I was supposed to have been baptized, made my First Communion, my Confirmation, and one day get married in the Catholic Church and eventually bring children of my own in to be baptized. It was a role that was laid out for me by the families who were my neighbors, my classmates and fellow PTA families, and my teammates. These people made up my community, and they had established this social norm long before I came along. I was not breaking any laws by deciding that the Catholic Church was not the right fit for me. I had not harmed anyone, and I had committed no crime. I had, however, inadvertently become a social deviant, and I experienced firsthand the intensity of informal sanctions. I was different from the people I spent the majority of my life with, and they had trouble relating to and understanding me. In my immediate community, there was no deviant subculture. I did not have a network of other non-Catholic friends or families to bond with. Catholicism was a not majority in the sense that over half of families were practicing, rather they were a majority in the sense that my family was the only family in my neighborhood who did not attend the Catholic Church on our block. “Catholic” was an overwhelmingly common social identity in my community and choosing to self-identify as “nonreligious” was not a decision I took lightly. My decision says a lot about the debate over agency versus
I was supposed to have been baptized, made my First Communion, my Confirmation, and one day get married in the Catholic Church and eventually bring children of my own in to be baptized. It was a role that was laid out for me by the families who were my neighbors, my classmates and fellow PTA families, and my teammates. These people made up my community, and they had established this social norm long before I came along. I was not breaking any laws by deciding that the Catholic Church was not the right fit for me. I had not harmed anyone, and I had committed no crime. I had, however, inadvertently become a social deviant, and I experienced firsthand the intensity of informal sanctions. I was different from the people I spent the majority of my life with, and they had trouble relating to and understanding me. In my immediate community, there was no deviant subculture. I did not have a network of other non-Catholic friends or families to bond with. Catholicism was a not majority in the sense that over half of families were practicing, rather they were a majority in the sense that my family was the only family in my neighborhood who did not attend the Catholic Church on our block. “Catholic” was an overwhelmingly common social identity in my community and choosing to self-identify as “nonreligious” was not a decision I took lightly. My decision says a lot about the debate over agency versus