Here in the Bible Belt I came to realize religion plays an important role, but it has had a very minor impact on my life.

I was raised Christian but I can’t state what kind of Christian because I honestly don’t know. Before my parents divorced, they took me to church maybe once a month but never made it a huge obligation. And the church was more like a concert hall anyway, with other families in casual dress trying to look like they actually knew the words to the songs.

I went. I participated. But eventually it completely dissipated and church was disregarded.

Once it couldn’t be any less influential, religion started to build energy during high school after a poor decision under the influence of a girl who led me to a Young Life youth group. I started attending weekly meetings at first just to spend time with her, but eventually began getting dragged to independent Bible studies. Having no knowledge of the Bible and no intention of putting forth the effort to read it, I continued to attend the meetings for one reason – the girl. This was a terrible reason, but fortunately I was able to knock my head loose and jump out while I still had my senior year ahead of me.

Though I may make it might sound like Young Life is a terrible organization it truly isn’t, and I want to make it clear that — it just wasn’t for me.

Able to look back now and observe how things transpired, I am happy with my experiences and how my parents raised me. Religion was there but beyond being baptized, the Young Life ordeal and celebrating Christmas, it was quite irrelevant growing up.

To this day I find nothing wrong with that. I guess you can say religion’s impact is its insignificance in my life.

It was never anything special and will never be anything special. Religion often brings along rules and ways of life to follow and without these guidelines one can look at its absence in peoples’ lives two different ways. Some people will probably think that without religion an individual will be lost and live a life of sex, drugs, crime and alcohol, but hopefully the majority believes that people can get along just fine without religion.

I view myself as a life without religion success story thus far, and I don’t see it creeping back in anytime soon. Thinking back to the church services, there were highlighted individuals who were in unfortunate circumstances and used Christ and the Bible’s teachings as a guide for how to cope. There is nothing wrong with these people, but there is nothing wrong with coping without some religious teachings either.

It seems our culture is uncomfortable when an individual refuses to identify with a specific religion and I realize I’m the minority when I say I don’t identify with any specific religion. To sum up my beliefs I will say this: there is a tremendous amount that had to go right for our presence on this planet to be possible, but there are too many higher powers to choose from.

That might be vague but it works for me.

Religion’s absence in my life has not influenced me in a negative way but instead left room for other things to influence me even more. I obtained my morals, values and other guides to impact my life from role models, parents, culture and personal experiences. If you enjoy identifying with a certain religion, don’t stop if it makes you happy, but I am here to say that you should not feel obligated to pick one. I am certainly happy with my choice and proud of it.