This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at CU Boulder chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

Here I am, crossing myself: forehead, chest, left shoulder, right.

Here I am capitalizing every “G” in “God.” Here I am on my knees, begging for His forgiveness. Like many of us, I was born into religion before I ever knew how to choose. Before I had language, I had ritual. Before I was born, I was Roman Catholic. And after I was born, they brought me to the altar and baptized me as a babe. I was raised in a routine of Sunday mass, cradled in the rhythm of prayer. I learned faith the way children learn anything, by repetition, by imitation, by love. My mother carried it like something alive, something sacred she could pass down through her hands. She wrapped me in it, taught me its language, its names, its certainty. She did not just believe, she knew, and in her knowing, I learned how to believe too. My father was quieter in it. For better and worse, he did not press belief into me the way my mother did. He let it happen. He let her teach, let the Church shape me, let the rituals settle into my bones. In many ways, he taught me without teaching at all. He showed me that belief could exist alongside curiosity, that faith did not have to silence thought. And slowly, without ever saying it directly, he taught me that everything, even religion, could be questioned. So naturally, I did.

There comes a time when everyone asks: why?

I remember sitting in church one Sunday, the kind of morning that felt like all the others, routine and expected. The pews were full, the air thick with incense and familiarity, and I moved through the motions without thinking.

Stand, sit, kneel. Repeat.

The priest began his homily, his voice steady, carrying easily through the room. I had heard hundreds of them before, messages about obedience, about love, about living rightly. But that day, something shifted. I was listening, really listening, and the words didn’t land the way they used to. They felt circular, reaching for something they never quite said, asking for agreement without offering logic. I remember thinking, “This doesn’t make sense.” Not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet, almost unsettling realization. Like noticing a crack in something you had always assumed was whole. Suddenly, things began to blur in my young adult life. And naturally, college deepened that feeling in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Sitting in my political science classes, learning about power, institutions, colonialism, and governance, I started to see religion differently. Not just as belief, but as structure. As influence. As something that shapes laws, identities, and entire nations. It wasn’t just about prayer anymore. It was about who gets to define morality, who gets to enforce it, and who is expected to follow it. The same church that had taught me reverence now appeared in conversations about policy, about control, about history I had never been told in full. And suddenly, the disconnect I felt in that homily made more sense. It wasn’t just that the words didn’t land; it was that I was hearing them through a new lens. One that asked not just what is being said, but why, and for whom.

person writing in a journal while they read the bible — Photo by Kelly Sikkema from Unsplash

Taking The Bible as Literature last fall became my first real step toward answering my multitude of questions, by permitting me to sit inside the uncertainty.

As we read as much of the bible as we could throughout the semester, I found myself more perplexed than understanding. It was an incredible feat to attempt to make sense of such a significant book, whilst abandoning all of our religious biases at the door. Nevertheless, we tried. I learned of all the big stories of the bible that the priests don’t speak of in their homilies, like Lot offering his daughters to a mob, or Job losing everything in what feels like a wager between God and Satan. I wondered what the hell happened with Elisha and the bears? I wondered why I’ve never seen resurrection myself. And why did Noah let mosquitoes onto his Ark? I began to conceptualize whether science and faith could coexist.

There were moments where this biblical God felt intimate and tender, and others where he felt distant, or worse. Verses that once sounded comforting began to feel unsettling when placed beside stories of violence, exile, and unanswered suffering. I realized that what I had been taught to accept as certainty was, in many ways, built on selective reading. I came into the class expecting answers, or at least clarity. Instead, I left with more questions than I arrived with, and somehow, that felt more honest. This class did not destroy my faith. It complicated it in all the right ways. It gave me space to understand it. I learned that community is not just the people around me, but a kind of shared practice, a space where learning is not performance but return. Where we come back again and again, asking, failing, listening. Dr. Saxby taught me “Kairos, not Chronos,” that growth cannot be timed. That understanding arrives when it is ready, not when it is demanded. I learned to see others as “icons,” even in disagreement, to treat difference not as opposition but as possibility. I learned that learning itself is not a factory producing results, but a field needing rest. Most importantly, I learned to ask better questions. I initially approached religion like an argument to win, filled and fueled by Jubilee YouTube videos. Now I approach it like a landscape to walk through, without needing to conquer it.

Still, after taking this course, I couldn’t stop thinking of Nina Simone’s words that I came across one day,

“The people who built their heaven on your land are telling you yours is in the sky.”

I am from Benin, West Africa, where truthfully, Catholicism did not arrive as a neutral faith, but as conquest.

Without colonialism, I would not carry Catholicism the way I do now; so, in an effort to continue to educate myself, I’ve taken another class this semester, African Colonial History, and with it, in tandem with my own research, I’ve formed some solid opinions on my own faith background and origin. When the French colonized what was then Dahomey, religion followed as both companion and instrument. Missionaries built churches and schools, teaching not only Christianity but also the French language, values, and ways of seeing the world. Conversion was not always forced outright, but it was never neutral. To be educated, to access opportunity, to move within the colonial system often meant moving closer to the Church. Indigenous beliefs, including Vodun, were not treated as equally valid spiritual systems but as something to be replaced, corrected, or erased. And so, Catholicism in Benin became more than a belief; it became entangled with survival, with adaptation, with the slow reshaping of identity under colonial rule. This pattern is not unique to Benin. Across the world, religion has often traveled with empire. In Latin America, Spanish colonization spread Catholicism through systems like the encomienda, where conversion was tied to control over Indigenous populations. In the Philippines, Spanish missionaries transformed local spiritual practices into Catholic ones, layering new rituals over old beliefs while maintaining colonial authority. In parts of Africa beyond Benin, British and Portuguese missions operated similarly, building churches alongside administrative centers, embedding Christianity into the very structure of colonial governance. Religion, in these contexts, was not simply about salvation; it was about assimilation.

What makes this history even more complex is that religion did not simply overwrite what came before; it blended with it. For example, in Benin, the predating practice of Vodun did not disappear. It adapted, survived. You can still see traces of this syncretism today, in the way Catholic saints are sometimes understood alongside traditional deities, in the way rituals and beliefs intertwine rather than fully replace one another. This reminds me that even under systems of power, people find ways to hold onto themselves. Religion, even when imposed, is never received passively. It is remembered, replanted, and made local again. I have no relationship to Vodun, but when I think about my own relationship to Catholicism, I have to reckon with the fact that it is not just inherited through family, but through history. It is tied to a moment when belief was used to justify domination, to present conquest as moral. That doesn’t mean every act of faith within it is insincere, or that every believer is complicit in that history. But it does mean that the foundation is not neutral. It carries weight. It carries memory. So if and when I pray, when I think about God, I am not just engaging with something spiritual. I am engaging with something historical. Something political. Something that arrived long before me, shaped by forces far beyond individual belief. And that realization does not make my faith disappear, but it does make it more complicated. It forces me to ask not just what I believe, but where that belief comes from, and who had to lose something for it to reach me.

If it isn’t clear, I struggle to settle on my identity in religion. What does it mean to be an African Catholic? And what does it mean to be a catholic woman? Even further, how does the church view communities I don’t identify with? This system is older than me. Bigger than me. There are no female leaders in the Roman Catholic Church. The first human is written as a man, even though women are the only beings capable of creating life. Sometimes I wonder if man created God in his own image, because the closest thing to God is woman, and man has never learned how to worship her. Yes, misogyny exists. I just didn’t realize how close it lived to me, how intimate it was, how it moved through ordinary spaces. I work stocking shelves in the kids’ toy aisle. To my right are cleaning toys, miniature brooms, plastic kitchens washed in pink and purple, carefully packaged for girls. To my left, trucks and construction sets, no pink, not a trace. No pink trucks. No pink tools. No pink labor. We raise women to clean and men to build. What unsettles me most is not just that this exists, but that it is written, preserved, and sanctified in texts we are taught to revere. When I began reading the New King James Bible as literature rather than unquestioned truth, patterns emerged that I could no longer ignore. Women are consistently positioned as secondary, as derivative, as belonging to men. “For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man… neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (1 Corinthians 11:8–9). This is not just inequality; it is justification. It tells a story about origin, and in doing so, it dictates hierarchy. Some stories are even harder to sit with. In Genesis, Lot offers his daughters to be violated to protect male guests: “You may do to them as you wish” (Genesis 19:8). Their bodies become negotiable, expendable. Even when the Bible condemns wickedness, women’s suffering is collateral. I cannot read that and not ask: what kind of moral authority does a text hold if it normalizes the disposability of women?

I used to justify these contradictions by telling myself it was a different time. That cultural context explained the hierarchy. But even then, I knew how fragile that argument was. Because Christianity did not remain in its original context. It spread, shaped societies, influenced laws, and molded cultures across centuries. It did not simply reflect patriarchy; it helped sustain it. And even now, as the world moves toward equality, the Church often feels like one of the last places where that hierarchy still thrives, even if softened, even if disguised. As a political science student, I can no longer approach religion as something purely spiritual or personal. Faith, to me now, is inseparable from power. It is structured. It is governance. It is influence. And in the United States, especially, Christianity does not exist quietly. It legislates. It organizes. It claims authority over public life in ways that feel impossible to ignore. Christian nationalism, in particular, feels like the clearest example of this collision between faith and power. It is the belief that America is, and should remain, a Christian nation, not just culturally, but politically. But this idea is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of this country. Manifest Destiny, taught in elementary school social studies, was one of its earliest expressions. A belief that expansion across the continent was not just justified, but divinely ordained. That God had given land to settlers, regardless of the people already living on it. Religion, in that moment, was not just belief. It was permission. And that thread has never fully disappeared. It lingers in language we repeat without thinking. “One nation under God.” A phrase embedded in the Pledge of Allegiance, spoken by children before they even understand what it means. It suggests unity, but it also suggests hierarchy, that belief in God is part of what defines belonging. And I cannot help but wonder who gets excluded in that definition. What happens to those who do not believe, or who believe differently? Where do they fit in a nation that names God as part of its identity?

As someone who identifies as deeply liberal, I find myself resisting this with everything I have. Not because I reject faith entirely, but because I reject the idea that one religion should dictate the lives of everyone else. Especially when that religion, as I have come to understand it, carries a long history of gender hierarchy, colonial expansion, and moral control. Christian nationalism doesn’t just blur the line between church and state; it erases it. This becomes especially clear when I think about the Catholic Church that shaped so much of my upbringing. Its stance on abortion is one of the clearest examples of how religious belief moves into political enforcement. The pro-life position is framed as moral, as protective, as righteous. But I cannot align myself with it. Because at its core, it denies women autonomy over their own bodies. It places potential life above lived life. It asks women to carry, to suffer, to sacrifice, regardless of circumstance. And I cannot accept a system that demands that kind of obedience while claiming to value compassion. The same tension exists in the Church’s stance on sexuality. The quiet, and sometimes not so quiet, homophobia embedded in Catholic teaching is something I cannot reconcile. To claim love as a central tenet of faith and then deny that love in others feels like a contradiction too large to ignore. It creates a boundary around belonging, one that excludes people not because of harm, but because of who they are. And again, doctrine becomes limitation. What unsettles me most is how often these positions are presented as unquestionable. As truth. As moral certainty. There is no room for doubt, no room for people like me who exist in the in-between. But everything I have learned tells me that certainty is often where power hides. Democracy depends on plurality, on disagreement, on the ability to hold multiple truths in tension. But Christian nationalism insists on singularity: one truth, one identity, one moral framework. But I know this: if there is a place for religion in politics, it cannot demand domination. It has to allow for questioning, for plurality, for people like me who are watching carefully, deciding whether to step off, or simply stay long enough to understand where I’ve been.

Girl with closed eyes and praying hands — Photo by Ben White from Unsplash

“Religion may, in fact, be a byproduct of the way our brains work…” . I don’t think religion exists by accident. I don’t think it simply appeared out of nowhere, fully formed and untouched by human hands. The more I study it, the more I sit with it, the more I question it, the more it seems like something deeply human. I think religion exists because we are afraid. Afraid of death, of meaninglessness, of the vastness of a world that does not always explain itself. Religion gives language to that fear. It tells us that there is something beyond what we can see, something that orders the chaos, something that watches, something that knows. It makes the unknown feel held. It turns randomness into intention. And in that way, it comforts us. I also think religion exists because of power. Because once belief becomes shared, it becomes a way to organize people, to guide behavior, to define what is right and wrong. It becomes a tool that can unite, but also one that can control. Rules are written. Hierarchies are formed. Authority is claimed. And suddenly, what began as an attempt to understand the world becomes a system that governs it. The same belief that soothes someone in grief can also be used to justify inequality. The same text that offers hope can also impose limitations. And I think that duality is part of why religion has endured for so long. It meets emotional needs, but it also builds social order.

In the same breath, I cannot ignore the beauty of religion across the world, all the ways humans have reached for something beyond themselves. There is something deeply moving about the fact that across continents, languages, and histories, people have created meaning, ritual, and reverence. From the quiet discipline of Islam, bowing in prayer five times a day, to the layered spirituality of Hinduism, where gods take many forms and stories stretch endlessly, from the mindfulness and stillness of Buddhism, to the ancestral grounding of African traditional religions, where the living and the dead remain in conversation. Each one offers its own language for the same longing: to understand, to belong, to connect. Even when I struggle with the structures of religion, I cannot deny the beauty in its expressions, the poetry of it, the way it gives people something to hold onto, something to return to. It reminds me that faith is not singular, not owned by one tradition or one truth, but something vast and varied, shaped by culture, history, and imagination. And that, in itself, is something sacred, that so many different paths exist, all trying, in their own ways, to answer the same impossible questions.

I don’t know if God is real in the way I was taught. But I do know that religion persists because it answers something we cannot quite silence. And maybe that is why, even now, even in all my questioning, I haven’t let it go completely. You are handed a book filled with beautiful words, a book that claims to explain life itself, and yet it is too long to read in its entirety and too complex to fully dissect. The easiest thing to do is believe. It doesn’t help that its poetics reach directly into every doubt you’ve ever carried. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:3–5). It makes you feel small, but also seen. Or “I waited patiently for the Lord… He drew me up from the pit of destruction… and set my feet upon a rock” (Psalm 40:1–3), promising that even your lowest moments are temporary, that someone will pull you out. The first verse my mother ever taught me was Luke 1:37: “For with God nothing will be impossible.” So short, so simple, yet so powerful. It planted something in me early, the idea that with enough faith, anything could happen. What child wouldn’t believe that? What person, even now, wouldn’t want to hold on to it?

Sometimes, though, belief is taken too far. Religious psychosis is something I approach carefully, because it sits at the fragile edge where faith stops being grounding and begins to consume. I don’t mean belief itself, or even deep devotion, but the moments when religion no longer feels like a choice or a comfort, and instead becomes overwhelming, absolute, inescapable. It’s when God is no longer something you reach toward, but something that feels like it is speaking through you, controlling you, demanding from you. When every thought becomes a sign, every coincidence a message, every doubt a danger. I’ve seen how thin that line can be, how easily certainty can tip into something more isolating, more rigid, more consuming. And it makes me wonder about the way religion, when taken without question, can blur the boundary between belief and reality. Because if you are taught that your thoughts can be divine, that your feelings can be God’s voice, that obedience is the highest virtue, then where do you locate yourself? Where do you end, and faith begins? It’s not that religion creates psychosis, but that in certain conditions, it can give structure to it, making something deeply internal feel externally justified. And that frightens me.

As I lingered on this fear, I stumbled upon a memory of the same feeling. I’ve realized flashes of the first piece of religious media that ever made me question. My father used to bring home random stacks of CDs from the thrift store for us to watch. In one of his hauls was a CD titled The Adventures of Mark Twain. I must have been around nine. The film didn’t feel like anything I had been taught in church. Instead of neat stories and clear lessons, it followed a version of Satan who spoke about humanity in ways that were eerie, philosophical, and strangely honest. I remember feeling both afraid and drawn in, as if I had stumbled onto something I wasn’t supposed to see. It planted a kind of quiet confusion in me, one that didn’t go away, I suppose. Fast forward to last year, and that same feeling returned once more! But in a different form. I watched the critically acclaimed Sinners, and instead of giving me clarity, it deepened the questions I had been carrying for years. What stayed with me wasn’t just the story itself, but how it treated belief as something complicated, shaped by history, identity, and survival rather than simple choice. It made me think about how religion lives within people, and I couldn’t resist sharing how it lives with me.

Ultimately, I remain in between. Somewhere between agnostic and Catholic. An impossible middle. Half deconstructed, yet still held up by the very foundation I question. I cannot forget where I come from, but I cannot unknow what I now see. I believe in the power of prayer because I believe in my matriarchs. I believe I am alive today because of the prayers they whispered over me every morning and every night. I believe in the power of the tongue. My mom’s is undeniable. Her faith is not quiet. It roars. When she calls her God by any of His many names, it feels impossible not to believe her.

“Adonai.” “Jehovah Rapha.” “Jehovah Shalom.” “Jehovah Nissi.” “Jehovah Jireh.” “Abbah Father.” “Elohim.” “El Shaddai.”

And finally, “El Roi.”

“The God who sees me.”

That is the version of God I cannot let go of. Not the God of hierarchy or control. Not the God used to justify silence, suffering, or obedience without question. But a God who sees. A God who witnesses. Someone who knows. If omnipotence exists, for me it lies in the intimacy of being seen without explanation, without performance, in the quiet acknowledgment of my existence, even when I do not understand it myself. But even that belief fractures when I look outward. Because what does it mean to be seen, in a world where so many are invisible? Where centuries of suffering stretch endlessly, unanswered. Where prayers echo and do not return. I struggle to hold onto a God who sees me when I cannot reconcile the millions who feel unseen, unheard, and untouched by that same presence. Because I have read too much now. I have seen the parts that were never preached to me. I cannot make sense of a faith that asks for trust while offering so little clarity in return. The more I search for certainty, the more I find contradictions.

Sometimes I think God is a woman. Sometimes I think women are God. Once a week, I don’t believe in God at all. And then there are nights where something in me softens, and I whisper “thank you” into the dark, not knowing who or what is listening, only that I need to say it.

Maybe that is what faith is for me now, personal and quiet. Not belief, but the inability to fully let go.

There I am again, crossing myself out of habit.

Old habits die especially hard when you are born into them.

For every answer, another doubt.

It seems I won’t ever know for sure.

For every prayer, I now have a question.

For God, or god, or gods

I have ten thousand.

Some helpful links:

Pray It Ain’t So

We wanna slide into your DMs