By Alex Nash
Our last issue of The Mossy Log featured an article from our wonderful contributing writer Kai Mermis-Cava about the benefits of Lewis & Clark being a largely secular campus. In it, they argued that LC’s secularity allows for religious freedom for all students.
Kai’s article reflects an opinion that I believe many LC students share: that the religious freedom offered by secularity is primarily a freedom from religion. This is something I completely understand. Some people come from backgrounds in which religion was imposed upon them by their community. Some people may be morally, intellectually or politically opposed to religion. There are plenty of justified reasons to be secular, seek freedom from religion or even to be anti-religious.
However, equating secularity with religious freedom inherently makes the freedom to practice religion secondary, which will be honored only once the first “freedom from” condition is met. The distinction between “freedom from” vs. “freedom to” of religion on a secular campus is what I hope to add on to Kai’s article, along with some insights as they relate to my experience as an Israeli American Jew on this secular campus.
I do not consider myself a highly-religious person. Though I have participated and taken on leadership roles within the Office of Spiritual Life and have published some of my experiences as such in The Mossy Log, religious practice and adherence are not a major part of how I live my life. But as it does with most things, Judaism complicates this. For each part of me that is a secular and an NPR-worshipping West Coast skeptic, there is another that is deeply connected to history, spirituality and ritual. My ethics, logic, communication style and sense of humor are all deeply rooted in Judaism. Many of my closest relationships are as well. Judaism is a religion, but it is also an ethnicity, culture, moral code, logical framework and diasporic community. In short, it is complicated. And secularity, at an institutional level, has a difficult time accommodating — or even just understanding — that complexity.
Firstly, LC, and non-religious American institutions in general, are less secular than they may seem. The year 2025 counts solar years since the assumed birth of Christ. Our month-long break between semesters, neutrally dubbed “winter break,” always begins in time for Christmas. Most offices are closed and classes are not held on Saturday and Sunday, the Shabbat and the day of Christ’s resurrection respectively.
These details are rightfully trivial to a secular person who does not care one way or another which days of the week they have off or whether the calendar their classes use is solar or lunar. But for nonsecular people, these things are nontrivial. Religious observance can sometimes come at the expense of participation at a secular institution, like skipping class to attend religious services, and participation at the institution can also come at the expense of observance, like attending classes during holidays because they would be difficult to make up.
LC certainly does not mandate secularity. We have accommodations and exemptions for students’ practices and observances, we have designated spaces for prayer in Watzek Library and Flanagan Chapel, we host celebrations of religious holidays and have both staff and student leaders dedicated to creating spaces for religious groups to commune. Still, this tradeoff between participation and observance is something every religious member of a secular institution has to weigh for themselves, and the respective weights of the two may shift from instance to instance. In my experience, this decision is made more difficult by often being the only person in the class, staff or team who has to make it. This is “freedom from” at the expense of “freedom to.”
“Freedom from” religion is by no means an unimportant priority. As much as I value my “freedom to” engage with my Judaism, I find perhaps even more important that I have “freedom from” Christianity, the predominant if receding religion in the United States. It is important to note that, within a predominantly-Christian culture, “secular” very often means “only observing Christianity a little bit.” This Christianized secularity is often still a “freedom from” for Americans with Christian backgrounds, a position of privilege not available for, to give a random example, a kind-of-but-not-really-religious Jewish student journalist at LC. Christianized secularity is not a “freedom from” for non-Christians.
To equate Christianized secularity with religious freedom is to fundamentally whitewash the difficulties of a non-Christian religious person in a secular space. In my experience, instances of religious discrimination are taken less seriously than other forms of prejudice, which is a side effect of religious identity being less valued and legitimized by the Christianized secular institution. When it is taken seriously, it is because of religion’s intersections with other, more-established identities like race and national origin. At a secular institution, “freedom from” religion for a secular majority means that “freedom to” practice religion for a religious minority is hindered. What I hope to convey is not that “freedom from” should or even could be substituted for “freedom to,” but that “freedom from” is not unilaterally good.
When secularity is a singular goal, the needs of religious people are necessarily deprioritized. Time and time again, I have seen secular people fall into the fallacious belief that secularity is the end goal for all modernized, educated people. This is based on a belief that all religion is by its nature antiquated, coerced and bigoted. This is not an intellectual opposition, it is bias, and it misunderstands what secularity is.
Secularity is one of many relationships that a person can have with faith. Everyone has a relationship with faith. What that relationship is, and what that faith is in, is unique to each of us. G-d, gods, a higher power, the universe, nature, good vibes, karma (a Hindu principle, bitch or chameleon), whatever you want to call it — many people have some level of faith, and it is not political, explicable or rational. To achieve true religious freedom, including “freedom from” and “freedom to,” faith cannot be treated as a precursor to secularity. It must be respected as one of many facets of identity, approached with the tolerance and curiosity that I know the LC community strives toward.
“Freedom from” and “freedom to” are not mutually exclusive. LC, for its part, does a much better job of honoring both than many other secular institutions do, and I am beyond grateful for the faculty, staff, students, coworkers and friends who have welcomed and accommodated me without question or judgement. Still, the onus to accommodate is on those with the privilege of not needing accommodation, and that must begin with the recognition that “freedom from” and “freedom to” are distinct and equally-necessary parts of freedom for all.
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