Fallen from Grace

Recently, The Vatican released a statement condemning transgender people, which reinforced my belief that The Church will never truly be friends of the queer community. Even if the current Pope preaches that homosexuality is okay, he still calls being trans unnatural and against the laws of God.

While this disappoints me, it doesn’t surprise me.

While I might actively try to surround myself with people who use the correct pronouns for my partner and child, attempting to create a bubble of safety and validation, I do know that most people in the (White, Western) world refuse to use pronouns that “disagree with their beliefs.” In fact, it has repeatedly amazed me how people cite Christianity, Jesus, God, and other religious things as a way to bully, be disrespectful, and attempt to control other people.

Did y’all read the same Bible I did?

When I read the Bible as a kid and again as an adult in a religion class in college, what I noticed and what really stuck out to me was: 1) God is an asshole, who kills people constantly. Like honestly, most of the Old Testament is stories about God killing people, telling other people to kill people, or just in general being violent and destructive. 2) Jesus was a communist, nonconforming rebel. He went against every societal norm, broke all the rules, hung out with the “bad crowd”, and destroyed capitalism within the Temple. 3) As soon as Jesus wasn’t around anymore, everyone went back to making rules and hating people who broke the rules. Sure, they might have been new rules, but Paul was establishing a norm and outlawing people who broke it.

Basically, to quote Bara Dada, an Indian philosopher, “Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians, you are not like him.”

I might not have left the Church if people were like him, honestly. I can get behind a nonconforming communist. Take care of the sick, the poor, the elderly, the children, the sex workers, the outcasts, and the foreigners. Spread the wealth, and let the wine flow. I feel that.

But I grew up in the Church, and I didn’t feel that energy from it. What I felt was that same energy that lead to Pope Francis I giving ammo to hate groups, at the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, no less.

When I was really young, under 10, the Church was a fun place. It was where we went every Sunday morning, and I got to see my friends. I liked it because I knew nothing else, because I played there, because I was too young to question the universe.

Of course, because this is me we’re talking about, I still did question things, and I still had some drama with people. I seem to not be able to help these things. It seems to be fundamental to who I am; to question and to have drama.

This means that I liked the Sunday School teachers who would answer my questions, debate with me, and actually cared about teaching me, and I did not get along with the ones who wanted me to sit still and just accept The Truth. I also ended up in a weird feud with the pastor’s kids? I honestly don’t remember how that started, but I did have a black-eye from a kickball at some point. Life is weird, okay?

Despite getting black-eyes at church, my issues with The Church, religion, and Christianity didn’t really begin until we left that first church, when I was around 11 or 12, and went to a new church. We spent the next couple of years bouncing from church to church, trying on different flavors and trying to find a place where we belonged.

During this time, my anxiety really began to manifest strongly. Were these two things related? Probably. Leaving the church I grew up in felt like leaving a home or family to Young Me. It was leaving the familiarity of a place and people I knew so well and being thrown into a new world, where I knew nothing and no one. To be perfectly honest, leaving the first church hurt my feelings, and I was too young at the time to understand why we did it. Just that it happened, and I was sad.

When I was about 13 or so, we settled into a new church. I was grateful for the ability to attempt to make this new place a home, to try to find my place there. I thought, for awhile, that I had even found a place there. There were people who recognized me, who were happy to see me, and who I could talk to. I went to Sunday School with the middle-schoolers and then with the high-schoolers, and my family and I went to a family group. It was really feeling like we had a community there.

Two things happened that ruined this.

First, it was me. I did the me thing. I questioned and caused drama.

See, there’s this thing about Christianity that bothered me since I was really, really young. I mean, since I was around 7 or so, and I know this is about when it started bothering me because I’ve read old journals I’ve kept. One of the promises of the Church is that if you follow Christ, you’ll be happy. If you follow the rules, do certain things, like read the Bible, pray, take communion, etc. and everything will be sunshine and rainbows.

I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety all my life, even as a kid. And Christianity was presented to me as a cure-all. If I just tried enough, if I just believed enough, if I just prayed enough, if I just surrendered enough, all my fears would go away and I would be made whole and happy. Right?

This compounded the idea that something was wrong with me. I wasn’t enough; I wasn’t right. Which, you know, are the kind of lies and negative thought patterns that depression and anxiety give you anyways.

I had had this private battle for years, but when I was 15, I put everything on the line for a missions trip. I poured my heart out into a letter, asking for donations to pay for me to go to New York City for a week with other high-schoolers from the church. I told everyone how much I wanted to feel that passion that other people seemed to have; that “on fire for Christ” and “Jesus freak” and, most importantly to me, that happiness and love promised me for so long.

I’d like to make an aside note here: everything was fine. I had a reasonably happy childhood. My parents were (are) good to me. My home has always been happy, loving, and stable. But everyone who has struggled with mental illnesses know that it doesn’t matter if things are okay or not. I have mental illnesses, I have a shortage of serotonin in my brain, no matter what my home life or childhood was like. It’s a part of who I am, just as much as questioning, causing drama, and writing out long essays for apparently no reason are. There are definitely things in my life that have caused trauma and issues, like the problems with the Church I’m discussing here. But, for the most part, everything was fine. And that church stuff? I know that my parents thought they were doing the best thing for my brother and I. They wanted it to be good for us, just as much as I wanted it to be good for me. They wanted to belong there, just as much as I wanted to belong there. Who knew we didn’t belong? Probably a lot of people who were there, actually. Anyways, back to my story.

So at the age of 15, with bright pink hair, I climbed into a van with 8 (or was it 9? why can’t I remember anymore?) other teens and two chaperones and headed to NYC for the first time to spend a week in Brooklyn, helping Baptist Church with their summer program for local kids. I had no idea what I was getting into, but I was absolutely, completely, and ridiculously optimistic. I was sure that this was it, this was how I was going to get that thing that everyone else had that I didn’t have.

I don’t regret going on that trip at all. It was so good for me, the home-schooled kid from Indiana, to see Brooklyn, to see all those different types of people. It was a profoundly good experience, though one that ultimately lead away from the church, rather than closer to it.

Without getting too much into the drama of what happened, because honestly it would turn into a rant of my sore feelings rather than being of any interest or use for anyone, here’s a brief summary: I and one of the boys on the trip, we're going to call him Brian, became close friends during the trip, and it freaked everyone out, I guess. Here’s the thing I’m still sore about: everyone kept talking about fellowshiping with your siblings in Christ, supporting each other, talking to each other, praying for each other, etc, and, yet, when Brian and I spent time talking to each other, everyone got upset. We were both taken aside, a few times on the week long trip, and asked if we were pursuing each other romantically and reminded about Christian purity and all that nonsense. Both Brian and I were dating other people at the time, neither of us were interested in the other. We just got along well.

One of the other girls on the trip, the daughter of one of the chaperones in fact, freely admitted to liking one of the boys. She was super flirty and went out of her way to touch him, hug him, etc. Whether he was into her or just into the idea of a girl being into him, I have no idea. But there was, you know, hormones. Were they glared or side-eyed in the same way though? Nope. But the kid with the bright pink hair who somehow found herself in this group from a conservative Christian church in New Haven, Indiana was a troublemaker, here to lead these poor boys to sin.

It’s me, the Lilith/Daliah/Jezebel. Whoever I am, I was mistrusted, and one of the few real connections I had during that trip was treated like a sin, like I was doing something else wrong for having a friend. During this trip, I also had a massive panic attack in Time Square, which resulted in sobbing in public. Brian was one of the few people in the group who was concerned, who made sure I was okay, who held my hand and made sure I knew I was safe. The chaperone, the program leaders, and most of the other teens didn’t care. In fact, it seemed to make them like me and trust me less. Because you know, panicking in a crowded space is because you want attention and it’s because you want to ruin other people’s fun.

In reality, I was a kid, who was overwhelmed, far from home, and too hot.

I returned home without a burning passion for Jesus, with a deepened mistrust of the church (and with adults in general, honestly) and with the absolute frustration that not even my supposed friends at church believed me when I said there was nothing between Brian and I.

That drama would continue for awhile in the form of Brian's girlfriend freaking out on me and telling him that he couldn’t hang out with me anymore, and then when Brian broke up with her, he would then go on to ask me, “Well, what would you say if I asked you out?” To which I responded with complete outrage, because we had talked about this enough, how neither of us were interested in the other, how we had argued with nearly everyone we knew about it, and how we had agreed neither of us wanted anything other than friendship.

I haven’t spoken to Brian in years. He still has a book I lent him. So let this be a lesson to you all, don’t lend your books to people. You never get them back. (Truly, I have another story about all of my John Green books that a former friend has, including a signed copy of The Fault in Our Stars. I will never see those again, I am confident.)

The second thing that ruined the community we were trying to establish in that new church was my brother, or, to be more accurate, the backlash against my brother.

My brother, Michael, is gay. And we love him, and his long-time partner, Ben. I am so glad that my brother has found happiness, acceptance, and love.

But when he came out, in our conservative, Christian, home-schooled world, it was kind of like an explosion had gone off. While there didn’t seem to be any outright hostility, there was certainly a sort of shunning going on.

This was a year or so after my missions trip, and my relationship with the church and religion as a whole had plummeted already. What little interest in it I had left, completely vanished as people who were supposedly our friends, fell away one by one, cutting off communication and support. This affected my mother most of all, who wanted to turn to friends, sisters in her community, and ask for advice and help. She had spent so long believing one way, and she was struggling to understand.

Michael wasn’t abused, or neglected, or possessed. He wasn’t wrong. Nothing was wrong. When you grow up in the church, these are the sort of lies you are told about the queer community. Michael was fine. I mean, he was kind of a jerk to me growing up, but otherwise, he’s fine. Normal, healthy, well-adjusted. He’s smart and talented, and everyone has always liked him.

Until, you know, the gay thing vs the Christians.

I will never forgive those women who were supposed to be there for my mother and instead turned their backs on her. It may have been for the best in the long run; we were sort of pushed out of the church, which I truly believe was good for all of us. But that shit from those people towards my mom. That was so wrong.

And we still have those forced smiles and, “Oh hey, so nice to see you! how are you?” in that fake, high-pitched voice when we run into them at Meijer or Marshalls. Like it’s actually nice to see each other, like there’s any real friendliness there.

When my mom and I talked about The Vatican’s recent statement about transgender people, she told me that she couldn’t wait until the Evangelical Christians took hold of the Pope’s words and waved it around like a great big “told ya so” sign, because we both know, even though they’re not Catholic, even though they’ll ignore the Pope saying that homosexuality isn’t a sin or that Global Warming is real, they’ll still take this and use it to fuel their hate, fear, and ignorance.

Because that’s all this is, that’s all they have. There’s no real love, no real following of that communist, wine-drinking rebel, no real desire to help people, to take care of people, to bond with people. My experience with the Evangelical church, with Christians, has shown me that it's really about hate, fear, ignorance, and some wild attempt at controlling people who are different. It's about shunning The Other; the people that Jesus went out of his way to spend time with.

Honestly, I might have stayed a Christian, I might have found God, if those who claimed to follow Jesus were actually like him. I can 100% get behind a man who can turn water into wine because he doesn’t want the party to end.

Instead, I’m this weird Pagan-Buddhist hybrid thing that makes decisions based on the position of the Stars and the phase of the Moon.

Maybe all those Christians were right to mistrust and dislike me when I was a teen. Maybe they saw this coming, all those years ago. Whatever. They were assholes, and I’m great.