I am not a religious person. My mother had to bribe me to have a Bat Mitzvah. I go to Open Shabbats to feel a sense of community, but I wouldn’t really say I believe in God. And I’m not even one of those people who says, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” I’d like to be more spiritual, but frankly I just don’t have the time.

But then there are those moments. In the Bolivian rainforest when I was sixteen. In Vermont, watching the light bounce off the frosted branches of the pine trees by my house.

And in Jerusalem, where I could feel an aura of heat emanating from the stone buildings and infusing the air with, for lack of a better word, God. Maybe not in the traditional anthropomorphic definition, and I certainly don’t think I can define it, but God was there. I didn’t see it or hear it and I can’t prove it, but I know it just the same.

That’s why I didn’t buy it when a professor said recently that Jerusalem rose to prominence because it lay at the center of a major trade route. It was the first time I’ve ever felt like one of those marginalized religious Macalester students you hear about now and then. Jerusalem is a spiritual center for Judaism, it is the birthplace of Christianity, it is the third holiest site in Islam, and it is the site of an explosive conflict that has been raging for the better part of a century-because it was the center of a trade route a thousand years ago? Hundreds of cities have been centers for trade, but there’s only one Jerusalem.

It was presented in class as a matter of fact versus faith, rational intellectualism versus irrational emotionalism. “Of course,” the professor responded to my objection, “not everyone would agree-religious people would say the city is holy.” Their answer to the question of Jerusalem’s importance, he said, is based on “faith.” Though he may not have intended it this way, the implication for me was that his was the intellectual, and thereby correct answer.

I did not feel comfortable expressing my non-Macalester spirituality in class. I commented nonetheless, but I couldn’t bring myself to say outright that I thought there was a spiritual reason for Jerusalem’s importance. And as I sat there brooding, I realized that I didn’t know if I’d feel comfortable sharing my feelings with some of my closest friends. I didn’t think that many of them would understand, since they, too, subscribe to the view of religion as irrational.

This fact versus faith dichotomy is relies on a gendered and racialized conception of the human mind and soul (or are they even separate?). White people are seen as rational and logical, living in the world of logic and ideas. People of color are seen as more spiritual, irrational and emotional. The same can be said of men (they’re rational) and women (they’re irrational). And the same can be said of Macalester atheists (rational) and the rest of us (irrational). The problem is that Atheism is just as based on faith as any other religion.

At Macalester, religion is often seen only as an institution that tries to exert control. There’s a knee-jerk reaction to the imposition of rules and social mores, and all religion and spirituality is thereby ridiculed. It’s ironic that so many people use a patriarchal and racist ideology to critique what they think is an engine of oppressive authority.

Catholics bear the brunt of this distaste for spirituality. For many Jews in particular, and for iconoclasts in general, Catholicism is the ultimate Christianity, the ultimate patriarchal system that tries to exert control over people’s lives. This point of view is largely based on xenophobic attitudes towards Catholics that have existed since they began arriving in this country. Protestants feared and ridiculed the power that the pope had in the Catholic religion, and they had a general distaste for immigrants, and they reacted with prejudice. Today good liberals ridicule Catholicism for the same xenophobic reasons, but now they think they’re fighting the man.

I don’t think Macalester ignores God any more than Grinnell or Oberlin or Carleton or Swarthmore. But a knee-jerk reaction against the possibility that forces beyond our understanding have played a role in history, and still play a role in the shaping of the world today, does a disservice to a large group of Macalester students.