Religious Minority on a Diversity Statement?

[Elihuwants]

Hello all! I have been a lurker on this site. I want to thank all the admins and regular posters for providing such good information and hope to be in a position one day to take on the torch of providing people on this board with good info from my own experiences. I have a question.regarding my Diversity statement. I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness who are anti-intellectuals and for the most part are against higher education. As an undergraduate I had to hide my text books and will be the only person in my family for at least three generations to achieve a degree higher then an undergraduate degree let alone a Phd. In order to earn my undergrad, I had to pay the price of being alienated from my family and lose alot of the professional contacts that I had earned due to the fact that my social network was primarily comprised of Jehovah's Witness. My question is could these struggles be composed in such was as to bring about a positive reading upon an admissions staff reading it? I have shopped this question on a couple of other boards and got some mixed results. However, I really do feel this struggle makes me unique and therefore would add to the diversity of any campus because almost no one with my background gets as far as I have. On the other-hand, some of said that such a story makes me sound like some kind of revolutionary or someone is rogue and perhaps could work against me? What do you folks think? I should add that some academics view Jehovah's Witness as a cult. Perhaps I should not mention that I was a Jehovah's Witness and just say I was raised in a cult?

[fuzzylogician]

First off, I think this story has no place in a SOP (you didn't ask, but I'm saying it anyway). As for a diversity statement, I think there are ways of writing about it that would be appropriate, but it would depend on the content of the essay. One thing to ask yourself is how private you want this information to be. Will you be comfortable with random faculty knowing this fact about your past? Do you plan to share it with your advisor and cohort? If this is a private matter, you may choose not to share it with the entire admissions committee. If you're open to sharing it, I think you should run it by at least one trusted faculty member, but I think you could write a powerful essay based on your experiences. This all said, there is a question of what this statement will be used for. To my knowledge, the diversity statement is not used to make admissions decisions but rather to identify candidates for diversity scholarships and the like. So, that's worth finding out about and weighing into the decision when you make it. 

[Elihuwants]

Fuzzylogician! You make a lot of sense and your statements echo some advice that I have received already. Thanks for taking the time and expressing your opinion to me. No, I hadn't planned on putting it on my SOP, I have only so many words and I dont think it is relevant to Labs tha I want to make it into.