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Has anyone else experienced anxiety related to being a religious minority or atheist? My background information is super long, feel free not to read it: I was raised in a mixed-religion household by an agnostic Daoist father and a Freemason (Eastern Star) mother. I have been an atheist for my entire life. I was raised more with my father’s religion than my mother’s. Instead of church, I grew up going to monthly hall/temple meetings despite being a child (which is usually not allowed). The temple was very ornate and beautiful inside. But, even many of the Masonic concepts seemed foreign to me as a child because I was more familiar with Daoist beliefs. I felt like an outsider, even here in the hall, because I also knew atheists are not allowed in Masonry. My mom has never known that I’m not religious, and she enjoyed taking me with her, so I felt like I had a big secret to keep. (I know masons don’t consider themselves to be a religion. My experience being raised with it as a child makes me feel that it is “close enough” for the purpose of this conversation.). I remember feeling a sense of anxiety as a child because I knew that everyone around me was raised with a completely different set of beliefs, which I knew nearly nothing about. I also feared that many of my peers had been told negative things about people like me & my family by their parents and religious leaders. I knew that they automatically assumed I must be familiar with religious concepts which I’d never heard of. I feared that they would immediately become suspicious & distrustful of me if I accidentally “let on” that I did not share the dominant religion. I had that fear, of being distrusted & demonized for being an atheist or being from a religious minority family, from the time I began Kindergarten. I was afraid of being “found out.” I would feel isolated when people discussed religious concepts I had never heard of as if they were basic knowledge. When I was 12, people finally began figuring out that I hadn’t been raised with the dominant religious background. I was correct in my assumption. When people figured it out, or when they deliberately got me alone so that they could force me to confess, they would react with disgust. Shock. Rage. Fear. Interrogations, accusations, and eventually angrily shouting a series of rapid-fire Bible trivia questions at me for 40 minutes while I meekly said I didn’t know the answers was how the first therapist I ever saw reacted. I was 16 at the time, and that’s just one example. The first time that somebody found out, I was 12. This first incident was nowhere near as dramatic, but it confirmed that my fears had been right, all along. I was at quiz bowl practice. Our coach gave us a practice question about an event from the Bible. She always told us that we should guess, even if we have no clue, because the tiny chance of a random answer being correct is better than a 0% chance by saying nothing. I meekly buzzed in and answered incorrectly, guessing that this strange event could have occurred in a specific sci-fi/fantasy novel. Our coach then stared at me with complete disgust. Our practice stopped in its tracks while she grimaced angrily at me for a long time, something she had never done before. In that instant, I knew she had “found me out.” It felt like the floor had been pulled out from under me - I had finally slipped up badly enough that someone found me out. And she reacted just like I had feared, with immediate distrust. How am I so sure that she was angry? Well, this was at a small school in a rural area, and I had just claimed that an event from the Bible was from a sci-fi novel (which I now know was the story of FREAKING Adam & Eve...) - meanwhile just two minutes earlier I had correctly answered a question about a teaching from the Quran. We had learned about it recently in Social Studies... I think it’s safe to say her look of anger was not something I imagined. She seemed to have assumed that I was raised in Islam. I have to wonder if other students from minority religions, such as Islam, have had a similar experience with a teacher reacting this way. As an atheist, it really hurt that my SCIENCE teacher (the coach) reacted with disgust & anger when I incorrectly answered a question about a religion that I was not raised in. Having the first person to react this way be a science teacher was something that really hit me deeply. It cemented in my mind that there was no one I could trust. And, she would be the first of many people who reacted this way (or much worse). On a slightly related note, I also grew up fearing that, if I was wrong about my atheism, I would be tortured in hell for eternity for being a nonbeliever. I was a toddler when I solemnly accepted this was a possibility that I had to be prepared for. When bad things happened to me as a child, I would tell myself that I was preparing for when I may be sent to hell for being a nonbeliever. I was aware of the concepts of heaven and hell because my dad was also an ex-catholic, and he would talk to me about why he left. So . . . anyone else have experience with anxiety related to being from a religious minority or being an atheist?
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