Peer Pressure!

So, my mother (like your mother, I am sure) never bought the excuse "But everyone else is doing it/has one/is allowed to!" In fact, her response was (exactly what your mother's response was): "And if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?" It's very hard to win an argument with your mother.

Actually, I heard someone, somewhere, defend this. Ah, yes, it was in college. We had a huge argument. Somebody or another was arguing (and believed it, too, I think) that it is okay for your 12-year-old daughter to date somebody just because "everyone else is doing it." And that it is okay because, and I paraphrase here, "You have no idea how much they might suffer in the lunch room if they don't." It was clearly extraordinarily important for this person that his/her child be popular. Without popularity, why live?

As you can probably tell, I buy this argument not at all. I was brought up to cherish my individuality and my freedom of thought, and not to let people push me around. In fact, I was more likely to do the OPPOSITE of what everyone else was doing, just so I could avoid being like everybody else. I was that kid for much of highschool - you know the one, the one who is standing in the back whining "Guys, I don't think this is such a good idea....". Only instead of whining I was generally the one saying "No. No NONONONONONONONONONO." Luckily my friends chose to continue to hang out with me, mostly because they were also brought up to cherish individuality, and they preferred to keep me around to tease me about my enormous conscience (which they named Nevada) and because I was such a scintillating, fascinating person.
Essentially, I am the last person in the world who would follow my friends off a cliff. Unless they needed saving, in which case it's possible, but that's a whole other issue.

Anyway. This post has a point, I swear. And that point is this: even I, maven of individuality and protector of the small and weak, find myself caving to peer pressure now and again. But it's a much more insidious sort of peer pressure, none of that 'dude, you are so not cool unless you own a pink Barbie watch with flashing lights'. It's the peer pressure that comes naturally from living as a minority of any sort. I now, by the way, have incredible amounts of respect for other people who have lived as a minority, and I'm much more conscious of it in my life when I'm in the States and definitely not a minority.

I'm a Christian, I'm a white kid, I'm a blond woman who stands out a mile as a foreigner. I study Islam, I study Arabic, and I am honestly, truly interested in all of this. And, to top it off, I'm the sort of person who is constantly reexamining myself and my beliefs. I can't tell you how many times I have been asked whether I am Muslim, or whether I am intending to convert, because obviously if I study Islam and move to Saudi Arabia I am clearly intending to be Muslim. No, I patiently explain, I am very interested and I find much of Islam beautiful, but I'm very happy with my religion and don't really feel the need for another one, thank you very much.

But why, then, would I be spending my time studying Islam? Clearly I must be vulnerable. So I get invited to all sorts of "Welcome to Islam!" bashes, and I get given huge numbers of informative pamphlets (because once I know enough obviously I will see the Truth). The people who know me have figured out that I am well-informed and very curious, but they've given up on converting me (or, bless their souls, they never tried in the first place).

Doth I protest too much? Yeah, that's the problem. Because although I don't feel in need of a different religion or a change in lifestyle or values (I like myself, and my values, and my religion, just fine thank you very much - even if I'm occasionally uncertain of who exactly I am and what, exactly, my values and religion are), I am still very conscious of the underlying message that my would-be converters are sending: you are not good enough until you are Muslim. You are not "right" until you are Muslim. You are not "saved" until you are Muslim. You are a deluded, hell-bound infidel demon until you are Muslim. Okay, the last might be an exaggeration (but then again, maybe not).

I suspect I'd get the same thing if I were in a conservative religious community anywhere. Unless, of course, I were willing to hide who I was and what I believed, and I've never really been a big fan of doing that. I took a class on the early history of Christianity, and you know in Rome pre-Constantine they used to force people to stomp on a picture of Jesus or else they would be killed? Even though I can't imagine that God would consider stomping on a picture to be really that bad if it saved your life, the idea of publicly renouncing your beliefs in order to fit in still feels incredibly, incredibly wrong. Although I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be brave enough to die for my beliefs, I gotta say the idea of stomping on that picture makes my stomach turn. And yet, when you're surrounded by a group of people who think differently from you (and simultaneously think, with absolute certitude, that YOU are wrong), it's really, really really really really hard not to feel pressure to conform. It weighs on you, the knowledge that everyone else thinks your moral system is corrupt and wrong. It gets to the point where you assume everybody thinks you're going to hell because it's easier than assuming the opposite and then being unpleasantly surprised. That's the worst part, for me. I find myself constantly underestimating the open-mindedness of the people around me just because I can't bear to be disappointed in them. I struggle to keep myself from doing this, but it's hard.

It's not easy to constantly be aware that you're considered freakish. I can only be thankful that there are lots of people out there, Muslim and non-Muslim, who don't consider me freakish.

It would be much easier if I were like my sister, who is pretty darn sure of who she is and what she believes (and she is NOT afraid of letting you know), but then I am not sure I'd really get as much out of the experience. But who knows. The fact of the matter is, I'm not like that. Like I said, I'm a pretty fuzzy outline in my mind, and to be honest I like that about me. I like to think I'm adaptable and willing to honestly reflect on myself in order to improve. Maybe I'm just wishy-washy. But regardless, in a community where you feel constantly judged (negatively), it's tough to keep that from affecting you as you renegotiate yourself. I think in the long run it's probably good for me ("builds character" as my father would say), and I think it makes me take a deeper look at what I really believe and why. I don't even entirely dislike the experience. It's a trial by fire, and even if it weren't a fascinating to look at the society around me, it would be fascinating to try to navigate personal relationships around the inevitable landmines that exist because of different cultural and religious values. And I've found to my delight that a lot of the time there are many fewer landmines than I think there are and, more than that, I've found a huge number of things that I truly admire about the culture and the people and the religion here, so there are things about myself that have changed positively because of the experience.

I'm rambling. All of this thought crystallized a little today because of two things. One, I found this blog (via the Daily Dish) and spent much of the day reading back through all of the archives, and two I talked to my sister about it. We are both fascinated by social experiments like this (for those who are too lazy to click the link, it's a lady who is Living Oprah - meaning, she watches Oprah daily, reads O magazine, and uses Oprah's website and is trying to create a holistic system of life by following all of Oprah's edicts on what to read, eat, how to dress, what to buy, how to think, etc.) where someone immerses themselves in a lifestyle very different from their own in order to test their own boundaries and to experience another point of view (or, in this case, to make a larger point about the unfortunately large role celebrity gurus play in our lives). That's kindof what I'm doing here, and my sister said she would be interested in joining a fundamentalist church to do something similar. But reading the Living Oprah blog, the blogger talks a lot about how she ends up feeling like she is inadequate in some huge way for not having immediately found the enlightenment and self-love that Oprah seems to expect us all to acquire easily. I completely related to that. Okay, I haven't chosen to follow Oprah's word as the Word of God, but I did choose to move to a country with a religious code different from my own. I think, where I feel the weight of the whole society here on me, our Living Oprah blogger feels the huge weight of Oprah's enormous charisma/star power/celebrity as a society of its own, a society in which everyone is well-adjusted, skinny, energetic and clutter-free.

That's all I've got. I realize this wasn't the most coherent post ever, but hey, obviously coherency is not one of my strong points. And I am, as I say, a work in progress, so I reserve the right to completely contradict myself in the future.