Originally published in the April issue of El Estoque with the headline “This I believe”.

Written by Trisha Kholiya and Sebastian Zhang.

It was a time of opposition. Sophomore Ryan Yang struggled to reconcile macroevolution with his Christian background. Senior Fay Neil questioned her own beliefs because of new perspectives on Tumblr. Sophomore Nicholas Chen found what he read on social media contradictory to his faith in individualism. It was a time of self-discovery. The future of their beliefs remained uncertain, but their origins stood below it all, fueling exploration. It was a time of exploration. To fully grasp what developed in their minds over the years, the zygotes of their beliefs must be dug up from the wombs of their pasts.

The ruins of the World Trade Center lay in flames on the ground, smoke rising to replace what once stood tall. Mothers, fathers and lovers reduced to limp skin-rags spilled across glass, streams of blood curling into fingers that gripped a nation by its throat.

9/11 was a potent ideological catalyst. For many, it bred Islamophobia. But for senior Fay Neil, it formed the base of her identity. Since she and her family were Muslim, they felt threatened by the very people that seemed to fear them. It was then that Neil’s mother warned her against using an isolated event to justify such rampant prejudice. Only a child, Neil accepted her mother’s words without question and continued to do so when her mother taught her about equality. Years later, Neil can be heard echoing her mother’s remarks when she speaks up in disapproval upon hearing a homophobic or racist remark.

Unlike Neil, sophomore Nicholas Chen had little influence from his parents, as they didn’t speak of politics. Instead, much of the foundation of his beliefs came from attending school in a mostly liberal environment.

“I’m liberal because everybody here is liberal,” Chen said, “I feel like in a society like America, liberalism is really the only way to go, because America’s a country that’s always changing… it’s always moving forward, it’s always pushing forward.”

At a young age, Chen was instilled with the core liberal principle of individualism, which fueled his later explorations. Because of this background, Chen felt that developing his current ideologies was an intuitive process.

With an atheistic father and a Christian mother who did not impose her beliefs upon him, Yang didn’t take church seriously on the few occasions he attended, and based most of his beliefs on science.

However, it was when Yang began regularly attending church near the end of seventh grade, at his mother’s suggestion to bond with a new community, that he began to develop his ideologies. Soon, he became interested in Bible prophecies, which caused him to take religion more seriously. Around the beginning of eighth grade, Yang started looking into the Bible’s actual teachings and strayed away from the prophecies.

Yang was no blind follower of Christianity. As he read God’s words, he continuously questioned them. It was through this process of constant inquiry that Yang gradually uncovered what he saw as truth. To Yang, there were two biblical teachings that resonated with him most: to love his neighbors and to love righteousness.

The more he studied the Bible, the more Yang saw contradictions within science. He deduced that because macroevolution stated that everything originated for no apparent reason, it suggested that life was meaningless. Yet, he often saw his secular peers trying to enjoy their lives and following morals, which to him, contradicted the implication of nihilism. The Bible’s idea of a loving God creating earth and mankind just made more sense to Yang, and he accepted the Bible as a more logical source of information.

“If you are an atheist, then what is the purpose of morality?” Yang said, “They tried to get around that question. If you do believe in a God, any loving God wouldn’t just randomly evolve a bunch of stuff that turned into humans because that’s just too random and it doesn’t make sense.”

While Yang dedicated his time to analyzing the Bible, Chen and Neil pursued their own paths to forging their beliefs. As he read stories posted on social media, Chen started to criticize articles from websites like Buzzfeed and NowThis for oversimplifying aspects of intersectionality. Neil, however, took to social media in her own way. Following a friend’s suggestion, she created a Tumblr account and followed users that her friend recommended. She then discovered articles and personal narratives on political issues like sexual assault. Much like the Bible sparked Yang’s intrigue, social media and websites gave Chen and Neil access to a breadth of new questions.

Chen learned of the popular liberal theory of intersectionality: the idea that the disadvantages of certain groups in society can overlap into something stronger. For instance, a gay woman would have more disadvantages than those who were only women or only gay. While he found many of his peers adopting this belief, Chen immediately doubted the model’s simplicity. He was raised to believe in individualism: looking at people on an individual basis, and intuitively came to see the contradictions in the media’s portrayal of intersectionality.

“They oversimplify [intersectionality] and they throw people into buckets,” Chen said. “Then they combine these buckets using the intersectional model to try and assert that certain people are more disadvantaged than others. That’s obviously contrary to the ideas of individualism, because you’re putting people in buckets. You’re not looking at them as individuals.”

Chen’s skepticism led him to develop a more nuanced look into intersectionality. Although he agreed that some groups were more disadvantaged than others in certain cases, he also believed that these disadvantages were not absolute. As an example, he said that gay men have been shown to receive higher rates of violence than gay women, which counters media’s idea that overlapping two disadvantaged groups produces a group of even greater disadvantage in all scenarios.

“Can we absolutely say that women are more privileged or less privileged than men? Because I definitely agree that they are in certain aspects, but if you ask somebody who’s on trial for a crime,” Chen said, “it definitely would be better to be female than to be male when you’re on trial.”

Neil had a different questioning process. On social media, she saw a diversity of beliefs. Tumblr usually supplied liberal views, Facebook and YouTube usually conservative. This was typical; according to a 2014 survey performed by Pew Research Center, 62% of respondents who paid attention to political posts on Facebook saw content that matched their beliefs only some of the time. But despite the variety of sources, most of the time, Neil readily agreed with the liberal views, as they harmonized with the background her mother had influenced in her, and rejected the conservative views, as she quickly saw logical errors in them.

“I do readily accept the liberal views that I have on my newsfeed because it’s stuff that I already agree with, so it’s easy to accept it,” she said.

It wasn’t the conservative sources that challenged her liberal background. Rather, it was the liberal sources that made her question how liberal she truly was.

During her freshmen year, Neil believed that in some situations, victims of sexual assault were at fault for provoking the perpetrator through promiscuous panoply, as various social media articles had indoctrinated her with the idea that female nudity was inappropriate while male nudity was acceptable, and even encouraged. She then came across personal narratives on Tumblr of people sharing their sexual assault experiences and explaining that the victim’s demeanor had no connection to the assault. Weighing that in her mind, Neil decided to reject society’s double standard for dress, and became convinced that sexual assault was always the perpetrator’s fault.

Neil observed something interesting about this case: it was social media that pushed her to blame sexual assault on promiscuously dressed women, but it was also social media that led her to shift that blame onto the perpetrator. She then realized the diversity of views in social media and the importance of staying conscious when reading it. She now makes sure to research anything that she reads and finds questionable.

Through skepticism and self-examination, respectively, Chen and Neil came to solidify their ideological beliefs. However, Yang finds himself only at the beginning of his path toward self-discovery, habitually digging up more unanswered questions as he studies the Bible in his search of his identity.

For these students, what they now believe in is shaped by the ideas that others have shared. But soon enough, they will be part of the next generation of thinkers.

Until then, students will continue to question, to search, to share. From childhood teachings to books discovered at adolescence, this is the beginning of the next face of the world.