Like a lot of people say in the Evangelical church, I grew up 'in the church.' Meaning that wherever my family lived, we tried to get hooked up with a church we could attend. It was a lifeline to social support, a place where we could learn about life and how best to live it.
Christianity, I was taught, isn't a religion but a way of life. It is making a decision to live life according to Christ's principles. Most of all, it's deciding to love people. To love everybody. As they tell you in Sunday school over and over, Jesus spoke to the crowds and healed society's sickest members. He turned away no one.
Which is why it's surprising to me how much the church doesn't follow Christ's example. Instead, we're usually the butt of any joke that casts a homophobe.
A recent article by Ross Murray made me reflect on this disconnect between Christian culture and lack of support for homosexuality. There are Christians out there who support LGBTers out there, he says. And according to him, they haven't been receiving as much media attention as the more extreme groups (sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?). I'm glad that at least one person is seeing Christ-followers around him identifying as LGBT or LGBT allies. That's fabulous. I just wish I was seeing it too. Or rather, that I saw that growing up as a little church girl.
Gay people just weren't talked about when I was growing up. Or else they were referred to in a condescending manner, as if being gay was just a bizarre-o form of straightness these people were trying out. The d-word was a generic term for lesbian. I once said that I wished we had a gay relative that was out of the closet, just so the young kids would know what a gay person looked like. My mom was horrified—why would I want a gay relative?
This kind of discrimination was hard to recognize at first, just because they were so normalized. But once I came to college and gained some gay friends (and became a loyal devotee of Margaret Cho), I realized that the form of Christianity that I had grown up with had become far too discriminating for its own good. We had wandered away from our awesome counterculture roots, from being the radical peacekeepers to the elitist groups who saw fit to divine who was acceptable for Heaven and who wasn't. In short, we had decided to elect ourselves as stand-ins for God.
I've read the verses condemning homosexuality in the Bible, yelled by angry people in the street. And frankly, it makes me want to just flip up my collar, tightly hold my gay friends' hands and walk faster down the street. Because I'm embarrassed by what the Christian culture has become. Even if God didn't approve of homosexuality, I don't think He would ever ever hate people who identified as homosexual. I was taught that God loved everyone. And now He was on a hating spree?
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| That verse refers to biblical figure Esau. Who later married three women. |
It needs to be clarified, however, that the culture of Christianity is much different than the sacred texts themselves. Despite being added to all the time, they're probably one of the more consistent parts of the Christian culture. What does change is the interpretation of these words. Many Christians used to believe that interracial marriage wasn't good by God, and that's clearly not the case anymore. Nor are they against the drinking of hard liquor. And come on, not all Christian women really aspire to be Mother Teresa anymore. Nowadays, the American Christian just seems to want a house in a good neighborhood and high school-level popularity. In other words, they don't want to rock the boat. Which is exactly what embracing LGBT people is for American Christian culture right now.
Right now, I'm still figuring out what my faith means to me. I've left the church itself, but I still believe in God. But it seems like too easy of a decision to just walk away from Christianity just because it's lost its way. Because the tide could potentially turn at any given moment. It's already turning in secular America-is it too crazy to imagine for religious America? Evangelicals could be handing out bread and fish (and hopefully popcorn and soda) to attendees of the GLAAD Awards next year. Culture changes constantly; anything is possible.
All I know is this: No God of mine hates anyone. Period. And if you say so, you're forgetting that Jesus hung out with tax skimmers, poor boys and 'hos.
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| "Where the wine at, fellas?" |
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