Recently I had the opportunity to go on to a good friends podcast and talk about my background growing up in a fundamentalist baptist church. The discussion got intense. Often we take for granted how differently we each grow up and how subcultures that we are a part of can have their own norms and values, giving the person within that culture an experience of culture shock when they move into new cultural dynamics and experiences as they grow up. Before joining this church I was raised as a “normal” kid, although by anti-establishment hippy parents who taught us to make our own food from scratch and homeschooled us because they wanted to raise us with specific values. Around 7 years old my father brought us to a church community that had its own ideologies and approaches to life that differed greatly from every day American values and norms. This was a very immersive experience that had a huge impact on my understanding of morals, values, and religion. When we left 5 years later, our world changed completely. We were sent to private school, no longer part of this community and had to adjust to a new way of living within a culture that we had not been a part of for many years. This experience of change from one culture to another, of adapting to these differences, are what created a fascination in me around the human experience and impacted my choice to study Anthropology. Later, I went on to write my thesis on people’s experiences going from being members of this church and later leaving and how this had an impact on peoples beliefs and their sense of belonging. This work gave me a lot of understanding of people’s experience with disenfranchisement and how crucial and fundamental a sense of belonging is to each of us as humans.
To hear more about my experience check out the podcast here: Sam’s Very Own Podcast
Letting my own biases get in the way as we discussed it in a casual setting, I did refer to the church as a cult several times and now wish I had stayed a bit more objective in my description. But that is the nature of the emotional impact that our experiences have on us, the often impossible task of separating our feelings from our analysis. However, if you would like to understand more on the topic from a truly objective anthropological stance, click here for the link to my thesis for those dedicated readers who want to go 50 pages deep into understanding the intricacies of it all. Belonging to a community influences our identity and our beliefs, becoming an integral part of who we are even as we leave such a community and go out to interact with the rest of the world.
We also discussed spirituality vs. religion at the end which is a topic I would like to embellish on from the anthropological stand point in a later post.
