Checking God Off Your To-Do List

As romantic rejections go, the one William J. Maskiell ’02 received his first year was fairly brutal. The girl in question didn’t tell him that he was a nice guy or that she didn’t want to ruin their friendship. She didn’t pretend to have a boyfriend. She didn’t roll her eyes or ignore him. She didn’t even claim to not have a phone.

“She pretty much told me, ‘Look, you need Jesus, you’re going to hell without him, so I can’t be with you,’” recalls Maskiell, an economics concentrator in Pforzheimer House. He pauses. “Needless to say, I got a little put off by that.”

Maskiell emphasizes that while his relationship with that girl was one catalyst in his conversion to Christianity later that year, it wasn’t that simple. A rough final year of high school, which he says was characterized by “self-degradation, bad feelings and low self-esteem,” had culminated in suicidal tendencies. “I had the knife out and on my wrist,” he says.

When he got to Harvard, the situation only worsened. To combat his misery, he was drinking frequently, experimenting with drugs and making friendships and romantic attachments that he now considers unhealthy. “Back then, I called it fun, but now I call it sin,” he reflects with a laugh. “I began to realize that I needed Jesus to intervene and to point out to me how bad my life was and how much easier and better it could be if I accepted him as my Lord and Savior.”

Some people come to Harvard to further their galloping ambitions. Some come looking for intellectual challenge. Some come in search of themselves, or to change the world, one extracurricular at a time. Some come looking to make their first million. And some people come to Harvard looking for any or all of those things—and they find God.

For Maskiell, the first step was to pray: “I just said, ‘I can’t be perfect on my own, God. Please help me. Please. I’ve tried my whole life to control my destiny, but I can’t do it, so you do it. I’ll follow your leadership.’”

Now a senior, Maskiell says he hasn’t been drunk or done drugs since he became a more committed Christian. His grades have picked up and he has adopted a self-discipline marked by regular Bible study, as well as physical, intellectual and religious discipline. The girl who rejected him is now his fiancée.

“I don’t want to make it out like it was some kind of perfect transition,” he says. “You know, like once I was the happy pagan and now I’m the perfect, pure saint walking on water…but I’ve beaten a good number of my vices.”

Sociologists adopt a basic model of religious conversion that aligns fairly closely with Maskiell’s story: experiencing tension or stress, encountering a religion at a turning point and, once converted, reconstructing perception of one’s experience according to the adopted world view. But for most converts at Harvard, the path was slightly less dramatic.

“I’m a math person, so I made a flow chart,” explains Claire V. McCusker ’04, a government concentrator in Leverett House who completed her conversion to Catholicism from atheism two days before she arrived on campus. Following intense scrutiny, reading and discussion about religion, her flow chart consisted of premises concluding that, for her, “Catholicism was true.”

At pre-frosh weekend, Richard T. Halvorson ’03, a philosophy and government concentrator in Pforzheimer House, dragged the people he’d met that day to meetings of the Harvard Secular Society. Raised a Catholic, Halvorson was fascinated by Buddhism and secular humanism in high school, yet Christianity beckoned. Halvorson, drawn to what he saw as the historical validity of the New Testament and the answers it offered to his philosophical questions, made a decision to become a Christian the summer before he arrived at school.

Still, in his first year, Halvorson became active in the Harvard Secular Society. In high school, he’d engaged in e-mail dialogues with the authors of books on secular humanism and atheism, asking them for the most convincing arguments against God. He had asked professors, teachers, friends. “I wanted the strongest arguments against the things that I was starting to believe,” he says.

That manner of determined study typifies many Harvard converts. For Laura C. Cohon ’02, a biochemistry concentrator in Cabot House, conversion to Islam began with a reexamination of her assumptions about spirituality. “I came to the realization that it was kind of arrogant of me to suppose my beliefs about religion were superior to others’ beliefs,” she says, “when I hadn’t even taken the time to learn what they said.” Through reading and exploration, Cohon gradually developed an interest in Islam. She says she shared common American misconceptions about the religion and through careful study she came to the conclusion that charges against Islam misrepresent the messages of the religious texts.

“At that point, I started to get scared—I really didn’t want to be Muslim. I couldn’t imagine what my family would think and how my life would have to change to accommodate things like praying five times a day,” she says. “But one day, I woke up knowing that continuing to reject the truth was unfair to myself and, more importantly, unfair to God. [I realized] that my life could end at any moment and I didn’t want to die in that state,” Cohon says. “So, I converted, which consisted very simply of saying, in Arabic, ‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God.’”

Many of those who are willing to talk about their experiences converting or becoming more religiously observant at Harvard were born nominally Christian and then became committed Christians, often evangelical Protestants. For example, there were no outright converts to Judaism within the Harvard Hillel community who were willing to be interviewed for this story. Instead, most religious transformation at Hillel involved previously non-observant students leading more traditional or involved religious lives.

“‘Conversion’ in the sense of changing one’s religion is not a priority of our organization,” says Swami Tyagananda, who leads the Harvard Hindu Fellowship. “In fact, we believe that changing labels is irrelevant—what is vital is a change of heart. In order to appreciate the Hindu world view, it is not necessary to abandon the tradition in which one has been brought up.”

Only a handful of Islamic students agreed to be interviewed, and appeals to United Ministry representatives of smaller groups such as Bahá’í and Zoroastrianism turned up few or no converts.

In a diverse institution that trumpets pluralism, the subject of conversion is understandably touchy. The United Ministry’s website cautions against “destructive religious groups” that are not affiliated with the University, adding that all United Ministry members “are committed to mutual respect and non-proselytization; we oppose religious harassment and manipulation, and we affirm the roles of personal freedom, doubt and open critical reflection in healthy spiritual growth.”

Does this create an inherent conflict with groups that consider evangelism a core tenet of their belief system? Some see little difference between these “destructive” groups and Christian groups that seek to enthusiastically share their faith. But at Harvard, even the extent of those groups’ evangelism varies, depending on whom you ask.

“We’re not highly evangelistic,” says Russell J. Schlecht, the pastor of Grace Street Church, a Protestant congregation that rents space in Old Cambridge Baptist Church and has attracted some of the converts interviewed. “We have a lot of faith that God is actually the one pursuing people. We take a great step backward in that. However, when someone is ready to commit to Christ, we’re right there.”

Converts can sometimes make the most fervent converters. Asked how important sharing his faith with non-believers is, Maskiell is blunt. “It’s life or death. It’s that simple,” he says. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way of the truth and the light. No man comes through the father but through me.’ And if you don’t have Jesus in your life, you will not live eternally with God. It’s that simple.”

But most evangelical Protestants at Harvard take a less confrontational stance, while still maintaining the importance of evangelism. “If we believe that this is true, that this is life-saving truth, not only a pie-in-the-sky-in-heaven truth, but a real-life, can-make-your-life-better-here truth, we’re compelled to share that good news,” says Benjamin D. Grizzle ’03, whose parents both became Christians just before or while they were at Harvard. Grizzle, a Crimson editor, is also one of the leaders of the campus group Christian Impact, which has drawn several converts. “It’s not preaching on the corner—that’s just plain obnoxious,” he says. “It’s a matter of loving people.”

For Mattie J. Germer ’03, that was exactly the matter. Raised Lutheran, she had briefly considered converting to Catholicism in high school, but eventually abandoned the idea. She stopped going to church completely and considered herself an agnostic. “I thought religion was a sham,” she recalls. “An interesting sham, and a culturally relevant sham, but not something I really wanted to believe in.”

Last year Germer took a religion elective with Diana L. Eck, professor of comparative religion and Master of Lowell House, where Germer lives. Though she says her initial motivation was to get to know her House Master and to enroll in a “cushy elective,” she found that she was doing her religion homework before anything else. She eventually added religion as a joint concentration with government, her chosen field, but says the readings in the religion tutorial, which focused on “religion as a psychological crutch,” as she puts it, only reinforced her agnostic tendencies.

Last summer, while interning in Washington, Germer began spending time with other rising Harvard juniors who were also working in the city, three of whom were committed Christians: Halvorson, Grizzle and Heather A. Woodruff ’03, another leader of Christian Impact. Germer, who says she had been going through difficult emotional times with her friends at school, began asking questions about their faith and their lifestyle.

“I just answered her questions,” Woodruff remembers. She says she told Germer, “I don’t know if this is how you feel, but this is what I feel like in my life. This is what I believe. This is what I know to be true in my own life. I’ve seen God work radically in me and do things that I couldn’t do on my own. And I’ve seen His love for me.”

This past fall, her curiosity piqued, Germer came to Grace Street Church with Grizzle and Woodruff. She had begun to shift away from her political involvement on campus and from the friends she had made there. “I thought [church] was going to be totally nerdy, or be all like, ‘I love Jesus, you should love Jesus too!’” Germer says, adopting a high-pitched, mock-passionate voice. “And it wasn’t like that at all! These people are smart. They’re not like, ‘Well, this is what my parents told me, so this is what I believe.’”

Germer began meeting with Schlecht and reading religious texts by authors like C.S. Lewis and Simone Weil. “I was really hungering for a spiritual aspect of my life,” she says. “Because I’d been studying it. And I liked watching it in other people…I just didn’t know if I could get past my belief that the knowledge of God is really beyond human understanding.”

A tumultuous reexamination of her beliefs followed, exacerbated by issues she already had with her life and her friends. But by December, something had to give. “This sounds so stupid, because if someone had said this to me a year ago I would have laughed at them,” Germer says wearily. “But I just kind of finally sat down and prayed. And I just said, ‘You know, God, I believe in this. And I believe that You sent Jesus to die for my sins.’ Part of me was laughing at myself for saying it, but part of it just felt so good to commit myself to that core belief of believing in Jesus, believing in salvation through grace.”

“And things just started getting better,” she continues, smiling. “I know that sounds so cheesy! I have a hard time believing it myself.”

There are some obvious reasons why students who come to college might seek answers in religion, not the least of which is the fact that they are staking it out on their own for the first time. “It’s really easy to turn your back on religion when you’re at home and you have a support network of your parents and the community. That’s much harder to do when your frame of reality is so fundamentally changed,” says Ann E. Chernicoff ‘03, who moved 3,000 miles from her native Berkeley, Calif., and went from being a casual Reform Jew to a committed member of the Hillel community. “If you’ve always been told that you belong to this tradition, there’s a place to turn, at least initially, and to say, does this have anything to say to me? Can this help me deal with the things that are facing me and my life right now?”

Most converts say that while it isn’t easy being a person of religious faith in a climate of rigorous skepticism, their close friends received the news of their conversion with tolerance or acceptance, tempered occasionally with apprehension. Germer can recite the list of stereotypes about religious people, because she once held them: “Religion is anti-intellectual. You can’t be smart and be religious. If you believe in a certain religion, you must just be lying to yourself.”

Perhaps that is why students interested in pursuing new religious paths at Harvard undertake such meticulous inquiry before converting. For those who also seek what they term a personal relationship with God, this can sometimes prove to be also a liability. “One of my worries is that my relationship with God is very intellectual and practical—actions and ethics and morals and things like that—and that I don’t have enough of the interior and spiritual,” says Harpaul A. Kohli ’02, who was born to a Catholic mother and Sikh father and began the process of becoming a Catholic soon after arriving at Harvard.

Even though Kohli and others were already considering religious transition before college, there may be aspects of student life at Harvard that encourage such a change. “The preoccupation with wealth and the focus on rather dismal ‘realist’ theories in class has prompted me to seek out the ideals of acceptance and not-wanting and compassion in Buddhism,” says Roxanna K. Myhrum ’05, who made the decision to become a Buddhist shortly before coming to college.

For those who arrive and find the social environment here fraught with competition and pressure, a religious community may offer a refreshing alternative. “Yes, Christians at Harvard are different,” Germer says. “But not because they’re weird and they don’t go out and drink or, you know, they’re from small towns in the South. They’re different because they care about other people. They’re different because they’re willing to stick by it in tough times. They’re different because they’ve committed their lives to something they believe in strongly.”

In a community full of compulsive schedulers and multitaskers, even finding religion can be an item to be crossed off a to-do list. “Harvard casts kind of an air of us needing to have every area of our lives settled,” Woodruff says. “You know, everyone’s got to leave here with the job, the signing bonus, the apartment, the five-year plan, the 10-year plan…Everyone wants to have every duck in a row. Religion may further people’s pursuit of ‘What am I going to believe? What is going to be the truth that guides my life?’”

Sometimes the search really is about covering all of your philosophical bases. “I said, okay, so I’m going to be Jewish in one way or another for the rest of my life,” says Jason B. Rubenstein ’04 of his transition into observant Judaism. “I’ve been exposed to one kind of Jewish upbringing…and for me to decide what the rest of my life would look like would be somewhat irresponsible and hasty and ignorant if I didn’t at least see and perhaps even try out a more traditional, more observant Jewish life.”

Explanations for conversions naturally err on the side of offering rational justifications for what is seen as irrational faith. “I would encourage people not to view it in a deterministic way, because that discounts the possibility that people might have really done the intellectual and spiritual work of trying to figure out whether the claims of a religion are true,” says Sarah G. Dawson ’04, who was baptized as a Christian at the end of her first year, despite considerable objections from her family. “Regardless of whether or not one ends up converting to a religion, that investigation is something I would encourage people to pursue.”