It's not easy to be yourself when you're in the midst of the emotionally-charged, social pressure cooker that is middle school.  But when you are raised as a Unitarian Universalist, it can be an even greater challenge.

My daughter considers herself to be an atheist.  This is something that she has come to on her own, and as a result of many factors, not the least of which was the tragic death of her best friend when she was 10 years old.  It broke my heart to hear her say that she couldn't believe in a God who could be so cruel as to "kill" someone so wonderful, good and kind as Becky.  But, three years later, she remains a skeptic and can sometimes be pretty vocal about it.

Which doesn't go over too well in middle school.

Now there is a group of girls at her school -- friends, actually, not those who have a tendency to make fun of her for being "different" -- who have decided that it is their mission to get her to be a believer.  They think that if they can only help her to believe in Jesus as the savior of all humankind, then they can "save" her.  You know, alleviate her pain and suffering, not go to Hell or be "left behind" -- perhaps all three.

Because these girls are her friends, I believe that they truly want to help her and are not intending to cause difficulty for her.  She and I have had conversations about the ideas they may have grown up with and the possibility that up until this point, they may have not even fathomed the idea that someone might not believe in God.  After all, when she was in sixth grade, she said in a class discussion that a social organization helping the community with the word "Christian" in its name might discourage people who were not Christian from joining.  Some kids in the class looked at her as if she had condoned Devil worship.  In a culture that equates Christianity with being "good" then being non-Christian surely has to be bad, doesn't it?

However, I'm not sure that knowing her friends think they have her best interests at heart is really helpful.  She would prefer that they accept her for who she is and respect her opinions.  That's what she's been raised to do, and something she believes in very strongly.  But this is different from how so many of her peers are raised, and being different is so hard to do in middle school.