2nd place — 2024 high school essay contest: Garrett Hartfelder

FFRF awarded Garrett $3,000.

By Garrett Hartfelder

I vividly remember one summer when I was very young, I was at a summer camp at a local church. I remember a teenage boy lecturing us with a puppet show on how sinning would condemn us all to hell, a “dark void” where I would “be alone forever.”

Me, being a freaked-out 5-year-old, bolted out of the room bawling. I felt a straitjacket of morality wrapping itself around me. I found myself dreading damnation above all else.

For a few more years, the chains of fear were dragging me down with every decision I made. I dreaded sin — a nebulous specter haunting every corner of my life that was going to cause me everlasting pain. I was overwhelmed at what felt like a wall of guilt closing in around me. To be a good person is to be religious, no?

No. No, it isn’t.

Fortunately, I, and many my age, have become rather disillusioned with religion. We’ve realized that the philosophy peddled to us was obsolete. We’ve realized blindly fearing sin at every corner wasn’t a healthy way to live. We’ve witnessed massive swaths of people seeking to deny civil rights and liberties in the name of some so-called God. “Love thy neighbor,” they preach, while practicing malice to-ward the most vulnerable among us.

So many people I love are queer. They’re my closest friends and family, not “abominations.” So many religious people shield themselves from this reality, placing themselves in a prison of pretension they want everyone else to be an inmate in.

Seeing people masquerade as spreaders of love and virtue beat down innocent people because some book said so made me realize that something had to give. Fundamentalists seek a world where they control women’s bodies, people’s sexuality and gender and where they persecute those who dare to be different.

That world can never exist.

Luckily, there’s hope that it won’t — hope that our generation of Nones sees through the hollow worldview of fundamentalists, thinking independently of inane ideas of sin, paving a bright future liberated from self-righteous bigotry. The Nones of our generation already support the rights of women to control their own bodies and protecting the right for queer folk to simply live.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing us in action. I’ve worked on a successful recall effort to oust bigoted fundamentalists from my own school district. I’ve seen my fellow students — people who have seen the harm of religious extremism for themselves — make a mark in the most conservative parts of Orange County.

Religion should never be used to limit someone’s humanity or ob-struct an open mind. Nones like myself will fight for a world where everyone can live free from fundamentalist extremism, even fundamentalists themselves! It’s why I want to become a civil rights attorney. I want a world that practices the “love thy neighbor” that fundamentalists preach, not one where “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a documentary.

Garrett, 18, is from Anaheim, Calif., and attends University of Southern California, where he plans to major in political science with the intent to go to law school.

“I’m grateful to have worked within my community to combat fundamentalist overreach, including a successful recall election of two transphobic board members in my own school district,” Garrett writes. “I also volunteer for U.S. Rep. Lou Correa and work to rescue homeless dogs in my spare time.”