Harvard Surveys: Am I “Very Religious”?

My college career was replete with surveys; there were university surveys, dorm surveys, dining hall surveys, Navy surveys, and so on and so forth, not to mention the annual influx of questionnaires as all the social science majors attempted to find volunteers for their research projects. A couple of days ago, I filled out a final “senior survey” (see last year’s results here) and found myself puzzled by this question:

How religious are you?

1. Very religious
2. Religious
3. Somewhat religious
4. Not at all religious

What does “religious” mean? This word, with its myriad definitions, confuses me almost as much as the word “spiritual.” Does it mean I frequently participate in religious rituals? That I feel strongly about my religious identity? That I intend to enter an explicitly religious profession?

I have concluded that the actual question is something to the effect of “how big a role does religion play in your life?” I would first point out that no one actually has ‘religion’ per se; we have deism, or monotheism, or Islam. One cannot really speak of ‘religion’ in general, only of specific sets and systems of beliefs and practices. So I will rephrase the question to ask about the role of ‘my religion’ and go from there, though I suspect what I shall say is true of many other religions.

You guessed it: I think this question gets it backwards. Christianity isn’t a question of degree; it’s a question of mindset. Put another way, the problem is that, if all my life’s a stage, Christianity does not merely ‘play a role;’ it frames the entire production. Put still another way, Christianity is not one of my daily activities; my daily activities are a manifestation of my Christianity.

Harvard has been misunderstanding this question from the very first survey of my college career. At a seminar during freshman orientation, the moderator gave us a piece of paper with a circle on it and asked us to draw a pie chart of things that made up our identity: gender, ethnicity, nationality, family, sexuality, religion, what have you.  I was baffled. My identity is not, say, 30% American, or 40% Christian. All of me is American; all of me is Christian. I cannot be 10% female any more than I can be 10% alive; I simply am a live female, and everything I do is shaped by that fact.

That does not mean all my thoughts are about femininity per se, and in fact, very little of my time is spent in explicitly ‘feminine’ activities, though femininity does generally involve such activities. But if I think, or act, or breathe, I must do so as a female. It is conceptually impossible for me to do otherwise. And in the same way, everything we do is indelibly marked by our worldview, be that view Christian or otherwise. We all ascribe to some system of beliefs, and whether or not that system explicitly involves certain activities, it shapes every thought and every action of our lives.

Now, it is certainly true that for some people, religion is something like chess club, a meeting of a people with shared interest every week or so, a sort of hobby. But that is not how most religions see themselves. It may look from the outside as if a doorway is just a minor part of a house’s exterior, but if you step through the doorway, things will look quite different; you enter, in a small way, an entirely separate world. You have to be inside the house to see it; the doorway is everything. We are all, in reality, inside some sort of house, some sort of worldview or philosophy. Some foundations have more cracks than others.

But I digress. Whatever my quarrels with Harvard’s paradigms of identity or religiosity, I had to pick one of the four answers, so I did what I would never do in a conversation and called myself “very religious” with no clarification. This explanation is possibly only my attempt at rectification and catharsis, or the particularity of a philosopher backed into a corner, but bear with me as I explain what I meant:

First, I meant it in a ‘what’ sort of way: I think that ‘what’ Christianity says is objectively (though not necessarily literally) true – not only certain sections or stories of it, but the whole system taken together. Secondly, I meant it in a ‘why’ way: Christianity is the ‘why’ and wherefore of my life. It provides an ontological framework, an objective grounding, for meaning and purpose and morality; it gives my life context. And because of that, it gives meaning to even the smallest acts. Taken together, when I say I am “very religious,” I mean that I seek to live a life where every aspect of Christianity permeates every aspect of me.

This is, I believe, the only logically consistent way to hold any worldview: holistic belief manifested in holistic action. Perhaps that sounds extremist, but the only alternatives are hypocrisy – you really don’t believe it – or apathy – you believe it but don’t care. This world could use more extremity in service of the right things. The center cannot hold if the best lack all conviction.