Page Getz is a sophomore in journalism and mass communications
at Kansas State University. You can reach her by e-mail at [email protected].
By Page Getz
Growing up as the product of an atheist and a Jew, I had a lot
of neighbors, friends and even teachers trying to save my soul.
Unfortunately, I got the condensed versions of various
Protestant and Catholic dogmas.
My parents made it clear that in our family, as liberal,
enlightened intellectuals, we were going to have to find our own
truths, and they weren’t going to tell us what to believe.
So, with all of my elementary-school logic, I decided not to
believe that 2,000 years ago some supposedly blond, blue-eyed Arab
could erase every wrong I had ever done, which made my life in the
Bible Belt inconvenient.
Childhood friends told me cheerfully that if I didn’t go to
Sunday school with them I would burn in the fires of hell.
It was after a series of these encounters that, inevitably, I
began to resent Christians and to despise Christianity.
It was only when I stumbled into Eastern philosophy that I
stopped spitting on Bibles. When I could see the distortion of the
fear-driven dogma substituting faith in religion, I could see
through the anger to find the same light in all religion that had
drawn me to Eastern religion.
However, I found my ideas dismissed as flaky and misled.
I was forbidden to enter my friends’ houses and was once taken
to what I thought was a Christian comedian, only to find myself at
a revival where my friends hoped to purify and cleanse my soul from
the hold of the mighty Lucifer.
We live in a society that supposedly protects our free speech,
but sometimes speaking out isn’t safe, or it’s expensive, or it,
God forbid, might offend someone who has control over my grade
point average or my financial aid.
It amazes me that others are so quick to tell me about the
dominant religion in the United States, that somehow I must have
missed it or I would have conformed by now.
I know Christianity.
How could I not? I have learned from what the public schools
called secular books written by Protestant white men and sang their
songs. I know about Christmas, Easter and the Bible.
I can find Christianity in Wal-Mart, on car bumpers, on
television, in hotel nightstands and in every nook and cranny of
the American culture.
As an American Buddhist, or just a non-Christian, I can’t help
but know Christianity. But what do Americans know about us?