The following is a response to the SLC Community Question: What role
do you feel religion plays in Sarah Lawrence’s secular environment?
My faith was far from my mind when I came to Sarah Lawrence. I had spent my high school years thinking that the Bible was archaic, and convinced that because somewhere in Leviticus it said that you couldn’t wear poly-cotton blends, the whole thing was pointless. I was cool with Jesus but sick of the church, and during my first few weeks on campus I found most people to share this sentiment.
I stumbled into Cameron Afzal’s Emergence of Christianity class almost by accident. One of my friends was going in for an interview and it seemed like something that might be interesting but probably not my thing. I am now a junior and am auditing the third class I have taken with Cameron, including the class from my first year. I came to Sarah Lawrence to study dance and am now intending to apply to graduate school for theology. I still love dance, but I know that I am where I’m supposed to be. I imagine that everyone at this school can appreciate that you can find ways to incorporate your passion into almost any class you take. I’ve become almost entirely a humanities person and thus am able to incorporate my love for studying religion, specifically Christianity, but also Islam and the Hebrew Bible into my classes, though I’m sure I could bring it over to the sciences and the creative arts with relative ease.
While that incorporation has been invaluable to me, the use of religion in ‘secular’ classes has had some drawbacks. There are a number of people on this campus who hear the word “religion” and shut down. These are the people who have decided that they know all that they need to know about religion and that it isn’t worth studying because it’s the root of all evil. I am not an apologist; I acknowledge that countless people have used their faith to further their own agendas and done atrocious things behind the shield of their beliefs. But I also know that, to me, G-d is love and anything that is not done with loving intent is bad, ill-advised and goes against what I believe and what my experience of faith has taught me. That does not, of course, mean the feelings of people who have experienced horrible things at the hands of the faithful or have decided that faith isn’t their thing are invalid. And if they don’t want to know more about religion in any capacity, that’s cool; however, there is a difference between not wanting anything to do with it and choosing any moment that the word comes up to condemn and rail against it as though everyone believes the same thing they do.
As unfortunate as it may seem to some individuals on this campus, religion has been and still is a pervasive force in this world. It isn’t something that can be ignored, although that is something that is easy to do at SLC. This school is an amazing place because people are able to come here and it is possible to avoid it entirely for four years. And it is equally amazing that a student of faith can come to this campus and find that religion is not confined to the religious studies department. However, sometimes I wish that it could be. What I mean is that because of its pervasive nature, it is sometimes challenging to find a class where it is possible to discuss religion without creating a battleground. It is impossible to discuss the Bible strictly as literature in a literature class or as history because religion is one of those topics on which everyone has an opinion. This is understandable because, as I stated early, it is still a permeating social fact. I believe that the root of the problem is tied in with the idea that many people believe (and this is not just true of religion) that our morals, our ethics, our understanding of the world was something held by people of the past.
The role that religion plays in this ‘secular environment’ is one that can permeate your day-to-day existence, as it does for me, or it can be completely outside of your sphere of experience. It is probably confronted more by a humanities student than a science student, but then again I haven’t taken a science class so I can’t say for sure. In the end it is entirely up to you. All I ask is that the next time you have the opportunity to expand your sphere of experience, whatever that opportunity may be, that you take it because it is only through the respect of knowledge that we grow as a community.