AUDASE

Taking on Hobby Lobby After Turning Away From a Religious Past

　

MARK OPPENHEIMER NY TIMES

There are many ways a high school senior might decide on a college: cost, what majors are offered, a decent football team, a really rocking Greek system. But when Sarah Jones was in high school in rural Bristol, Va., she was moved by other criteria.

"Cedarville sends touring ministry teams to churches," said Ms. Jones, 26, referring to Cedarville University in Ohio. "One of them came to my church, and the kids were very nice to me, and a lot of people hadn’t been very nice to me lately. They were nice and sincere. And they were wearing jeans."

Knowing she was expected to attend a Christian college, Ms. Jones believed she had found a "tolerable option."

But when she graduated from Cedarville in 2011, Ms. Jones was well down the path to atheism and feminism. She now works for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a liberal advocacy group, which sent her to the Supreme Court on Monday to await the decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Of all the anti-Hobby Lobby activists there, probably none had traveled as far from religion as quickly as Ms. Jones.

I first met Ms. Jones at a secularist conference in Virginia last month. Over several conversations since then, she described her journey, which has strained her relations with her parents and shattered any connection to her alma mater.

"My parents identify themselves as fundamentalist Christians," Ms. Jones said. "I was home schooled most of the way through. I didn’t have any contact with people outside my church or any friends who were in public school — little to no contact with the outside world."

Ms. Jones was kicked out of one religious high school for being "a disturbing influence," she said. The school never explained what that meant, although she suspected it was related to her struggles with depression. "Some fundamentalists believe mental illness doesn’t exist, and you just pray it away," she said. She also wondered if the school, struggling financially, was eager to shed one of its scholarship students.

At Cedarville, Ms. Jones took a philosophy class that expanded her thinking about religion. "I still believed in God, still considered myself a Christian, but it was exciting to be exposed to other points of view," she said. "I was also considering egalitarian interpretations of Christianity, like feminist interpretations of the Bible."

Ms. Jones found herself rejecting what she called Republican Christianity, with its strong condemnations of homosexuality and its right-wing economic assumptions. "Why was Reaganomics being treated as the 11th Commandment?" she asked.

When she was 21 and a junior at Cedarville, she realized that she did not believe in God anymore, and she stopped going to church. She remembered thinking: "I am trying to put on someone else’s clothes. They were not mine."

Her senior year, Ms. Jones began dating a fellow student, and in one instance, she said, the relationship turned abusive.

"I would classify it as attempted rape, but I did not report it at the time," she said. "I had said ‘no’ repeatedly, and it didn’t culminate in rape, but there was a lot of unwanted sexual contact before it finally stopped."

Ms. Jones began having nightmares, and her depression returned. She was eventually told she had post-traumatic stress disorder. She never filed a criminal complaint, and she missed the deadline for a federal Title IX complaint about her case. In 2012, though, she filed a Title IX complaint against Cedarville for general noncompliance, accusing it of not having "prompt and equitable grievance procedures that address sex discrimination."

Last month, the federal Education Department notified Ms. Jones that her complaint had been resolved because Cedarville had made sufficient changes to its procedures. A spokesman for Cedarville said Thursday that the university had begun making changes "prior to being notified" by the Office for Civil Rights and that it "was encouraging to see that the O.C.R. validated our work during its preliminary investigation."

Ms. Jones said that she had lost her faith before the sexual assault, but that the school’s Christian culture had made it more difficult for her to seek justice. "One of the reasons I didn’t report it is because my boyfriend knew I was no longer a Christian," she said. She feared that if he revealed her apostasy, she would be expelled.

One year, she said, the campus abstinence group held a panel on "modesty," in which the male panelists castigated women for wearing pajamas to the dining hall and thus tempting men. "I was wearing pajamas when I was attacked," Ms. Jones said. "To attach so much shame to something like pajama pants — how can you address something like sexual assault?"

After graduation, Ms. Jones volunteered at Planned Parenthood of Ohio and Femin Ijtihad, an international human rights group that works for Muslim women. She then went to graduate school at the University of London.

Now, at the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, based in Washington, Ms. Jones finds herself spending time with conservative Christians once again. For example, she has researched the external activities of Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, who shaped a Bible curriculum that he hopes will prove constitutional for use in public schools.

"I am concerned about the Green family’s broader agenda," Ms. Jones said.

As for the Hobby Lobby ruling, she found it a disturbing reminder of the community she had left behind. "The Green family’s definition of religious liberty isn’t drawn from the First Amendment," she said. "It’s drawn from a belief common to the religious right: that they have a right to control the choices and moralities of other people."

Although there is no love lost between Ms. Jones and Cedarville — which, since she left, has become even more conservative and eliminated its philosophy department — she has tried to remain close to her Christian friends and relatives, especially her parents.

"Obviously, they wish it hadn’t happened," Ms. Jones said of her change in beliefs. "But I think we have reached some kind of equilibrium. I’m not antireligion, per se. I kind of just don’t believe in it."