Bridging Multiple Gaps
Scott and Dhanya
Bethal is a small South African farming town of about 8,000 in the middle of the open Highveld between Johannesburg and the Swazi border. Like all South African towns and cities, Bethal was zoned by race during the apartheid era, with each of four racial groups consigned to its own residential and business districts. It was into Bethal’s small but thriving Gujarati Indian community of the 1970s that Dhanya was born.
Her parents were observant Hindus who followed the customs and rituals their parents instilled in them. “I’ve adopted many of these myself,” says Dhanya. “We celebrate many of the religious festivals and always look to the Gujarati calendar when choosing dates for events or functions, choosing a name for a newborn, or traveling. We always had a small shrine at home and each member of the family prayed there once or twice a day. I still do this today.”
She attended a Hindu Sunday school from age 7 to 17. “We sang different religious songs, and were taught about the different scriptures. There were also dances and religious plays that traveled from one Hindu community to another through the province.”
Half a world away, Scott was growing up in something of a religious minority himself, the son of moderate Episcopalians in the Southern Baptist stronghold of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Though still racially segregated like most of the U.S. South in the 1980s, Chattanooga was Southern Baptist through and through—just white Southern Baptist on the north and west of the city, black Southern Baptist on the south and east.
He wasn’t aware how low-key his own religious upbringing was until his best friend, whose family was Baptist, tried to “save” him when they were seven. “I didn’t even know what that meant for a long time,” he says, “but he clearly did. In my family, God didn’t come up all that often. We prayed before dinner, but religion was not often talked about.”
Not so at the conservative Christian secondary academy that Scott attended, whose motto was and is, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” Given the setting, Scott says he is “surprised in retrospect” that he was part of a core group of six friends there from very different backgrounds. “We were three Indians, one Thai, and two Caucasians, and a mix of religions—Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. We enjoyed talking about intellectual things, but rarely about religion. So I didn’t learn that much about their religious views.”
He attended the same Episcopal church from birth to high school graduation. “I can’t say I was your ideal parishioner. I went with the family, I participated in the youth group, and I even served as an acolyte. But most of my religion-related memories were having these internal conversations with the crucified Christ on the cross hanging above the altar: just your casual howya-doing kind of stuff.” But it was comfortable and familiar, with the same priest the entire time he attended. This kind of religion didn’t bother him.
But the Evangelical brand was another matter, and a New Year’s Eve Southern gospel concert cemented Scott’s disdain for that kind of religion. “This was not the black choir singing ‘Amazing Grace.’ It was pure white Southern Baptist praise-Jesus-or-you’re-going-to-hell country singin’,” he recalls.
“One realization that made an impact on me that I still remember is this: I didn’t want to believe that my non-Christian friends, thinking mainly about my high school friends, would ‘go to hell.’ I feel like this may have been the first time such a thought occurred to me. I came to the conclusion that I could not accept the idea that my friends who were very good people would be punished for their differing beliefs in some afterlife. And if I couldn’t accept that, then I couldn’t accept any religion that promoted that.”
Scott majored in computer science and computer engineering in college. “I attended an Episcopalian service a few times in college, but it was not like the church of my youth. It was around this time that I began to think about my worldview and settled on agnosticism as a name for it. I didn’t really actively stop believing stuff, but I became less interested in it and didn’t go to church anymore.”
After graduating from her secondary school, Dhanya studied veterinary science, first at the University of Pretoria, then at Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands, working on research to develop diagnostic procedures for tuberculosis in elephants and rhinoceroses. She eventually returned to Pretoria to teach at the university, occasionally popping up to the Netherlands for three months at a time to connect with the research team at Universiteit Utrecht.
In January 2008, after a few years working for a computer engineering firm, Scott decided to pursue a PhD and entered a program at—you guessed it—Universiteit Utrecht.
One Saturday near the end of February, he headed out to meet an international student group to tour a monastery and brewery just over the Belgian border. “I lived in a tall apartment complex on campus. I came out of the elevator and had stopped to tie my shoes when a very cute Indian girl came out of the elevator and left the building. I walked to the city bus stop .. .”
“And there I was!”
“And there she was. We both got on the same bus, then off at Utrecht Central Station. I started walking through the station to the other side where the group bus was parked. I think I passed her on the way because I was walking quickly, hoping I wouldn’t be too late.”
“Yes, he did pass me. I noticed he was walking in the same direction, and I got the feeling that he may be going to the same place as me. I was right—I saw him waiting at the bus that was to take us to Belgium.”
“I smiled as she approached and asked jokingly if she was following me.”
“I said, ‘Yes, I’m following you.’
” “When we got off the bus, we had the option to take either a Flemish tour or an English tour,” Scott says. “The cute girl was going on the Flemish tour, so I decided to go too, even though I didn’t know any Flemish.”
“We spoke to each other a bit during the tour, then talked much more on the bus back to the campus and exchanged email addresses,” says Dhanya. “I didn’t really expect to hear from him again but I did, many times.”
They began seeing each other in the following weeks, then decided to continue their relationship after she returned to South Africa.
“I had already had a long-distance relationship before and thought I would not want to have another. But there was something about this girl that convinced me to try it, even though the distance was even longer and the differences between us were even greater.”
“And he convinced me to try it, too.”
Dhanya’s parents were another matter. “They were not happy about it. They both said it would be better if I met a Gujarati boy. I said I understood where they were coming from, but asked for them to first meet Scott before they made any conclusions about him and the relationship. They agreed, but not with enthusiasm. My mum felt that since we come from completely different backgrounds and cultures, that this relationship was just not a good idea.”
Scott’s mother had said very much the same thing—not about Dhanya, but years earlier. “When I was in high school I asked what she would think if I married somebody of a different religion. I even hypothetically suggested Hinduism, for some strange reason. She said, in her very diplomatic way, that she would be concerned that we might have more difficulty than if we both held the same beliefs. It wasn’t much more than that.”
Whatever concern she had disappeared when she met Dhanya. “They both love her,” says Scott. “They’re even more excited to see her than me when we visit.”
Once they got to know Scott personally, Dhanya’s parents also came around. “When we called to tell them that Scott proposed to me and I said yes, I was rather anxious and nervous to make that call. But my dad responded by saying, ‘We were waiting for this news for a long time, congratulations!’ Everyone in both of our families was very happy to hear the news. Since then, their relationship has grown, and they love and care for him a lot. That makes me very happy.”
Dhanya and Scott were married in Bethal’s Hindu Community Hall in a traditional Gujarati ceremony (discussed further in Chapter 14).
Neither Scott nor Dhanya consider their religious differences much of an issue. “Honestly, when Scott told me he was agnostic, I had no idea what that meant,” Dhanya says. “I don’t think I had heard that word before, something that described this thought process. I thought it was pretty cool.”
A few months before the wedding, Scott began to prefer the general term nonreligious. “I don’t practice religion and I don’t reject religion. I might be a secular humanist, but I haven’t learned enough about it and myself to come to that conclusion. I don’t consider myself an atheist because I am not dogmatically opposed to theist beliefs. I felt like nonreligious was the most correct description of my thinking now.”
Both Scott and Dhanya describe their discussions about religion as lowkey and respectful, though they admit to occasionally stepping on each other’s toes.
“I try to be understanding about other people’s beliefs, something I learned from my mom,” Scott says. “But there are times when I ask an admittedly pointed question. Dhanya often doesn’t know why she does some of the things she does, and she doesn’t like to admit that easily. So when I ask why, she may get flustered. Earlier in our relationship, she felt that I was being critical of her, and this caused a number of tense calls over the years. Eventually, she mostly came to accept that I’m just very curious and trying to understand.”
“I have never really questioned my beliefs, but there are times where I also have questions about some of the things we practice as they don’t always make sense to me,” Dhanya says. “And when I ask my parents, they don’t always know the answers, either.”
Neither Scott nor Dhanya harbors any real desire to convert the other, which helps keep tension low. “I think Scott would adopt a religion if there is convincing science-based evidence backing it,” she says, “but I’m neutral on whether he should.”
“I don’t know if I want to see her become nonreligious, but I do sometimes wish she would look at things with a more critical eye,” Scott says. “Early in our relationship, I learned about her affinity for some pseudoscientific things. We have had a few tense moments around those, and I’ve learned to not be so direct and brash in my dismissal of what I see as quack medicine and superstition. I’m more concerned about educating her out of those things than religion. I try to guide her to look for rational answers without forcing anything. As for religion, we’re mostly at peace with what we do. I let her follow her customs and don’t worry about it. They don’t generally seem to affect her rationality, which makes me happy.”
“I feel this is one of the reasons our marriage is happy and stable,” Dhanya says. “We respect and try to understand each other’s backgrounds and belief systems without pushing too hard. One of the things I admire about my husband is that he always makes an effort to understand why we do certain things and how we do them, although I don’t always have the answers.”
(Scott and Dhanya’s story continues in Chapters 14 and 17—look for the dotted arrows with the couple’s names.)