Religion deserves respect

In the throes of election fever, many consider the politically ignorant — confused by the details, swayed by the insignificant, and informed by Jon Stewart — to be deplorable. "Why are these people allowed to vote?" they rage. Yet some of them will likewise rely on media portrayal, secondhand information and stereotypes to judge millions of their fellow citizens and billions of people throughout history. Dismissively, they will attribute religious faith to desperate circumstances or, more commonly about people in this country, to crippling familial influences.

Late converts notwithstanding, it is true that many religious people came of age in religious families. But the notion of a deluded and sheltered populace, with one generation brainwashing the next, denies the complexity of faith and the diversity among the faithful. It denies believers the wherewithal for introspection, the ability to recognize competing viewpoints, the capacity for personal growth, even the inclination to resist authority — all qualities we easily grant ourselves.

The stories of how and why people came to their faith are numerous and varied. Many who "grew up religious" have had their share of struggles, both individual and familial, and many (yes, real people our age, at schools like Princeton) came to their faith against strong opposition, at financial and emotional sacrifice, even as their families cut them off. But rather than getting to know them and hearing their stories, it's certainly easier and more amusing to imagine flocks of sheep huddling over outdated texts, oblivious to the greater world and the Reality of Life — about which their critics are experts, no doubt.

You can inherit a bias towards religion whether it's positive or negative, and unless nonreligious children are somehow more capable of "objectivity" than their religious counterparts, there is no reason to aim skepticism selectively. Those who observe that others share "inferior" beliefs with their parents will then boast that their own "superior" interests, priorities and affiliations — political, academic and recreational — run in the family. As Christian scholar C.S. Lewis, an atheist until his thirties, noted, "A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional ... values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."

The beliefs of many — both religious and nonreligious, Republican and Democrat, urban and country — would collapse under scrutiny, due to the inevitable influence of heredity, background and environment in our lives. Man cannot carefully weigh every possible mode of belief — it's temporally impossible — but to therefore make negative assumptions about entire populations demeans them, and demeans us.

When complaining that the religious don't seriously question their views, have you ever considered leaving your secularism? When wondering why people find meaning in an afterlife, higher beings and absolute laws, do you challenge yourself to explain why you do not? What makes one position the default, and the other an alternative on the defense? If you see yourself as the standard, everyone else will undoubtedly seem bizarre, brainwashed, antiquated.

But despite your scorn, religion isn't about to disappear. As David Brooks wrote, "The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom... secularism is not the future; it is yesterday's incorrect vision of the future."

As members of the educated elite, we oppose imperialist ethnocentrism. We have no patience for those indifferent to genocide overseas, or those who consider foreign tongues gibberish, not language. We read works outside the Western canon. We travel around the globe. We reject the idea that the unknown other is a different species to be colonized or otherwise abased. But how enlightened are we if we can't even allow that our fellow citizens have legitimate opinions?

If we graduate without shedding our penchant for hypocritical generalizations, then higher education — with its fostering of "analytical skills," "widening of perspectives" and "emphasis on diversity" — will have failed us, and we will have failed to reach the maturity we should demand of ourselves. We may vote with confidence, but what else can we get right? Julie Park is an English major from Wayne, N.J. She can be reached at jypark@princeton.edu.