I am a pagan. An unbeliever. A heathen. An infidel. While my beliefs about the existence of God and souls have changed considerably over the course of my life, to the majority of the world, I’ve never been someone worthy of blessings, never been someone who would make it to heaven.
I was born and culturally am still a Hindu. Despite how terrible many elements of religion were for me — I am a woman and I am queer — I still respect the role that belief in a higher power plays in many people’s lives. My closest friends are Christian and Jewish and Sikh and Muslim. They are Hindus who believe in God, Hindus who believe in gods, Hindus who believe in only reincarnation, and Hindus who are completely atheist.
I respect that. But I was not respected.
Growing up in America meant routinely hearing that my views didn’t matter — that even the commercialized version of Christmas was inherently holier than days of pooja. I heard jokes about the statues we worshiped and kept at home, about cows being holy, and about bindis. My family and I were required to sign we believed in Christ to join several extracurricular groups in the Bay Area, a very liberal and diverse place. It’s only worse across the middle of the country. Christians in America made decisions for all of us about gay marriage, abortion rights, and the separation of church and state, because they believed their faith was right and imposed that belief on others.
This happens in other countries as well. When we were in Egypt and Turkey, men asked our dad if they could buy us for marriage. I’d hear endless comments about being “allowed” to work and go to college, as if that was something my dad had the right to decide. We had no choice about covering our hair and our bodies — a Muslim friend once told me that, based on her faith, she thought I deserved to be assaulted and that she pitied me for being wrong about God. Another acquaintance once made fun of a person with a guide dog because his religion forbade them. In America, Muslims are a discriminated minority, so we often forget to have important conversations on what life looks like for minorities in Muslim-majority countries or how discrimination impacts religions that are smaller than Islam (all of them, except Christianity).
