ABSTRACT
Having attended public schools all my life and worshiping at a local Methodist church only on occasion, I was most decidedly raised in a secular environment. I suppose I thought of myself as a Christian, however, this designation seemed more polite convention than a genuine statement about the kind of worldview that actually shaped my thinking. Of course I did believe in God but I was not accustomed to calling upon the presence of anything “spiritual” very often. Grace before meals was the only public moment for prayer in my family: if you prayed at other times it was clearly a private affair. In the classroom, the only mention of God that I recall was during the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. Essentially, the religious identity of students themselves was an “unknown” except perhaps for those people with whom you established more intimate friend-ships outside of school boundaries. It is clear to me now that the culture of my middle-class,
secular upbringing-the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that I acquired during the years of my childhood and young adulthood-gave only the slightest nod to religion as a component of the social development that ultimately leads one to claim particular kinds of identities or selfhood. Religious sources of meaning had little influence upon what or how I learned or the way that I made sense of my life.
