Keep it a Secret: Staffer’s Take on Silencing Dissent

“Just because you’re an atheist doesn’t mean you can disrespect us believers during prayer!”

My teacher’s words echoed off the cold, linoleum floor as 19 sets of eyes darted toward me. The tirade went on and I could do nothing but bite my tongue and shake my head in confusion, holding my hands behind my back to keep them from quivering at my sides. After the diatribe is done, class is dismissed to lunch, and all of my classmates avoid my gaze as I stay in the room, trying desperately to control my trembling.

Berating a middle-schooler in front of all her peers is harsh enough as is — especially since I wasn’t the one who was talking. It was the two people next to me who were talking during the “Our Father,” but I was worth punishing more than the “devout” Catholics around me.

The teacher saw an opportunity to make an example out of me, and he seized it. A behavior I had learned to get used to.

About a month prior, halfway through my eighth grade year, I had casually pointed out that I didn’t consider myself religious in a meeting with my class and principal. Almost immediately after, I was called down to the office over the intercom where I was told that I was forbidden from sharing any more beliefs that went against Catholic teachings, or I would face unnamed consequences. I left that meeting in tears. And I’m still dealing with the effects — just as much now as I was then.

I was told to sit down, shut up and that I was wrong (in more or less words). This experience fundamentally changed how I interact with the world, especially in regards to authority and religion.

Since second grade, I felt safe enough at my school to express my doubts about everything — from trivial things like whether Ryan and Jenna were kinda-sorta dating, to the more serious topic of atheism when I reached middle school. I was an outspoken eighth-grader at Catholic school who didn’t believe in God — a dangerous pairing, apparently.

None of my classmates had ever expressed annoyance, not even an eye-roll, towards me when I was expressing my beliefs, so I never thought being vocal was an issue. But to the administration it was, and so they shut me down.

As a young person in the process of developing my own thoughts, it was right for me to question the supposed “facts” that had been preached to me since I was six. And who knows? Maybe if I had been allowed to explore different belief options, my atheism might have just been a “rebellious” phase. I might have decided I was a true Catholic and embraced that God had a plan for me. I might have developed an unbreakable connection to the God of my childhood. But I was denied my opportunity to explore different beliefs and get some clarity of my own — and being stifled made the situation far worse than it needed to be.

When you’re a child berated by those in a position of authority, it goes deeper than one conversation. From that point on, I no longer felt accepted in the place I had called home for seven years — I was the troublemaker who deserved little to no respect from my teachers. Even when I wasn’t the one “misbehaving,” I would take the fall.

In retrospect, it was entirely unacceptable for my teacher to publicly shame me, a student who he knew was an atheist, and scream at me in front of my entire class. I don’t know if he genuinely believed I was the one talking or if he just decided to make an example of me, but the humiliation still stings regardless.

Being silenced has turned me away from any organized religion, especially Catholicism. The great irony of it all is that I want to have the religion of my childhood back. I want to have a community I can always fall back on. I want to know that there is something greater looking out for me when my family is screaming at each other or I get rejected from my top-choice college. I don’t want to be alone.

But I can’t go back. I will never again feel welcome by the Church that has made me feel so unwanted.

When I finally left that school to move on to my perfectly secular education at East, I thought I could leave everything that happened behind me. But I couldn’t.

Every time I’m called down to the office at East, although it’s never been for anything that I’ve done wrong, my heart starts pumping, my breathing gets shallow and I’m terrified that someone is going to tell me that I don’t have the right to be express my beliefs. Because I’m wrong. Or stupid. Or unworthy of a voice. I have an innate distrust of the authority figures in my life, because a few of them have abused their role.

It’s not that I didn’t want closure. On New Year’s Day 2018, I stayed up until 3 a.m., sobbing, as over 1000 words spilled out into my keyboard in a letter I sent to my former principal, explaining everything I had gone through because of one meeting. I could not spend one more year with the weight of unresolved Catholic guilt bearing down like a cross on my back.  

But I had to learn to find other ways to move past the emotions bearing down on me, since my 1257-word letter got a 162-word email in response, promising a full explanation that never came.

I know I shouldn’t have had to find ways of my own. Even years later, this was a conversation I should have had with my former administration. But their silence did make me realize that no matter what I did, my Catholic school wouldn’t listen to my voice — so I am finding other ways to make myself heard.

Journalism is an outlet that allows me to bring a voice to the voiceless, which is simultaneously an opportunity and a responsibility that I will never forget after being robbed of my own voice. And now I am finally, after nearly four years, talking about how what happened to me is not acceptable.

Silencing other beliefs to strengthen your own is not a solution. The dissent is not the problem — the weakness of your belief system is.

I understand that I was a loud-mouthed, self-righteous 13-year-old. I understand that my friends and I must have put my religion teacher in an uncomfortable position when we were pulling up quotes from evilbible.com in the middle of religion class. I even understand that I might have been too quick to conclude that because there was so much wrong with the world, there must not be a God watching over me.

But that doesn’t mean I was wrong to challenge it.

A school and a church are supposed to be the pinnacles of safe spaces. For many, that means being somewhere where young people can choose their own religious paths and figure out what’s best for them. I don’t care if my beliefs went against what the administration wanted — my only outlet and major connection to religion has forever been tainted.

It was easier for them to shut me down and to make me, one insignificant girl in a school of hundreds of others, feel so incredibly alone and attacked than to have a difficult discussion about the doubt I am entitled to express. I wasn’t a priest, I wasn’t a teacher, I was a 13-year-old girl who could barely understand the Gospel of Luke.

And now it’s too late for me to go back. I want to connect to the God who I turned to for 10 years in times of trouble – the God who I want to still have in my life. But I can’t.

Because in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit — I can’t keep my hands from shaking whenever I try to pray.