Some say, “what’s the problem with public prayer?” This isn’t about a problem with public prayer, or a problem with prayer at all. Prayer is a beautiful spiritual practice.
What we’re witnessing, instead, is white women adopting a religion that is not native to their cultural, national, or ethnic identity. “So it’s about race?” Yes and no. As I said, Islam is not native to anybody considered “white” (a social construct that refers to people of European descent), so what do we observe from the adoption of this foreign faith?
We see the weakening of these students’ sense of identity and romanticization of foreign identities instead. This was the result of many years of being made to feel guilty for being white and shamed for “having privilege,” which led them (as it would anyone) to shirk the identity of perceived privilege by instead adopting the identity of those considered “oppressed,” which is glamorized in western leftist society. Middle Eastern people (and by extension, their religious and cultural identities) are considered “oppressed,” and thus “good.”
So what’s the problem with this? Well, the glamorization of a religion they don’t understand is a gateway to endorsing its extremism because they aren’t able to draw the lines that are understood by native practitioners. For example, there are people in Iran who lean into their Muslim identity and simultaneously condemn the Islamic Republic and religious extremism, because they have intimate experience with the boundary between their religious practice and the extremism that weaponizes religion to justify mass slaughter, torture, rape, imperialism, power, and control.
It’s neither reasonable, nor likely to expect those unfamiliar with foreign identities (much less religions) to be able to draw appropriate boundaries from personal experience and understanding, which ultimately leads to a defensive posture toward that adopted identity, including all the extremism that attaches to it.
What we need to do, instead of turning a blind eye to these obvious dangers, is to help these youth learn to love themselves again for all that they are so that they aren’t shamed into cosplaying as somebody else and inviting in a whole host of secondary problems because of their primary motivation to escape themselves.
These are the downstream effects of a culture of shame on American youth.
