Religions and Reflections

Reflection and introspection play essential roles in my life. They link my past lessons and future unknowns with present experiences, greatly influencing the way I approach all sectors of my life, from academic to personal to all those in between. My personal value for reflection is largely what encourages me to write for and edit these very opinions pages of the paper.To a varying degree, I’m confident that almost all other Exonians have similar experiences. Connecting with ourselves is a means of shaping our actions and cultivating our perspectives to encompass more meaning and care in all that we do. For those of us who choose to affiliate or label ourselves, that is where religion enters the picture.Exonians’ religious values present us with perhaps the widest range of diversity on campus. Not only do we have a litany of religions represented through our ministry clubs, but the spectrum of beliefs within each of those individual groups provides an additional dimension of range.It is the school’s responsibility to ensure that students feel comfortable in all genres and environments on campus, and although it is not widely discussed at Exeter, I think that the topic of religion requires extra attention and care—it’s a subject that wraps up mental health, personal well-being, family, moral values, childhood experiences and even ethnic or political ties. For that reason, I feel increasingly uncomfortable at the thought of assuming people’s religious beliefs, pushing them to adhere to the assumed ideals and shunning the thought of them not fulfilling that adherence. I understand our school was founded on religious principles, but that has since been officially abolished, and it’s important to remember the line between gentle humor and what I’ll coin "Christian religio-normativity"— assuming that everyone in an audience (or at least in a racial group) belongs to a certain religion, in this case, Christianity. Discussion at school has well-acquainted many of us with the term "heteronormativity"—acting and talking while assuming the heterosexuality of all students, which inherently discriminates against, well, anyone who does not consider his/her/themselves heterosexual. Similarly, the mentioned religio-normativity discriminates, against non-Christian students when, in the age of a non-denominational Exeter, not everyone actually is Christian and not everyone should be expected to adhere to the accompanying rituals and traditions.Even if a student does consider oneself religious and affiliated with a labeled group, we should still remember and honor that everyone may vary slightly in terms of practice. For those who are religious and believe that it is your duty to impose upon others your moral law, please remember that you are not God or whichever Divine Being or Authority in whom you believe. There are serious boundaries that exist between encouraging people to practice faith, forcing them to adhere blindly to a set of beliefs and considering them sacrilegious when they begin to see differently on a particular subject. It is okay to have varying forms of religious expression, but all too often that ideal is lost.Most importantly, your religious affiliation has just about zero correlation to the kind of human being you are. You could attend your respective service, Christian or otherwise, consistently weekly and be a complete jerk in other general spheres of life; you could be an atheist who is a thoughtful, polite, respectful individual. We could flip scenarios or introduce any combination of characteristics along these spectrums, and it wouldn’t alter the core principle of the matter. Simply "checking off" that kids go to Church, Temple, Mosque, Meditation, Pooja, etc. for a service won’t necessarily make them kind human beings. These venues can surely foster thought and reflection, but in no way are they a means to an end by themselves. And there are also plenty of non-religious ways to be a person of quality character.As someone who was both raised and still today considers herself religious, I value so many of the opportunities and insights that religion has the potential to offer. I also absolutely understand the ills of institutionalized religion. Besides the obvious, terrible extreme fundamentalist groups, like ISIS and the sorts, whose radicalization make them both so far from the Islam's roots as well as simply atrocious human beings, there are also non-extremist, yet conservative mindsets whose actions bring to light many concerns. For example, an ill of institutionalized religion is the symptoms of cultural baggage it can carry—I can speak for myself, and surely countless others, when saying that many Muslim communities even in America show clear, unfair discrepancies between the attitudes towards raising and educating boys and raising and educating girls.Ultimately, my view on religion is not the institutionalized Islam I’ve seen in the American-ethnic mosques back home (if my view or my parents’ were in line with those, I would not be a girl at a boarding school across the country), but rather derived from academic opportunities I’ve been able to pursue, especially at Exeter. That free pursuit of religion, knowledge, reflection and introspection has been a great gift for which I can thank no one but the Academy and teachers like Ms. Hamilton, who have all helped me dichotomize cultural baggage from religion and discover the beauty and wisdoms in how religious lessons and values apply to my life and personal beliefs.In the end, jests and indifference that bring into question, even for a second, the free pursuit of religious knowledge at Exeter, as expressed by casually tossing around generalizations, is disheartening. It is not fair or productive to assume people’s religions, associate them with institutionalized rituals and draw accompanying judgements. Indeed, there are always humorous remarks to be made, and perhaps the only way to unite and engage a community over such an issue as diverse and thus divisive as religion is to inject jokes into the conversation—but do those have to come at the expense of disregarding the very students who fabricate that pool of religious diversity and resurfacing the Christian religio-normativity at a school that now prides itself as non-denominational?