Religion has been a potent force in my life, shaping my identity, values, self-concept, and worldview. Beyond the psychological power of faith, religion has primarily served as a social mechanism in my life. I have always struggled with the more esoteric elements of faith and religion including the efficacy of theological concepts. Especially because I have been exposed now to many alternating views of what God is, how the cosmos functions and how it was formed, and the meaning of human existence, I am less sure now that any one faith, religion, or belief system holds all the answers. This course has further expanded my mind and outlook, exposing me to attitudes and approaches to worship that are totally different from any others I have experienced. Rather than muddle my mind, this course has engendered in me an appreciation for pluralism. Yet ironically, my growing interest in world religions and ecumenism has also strengthened the core of my true faith. I attribute my ability to reconcile an exclusivist heart with a pluralistic mind to several mentors and influential people in my life. Buddha would not have evolved his faith were it not for his Hindu background, and Jesus evolved His ministry from Jewish roots. No religion sprouts out of nowhere; all are fertilized, watered, and nurtured by human history and the contributing minds and souls of believers. Therefore, this personal religious autobiography begins before I was born. My grandmother practically raised me. Because we were poor enough that both my mother and father had to work double shifts, I would come home each day to the loving home my grandmother created for my siblings, my cousins, and me. She was a pious woman. At times she was strict, but she was always loving. I owe to my grandmother a sense of firmness in my identity and a strong belief in Jesus Christ. However, my grandmother was a Seventh-Day Adventist. Although my parents inculcated their own beliefs into my world, my grandmother taught me the core precepts and practices of Seventh-Day Adventism. The practices include vegetarianism, and the precepts included service. Service is a concept that most—if not all—Christian denominations share in common with one another given the message at the heart of all of Jesus’s teachings (Hattingh, Morton, Ferret, et al., 2016). However, vegetarianism is not a Christian tradition and nor is it an American one—at least in the time and place I grew up.

My grandmother’s dietary practices made her stand...

Even though I was not a practicing vegetarian, I could only eat vegetarian food in my grandmother’s house. It was mainly on the weekends when my parents were home, at school, or at my friends’ homes that I would eat the standard American diet filled with meat and junk food. I only had one friend who was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and he did always seem different from the other children. In retrospect I can see that his diet was one of the things that singled him out, far more than his belief system since we kids did not care to discuss the intricacies of religion at all. Seventh-Day Adventism is a unique branch of Christianity that, like the Church of Latter-Day Saints, grew out of the religious revivalism sweeping America in the nineteenth century (Lechleitner, 2013). As such, it is a new faith and a New World faith. It is American to the core, which is something I only learned recently. I also learned through this course that Seventh-Day Adventism has been instrumental and influential in spreading the message of Christ worldwide (Banta, Lee, Hodgkin, et al., 2018). Because I admired my grandmother and looked up to her, I never considered that she would have followed a faith that was so new and so unique to be labeled more a sect than a religion for many years. Now I see that her faith has infiltrated every corner of the globe and especially in parts of the world where the people are disenfranchised (Banta, Lee, Hodgkin, et al., 2018). Before this course, I had not considered the historical and political implications of a religion that made a meaningful impact on my early childhood and on my identity.
This course has reinforced my knowledge that religion, politics, and personal identity are inextricably entwined and often problematically so. For example, Huntington (1993) writes about the “clash of civilizations” that usually refers to East versus West or Muslim versus Christian societies. I have experienced and witnessed culture clashes first hand in my upbringing. My religious autobiography would not be complete without mentioning the ways different Christian sects intersected with other religions including both Judaism and Christianity.

Neither of my parents practiced Seventh-Day Adventism, but neither rejected it. They veered more towards the secular humanist in their outlook and worldview, but both did believe in the value of church…