Religious Studies 🛐
I won a religious studies scholarship with the following essay. Check it out!
My rebellion against my parents was primordial. I refused to get confirmed at my Catholic Church after sixteen years of attending Catholic Mass. This was a big deal for my family. My cousins in Mexico were already confirmed at thirteen with their more conservative church, and my parents were doing their best to make sure all their kids made it into heaven. But I was fully committed to my teenage atheism and chose the path of martyrdom (being grounded) for my lack of belief.
I was deconverted when I started reading Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and the other New Atheists. I carried a Bible annotated with my own footnotes highlighting justifications of slavery, genocide, and the worst crime: contradictions. Some of my Evangelical friends fought back against my apostasy, and we debated over the theological implications of moral relativism, the question of miracles, and Pascal's wager.
I fell out of this phase when I started college and math classes got hard, and especially after I got a job; I didn't have time to go on the internet anymore. Slowly as I learned more, I saw my heroes fall. I realized just how shallow their arguments really were, mostly situated in the time of the War on Terror and the reaction against the Christian Right. As my old high school friends were taking theology classes actually studying the Old Testament, I realized how little of it I actually learned on my own when trying to disprove it.
After a few years of these mixed feelings, I was ready for change. My great-uncle Gero died three years ago. My parents and I went to rosary service at his home. The cluttered basement I remembered from my own childhood, the one filled with toys where I played fútbol with my cousins, was replaced with rows of white-clothed chairs and a giant table in front with photos, flowers, and massive crucifixes. It got packed with so many cousins and n-th removed aunts and uncles, and then we started our prayers.
My dad and I were sitting next to this young family that was somehow related to me, but the only path we could calculate was through Tío Gero. They had four kids from the eldest around six down to the youngest newborn baby. The kids were playing together while we were rote-ing off our Ave Marías one bead at a time. It was so sweet to see.
After we were done, my dad had something to say to me: "You should stay Catholic for us---don't leave everyone behind. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad---they're all good, mijo. The reason you go to church is so you don't make your grandma cry."
I was very moved by him. This was the best argument I had heard on behalf of faith. Nothing from Aquinas or C.S. Lewis or any of the logical theorems in any of my math classes compared to this line of reasoning. I wanted to stay connected with my relatives because of that shared love.
A few months later, I agreed to be a godfather for my baby cousin's baptism in our ancestral village. I attend each relative's sacrament party in the States and do my best to stay connected with them to preserve our culture. I call myself culturally Catholic, regardless of whatever lingering antipathy I have for organized religion.
I chose to pursue a religious studies minor to understand why my father's words were so persuasive to me. Along the way, I developed my academic goal of learning from these faiths, not letting disbelief get in the way of gaining real wisdom and insight. I'm grateful to the __________ Scholarship for allowing me to share my story and pursue these questions further.
