Last night in class, a classmate said, in comparing our modern lives to the Victorians, that religion doesn’t mean anything to us. Uh, say what? 

Religion doesn’t mean anything to our society today? Are you kidding me? How is it humanly possible to not realize that religion is a major factor in US politics and life?
 
When I marched in DC for marriage equality, the counter-protest signs said god hates fags. They didn’t say “I have a personal problem when two men smash each other’s colons excitedly,” no matter if that’s the true sentiment and god is just the label placed upon their hate. 

At the county fair back home, a c of c woman set up an extremely disturbing (traumatizing) booth about abortion because the baby Jesus told her to repopulate the earth.

Growing up, my parents and Sunday school justified war by saying that there’s war in the Bible and there will continue to be war until the end of times, until the final battle between good and evil.
 
My classmate may think religion has nothing to do with her life, but religion affects it nevertheless. If she were pregnant and wanted an abortion, whether or not she could get one would be dictated mostly by the local religious toleration of it because the general populace controls the laws. If she were gay, it’s religious groups leading both the pro- and anti-gay marriage/gay adoption debates. (Of course, she’d probably be like her best friend, whom is bi and told me last spring that California didn’t matter because she could marry in Connecticut and that it didn’t affect her. This level of selfishness caused me to just stare speechlessly.)
 
Everything. Everything is or once was dictated by religion. If she’d ever hung around any type of fundamentalists, she’d understand the exact level of control religion can–and does–have. In Arkansas, everything is controlled by religion, no matter how informal this control is. Morals control whether or not counties sell alcohol. It was only last year that a state lottery to benefit scholarships was voted in, after decades of attempts and religious fights against it. In Arkansas, Family Council, a conversative Christian lobbying group, has the power to pull out thousands with emails, phone calls, and letters telling people how to vote and what to be against for Jesus. Every election, they analyze every single politician up for election in the state and ask them questions like their stances on abortion, gay rights, and other hot-topic issues, along with listing their religion and how many children they have, just so voters can see that they’re good, Christian, family people. Had I been selected for the Equality Ride, I would’ve been traveling all over the country to private universities with anti-GLBT stances to talk with students and community members about how the baby Jesus loves everyone. Why? Because the Equality Ride understands that change begins with religious groups, and it’s religious groups both leading the gay pride parades and holding up the pitchforks against them.
 
In order to be an educated person, we should be able to see how our society functions. Religion is important. Even if you never set foot inside a church or read any sort of holy text, religion still has an influence on your life, whether you like it or not. Overlooking this portion of human life is to overlook a huge chunk of history and the human existence.