout Catholic, the other ignores religion altogether and the four children have happily been allowed to choose whatever paths they wanted. We told our kids that it was best that we didn't exercise our right to exclude them from religious instruction and ceremony at school, but we could talk about it at home. But the way you end up is not always necessarily an indication of how you were treated as a child. Kids are resilient creatures who pick up influences less and less from parents as they grow up and more and more from peers. Sometimes the most free-thinking people come from the most illiberal backgrounds, in the words of that great mafioso, they did it their way.