Religion works two ways: you can buy into it with your entire heart and soul or you can fake it so effectively that no one will ever know that you aren’t the person who completely buys into it. A great place to witness both types is at a Christian high school. Students go through the typical teenage phases while learning about Jesus’ one hundred percent divinity and one hundred percent humanity. Pre-calculus is taught alongside Old Testament and New Testament is fifth hour after Biology.
You are new, not what the rest of the students term a “lifer,” which means you have not attended this school since before kindergarten and known everybody else since before then. You are the strange one, the one that chose to be here, while others are desperate to leave. You are worried that they won’t accept you because all of the cliques are already determined and you heard at public school that they are quite cool to new kids. You can understand, of course, because parents try and send delinquent, immoral, and disturbed kids there. How do you convince them that you’re normal? That you’re Christian enough for them and your beliefs are similar and that you have the guts to stand up for yourself when your beliefs aren’t the same.
They accept you immediately, quite unconventionally, because you mention that you’ve always wanted to be a cheerleader and two freshmen and an eighth grader jump you in order to explain that they would love to have you on the squad. Bring money for shoes and cute kelly green and white megaphone socks and you’re official. Practices start near the end of October and you can be a flyer because you are skinny. Of course, you can’t cheer and play basketball, but you explain to the girls that you never had any intention of playing basketball because you have little coordination. They laugh because they think you’re joking about the coordination thing since you want to be a cheerleader and you laugh because they will soon find out that you’re not kidding.
You eventually get used to your Bible class and chapels every Tuesday where you’re asked to dress up in a skirt or dress not too short and a prayer including prayer requests in your first hour everyday. The mention of God every third word and not in vain is strange at first, but you get used to that too. The only sport played in the fall is soccer and that’s almost all boys. A guy keeps calling to ask you out on a date and you can figure out who by determining who is left at home on a Friday night when the soccer team is out of town. There are only three. As basketball season comes around, you marvel that your kelly green pleated cheerleading skirt is two inches above your knee and that spanks aren’t allowed, but transparent white bicycle shorts are.
The season kicks off with a tournament at your school named after someone—you’re supposed to know who. Obviously there is the national anthem and a prayer that God protect everyone during the basketball games, but really it’s not so different. You are still expected to be cool and catty to the other cheerleaders, somehow that shows God’s love, as does lusting after the other Christian schools’ varsity guys. Your own boyfriend is first up on second string varsity and after a month of dating you haven’t even held his hand yet. Your first date was a double with his sister and her husband. The movie wasn’t bad. This school has made you feel guilty for hugging members of the opposite sex because apparently it is a prime opportunity for them to feel you up. In conforming to the morals of your school, which effectively dominates your life, you become the witchy (with a B) ice queen and begin to believe that all your boyfriend wants is, well, what he can’t have because if nothing else, they’ve taught you, keep that V-card pure as the driven snow. In fact, after four months, when he does try and kiss you, you tell him in no uncertain terms that if he ever, you repeat, ever tries that again, you will kick him in his balls. Quite unchristian, but in order to save yourself it seemed necessary.
So really, how Christian is a Christian school? If you’re being honest with yourself, you don’t really close your eyes when they pray and you believe a little bit more in that sophomore who believes in God than you actually believe in God. But that’s not even it; you see the underbelly and it scares you. You dump the boyfriend because he’s not the marrying type and suddenly he’s allowed to psychologically attack you everyday within school walls. He refuses to talk to you for the next year and a half because “That’s how I deal with things.” Your best friend is straight-A valedictorian and on the weekends she cruises Aggieville to find someone to “love” her. Maybe God isn’t doing such a hot job in that department. Your senior year an overzealous teacher has a vision where snakes, the singular creature Satan inhabited, wrap around the students and the doors of the school bringing them all down. The devil himself has made it apparent that he exists here, will your God?
Written September 2004 for Creative NonFiction
