The Theologian's Daughter

Religion is like food. But whether you want to use it to feed your neighbour or shove it down their throat is upto you.

Hello there! If you reached here you’ve probably read my previous blog on my upbringing and how faith played a role into my formative years. It definitely has given me some of my best memories and a sense of community. But in this particular blog, I’m going to talk about where it all started to go bleak. Or in other words, how my rose-tinted glasses about the Christian faith, belief and community fell off.

2. The Food Poisoning

I’m not sure if it was because of my age (the whole adulting experience), or because of the college I went to. Perhaps both factors contributed to it. So I’ll tell you how it went.

I went to a conservative Christian college where a lot of the fundamentals of my faith started falling apart. I wasn’t very particular about going to a Christian college, but since it was one of the few colleges that had the course I wanted to study and it was relatively closer to home, I ended up taking admission. There were a lot of surprising aspects of my Christian college that definitely made me raise my eyebrow every now and then.

For example, the college prospectus states that people from different religions weren’t allowed to publicly practise their faith. I found that weird, even as a practising Christian who grew up very Christian and was admitted into a Christian college.

I noticed how people made very clear distinctions between their academic life and their spiritual life, thinking that one was more holy than the other. I noticed how the general morning assembly, which had people of all faiths sit together, was filled with messages that were unwelcoming to people who were not part of the faith (the assembly was compulsory and your attendance was marked, so you really didn’t have a choice on not attending). I noticed how, for many people, activities like planning and preparing for an exam were signs of a “weak believer” or “lukewarm Christian”. You didn’t have to worry too much about it. It’s in God’s hands.

Although I do believe that the Bible tells us to not be too anxious and also to cast our burdens onto Jesus, I also believe that Jesus does not promise us a life free of hard-work. Being someone who was very fascinated about the subjects I studied (I mean, there were some subjects I couldn’t wrap my head around but, in general, I probably the happiest in my academic journey, because this was exactly what sparked my interest), I found it hard to digest that a lot of people used spirituality to justify academic incompetence. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that how much you choose to study and how much you aim to score are very personal choices that one needs to make, the spiritual justification was what I found absurd. And this was not just academics, I found samples of this school of thought in almost every thing people did. And it seriously gave me the icks.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in the grace of God. Grace, of course, covers us all. But when it starts becoming a repetetive expectation, or a transactional one, I don’t think it can be called grace anymore. The Christian life is not a bed of roses where you treat God like a genie or a puppet. This was what I knew. And the more I saw my faith being mis-represented, the more my aversion towards the Christian faith started to grow.

You know sometimes when a friend would make a parody of a song in a regional langauge and it is so funny but also so bad that you jokingly wish you didn’t understand the regional language cause it hurts your ears? Like, I really wish I didn’t understand this language so I wouldn’t have to deal with how bad the humour is?

That was me, but on a serious note. I wished I wasn’t a Christian so I didn’t have to deal with all the twisted ways it was represented.

And then came the overdose of religion. I started to feel numb. I was getting oversaturated.

Very gradually, my faith and belief was hanging by a thread.

And one day, it snapped.

I did not want to be associated with the people claiming to be men of God.

(Click here for Part 3.)

(To know more about the Food Poisoning, you may also read Disentangling Series Extended.)