Eliot Sherman: Stay out of my faith

I was sitting in my room this Monday night, quietly minding my own business when I received a visit from the Campus Crusade for Christ. More specifically, my roommate received the visit, as I was preoccupied with a noble attempt to defeat alien invaders and restore peace and harmony to the galaxy. The group's visit, however, was unusual enough to make me put down my X-Box controller. They had left a copy of the Bible and a video. The version of the Bible was an interesting one, and I'm pretty sure it's enough to make my old buddy King James turn in his grave. According to the byline, the Bible ("#1 International Bestseller of all time!") was written by God, who among other things "works as a teacher, theologian, physician, father, son and counselor -- all simultaneously without taking a break." That's a pretty impressive resume, enough to make one wonder how he ever has any time for X-Box. And just in case I wasn't putting together a clear enough picture of this supreme Renaissance man, I found a handy leaflet with a diagram of the Holy Trinity. Apparently, there's some sort of spiritual cycle at work there. Well, at this point I was hooked. The drama! I had to watch the video. And that's when I started to get a little creeped out. The video was a series of interviews with several different hip youths (one of every gender and ethnicity, of course) who, without prompting, launched into a series of soul-searching assertions which, suffice to say, were not quite as deep as a well or wide as a church steeple. I wish there was another word for superficial in the English language that meant the same thing, only a thousand times more so. There isn't, but I think you get the idea. If we are to believe this video, everyone with any faith in their life falls into two distinct categories. They are either male, in which case they turn to God on account of being social rejects, or female, in which case they turn to God on account of having slept with everybody else. While they spoke, someone playing guitar in the background incessantly repeated "I'm gonna be someone someday" over and over again. Toward the end, all the subjects agreed (repeating each other in an exasperating attempt to sound dramatic) "I think I could use some do-overs." Let's face it, guys. You need a hell of a lot more than a do-over. Throughout these intimate confessions, several things occurred to me. Rarely, once or twice, did anyone ever actually say "God"; I heard a lot about "intimate relationships," but nothing about religion. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that this was the pilot episode for yet another "reality" television series. For example, the Indian fellow who told me, presumably before he "found" God, that when he went home, he would just read books because he had no friends. What's wrong with reading books? Could it be that some people manage to read books and also hold on to a few acquaintances here and there? Why are they pushing the Whore of Babylon/social recluse angle so strongly? To me, this whole approach represents the sleazy side of religion. It is a thinly veiled attempt to gather the vulnerable, the weak-minded and the desperate. Maybe there is someone somewhere out there who believes in God without having serious social affectations. Maybe, just maybe, there is someone out there who is doing a fine job of finding God on his own without help from anyone else, thank you very much. I may maintain a fair bit of cynicism toward, oh I don't know, everything, but that doesn't mean I haven't thought about the deeper mysteries. So don't condescend to me and treat me otherwise. A few New Testament quotes about the salvation of Christ and a cheesy video of kids (they dress just like me!) are not going to grant me a divine epiphany. Maybe I believe in God. Maybe I don't. But either way, it's none of your damn business, unless I wish it to be. So stay out of my home. Stop harassing me on the Walk. I have a hard enough time getting to class anyway, between frigid temperatures and waking up before noon. Faith, it seems, is a wonderful thing for those who have it. And I don't begrudge religion being responsible for more death and suffering than any other endeavor in history because if it hadn't been religion, it would have been something else. However, one can hardly deny the fact that if people had been a little less interested in how their neighbor prayed, a whole lot of people could have been spared. Eliot Sherman is a sophomore from Philadelphia, Pa.

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