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YOUTH

Personal faith and politics

Politics student Sophia Johnston shares personal reflections about her faith and how it has shaped her world view.

IT will be unsurprising that I, a politics student, have a lot of very strong political opinions.

My politics have been shaped by innumerable factors: my parents, growing up with the internet at my fingertips, the experience of working for minimum wage. I would certainly consider my faith to be one of the more significant of those factors. I find the relationship between religion and politics to be fascinating – particularly in how it exists across the political spectrum. It’s arguable that religion (perhaps Christianity especially) is more commonly associated with the political right wing, but of course there are many people of faith on the left. While I’m now (mostly) content to remark on how interesting it is to see how differently people have interpreted the Bible, I’ll admit it used to upset me quite a bit. I didn’t understand how some people could use the God and Jesus I had grown up knowing to justify cruelty and discrimination to certain people – those in the LGBT+ community in particular, as around this time I was working out that I wasn’t straight. Even though I had always grown up in affirming churches, and my parents had both been advocating for gay people to have a place in the church since before I can remember, as a young teenager I had many moments of doubt in my faith because of this. Sadly, I’m sure it’s a very common experience for gay kids who were raised Christian to have trouble reconciling their faith and their sexuality. Even worse, I’m sure it’s less common for kids to do so in a Church environment which tells them that who they are is okay, the way I did. A lot of gay kids leave the Church for this reason, and it’s certainly understandable. I know I would have a hard time telling any of those kids they were wrong. I count myself lucky to have overcome it, but when I was fourteen it did feel like Christianity itself was considered conservative – despite my lived experience – and this was something that felt deeply hurtful to me.

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Life and Work
December 2020
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