Motherhood Quote by Robert Jay Lifton

Lifton’s sentence is doing the quiet work of autobiography: it frames a life of intellectual dissent as something learned at the dinner table, not discovered in a seminar room. The key word is “pride.” His father isn’t simply nonreligious; he performs atheism as a combative identity, a stance sharpened against “traditional or orthodox forms” that are described almost like an inherited apparatus. That pride hints at motive: atheism here isn’t only disbelief, it’s a moral and cultural refusal, a bid to separate from the gravitational pull of immigrant or family authority.

The subtext is a generational drama about modernity. Lifton’s grandparents are “very steeped” in Judaism on both sides, which makes the father’s antagonism read less like casual skepticism and more like a conscious break with a dense communal world. “Combating” is unusually kinetic; it suggests argument, perhaps even ridicule, aimed at orthodoxy as a social system as much as a theology. Lifton subtly positions himself as “influenced,” not indoctrinated, leaving room for the reader to see the psychological inheritance: a model of identity built through opposition.

Context matters because Lifton’s career revolves around how belief systems shape (and sometimes trap) the self - from totalitarian “thought reform” to the psychic aftermath of catastrophe. This origin story supplies an early template: watch the forces that claim absolute authority, notice how families transmit them, and pay attention to the counter-force of dissent that can be principled, performative, or both.