1) Let the little children come to me.

This week has seen a trend among spiritual blogs of posts about why they or people of their demographic have left the church or the faith. I feel for them, though I never left the church. I was never in it. I figured I would exploit this theme to launch this blog – that, and a question recently posed at the end of a guest blog entry hosted by Rachel Held Evans: “If your children have had doubts, how do you talk with them about it?  What do you say when there aren’t easy answers to their questions?”

I will make one thing clear before I begin my narrative: I believe in Jesus and his teachings. I believe in Jesus far more than I believe in people, even other people who believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to express it. If I were, I would never grow and my faith would atrophy. If I were, I would never have cause to argue about my faith, and I could not grow in faith with others. I would never truly learn anything new or have cause to shed old suppositions. I would wear a liar’s yoke.

I am a convert from a mostly non-religious family. I spent the first two decades of my life looking at the church from the outside. My impression of the church was via the news and the people trying to pull me into it. I honestly felt that it wore a liar’s yoke. Now that I am in the faith, I still think it does. The level of cross-talk and self-delusion that much religion holds in general and the American church uses in particular would be inexcusable from any secular institution. From the sacred can come the most profane.

In this and the next few entries, I will discuss how I came into the faith so that you will be able to understand how I saw the church as an outsider and how it affects the way I see it now from within.

One of my first church experiences came at the age of four. A friend in our apartment complex had invited me to come to Sunday school with him for a period of time. The first thing that was taught to me about the Bible in that Sunday school class was that it was the word of God. Every word was meant to be read literally. Adding to or subtracting from the words of the Bible was a very serious sin that could lead one astray into the waiting arms of the devil.

A later lesson involved the ten commandments, which were straightforward as he taught them:

1. Don’t love anything more than you love God, especially not money.
2. Don’t make a statue and pretend it’s God. It’s not
3. Don’t say “God damn it” or “Jesus Christ” or any variation of one or both when you’re mad.
4. Sunday is about church. Never do bad on Sunday.
5. Do what your parents tell you to do.
6. Don’t murder. There are exceptions to this.
7. Don’t commit adultery. You’re too young to understand this, but it’s disgusting. Don’t do it.
8. Don’t steal.
9. Don’t lie.
10. Don’t be jealous of other people’s stuff.

As far as a child that young needs to understand the commandments, that was as clear as it needed to be. This was presented as God’s highest law for us, and failing to obey them would guarantee you a place in hell. Hell is where you go and burn and are tortured for all eternity for making God angry. The devil will have you all to himself. I certainly didn’t want that. I figured I should really pay attention.

The next Sunday, I learned my first lesson in picking my battles. The teacher read to us the story of creation in the book of Genesis. He read about Adam and Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He read about the snake. After, he said the snake was the devil. I raised my hand. “So the devil is a snake?” Well, no. But the devil disguised himself as a snake then. The devil takes many disguises. “So all the snakes were punished because the devil put on a costume?” Well, no. The first snake was the devil in disguise. “The book doesn’t say that. How do you know?” Well, you’re right, it doesn’t. But we know that the devil is the only person who wants us to do bad, so we know that the devil had to be the snake. They just forgot to write it. “But you said we’re not supposed to add things to the Bible that aren’t written there. You’ll go to hell.” I spent some time in the corner.

My friend didn’t fetch me for Sunday school the following week.

Still, I had heard enough in my short time at that church’s Sunday school to get the impression that this stuff was really, really important. Lucky for me, I had other Christian neighbors whom I could ask my then-lingering questions. I hadn’t heard much about Jesus yet, but he was the most important guy in the whole Bible. Jesus, I had been told, was the man from whom everybody could have hope. As a kid, I needed hope.

I choose not to go into great detail about the collateral parts of my childhood, other than to say that I know a great deal about sexual and physical abuse first-hand. Some of it came from a parent, some from an uncle, some from an aunt, some from a grandfather. Most of it only caused bruises and welts, though a few times I required a doctor to stitch me back together again. Once, it even involved a gun; in that experience, I literally thought I had died. I simply lay there waiting for the afterlife to happen. I was six years old then.

So I was excited when my neighbor had told me what he called The Good News. That faith in Jesus can take away all of the bad things in your life. All you had to do was pray with a believing heart and God would answer those prayers. The message was simple enough. He showed me how to pray. I went home and begged God for hours for many days to change my dad. Nothing happened.

After some time, I asked my neighbor why nothing was happening. He explained that everything that happens to us is a part of God’s plan. Furthermore, he said, the Bible made it clear that bad things can only continue to happen to you if you are not right with God. The punishment I receive is likely proportional to my sin.

So what happened to me, then, was not because the people harming me were necessarily bad people, but because I was.

I didn’t like the idea of God that much after that. Rather, I hated Him.