Opinion: What Are You Standing On?

What Are You Standing On?

Beliefs, as it turns out, can be more mobile than we think. 

Some of us assume that what we believe is the product of careful thinking, conclusions we arrived at through reason and experience. But for most high schoolers, complete conviction is difficult, for most of us inherit belief through family dinner tables. In any case, belief needs footing: the community that shares it, religious rituals, the small daily moments that make it feel inhabited. We rarely examine what that footing is, for we rarely have to. The foundation holds until the context of our belief changes—then, belief has to find its own footing. 

For many students, DA is the first test of that footing. You cannot spend four years here and remain entirely in your head. You live alongside people who pray before meals and people who find that strange. You might get to room with someone who is incredibly religious, or someone who is a firm materialist. The community changes, and the daily rhythms you had at home are gone. In that sense, Deerfield is an unusually fertile place for spiritual growth and discussion. 

A student described his experience coming into Deerfield. Priorly, he had a loose belief in God. Some of his extended family are religious, while the student himself holds no particular religion or practice, although he enjoys and believes in the idea of a god. Through a Christian best friend in Deerfield, he was introduced to the close-knit Deerfield black community his freshman year, warm, mostly devoted Christians, and genuinely present in each other’s lives. Slowly, he started accompanying his friends to church on Sunday and was eventually converted to Christianity. He emphasized that his friends did not try to preach to him; he was drawn into his faith by living. He was surrounded by people he loved, people for whom faith was a shared practice, and that practice became his before he had fully decided what he believed. Through community, he found the footing for his belief. Another student I know was guided toward church by his best friend. He was initially curious himself, and his best friend noticed that and opened a door for him. Overall, the mechanism was the same. 

As the first student went deeper into STEM, the empirical frameworks he used to understand the world began to feel incompatible and contrasting to his faith. His best friend left Deerfield, leading to him straying from the Christian community. Without his shared ritual, experiences, and daily proximity, his religious practice dissipated partially. Although he still remains religious, he describes his relationship with God as more distant. He still prays at night, but he stopped reading the Bible. As the context changes, the student grapples with the question of whether or not his faith is still worth maintaining. 

Marco Feng had a different experience. As a self-converted Christian, his journey started with curiosity. He read, reread, and pondered the New Testament as a kid; his scripture study became the footing of his faith. Deerfield, on the other hand, gave him the worship dimension he had not experienced before, like fellowship groups and weekly trips to church. He interpreted faith in a different way. Marco was not unsettled by the same reasons that pulled the first student away—empiricism, STEM, the friction between scientific thinking and religious belief. Faith, Marco told me, occurs in moral and spiritual questions. If scientific observation contradicts a literal reader of scripture, the interpretation is wrong, not the observation. Religious documents guide him to make meaning within, and it has become a moral mentor through his high school years. 

Those are two distinct case studies on how people can examine their beliefs within DA life, suggesting that belief depends on how it is grounded. But these reflective cases are not the dominant experience. 

For the majority, religion exists in a quiet form: present, but rarely discussed unprompted or with an analytical lens. When I interviewed students across campus, the answers were often matter-of-fact: I’m in between, I had never thought about it that much, my friends and I—we simply do not talk about this. One student describes herself and her family as “lazy Christians.” She does not structure her life around religious doctrine, but she believes in God nonetheless. Her experience is probably what resonates with the majority of DA students—somewhere in between.

This turns out to be a dominant story not just at Deerfield, but everywhere. Analysis from the General Social Survey found that while religiously unaffiliated Americans have grown substantially since the 1970s, the percentage of Americans with strong affiliations has remained relatively steady. The growth of the “nones” came almost entirely from the nominally religious. When Americans were asked about why they left their religion, 38% said they simply drifted away. They stopped tending to their faith, and the footing eroded. A 2025 Pew Research data across more than 100 countries found that religious decline follows a specific sequence: people abandon public attendance first, then the personal importance of religion, and only finally nominal belonging, dropping the more demanding dimensions before the label itself. Devotion erodes before the identity does; people stop going to church long before they stop calling themselves Christian. The United States is currently in the middle stage of that sequence, as participation and devotion are already declining.

Marco pointed me toward Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodernist philosopher whose work examines how media and technology reshape the way humans experience reality. Baudrillard’s core argument is that certain innovations don’t just change what we do—they change what feels real. After the video camera, experiences can be recorded, shared, and measured; the recorded version begins to feel more real than the experience itself. 

Applied to religion, the contrast emerges as well. Religious experience is almost entirely interior. Prayer, worship, or just that spiritual feeling, none of it produces an output of some sort, and none of it registers likewise as something visible or measurable. As daily life becomes increasingly structured around what can be seen, tracked, and produced, the interior life sometimes loses its footing, and while the belief may persist, the practice erodes. AI furthers this; human intelligence has always been valued precisely because humans are fragile, because they suffer, because emotion and contradiction make thinking nuanced and irreducible. AI, on the other hand, reduces intelligence to computation, to solving problems and generating outputs. People would still prefer humanity, but at the same time, because of AI, humanity will be degraded, for computing is economically and practically better than human intelligence. By that standard, the parts of human life that resist computation begin to feel like inefficiencies. The world stops rewarding the humanities, and it erodes. Religion faces something similar, for that it is not that God is disproven, but just that God becomes harder to prioritize inside a life structured around productivity, measurable output, and immediate human desires. As Marco puts it, the practical reality is such that you would give up going to church on Sunday to do homework. 

And frankly, we see this pattern everywhere. Most of us believe the planet is warming, yet we continue to live in ways that contradict it. The gap between what we believe and how we live is not unique to religion. 

But the gap goes deeper than inconsistency alone. The busyness of life crowds out the reflection, the questioning, the “meditation” and pondering with what you actually believe and why, not just the practice. Spiritual life, if it is to mean anything, requires a kind of intentional inwardness, and modern life is especially bad at making room for it. 

So a question comes up: is the wider erosion of faith—at DA, across the country, across the world—something to mourn? Counterintuitively, no, not entirely. 

The inherited footing was always just a placeholder. Community, rite, family tradition—these support belief from the outside, meaning the person inside never has to find out whether their beliefs can stand on their own. When scaffolding erodes, like when DA introduces you to new people, or when modernity strips your practices, you finally meet your belief in its own terms.

A student at the sophomore declamation this year described believing in Santa Claus as a child; it was a faith he blindly followed. He then drew a line from his Santa Claus story to his belief in God, another faith he held from a young age, and questioned it by the same standard. He said that he had questioned belief, tested belief, and he still came out the other side with something more deliberate than what he started with. Doubt had made his faith more his own. That is a good claim, regardless of where you stand. The examined version of any belief, religious or otherwise, is more valuable than the inherited one. 

And the pressure on belief will only grow. The world changes rapidly around us, and the ground for your belief will move, for everyone, in every direction. What you do when the context of your belief changes—whether you rebuild or walk away—you will come out knowing yourself, and whatever you believe, more honestly.