Summary

For almost 3 months, I have stretched my comfort boundaries and experienced part of a culture I never thought I would. I have conducted informative interviews about religion and its affect on people’s lives as well as attended a predominately catholic event. I have learned a lot about how people’s lives are affected by religion and how religion impacts people’s lifestyles. I have also learned about a different perspective by looking at this intercultural communication from the perspective of the majority.

It is evident that some people have committed their lives fully to religion. Several people that I have spoken with have committed the next several years to serving their faith in a variety of ways. I cannot say that I agree with these people, but it has been interesting feeling their compassion about this subject. I spoke to one person who is graduating with a future in medicine, but giving up the first two years to do missionary work.

Figure 1. Gallup survey results

From my point of view, it seems like many people who are strongly religious seem to have a very narrow mindset. This is even supported in the results from a survey concluding that 30% of Americans take the Bible literally (Jones, 2011).  After collecting a pretty good amount of data myself, it became easier to put myself in their shoes. It becomes less close minded and more just expressing a strong religious identity. Some of my interviewees said that they couldn’t consider picking a different religion, and among those people, there was a spectrum of opinions when considering how they thought other religions should be viewed (Emily Cook, personal communication, March 14, 2012) A number of answers came with something along the lines of “the church is the only source that has the fullness of truth” (Beth Cowles, personal communication, April 3, 2012) combined with “most religions have some truth to them” (Katie Fenwick, personal communication, March 9, 2012). I thought one of the more interesting results was that those ‘typical’ answers ended up in the middle of the spectrum, with people being on both ends of their commitment to their faith and people being on opposite ends of what they thought of other religions (Sarah Maresh and anonymous, March 8, 2012).

The next most interesting result I collected was what people thought about their majority/minority experiences. This also ended up to parallel what I learned in my experience. Most people shared that when they are in the majority, it is easier to share and express their opinions. People in the majority then paid different amounts of attention to the minority. Some questioned the beliefs of the minority, why they believed what they did that put them in the minority group, while others mostly ignored the minority (anonymous, March 9, 2012). When considering the opposite scenario, when religious people were in the minority, they almost always didn’t question their beliefs and only became distraught when people in the majority were offensive. For the most part, my results paralleled those predicted by Martin and Nakayama in both religious identity and majority and minority communications (Cowles 2012). There ended up being a few outliers, which was as expected.

My experience at a catholic event was also very interesting. I did not end up going to a service, due to time constraints, but rather a social event following the service. I felt like this was a good opportunity to understand this new culture, by experiencing life as they experience it, and not just the service part. It was interesting especially because most of the people there seemed to be of college age, so I expected more of a ‘normal’ college atmosphere. The event ended up feeling like I was in the minority the entire time, even though I knew a fair number of people there. Even when I did interact with people, it quickly reverted to status of me being in the minority (personal observations, March 23, 2012). Because of this, I feel like my interviews gave me a much deeper insight on how catholic people lived and what their culture was really about.

Now that all of my data has been collected and compiled, I realized that I actually have learned quite a bit about intercultural communication. I had originally designed my project to be about religious identity, but it has also picked up aspects of majority/minority communications. I have learned that to make a complete and accurate judgment about somebody, it is more important to know exactly what their thoughts are instead of just guessing. There turned out to be many people that were catholic, and shared many beliefs, but also differed in a couple areas. These turned out to be primarily what they think of other people. If I redid this project, I would have narrowed down my cultural group criteria to be more specific than just catholic, because of the variety of responses that I still managed to obtain. I have also learned that even if you try something, you may be going about it completely wrong and not gain any insight that you thought you would gain. When that happened, I returned to what was more successful for me (interviews and talking to people individually) and stayed away from going to actual events. I have also learned firsthand many of the topics Martin and Nakayama have mentioned. Intercultural communication is uncomfortable, but the benefits definitely outweigh the negative aspects. One of the most important things I have learned is to retain motivation to not shy away from intercultural situations, regardless of contexts and prejudices.

References

Jones, J. (2011). In u.s., 3 in 10 say they take the bible literally. Gallup, Retrieved from http://www.gallup.com

Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2009). Intercultural Communication in Contexts. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.