After many people’s senior year of high school, many go to the beach or some sort of vacation spot for “sweek”. The term “sweek”, refers to senior week, where graduating seniors will get a house at the beach and celebrate their accomplishments in high school. It’s one last hurrah before transitioning to college.
During my own “sweek”, my friends and I went to Ocean City, New Jersey, and stayed in my friend’s aunt’s beach house. The one thing about Ocean City that makes it different from other beaches is the sense of family and religious value. Ocean City’s main residents are small families that belong to a Christian Church. During the summer the church will send out their youth groups and volunteers to survey the people on the boardwalk. These questions usually start of with a completely non-religious question and then they segway into asking if “you believe in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”.
While my friends and I were walking along the boardwalk, one of their youth group members stopped us and asked, “do you have time to take a survey about the boardwalk”? We weren’t doing anything specific and thought it could be helpful to give feedback about the boardwalk so, we agreed. Without asking a single thing about the boardwalk, she asked if we were religious. She asked those who responded no if they would convert. She asked any religious question she could but not a single question about the actual boardwalk. We eventually got through the questions and realized that we just wasted our time answering questions none of us had any interest in.
The next day another youth group member approached us. She asked us if we wanted to take a survey about the boardwalk. We responded that we already took the survey and don’t want to take it again. However, this youth member didn’t move on. She asked us if we were sure and that she’s happy to ask us the questions. However, at this point our group was getting annoyed, we were tired of answering misleading questions. Even though we told her multiple times we weren’t interested in the survey, she wouldn’t leave us alone. So I decided the only way we were getting out of this situation was if we were more stern in our attitude. Up until this point we were trying to nicely decline but it was enough. I got up and went towards her, and I raised my voice slightly to say “we had no interest in her survey, we already took it, leave us alone”. This seemed to get her to leave.
After this event some of my friends were a little mad at me because they thought I was being mean to the girl. However, some others and myself thought I was justified in my actions. There is a social policy that if someone doesn’t want to talk you stop asking, at least regarding surveys. Many people don’t take the time to complete surveys once, we did do it once and that didn’t seem to be enough to stop the surveyors. However, I still wonder if my actions in this situation were justified or not.
This was really funny for me to read, mainly because there are people from the church downtown constantly asking me about going to church right now. I can sympathize with the fact that after being asked once, repeated asking can become kind of tedious. I agree with you that you should be polite to people, but you may have to be a little more forceful in situations like this. I have personally had to deal with similar situations (other than the recent questioning about church). Overall, I thought it was a funny story that I enjoyed reading.
Funnily enough, I myself had the same exact experience with my friends in OCNJ last summer. We were in the midst of getting piercings on the boardwalk- a sweek rite of passage I think, and this group of teens approached us asking us to take a survey and it turned out to be a Christian recruitment group. I think this is firstly disrespectful of people’s time and vacation, but also goes against the principles of religion. I think that religion should be something people find on their own through some sort of higher calling- it shouldn’t require advertising, and I feel that that commercializes something that should be non commercial.