Navigate religion for yourself, not the people around you
Since I was born, I’ve been getting up every Sunday to go to church. And every Sunday since my parents were born, they’ve been attending church with their parents. It always felt so normal, a part of my routine and nothing that felt uncustomary. Up until eighth grade, I also attended a private Christian school, so I was constantly exposed to the religion I’d always known.
For college, it’s likely I’ll attend Pepperdine, the private Christian university where my dad works, many of my family members have attended and where many friends from different parts of my life currently attend. I’d never known anything different, which never posed any problems or thought-provoking internal conversations until I made it to high school, my introduction to public education.
Religion was no longer an integral part of my school experience. I didn’t pray in the morning, at the end of the day or before every meal. I wasn’t required to take a Bible class daily. I didn’t attend chapel every Wednesday. I didn’t pledge to the Christian flag after the American flag. I didn’t expect any of these things to continue on into high school, but their sudden absence made me think about the weight of their presence. I also began having conversations and friendships with people who had never been a part of religion. I learned about life without church, or even the specific choice to reject it.
Prior to this, I never had a deep desire to talk to such people, not because I disliked or judged them, but because I already knew so many people I loved and admired that I always had someone to talk to. I had countless well-educated, respectable adults I could turn to, friends I had had my whole life and family members who supported any conversation I wanted to have. I never felt stifled or like I was being deprived of discussions I could be having with different people. But high school showed me that variety is important when learning about the world. If you only ever look through one specific lens, you miss out on perspectives and experiences that could completely shift your view on life.
Something that arose from this realization for me was that a main aspect of religion and why it is so popular is because it claims to have tons of answers about why things are the way they are. Christianity claims to know how the universe started, why people are bad and how we will all be saved. “Knowing” these things should bring comfort, but instead they made me question why we can trust this information. Claiming to have all the answers is more unsettling to me than not having any. All of life is so uncertain, and for a group of people to claim to know what happens after life, beyond the universe and outside of our comprehension makes me question what I have been taught.
As I prepare to go off to college, I’ve started thinking about the personal reflections I’ll make and all the new experiences I’ll have. Starting over on my own and choosing what aspects of my life and belief system to keep or rearrange is a process that I hope will be a positive path. The environment that I’ve grown up in has not been toxic or overbearing whatsoever, so I have no desire to completely reject everything I’ve ever been taught. Instead, I want to self-reflect, explore and grow in order to figure out what I truly think. I’m so excited to take on this challenge by meeting new people and having conversations about the world.
The only schedule and social clock that you should be following should be internal. The only standards that you have to live up to are your own. This topic is one of the most individual and personal ones that anyone experiences, so to shape it around other people and their standards completely erases the value of having religion. There’s no reason you should have anything figured out by a certain point in your life, especially before you’ve lived most of it.
It’s very easy to settle into the life in which you were born. When a belief system is handed to you or reiterated on a regular basis, it becomes all the more appealing. There is nothing wrong with living a content life that follows in the footsteps that have been set for you. However, I’m advocating for your personal growth to overshadow this route. Deciding what you want for yourself and what you believe about the world is a vital path to take and shouldn’t be compromised for the sake of living up to people’s expectations. As teenagers about to enter the world, having conversations with all kinds of people and seeing as much of the world as possible will set up a life of openness and exploration. Without this journey, we might all still be stuck in the same pew for the rest of our lives.
