by Bobby Jindal
Naturally, my parents couldn’t have cared less about the car’s condition. They were concerned about me. They had visited the accident scene on the way to the hospital, seen the blood, and feared the worst. Now, after the initial shock of the accident had worn off, my mom stood by the bed and asked me a question that put me in a painful spot: “Which God do you have to thank for your safety, Bobby?”
Growing up I was taught to pray and believe in an all-powerful God who created the universe and was present and active in our daily lives. My parents were, and remain to this day, devout Hindus. There was no Hindu temple in Baton Rouge at the time, but we had a prayer altar in our home. My younger brother Nikesh and I would say our prayers there every night—it didn’t matter how tired we were. We prayed, as kids are apt to, “Dear God, if you will just give me an A in history, I’ll be good to my little brother,” or, “If you will just give me one more toy, I won’t ask you for anything else.” To us, God was like Santa Claus. I believed in and respected God, but prayer was a transaction—“I’ll be good and you’ll give me what I want.”
But the values I learned from my Hindu parents ran deep: honesty, respect for elders, hard work, modesty, reverence, the importance of family—traditional Hindu values that meshed quite well with Louisiana’s traditional Bible Belt beliefs. I never felt culturally different from your typical Baton Rouge kid.
My parents naturally assumed I would remain a Hindu and pass the faith on to the next generation. By the time of the accident, however, my mom and dad knew I was investigating Christianity. And now, here I was, a dutiful son, about to offer an answer that would cause considerable pain to my family.
The path that brought me to that point spiritually was unique in many ways. One day, riding the bus to middle school, my best friend Kent sat down next to me. Kent was the kind of kid who got picked first for baseball and football. And in addition to being a great athlete, he was a cool guy. Everyone wanted to be his best friend, but he was my best friend. On this particular day he said something that struck me as very odd.
“Bobby,” he said, “I sure do feel sorry for you.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. He could see my confusion, so he continued. “I feel sorry for you because when my family and I go to heaven, I’m going to miss you when you’re not there.” Billy Graham he was not.
I was a pre-teen at the time, and I thought he was crazy. Who would ever say such an odd thing? I quickly changed the subject, but the conversation jolted me for a few days. Then I forgot about it, until Christmas.
In addition to his other fine qualities, Kent was one of those thoughtful, generous people who bought the best gifts for his friends. So when it was time to open his Christmas present, I ripped off the paper in great anticipation. My heart quickly sank when I opened the box and found a book inside.
“This can’t be the real gift,” I thought. I actually remember flipping through the pages to see if there was any money inside, and being utterly disappointed that there was none. The more I studied the “gift,” the more my disappointment grew. It was not even an interesting book; it was a Bible. The practicality I inherited from my dad kicked in: Who spends good money buying somebody a Bible? And, Why buy a Bible when you can get one free in any hotel room? Sure, you might get in trouble for stealing towels. But the Bible? No way.
I was even more disappointed when I noticed that on the front cover in gold letters were the words: “Bobby Jindal.” “Great!” I thought. “I can’t even return it or give it to somebody else.”
My journey to Christianity accelerated at the end of my sophomore year in high school when my grandfather died suddenly of a stroke. I had spent happy days visiting him in India, riding on his shoulders as a young boy, and even though he never came to America, he was a big figure in my life. His death marked the first time I had lost somebody I loved. I felt so cheated that I did not get a chance to say good-bye or tell him that I loved him. I was mad that I had wasted so much time while he was still alive, and worried if I would ever see him again. His death also set my mind racing about the biggest questions in our lives: Why are we here? Do our lives have a purpose? Does some part of us live on after death?
The idea of God as Santa Claus no longer satisfied me. Looking for answers, I read Hindu texts and talked to pastors of several different faiths. I pushed my parents to buy a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most important Hindu scriptures, and read all 700 verses. Then I dug out from my closet the unread Bible Kent had given me. I didn’t know how my parents would react to my reading the Bible, so I found a cozy spot in the back of the closet and, armed with a flashlight, I read from Genesis through to the end. At one point, I bought Cliff’s Notes to the Bible, to help me make sense of it. I spent countless hours sitting in that closet, but in the end I had no epiphany. I prayed desperately, promising God that if He told me He existed and how to worship Him, I would consider myself blessed beyond belief and would not ask for anything else.
God used what was most important to me to get my attention back on Him. I was a normal teenage boy, so he used a teenage high school girl to get my attention.
During my junior year in high school, while attending a math tournament in New Orleans (stop snickering), I spotted Kathy. I had a crush on her, but had never mustered the nerve to say hello. This time I did, and we ended up going to a dance and having a great time. That night we stood on the top floor of the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans and tossed coins down into the water fountain. Things were going great. Here was this pretty girl and she was interested in me! Then I asked her a simple question that changed everything.
“What do you want to do after school?”
Now, most of my friends in Baton Rouge wanted to be doctors, or football players, or teachers, or nurses; a few might have wanted to be rock stars. But she gave me an answer I had never heard. “I want to become a Supreme Court Justice,” she said, “because I want to save innocent lives.”
Where’d this come from? I thought to myself. And yet, I was struck by her answer. Saving the unborn gave her a purpose in life, something that was missing from mine.
Kathy was Catholic, and out of curiosity I attended Catholic Mass with her. I didn’t want my parents to know, so I was probably the only teenager in Baton Rouge who told his parents he was going to a party so he could sneak off to church. Here too, as with my first tussle with the Bible, I had no profound spiritual awakening. If anything, I was confused by the kneeling, standing, praying, and mumbled words of the priest over the altar.
I bombarded friends and pastors with questions. I read classics of Christian apologetics, books about Biblical archeology, and books like Evidence That Demands a Verdict. My mind kept whirring. I wanted to know how the Church worked and how decisions were made. I asked a Catholic layman, “How does one get elected Pope?” “Bobby,” he replied, “don’t become Catholic because you think you’re going to be Pope.” Perhaps he knew me too well.
My constant queries were not always welcomed. At one point a pastor pulled a friend aside and said, “Look, Bobby is just not going to become a Christian. It’s not going to happen. He’s so stubborn. He’s got so many doubts.”
My questions continued until Kent (who had given me that Bible I read in my closet), invited me to hear him sing in a church musical at Chapel on the Campus, a nondenominational church at LSU. In the middle of the performance, they showed a simple black and white film about the crucifixion. I had intensely studied that momentous event, yet watching that film I suddenly realized that Christ was on the cross because of me—my sins—what I had done, what I had failed to do. This was my epiphany. He didn’t die for billions, which was so abstract, but because of me. Suddenly, God was tangible. Everything instantly came into focus. An historical moment in the Bible became a living reality. Christ had died for me, and how arrogant was I to be anywhere but on my knees worshipping Him? I don’t know why God chose that moment to reveal Himself to me, but I remember exactly when it happened.
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nbsp; I started reading the Bible with Todd Hinkie, a youth pastor, and I realized, under his guidance, that it was not just a book of stories and obscure genealogies and laws, but a series of personal letters from God slowly revealing himself to man, to me. I spent hours in fervent prayer, repentant and grateful. In the summer of 1987 I knelt in prayer and accepted Christ as my Savior.
But for a year I postponed telling my parents. The moment of truth came after the car accident, when my mother questioned which God had saved me.
I prepared myself for the worst. I was a senior in high school and I had been accepted early admission to a unique pre-med program at Brown University; now I feared my parents wouldn’t pay my tuition. I thought they might kick me out of the house. I had even quietly secured a scholarship and a job at LSU just in case.
I told the truth, and as I expected, my answer set off an emotional bomb in the family. My parents blamed themselves for being bad parents, and blamed me for being a bad son, and then blamed Christian evangelicals for, well, practicing evangelism.
My father had practical worries. Given the poverty he had seen growing up, he measured success in material terms. He lived by the idea, expressed by Maxim Gorky, that no man could consider his life worthy unless his children surpassed his abilities and achievements. Spiritual interests, particularly something new like Christianity, were a distraction or a diversion from material success. My mom worried that I might have been manipulated, that I might be the victim of a smooth-talking, corrupt televangelist, or that I might be joining some cult.
Many Christians, born and raised in Christian families, take their faith for granted. For me it was a hard-won treasure, the result of a painful and deliberate process of accepting the truth of Christ. If Christianity is worth risking family and friends for, it is worth practicing every day, whether convenient or not.
My path to Christianity was an intellectual journey followed by a leap of faith. It took me years, and at the end of it I concluded that the historical evidence for Christianity was overwhelming: Jesus had walked the earth and had performed amazing miracles in front of thousands of people. He claimed to be the Son of God, rose from the dead in front of witnesses, and His apostles willingly gave their lives for Him because they were certain of His truth.
That struck me as reliable history. But I also discovered that you can’t read yourself into faith. God is thankfully too big, too amazing to be fully comprehended by the human mind. That’s why, ultimately, you have to make the leap of faith. You need to trust God and accept Him, including all the mysteries.
My parents eventually accepted my conversion to Christianity. Looking back now, I can see they initially felt I was rejecting them. When they realized I still loved them, and respected and honored them and our heritage, they relaxed. They also discovered it was not just a fad, and that I still embraced the same values they had taught me as a child. Our relationship benefitted from the fact that my parents’ Hinduism proclaims there are multiple paths to God, and that there is but one God. It would have been harder for my parents if I had told them I was an atheist. When my children were baptized into the Catholic faith, which is where my spiritual journey ultimately led, my parents were on hand to celebrate the good news.
For my father, my requisite career path was pretty simple, reflecting the deprivations he had seen in his early life. “Son, you can grow up and become any kind of doctor you want,” he told me. So when I enrolled at Brown in fall 1988, my course of study was clear. I was accepted in the university’s PLME program, which offered automatic admission to Brown’s medical school. In my mind I was on a fast track to becoming a surgeon.
Providence, Rhode Island, was very different from the laid-back southern culture I had known in Louisiana, and Brown was especially distinct. I assumed that many of my Ivy League schoolmates would be better educated than I was—they came, many of them, from elite Northeastern prep schools—but I soon found that a Baton Rouge education could hold its own. What I wasn’t prepared for was the rabid “political correctness” of campus life. This was a campus where the College Democrats were considered the conservatives.
A few weeks into my freshman year (oops, at Brown you didn’t use the term freshman—that would be sexist) our resident advisor (who actually became a good friend) took me aside. She told me I was causing great offense because, as she said, “You’re holding the doors for the female students. And you need to call them women, not ladies or girls.” (Actually she would spell it womyn because to spell the word women would be sexist, too.) She went on for about ten minutes, telling me exasperatedly, “Look, Bobby, this is not how people act up here.” I glanced over at some of my dorm-mates and started to grin. Oh, I get it. They’re teasing me. This is hilarious. But she continued with such earnestness that I realized she was dead serious. I sat there for a moment dumbfounded. “But that’s how I’ve been raised,” I finally exclaimed. “That’s who I am.”
I rebelled against Brown’s insistence on politically correct uniformity. I refused to attend a mandatory new student orientation program in which, in the name of tolerance, straight men were asked to take on the identity of gay men. When the resident advisor reminded me the session was mandatory, I stood firm. “I’m not going. You can send my dad’s tuition money back, but I’m not going.”
Early in my first semester, Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy, called my dorm looking for my roommate, who was a leader in the College Democrats. When I told her he wasn’t there, she said, “I was calling him to see if he wanted to go to a protest. You want to go instead?”
“Really?” I asked. “What are you protesting?” I thought it would be something serious, maybe apartheid or some other human rights issue, or even nuclear power.
“Fruit,” she said. “We’re protesting against fruit. We don’t want people to eat grapes.” I later learned the protest had something to do with Cesar Chavez, pesticides, and the United Farm Workers of America. But at that moment, it struck me as absurd. You already had other groups on campus protesting veal and red meat. Now they were protesting fruit. We had all the basic food groups covered.
“Well, in my family, we like to eat grapes,” I said. “Red ones, green ones, we like them for lunch and dinner. We like all kinds of fruits. Vegetables, too.” Not finding this very funny, she asked me to leave a message for a roommate. I was never invited to attend a protest rally again.
I had never been a terribly political person in high school. Sure, I watched the news and knew who was running for president. But at Brown everything was politicized to the point of absurdity—except to the folks at Brown, I was the absurd one. I was often told, “You are the first pro-life person I have ever met.” I could have kept my head down and my mouth shut, but that was not my nature. Instead, I spoke up for ideas that were incredibly unpopular with my fellow students. I realized that my own beliefs were conservative, and Brown forced me to think about why I was a conservative.
I worked hard at Brown. I was a biology major taking twenty hours every semester, rather than the normal load of sixteen. The plan was to save money and graduate a semester early, which I did. But even with my heavy class load I was active in the College Republicans, Campus Crusade for Christ, and Intervarsity Fellowship.
Years after I left Brown, I was a guest instructor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I remember once discussing diversity and pluralism at a luncheon with Harvard president Larry Summers, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and an editor from the Washington Post. I asked Summers, “Does it bother you that you don’t have a diversity of political views in your student body and faculty? You talk about the need for racial diversity, but what about philosophical diversity? Why are conservatives underrepresented?” His answer shocked me. “You know, the reality is that many evangelical Christian families who vote conservatively don’t want their kids here,” he said. Then he added, “And that’s probably good for them and good for us.”
Imagine if he had uttered the same thing abou
t blacks or Jews or Muslims. Perhaps even more amazing, there was no dissent in the room. No one seemed to note the irony that Harvard had been founded primarily as a Christian seminary.
Summers deserves credit for honestly expressing what many other elite academics think. He was not being malicious or combative. And I certainly do not favor affirmative action for conservatives. But there is a definite disconnect between our elite institutions, which have become liberal cocoons, and the values held by most Americans.
Still, I never regretted my three and a half years at Brown. There is truth to the old Biblical saying that iron sharpens iron. At Brown I heard some of the best, most articulate and most intelligent arguments against everything I believed in; and I found that at the end of the day, I could hold my own. In the Bible we are taught to be salt and light in the world. But you’ve got to be in the world to make that happen.
After Brown I hoped to go to Harvard medical school. When I was accepted I was genuinely thrilled, but I went through the application process at several other schools just in case. One was Johns Hopkins, where I was required to sit down for an interview. My interviewer didn’t ask about my grades or transcripts. Instead she remarked, “I hope you’re not one of those crazy pro-life Catholics.” She must have looked at my volunteer activities and noticed I had been involved with several Christian ministries.
She spent the entire interview grilling me on my personal views and faith. If I had been a devout Muslim or of any other faith, this would have been considered highly inappropriate, but campus liberals seem to think Christians are fair game. Later, during my exit interview at Brown, I told them about my grilling at Johns Hopkins. The Brown administrator sided with the interviewer, though the dean was conciliatory. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with being a Christian, I just don’t want you to be one of those crazy Christians.”
