I have to make myself post to this every week out of fear that my motivation will peter off and I abandon it. I had jumped the gun and started the blog a few weeks ahead of when I wanted to; I wanted to be an entry or two ahead in case of a week as busy as this one. Rest assured, next Saturday I will be back on track.
Meanwhile, enjoy your time with your families and communities as much as I will enjoy mine.
Peace be with you all,
--Kel--
Through my remaining elementary school years, my contact with Christians was limited to the summertime while visiting my grandma. Looking back, I have to admit that these were probably the most harmless church folk I had encountered in my youth. Being a small town, they were the opposite of mission-oriented; they seemed a bit more like Hobbits in that they looked down upon what some would go so far as to call adventure.
My great-grandparents were a reflection of this. My great-grandpa, a long-time elder at this church, was very thrifty, avoided gossip and meaningless chatter at all costs, and kept very quietly busy. To a kid, he was downright uninteresting. His house, however, was a retired geologist’s dream come true. In the yard, in cases throughout the house, and in his old workshop he had at least one of every kind of rock imaginable and hundreds of fossils.
My great-grandma loved knitting and sang old hymns with a huge grin and a yowl that sounded like a cat with a noseplug. She believed in the Sabbath so strongly that she wouldn’t even go out for Sunday brunch and prey off the labor of the sinners. Though she seemed the frail and sheltered type, she had no problem picking up a chunk of wood thicker than her arm and dispatching of whatever poisonous critter gave her grandkids a stir out in the back yard.
They were a treasure absolutely unnoticed by the young.
It was there that I received my first micro-doses of what was actually in the Bible. However, rather than summarizing the stories in the Old Testament like the first church I went to, this church’s Sunday school classes treated the Bible more like a game of Battleship. It was all memory verses and times, dates and places that seemed more like the other kids were cramming for a big test. To me, it was like trying to put together a story from a book that had been put through a shredder. It mostly went in one ear and out the other. Though I could sense a common string in many of them, without context the verses seemed empty. I got the impression that if these slivers were the only things in the Bible worth remembering, the Bible as a whole must be either incredibly dull or incredibly dark. 1
By the time I reached junior high, fundamental movements had reached a certain growth. People like Jerry Falwell, Randall Terry and Pat Robertson were gaining popularity with a rigid type of Bible talk that focused on hell, rapture, queers, and pure family values. The TV had begun to erupt with Christian broadcasts that, at their core, seemed like nothing more than a bunch of overdressed scam artists exploiting controversy and gullibility to move millions upon millions of dollars to buy more suits, drive more expensive cars, and live in more elaborate estates or, even worse, funding organizations like Operation Rescue or Army of God who were taking Christian activism to a whole new level.
Watching all of this, I began to see the church in America through a more historical eye. From the Spanish conquistadors who paved the way, offering the indios the option of either accepting the sovereignty of the church or facing the sword and seeing their daughters and children made into slaves, to the colonists who viewed and treated the natives as godless, heretical savages to plunder, kill and drive from their homes. The Puritans had lost a generation of daughters to witch trials. The Ku Klux Klan touted Christian roots and burned crosses just as much in tribute to Jesus as to intimidate. The churches of the old South clung fast to slavery. The Natives that managed to survive relocations, mass murders and smallpox blankets saw their children forced away from them and placed into Christian boarding schools, where they were literally made to feel disgusted of themselves for their race.
This crescendo from the 1980s through the 1990s had a similar air. Abortion clinics became the targets of vandalism, bombings and shootings. The AIDS pandemic gave fuel to anti-gay groups, who celebrated the disease as God’s judgment. Beatings and murders of homosexuals became the stuff of celebration, and from this one Fred Phelps was able to carve a niche. The Southern Baptist Association, Focus on the Family, and other high-profile Christian groups used lobbying and mass-boycott power to try to enact changes in America that seemed like a movement toward a theocracy led by scores of charismatic sociopaths. 2
With these people as the noisy representation of the faith in the mainstream media and politics, Christianity was nothing more than a collective of hatred from my point of view. It was no wonder, then, that I instantly shut myself out to people who claimed to be Christians the moment they showed their faith. The first time I consciously did so was during a class in high school, where there was a classmate that for a couple of months I really enjoyed talking to, right up until she mentioned going to church. “But you’re so nice, how could you do that to people?” I really hated her from that point on. Looking back, I feel awful about it. But at the time, I had no reason to trust her or anything she had to say to me.
Oddly enough, despite my conversion, I still feel the same way about much of the American church. The old movements of my younger days still have not died away, just changed names, and one individual even took the abortion war into the very lobby of another church. Now we also have a culture war against atheists (rather than the vague Satanists) and several who honestly think there is a conspiracy to take Christ out of Christmas, etc. Child molestation scandals, which were once just the stuff of quiet rumor and tasteless jokes, were brought to light as fact along with their systematic cover-ups. There is a great deal of the church that is downright disgraceful.
So seriously, what now?
That is what some of the future of this blog will be about. As a person of the faith, I feel it is my obligation to call out these people and call upon others to help hold the perpetrators of hatred and overtly political agendas accountable and truly, fearlessly speak out. There is an elephant in the sanctuary that no one seems to talk about, and the world has taken notice. It’s time to be responsible for the way the world views us.
Meanwhile, I’ve talked to you about my view of the church before converting. Next, I will talk about how I was able to overcome that and receive Jesus and seek baptism. Tune in next week.
1 Imagine doing that with anything else in your life. Supreme Pizza, Slice 3, bite 8, chew 31: “Mushroom.” Because mushroom is one of the holy ingredients in the 3rd slice of Supreme Pizza, Nintendo instantly became the organization of the Anti-Pizza for portraying mushrooms as antagonists and making a game of stomping them out via a plumber named Mario.
2 Team that up with radio in the late 80s and early 90s that introduced crossover Christian artists such as Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant who became the pawns of a marketing scheme intent on tapping into what seemed to be a growing commercial demographic. Even mainstream artists such as Mariah Carey jumped on the bandwagon to produce a song or two to try to appear more appealing to an increasing number of parents involved in the fundie fad. TV morality sitcoms such as Growing Pains and Full House could not have been any more transparent in which audience they were targeting.
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:
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.
