I have been thinking a lot lately about identity, or perhaps I should say I have become more aware lately of a forming, shifting, tugging of identity that tends to cascade questions with answers. Life is a constant formation of identity and opinions. Sometimes I have the slight notion of being behind myself in some way, of feeling questions about life and my identity rearing up quicker than I can answer them, so that I am overtly aware of the whole machinery of identity and life. Perhaps these questions themselves, and the philosophy that they engender, is part of the process of forming identity itself.

I know that as a child I fell in line with the opinions of my parents and teachers. Part of the process of growing up is learning to question those assumed ideas and to decide for yourself: is this really my opinion, or is it something I have been taught to believe? Some people never get around to questioning those things, and I think that is a failing, in part, of education. Inquisitiveness is invaluable. I know that as a child I cared very little for reading the newspaper or watching the news. My religious beliefs were formed from a vague notion of a God who watched over church services as I squirmed on the cold wooden pew and counted the words left on the service sheet, waiting to begin the measured walk home to a roast lunch. I’m not sure I can point my finger on the exact moment that all changed. I think the shift began to happen in college, when the pressure of university placement decisions and the occasional political opinions voiced by older friends made me realise that there was more to the world than textbooks and exams. I didn’t have my own mind made up, and I became tired of trying to gauge the opinions of others before voicing my own because of my ignorance and my fear of being wrong.

It was a few months into sixth-form college that I began to read The Times every now and then, just because it was lying around and I wanted something to do while drinking a cup of tea after arriving home from college. It was a way to kill time before dinner, and I would pick and choose articles to fit my limited attention span. I paid a little more attention in the build up to the 2000 election in the States, and this was a turning point. Trying to trace the reason for this, I know now that it was based on a sudden realisation of conflict. I suppose I had always had an “us and them” attitude to opinions. Us – my parents, friends, etc. – would believe one way (the right way) while other people disagreed. But suddenly the opinions voiced by my father, who had, in my world, always been right, were opposed to those expressed by my best friend who, living in the United States, was surely able to give a valid opinion, one that I respected as something I would probably agree with, since we agreed on almost everything else. It wasn’t enough to vaguely skirt the subject and hope that I didn’t appear to be too committed to either side. I needed my own opinion.

That was the beginning, but something has happened since then, slowly over the last five years, to make me question again and again who I am and what I believe. It’s about more than religion and politics, although it encompasses those things, too. I’m gradually aware of a push-pull happening as I become more aware of the world, and along with that is a resistance to what I tend to see as “narrow-mindedness” and “uneducated opinions” and the inability to change one’s view when presented with better information (hard-headedness). I am so much more educated about the world now, and so vastly more interested. I have travelled and seen things from a variety of perspectives. The benefit, I feel, is that those perspectives are poles apart. But that is also a difficulty.

At eighteen my opinions about the world started to form, and it was while I was living in America. I think it was perhaps bound to happen anyway, but being over there certainly worked as a form of acceleration, propelling me into a world that was so different. I began to realise not only that it was completely contrary to what I had know before, but that I hadn’t really known a lot before. I felt like my opinions were changing, when really they were actually just beginning to form themselves. In a way, part of me grew up in the rural South, in the Bible-Belt of this foreign land that felt like home. I felt at once a part of this world – aligned to it – but at the same time an outsider. I was observing from the inside, participating but with a step backwards, watching, gaining information.

It could be said that I formed my ideas about the world in a hot-house of religious conservatism, but I don’t think that is necessarily true or that my views on the world are therefore skewed. On the contrary, I feel that my ability to one day be immersed in the religious heart of the South and then, on the other side of the world, read articles in a British newspaper heralding the fundamentalist Right as the destroyers of culture and freedom, created a push-pull that took a measure of assimilation, but which has ultimately given me the ability and the necessity to ask my own questions and to form opinions that I know are mine.

There have been people I have encountered in both worlds whose opinions are formed by their environment – like all of us – but in a way that has clouded their vision so much that they are unable to see the world objectively. I have met staunch Republicans who believe in their religion, first and foremost, and who believe in their right to own a gun, who believe in the death-penalty as the surest means of criminal justice, and whose views are skewed by a deep-rooted idea of the difference between black and white, Christian and non-Christian, American and foreign. And then, on the other side, I have met people who believe that anyone who has not been to an enlightened and expensive school is somehow inferior; who believe Christianity (and most other forms of religion) is a poisonous force in society; who believe in partial-birth abortion; who believe that the area south of the Mason-Dixon line is full of stupid, uneducated, uncultured, prejudiced people. I have met people who think George W. Bush is God’s gift to humanity and those who believe he is the scum of the earth. I have met white people who look down on black people and black people who look down on white people. I have met Americans who dislike “foreigners” and foreigners who dislike Americans. I have met people who think I’m inferior in some way because I wasn’t born in the United States and I have met people who think I am inferior for having lived in the United States at all. I don’t want to imply that my experience has all been about negativity and hatred – for the most part the people and cultures I have experienced have held open arms to me and to anyone else, whether they are the same or different, and whose opinion of the world is open and optimistic. What I mean is that my experience has opened my eyes to the contradictions of the world, to the stereotypes that lie deep down in people’s hearts, to the narrow-mindedness that so many of us, whether we know it or not, display towards others.

If my experience so far in life has taught me anything, it is a profound belief in open-mindedness, and a constant personal need to question my opinions, views, judgements, and to ask myself, “Am I being judgemental or prejudiced here? Am I forming an educated opinion or one based on emotion or defensiveness? Am I giving the benefit of the doubt?”

Perhaps this is why I have a certain amount of discomfit lately in my awareness of the push-pull of my opinions. On the one hand, I feel like I am coming to a truth, and yet on the other hand I feel a hand of caution coming up and warning me that I must be careful. Perhaps my caution stems from the fact that my opinions are settling much more on the liberal side of things while, at the same time, I am living in a culture that fosters specifically those liberal ideas. I have to ask myself: are my opinions being influenced by the media or the popular idea of the world? And then I find myself battling with a gut-reaction to defend the other side in the face of judgement. This particularly happens when someone is stereotyping or judging other countries or national values without fairly balancing their arguments or questioning stereotypes. I find myself defending an administration I don’t particularly agree with, for example, just because an attack on the President is so often clothed in terms that attack the country or the people. The more educated your view of the world, the more confident your opinions, but also the more need to become even more educated – to hear both sides of the story, to defend the other side when it is attacked from a biased standpoint.

It has made me hate narrow-mindedness but defend those who have not had the education that allows you to develop open-mindedness.

My religious beliefs have also shifted into place a little more, lately. My faith has become stronger, perhaps, but less full of questions. Fire-and-brimstone gives way to forgiveness-and-mercy. Condemnation gives way to conviction. Protection from the outside gives way to more of an outward embrace. Conviction of sin to conviction of love. I’m not suggesting I have it all right, but I am getting closer to what is right for me.