This is not an argument built with facts and statistics. It’s not an essay to be graded. It’s not even an attempt to point fingers or blame anyone. This is simply my story.
I made it to Andrews. I had been living a double life, where church and school were alternate dimensions that never interacted. So how would my tiny and frail teenage mind reconcile the two worlds? One preached the Bible as the absolute authority and insisted on a moral code to live by. The other preached the scientific method as the absolute authority with a focus on personal freedom. I lived with each world neatly tucked in their own separate box, both existing yet incompatible. I carried that cognitive dissonance with me for years, and it almost tore me apart, a clean rip right down the center of my poor brain. But finally—oh, finally! Church and school were combined, and I would be living with other Adventists! Oh the joy, I would finally be with my people!
Which was comedic in its delivery, because Andrews has made me feel more culturally isolated and less of an Adventist than I’ve ever felt in my life. I quickly realized in the first weeks that going to church my whole life didn’t cut it. I missed out on a lifetime of going through the Adventist education system.
During orientation, someone asked me a question for an icebreaker:
“What’s your favorite cereal?”
“Special K.”
“Haha, what a very Adventist answer.”
“?????”
Most times, I had no clue what people meant. What is an Adventist answer? I just like the strawberries inside. What is banquet? Is that like prom? What’s a senior class trip? How tiny are your classes?
This was when I realized that it’s a world of difference to grow up in public school vs. in an Adventist academy. My friends at my home church already grew up with that lingo, and now I saw that most people at Andrews had that same shared experience going through an academy. It was like I was the only one who didn’t get an inside running joke. I was once again an outsider. First in the secular world, and now in the religious world. Every minor difference in culture made me feel more and more of an alien to my own people, to the point where I decided I wasn’t a “true” Adventist. I knew the same doctrine, but we were still a different breed. At that point, my language changed from “us Adventists” to “me” and “the Adventists.”
Aside from dealing with these cultural issues, I had a bigger mission to deal with. Or at least, a mission that I foolishly assigned to the people of Andrews University.
Show me! I cried out. Show me what it means to be a Christian, so I can prove all those atheists wrong! Show me that there’s something special about Christians. Show me that we have the truth! Show me what love looks like, the thing we preach!
Months later, I was still crying those cries in my head, albeit subconsciously. I tried to be patient. But I couldn’t help but wonder, Were the atheists right? These are just regular people. Maybe even worse, because they call themselves something more than that. I called myself a mission field and waited for some missionary to swoop in and show me love and teach me about the faith. But nothing. Instead, I learned everything about posturing as a devout believer through graded religion classes and mandatory chapel credits. Sitting for nearly an hour at a time, I learned nothing of building a devotional life and nothing of how people acted out their faith. Instead, I learned that people in the back talk amongst themselves, pull up their computers to work on assignments, and zone out of the whole thing. And soon I was doing the same.
I learned that many people didn’t really care. And I wondered. And pondered. Why should I care if these people who are so much more SDA-educated than me don’t even care? And I also thought, do the faculty even realize that so many of these people don’t care? How many people at Andrews are actually practicing Adventists?
Anyone can fake their way into superficial obedience, which seems to socially satisfy, but many people I talked to—and still talk to—actually struggle with their faith and struggle with being honest. They don’t even know what they believe, but they obviously can’t vocalize that due to the stifling atmosphere of religious conformity (Even I feel nervous typing these words into existence, as if my story deviates too far from the obedient narrative that each student is supposed to carry). I realized that many of these kids aren’t even here because they want to go to an Adventist institution; they’re just here because they funnel in from Adventist academies and their parents wanted them to attend an Adventist university. It became clear to me that many others were just as lost as I was with the faith, and there would be no missionary to swoop in and answer all of my questions and insecurities that I carried from high school. We were more similar than we were different. And yet, despite all of this, I still didn’t feel safe enough to share my story.
Okay. So…the verdict?
I lost hope. Because I had put all my hope in Andrews University.
Some people are laughing at my words. Others might be facepalming and some might be shaking their heads. But I ask you to take off your comfortable snow boots, put on my dusty sandals that have traveled far—walk a mile in the Berrien snow and see how that feels. You wouldn’t understand unless you knew where I came from. To younger me, Andrews was a grand SDA fortress standing amidst a secular world, and I thought I would find answers coming here. People I met at Andrews acted like the “secular world” was this foreign place far away, but from my point of view, we all live in a desert of secular sand, and Andrews is merely an oasis. I thought I finally made it to the oasis. What is the “secular world”? I grew up thinking the whole world is secular. Of course my perspective is biased because of my upbringing, but so is everyone else’s. This is simply my story.
I’m not even an international student, but I’m an immigrant at Andrews. I’ve crossed dimensions to get here. This is a foreign land to me. So while Andrews had given me so much, far beyond the dismal outlook I’m portraying through just the lens of religion and culture, it is undeniable that my experience had been, in certain aspects, disappointing.
At that point, in the middle of my second year, I was ready to quit. I was prepared to leave the faith for good. It’s ironic because I survived the trials of a secular education my whole life, yet in just about a year, a religious education threatened to finally destroy my faith. The cognitive dissonance was building up, and it was too much to say I was a Christian and not practice as one. I had to either change the title or fully commit to it, and I was ready to let go of the name.
All this tension inside of me bubbled up to the outside, and others soon became aware of my spiritual crisis. I had nothing left, just questions and frustrations and that deep, sinking feeling that I was back to that dark place in high school, wandering around blind, searching for meaning. I ended up venting to people I knew would shun me and dismiss my reality. Or so I thought. It turns out, that was just the first step in a different direction.
This is a three-part personal story from an Andrews University student, which will be completed in the next issue. If you’d like your own narrative, creative work, or art piece to be considered for publication, please send it to tjhatra@andrews.edu.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.