Worth noting that this is the daughter…I realize I’m almost certainly projecting, but there is often a double-standard. My parents are pretty religious, and my Mom actually worked as a lay minister as a ‘second career’ for a few years after retirement. She still does funerals from time to time.
My parents—especially my Mom—are pretty pushy with my sister and her kids. Mom harps on my sister a lot about regular church attendence; my sister does belong to a church and for awhile she was even farily involved. Lately less so, and they don’t go every week. She is a believer, however—her kids are baptised and confirmed, they went to Sunday school, the youngest went to a church day care, and just a couple of weeks ago she got remarried in a church ceremony (a very simple one, but in her church with her minister all the same).
That’s apparently not good enough for our Mom, who gets pretty nosy about my sister’s church activities; I guess last Christmas she got fed up with how rambunctuous my nephews were being, so she announced that it time for a story and “I’m reading to them from THE BIBLE.” Didn’t ask, didn’t explain, just told my sister that she was going to take her kids aside and read from the Gospels. My sister, who doesn’t have strong feelings on the matter (she is a believer, after all) and who probably was more than happy to let Grandma take over for a little while, didn’t object. I’ll bet if she had, there would have been conflict.
I cannot imagine my Mom trying that crap with us, even though she knows we’re not churchgoers at all and probably has a pretty good idea that none of us are believers. Admittedly, my sister has always been closer to them than I, so gender isn’t the only explanation here by far, but I can’t help but think that the fact that she’s their daughter (and, for two years after the divorce, a single mother with no “man in the house”) played into the dynamic.
