From Vox
I was a rural, homeschooled Christian kid. Then I converted to Islam.
“So you’re Muslim? But wait, where are you from?”
Since converting to Islam in 2009, I have been asked this question more times than I can remember. It’s a kind of verbal squint: You look white, but…
When they aren’t satisfied with my answer — I was born in Maryland — they move on: “Okay, but where are your parents from? Your grandparents?”
They just can’t imagine a white Westerner being anything but Christian or maybe Jewish. An atheist even; that might make sense. But a Muslim? I must be hiding a secret Arab grandmother.
But the truth is, I was born into a Christian family. Then I chose to leave. I chose Islam instead.
I was supposed to be a pastor
I was raised in a conservative Christian home. My father was Catholic; my mother was a Seventh-Day Adventist. A lot of my childhood was spent working at her SDA church, going door to door to hand out literature, or evangelizing at the county fair. While other people were hocking fried food, we would set up our booth with books and pamphlets to help potential converts understand why Seventh-Day Adventism might be right for them.
I went to church every week. I knew a lot about my faith. I could quote scripture from memory and explain the finer points of SDA theology better than many of the adults. They were convinced I’d grow up to be a pastor. I was the kid you see on TV who always wore nice khakis and a polo shirt, the stereotypical “good Christian boy.” I went to religious school until the eighth grade. After that, I was homeschooled. My teenage years revolved almost exclusively around my Christian faith, and for the most part I loved it.
Then I went to college.
When my faith was challenged, it collapsed
It’s an old story: A kid from a small rural town comes to the university. For the first time in his life, his beliefs are seriously challenged. He has a crisis of faith.
Up until this point, I had never met someone who wasn’t some variety of Christian. My own faith, where we went to church on Saturday and believed in Christ but not hell, was about as far out as it got. All of my friends, even when I went to day school, had been Christians of some kind or another. It wasn’t that I didn’t know on some level that there were other kinds of people, but in day-to-day life, there was an assumption that pretty much everyone I met was going to be a white Christian. But now, suddenly, I was surrounded by “new” religions, some I had never even heard of, and even a few people with no religion at all.
