ABSTRACT
I remember noticing something peculiar when I was only in third grade: all my classmates were the same religion as their parents. All the Jewish kids had Jewish parents. All the Catholic kids had Catholic parents. All the Protestant kids had Protestant parents. And all the kids that “weren’t religious” or “didn’t have a religion” had parents of the same ilk. And then one day, a young girl named Emily joined our class midyear. What made Emily stand out-or, rather, sit out-was that she wouldn’t stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance along with the rest of us each morning. I was completely fascinated by this act of deviance. I thought that it took incredible chutzpah to sit each morning and not stand and recite the Pledge with the rest of the class. In the schoolyard, I quickly found out the reason for Emily’s behavior: she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and they don’t believe in swearing their allegiance to anything but God. And it didn’t take me long to find out that-surprise, surprise-Emily’s parents were also Jehovah’s Witnesses. “So that explains it,” I thought to myself as I went to play handball with Stewart Stein.
