Roommate is offended
DEAR HARLAN: I recently moved in with four roommates. One roommate is a lesbian. Another is a very devout Christian. The rest of us are very concerned about fights. The Christian girl is already on our case about cursing and about listening to music with vulgar messages. She even had a group of guys change the music at a party. How do we make it so that we can live as we normally would, especially without alienating her? — NOT A CHRISTIAN LESBIAN
DEAR NOT A CHRISTIAN LESBIAN: Between your mouth, the neighbor’s music and the lesbian roommate’s girlfriend, living a normal life is going to alienate your devout Christian roommate. Try to be sympathetic and compromise without compromising your identity. For example, if swearing isn’t a fundamental part of you, try using less colorful words around her. Ask the devout Christian roommate for some suggested words to substitute for your vulgarity (“Oh, fudge!”). As for the lesbian roommate, she can’t be expected to change her sexual orientation, just like the devout Christian roommate can’t be expected to abandon her values. The good news — these two don’t need to change. The Christian doesn’t need to approve of the lesbian’s lifestyle. The lesbian doesn’t need to prove the Christian roommate is wrong. They just need to share space. All roommates need to respect their differences and focus on their best qualities. If the devout Christian or the lesbian roommate can’t respect each other’s differences and get along, someone will need to live in a different room.
HI HARLAN: I just wanted to “get your back” regarding Weston, the guy who’s not religious but has a religious girlfriend. It seems that some of your readers are indeed unnecessarily conflating atheist and “not religious.” You correctly hold that “not religious” does not preclude “spiritual” and is (certainly) not the same as atheist. I’m glad to tell you that the statistics back you up. The 2008 American Religious Identity Survey polled more than 220,000 adult Americans regarding their religious or nonreligious self-identification. The results of the survey were published in 2009. The big story was the report’s finding that the number of Americans who self-identified as Christian shrunk significantly between 1990 and 2008. Here, ARIS talks about the “Rise of the Nones” (i.e., the nonreligious) throughout the past two decades. (The ARIS report was part of the inspiration for Newsweek’s “The End of Christian America” April 2009 cover story.) Interestingly, the 2008 ARIS demonstrates that while there are about 35 million adult Americans who identify as “nonreligious” (an impressive 15 percent of the adult population), only about 3.5 million (so only 10 percent of the “Nones”) explicitly identify as atheist or agnostic. In my own experience as a religion professor at a liberal arts college, this discrepancy bears out. In my Intro to Religion courses, there are plenty of students who claim to be “spiritual but not religious.” But of these, most say they believe in a higher power of some sort, or they will at least say something like “there’s something out there” or “I just can’t believe that the universe is sheer accident” or similar. Thought you’d appreciate the info. — HANS
DEAR HANS: Amen. Thanks for backing me up. Quick question for atheists. Can you be an atheist and still be spiritual? What does being spiritual mean to an atheist? I’d love to hear your response to fill in the blanks so I can avoid any future misunderstandings.