How can you call yourself a Christian, Page?
You might ask me this for many reasons, depending on your own values, past experiences, and/or the amount of Kool-Aid you've drank from either the Right Cooler or the Left Cooler (cause they are both dishing out some poison).
When I was a college student who drank too much, indiscriminately slept around, and liked to streak across campus any chance I got, a conservative Christian woman might ask me that question because I wasn't living up to her ideal of a godly woman.
Now that I'm a responsible adult in a monogamous marriage to a man, don't drink alcohol, and my personal style just happens to tend toward long pants and turtlenecks, I'd pass the eye test with that woman. The illusion would be broken the second I opened my mouth, but I'd at least get in the door. I'd have her clutching her pearls so tightly her jeweler would be shaking two towns away with fear she was gonna break the strand when I told her I don't think the Bible is factual and I think male headship is a sin of pride and power-seeking on the part of men who uphold it and I know deep in my bones that if Jesus was physically here today that He'd have a bumper sticker on His F150 in support of LGBTQ+ Christians. That woman might prefer I go back to my college days because at least then I believed that my attraction to women was going to land me in hell.
Nice, non-Christian people might ask me that question for a different reason. Page, how can you call yourself a Christian when Christians are so hateful and stuck up and hypocritical and power hungry and elitist and gullible and are in a cult in all the worst ways? Good question, y'all.
I ask myself those questions all the time. Am I holding so tightly to Christianity just because it feels like a part of my birthright, like being an Appalachian or a lead-footed Standridge or a risk-taking Sloan? Do I go to church just because it feeds my human need for community and provides a structured way to help the less fortunate? Is my ass in that front pew every week because the little girl in me is still just a bit scared I'll go to hell if I'm not?
I'm not going to deny those parts of me, those things are all at least partially true. But I was willing to give all that up, my heritage, a support system, a get out of hell free card - all of that because I couldn't stomach the version of Christianity that I was in. The version of Christianity that I had always seen. The version that keeps most people out of churches and the religion in general.
The Spirit hovered over the darkness at the beginning of time and the Spirit hovered over the darkness in my heart. God, in all Their goodness, wouldn't leave me where I was.
I walked in to St. Andrew's Episcopal Church and let me tell you, that was a hard walk. There is a thin line between hope and insanity, both have you doing something you've done before in search of something new. I walked in to a church full of white people in the rural south just like I'd done before and I hoped to see the values of an ancient, Middle Eastern brown man on display. Dear reader, I found exactly that.
There's a popular phrase in evangelical circles, "You are the only Bible that some people will ever read." Boy howdy, that's true. And that's why so many people will never read the actual Bible. That's why so many people don't want to be associated with Christianity. If you don't feel loved by the living Bible right in front of you, why would you ever pick up, much less believe, the living Word that was written in a far removed time and place and has been used ever since then to put people like you in their place - which is always lower than the place of the people carrying their Bible around professing to be the moral authority?
Are the people of St. Andrew's perfect? No. And they'll be the first to tell you that. Am I perfect? Hell no. And I want to make it clear that I don't think I'm "better" than you or "better" than other Christians or "better" than non-Christians. I'll be the first to tell you that I don't always live up to the things I believe I should do and think and be. I know I am a sinner. But the theology that guides us, the all-may-ness that sets us apart, is a Bible that I would be glad for the whole world to see in me.
Except, as was proven to me recently, I still have some shame, some concerns about the Bible itself as well as my identity as a Christian. I found myself with some free time and ended up sitting out by a fire at a little coffee shop with a peppermint mocha latte. Without thinking about it too much, I pulled my Bible out of my tote bag and picked back up where I had left off in Matthew. A few minutes in to my reading, I got this sinking sick feeling. There was a gay couple in the coffee shop. What if they walked outside, saw me reading this book that said they would be better off raping women than loving each other (if Genesis 19 is to be believed on a literal/surface level), and thought I would also condemn them? What if those high-energy young adults at the next table thought I didn't see them as viable leaders just because they happened to be women? What if that old, white man across the fire pit saw me reading the Bible and thought that meant he could start a congratulatory conversation with me about Trump? I wanted to stand up on my chair, lift my NRSVue Bible high up in the air, and yell, "I'm reading this to write a blog about how you can't trust the Bible as it has been presented to you! I swear I think you are perfect just the way you were made and that you have value and are loved."
Were these concerns based on the perceptions of strangers that I shouldn't be worried about and that they might not even be having in the first place? Yes. Had I been stereotyping those strangers based on how they looked? Yes. Maybe those men weren't gay. Maybe those women were more traditional in their views than their style suggested. Maybe that old white man was Kamala's biggest supporter. What is for damn sure is that none of those people were paying a bit of attention to me.
The problem was and still is my own religious trauma and my sincere wish to never be the type of person who inflicts that on others. The problem is that I am still so uncomfortable with being lumped in with mainstream Christianity. The problem is that I still have lots of questions about the Bible. As I get further into this journey of trying to make the Bible make sense and trying to make Jesus's message make sense in light of the rest of the Bible, and trying to make sense of how other people can call themselves Christians and believe things that I think are deeply unloving with "biblical" support, I began to realize just how many problems I still have.
How can I, a woman who doesn't believe in male headship, call myself a Christian? How can I, a bisexual person who doesn't believe that the only godly relationship is between a man and a woman, call myself a Christian? How can I call myself a Christian, knowing I don't believe that the Bible is prescriptive or true in the literal sense?
I thought I had resolved all this when I left my last church over issues of gender and sexuality and what they meant by love. I left my previous church because I couldn't square who I am, who I was CREATED to be, with the version of Christianity that was being preached there. I couldn't square a group of people who professed to hold love as their primary tenet and the hate they fed to people who didn't present as they do.
I found a church where all of those questions were answered in a way that allowed me to see a way forward in this religion. For a while I left it at that. But then I started the study of the creation of the Bible and the formation of the early church.
The more I learn, the harder this book is to understand.
This is why critical thinking, historical education, and asking questions have been discouraged in most Christian traditions as the antithesis of faith. A Christian I know once said, "Thinking people see right through Christianity." That's because a thinking person can't jive all the inconsistencies of the Bible with a perfect and omnipotent God. Thinking people can't jive the message of love for all that Christ lived and died for with the message of violence in the name of God and exclusion of large groups of people. Thinking people can't jive a supposedly loving and all-powerful God who would create an imperfect world filled with imperfect people and then punish them for existing as they were created.
Howard Thurman, a black theologian, pastor, and activist, put my own thoughts into words when he wrote "Jesus and the Disinherited" in 1949.
"For years it has been a part of my own quest so to understand the religion of Jesus that interest in his way of life could be developed and sustained by intelligent men and women who were at the same time deeply victimized by the Christian Church's betrayal of his faith." p. 19
Reading these words was like reading a log of the thoughts spinning in my head for the past several years, only Thurman was able to present them with more sense and succinctness than I ever could. He hit on the 2 major hang-ups that I have and that I suspect many who have left Christianity or who question Christianity also have. First, how can intelligent people believe the unbelievable book called the Bible? Secondly, how can folk who have been hurt directly and indirectly, in body, mind and heart, by the bastardization of the Biblical message ever be able to feel the love of Jesus and walk in His way?
INTELLIGENCE/REASON
Let's start with that first point: intelligence. Religion is faith. Faith that an unseeable God not only exists, but is WITH us. That's all out crazy talk and yet I trust in that God's presence. But, I'll tell you right up front, saying that we have to have "faith" and "trust" that just because something in the Bible seems contradictory or just plain wrong to us, doesn't mean it is, it just means that we don't have God's understanding, isn't going to fly with me. I see it as an full-on cop-out that lazy or brainwashed people use when they don't want to look something up for themselves or aren't allowed to think for themselves. I know that's harsh, but that's my experience as a recovering lazy Kool-Aid drinker. I was content to blindly follow what others told me and that was wrong.
God made us intelligent. God gave us reasoning. God gave us the Holy Spirit for discernment. God gave us examples of people wrestling with His orders and changing His mind.
If you don't believe that's still true for us today, I have a few things to tell you that you might not like. Forgive the list making, I am genetically and astrologically unable to stop myself from it.
If you don't believe we are supposed to use our own reason then you have no excuse at all for not following the Bible to the letter. If you don't, you are a hypocrite and by your own admission, you are not a Christian since you don't follow the rules of Christianity. You cannot use the excuse of different time, different place for anything because that would be applying your own logic and values to the Bible. You have to believe that anyone in slavery should just focus on being the best slave they can be and shouldn't fight for freedom. You also have to believe that you are unworthy because you aren't a part of the chosen people. After all, the whole OT is about how the chosen people are a very specific group in a very specific place and you clearly are not that, non-Jewish person reading this blog. But that's the OT, what about how Jesus came for everyone in the NT? Uh, sorry. According to Jesus himself (in Matthew 15:24 and a few other verses in Matthew, read it for yourself. I'm again too lazy to list them all here and even if I did you shouldn't blindly trust me) He was sent ONLY to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But what about all those other verses like in Isaiah and in the other gospels and the work of Paul that tells us Jesus came for Gentiles, too? So either Jesus was lying (God cannot lie, right? so that's not it), or simply mistaken (not all powerful, huh? that can't be right! God has a plan and sticks to it and His plan was always to save all people!), or whoever wrote Matthew put that in there because they had a stance they wanted to spread (BUT THAT WOULD REQUIRE US TO USE REASON AND DISCERNMENT and if we are going to do that here than what's to stop us from doing that when it comes to male headship or homosexuality? More on the issues of cherry picking and slippery slopes later).
If you think that the few words we are given in the Bible are the only way that God has ever spoken to us throughout all human history, then you are holding the Bible up as an idol. You are treating the Bible like God. You are saying that this book is your god and that you will listen to nothing else, not even that still, small voice whispering in your ear that your husband doesn't have to make you subject to him just because he happened to be born with a Y chromosome when we all know he isn't particularly smarter or kinder or braver than you..... It is pretty clear that God doesn't want us to put anything before Them, but here you are, holding up some letter Paul may or may not have written and claiming that it is God.
If you don't think God can speak to us now, in our time, that tells me two things about you:
You are cherry picking how to apply the concept of God's never changing character. You want to tell me that God doesn't change and so "His word" should still be read literally just like it was back then (who says they read it like we do?), BUT you refuse to acknowledge that God spoke to people then (both directly in the OT and through Jesus in the NT and indirectly via the Holy Spirit after the gospels) so He must still be talking to us now or He's fundamentally changed somehow. Also, you think God allowed people in the OT to change His mind and talk Him down from His initial angry response (in many cases that you can look up for yourself) and Jesus allowed a woman (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT JESUS LISTENED TO A WOMAN??) to change His mind about caring for a gentile when He was pretty focused on the Jewish people in that particular gospel (again referencing Matthew 15:22-28) but you don't think God lets us do that anymore? So is God the same then and now or isn't He?
You deny the purpose, and maybe even the entire existence, of the Holy Spirit.
From the description of Pentecost in Acts: Wasn't the Holy Spirit poured out so that all people could experience the truth in a way that they could understand it? Wasn't the Holy Spirit sent down so that ALL people who called on Him could be saved? Didn't the Holy Spirit come down and change people so that they sold off their possessions and fellowshipped with ALL people?
John 15:12-15 says “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." Doesn't this mean that the Spirit will guide us into the future, to things that we (as people and as a society) were not ready to hear yet?
We have to go past the surface, we have to use the brain that God gave us, we have to listen to the Holy Spirit's discernment, we have to put our heads and our hearts together to make this all make sense.
The Bible is errant and inconsistent in both facts and theology if read the way we have primarily been taught to read it. And I'm not even going to touch on the fact that Jesus - who was supposedly God and supposedly came down to fulfill an all powerful, all knowing God's plan - somehow didn't think to hire a guy to write down the stuff He was saying for future generations even though the Trinity knew they had created a bunch of skeptical animals who would kill each other over stuff that was written in the version They allowed to be created by those same animals who are not just skeptical, but also diabolical in their desire to wield power and influence.....................
Again, I have to quote the friend who said, "Thinking people see right through Christianity." It is easy to do. The logic is thinner than bargain toilet paper when you read the Bible on a surface level. If I thought that was all there was to it, I wouldn't be a Christian. I wouldn't be trying to convince you that the well of Christianity is so much deeper and wider than your frightened heart that clings to the safety of the status quo has previously allowed you to see. Here, I have to quote another friend. This friend, we'll call her Friend 2, has a more literal/traditional/
mainstream view of the Bible than myself and Friend 1 who was quoted above. As I was talking to her about these issues, she said that she didn't think God is inconsistent despite the points I was bringing up. And although we disagreed about a lot, I totally agree with her that God is not inconsistent.
Do I believe the Bible reads inconsistently? Yes, 1000%. That book has Problems with a capital P. Problems on problems on problems. Those problems are what have caused people, as Thurman put it, to be victimized by the betrayal of Jesus's message. Please at least agree with me that this book isn't infallible. You can find the list of factual inconsistencies both on Atheist websites and on Christian websites, the only difference is the Christian websites try to explain them away and the Atheists use them as all out proof that God doesn't exist. I think there is a third option. A way to acknowledge the inconsistencies, but still see the cohesive message that God loves us, God is with us, God wants us to love Him back, God wants us to love our neighbors as ourselves.
VICTIMS OF THE BETRAYAL OF JESUS'S FAITH
There are theological problems with the traditional way the Bible is taught. The biggest issue, to me, is that we are supposed to believe that Jesus came to earth to fulfill the law (thus dissolving that OT covenant) and died to save all people from their sins, in the meantime telling us that all we have to do now is love God and love our neighbors (and throwing in that pesky Golden Rule to show us how to love our neighbors), yet we cannot seem to be able to stop negating Jesus's life work by making distinctions between people and not affording ALL our neighbors the same rights that we want for ourselves.
And just to be clear, I want to say that I believe that you do not love a lesbian woman if you do not want her to be treated like you would want to be treated, meaning that you do not want her to have the same rights to marriage and her place in the kingdom of God as you. All this, I love gay people like Jesus told me to but I think they are sinners and don't deserve to get married or be members of the church, talk is just as thin as that bargain toilet paper. That isn't love, that's oppression.
If that's too hard for you to swallow, let's use that same logic but about women in leadership. Would you like it if you were told your penis and the other resulting effects of your genetics that God gave meant you always had to take a back seat to women JUST because they are women when it comes to the home, the church, and the government, even when a whole bunch of women you know are airheads and rapists and just plain gross enough to scratch their private parts in public? Hmmm. Doesn't feel good, does it? Taking the emotions out of it, it isn't logical. You would know that a man such as yourself might lead differently based on those God given traits (no one is saying men and women are the same), but that you would still be fit to lead in the places that your experience and intelligence made you a qualified leader. Again, you don't love women if you think of them as unfit to lead just because they are women. That isn't love, that's oppression.
Here I feel the need to reference Thurman again,
"The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker (referencing Jesus of course) appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed (Middle Eastern Jews oppressed by the Romans). That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus." p. 18
Man, what a rant this has been. I promise, I'm ready to make my point now. I'm ready to answer that titular question.
How can I call myself a Christian? Easy. I try my best to act like Christ.
But Page, how can you act like Christ when you can't trust that book about Him and therefore aren't sure if you can trust Him? Not so easy, but against all odds that have been stacked by the powerful men who wrote and edited the Bible and the powerful men who have been preaching their interpretation of the Bible to me, I can. I can because my God is that big. He's so big that His overall message shines so true, so bright through all the bullshit that humans tried to cover it with for their own purposes. I can because God has created me with reason and intelligence, Jesus has given me an example to follow, and the Holy Spirit reveals Herself to me and guides me daily in this "modern world", helping me to understand how to love God and how to love my neighbor.
When I look at the Bible as a WHOLE, it works. The logic isn't thin at all. It's as thick as the ozone was before the industrial revolution. When I look at the Bible as a whole, it tells me:
Creation: God made me exactly how I am and They did so because They need ME to fulfill Their Kingdom. As much as They need me, I'm not special. God made everyone exactly how they are because they belong and are necessary for His kingdom. That doesn't mean murders get a free pass. All that means is that we are free to be the people we were born to be. We get to be ourselves, but we are all held to the same standard of love. If we were all able to follow those standards, there wouldn't be crime. Is that gonna happen in this world? No, but we all have a responsibility to do our part.
The Old Testament and the Law: The Jewish people did the best they could with the knowledge they had in the circumstances they were in. Against all odds, God was able to reveal His message that we must love one another even in that ancient, violent, turbulent, patriarchal society. So much of what we view as prescriptive or commanding language is a cautionary tale or was written as a fable to show us an aspect of God that we need to see.
Jesus: Jesus was a miracle of a man who against all odds of His birth, the time, and the place was able to get God's message across. Their message was simple, but not easy, a source of power for the powerless, a way to redemption for the oppressor. Their message was that God loves us, that we must love God and love others as ourselves.
The Bible: The Bible is a terrible mess, a chaotic nightmare of a fever dream that is riddled with errors and filled with the thoughts of long dead men who were powerful enough to slip their pet belief in there. It is also the inspired word of God that is a necessary resource, along with the Holy Spirit, to guide us in understanding how to love God and how to love our neighbor as ourselves. The Bible is a rich and beautiful text full of examples of God's love for us that I am so thankful for and that I want to exemplify and that I will read proudly in public (just maybe with a sign that says "I'm reading this as a deconstructed Christian, ask me what that means and I'd be glad to tell you!")
If you think that's a load of hippie-dippie-pie-in-the-sky-kumbaya-watered-down religion, I bet I know what your comebacks are. I know because I've used them myself. They seem to be pretty standard so I'll address the ones I'm familiar with. If I missed your objection, let me know and I'll happily start a discourse with you.
Objection #1: Girl, you are cherry picking.
And you aren't? How can you explain to me that you think all the passages about slavery are because of the time and place and the people who wrote and edited the Bible, but all the passages about women and homosexuality aren't? You are cherry picking the verses you want to use to stay safe or in power or to keep this conception you have of yourself as a "good" person because you are following the rules better than some other people. How can you explain to me that there isn't a different allegory in the woman's creation from a man's rib or that there isn't a different allegory in the woman being the one who listened to the snake than the allegories you are already using to infer that women are subject to men and are inherently gullible and unfit to lead? And, here's the fun part, that bit about the woman being created from man is actually in the 2nd creation story. That's not the way it happened in the first chapter, so you are cherry picking which version better suits your needs.
But there is a way to read it without cherry picking. I can take any story in the Bible (I'm not saying verse because you can't pick a verse out of its context, that's just bad reading comprehension and Mrs. Abernathy taught me better than that in the 2nd grade) and tell you how that story supports what the Holy Spirit has revealed to me as the truth: that God is with me, that I must love God and that I must love all people as myself. To me, the point is that God made Adam and Eve, in His image, and they were exactly as they were meant to be, nakedness and all. Both of the creation stories make sense this way. They both tell us something about God that helps us to love God and helps us to see that we cannot make it in this world without Her or without other people who we love as ourselves. (Here is a great part 1 and part 2 about this example that I love). When you read the Bible in this way, it is cohesive, it makes sense within itself since it all points to God's goodness, just in different ways and since it allows us to love all people and give all people the same rights as we want ourselves, despite their gender and/or their sexual orientation because those aren't the salient points here. Those are surface level, inconsistent points that can be used to oppress people.
Objection #2: Girl, that is dangerous. When you open it up to all people being equal and having the same rights, that means you think anything goes. If you think we can get rid of the way homosexuals are discussed in the Bible, I guess you think we can dismiss murders and child molesters, too, right? I mean, you probably think God made them exactly that way so your logic is flawed.
My rebuttal to that is twofold. First, you are conflating WHO people are with what people do. People are born women. People are born gay. People are born poor and disadvantaged. People are born in places that they'll never hear the word of God. People are born in places where it is impossible to believe the word of God on the off chance they do hear a tidbit of it because of their culture or history with Christianity. People are not born murders or child molesters or even white collar criminals (tabling the questions of some sins being greater than others and the concept of God's forgiveness and punishment versus human's for now, maybe we'll talk about that in another post). You can't kick people out of the kingdom of heaven or out of full participation in it because they are one gender versus another or because they are attracted to people you think are icky or because they weren't born in a predominately Christian culture like you were. Basically, you can't put people on a rung lower than you on the ladder to heaven because they were born one way and you were born another. That's the definition of elitist. Jesus wasn't elite and He wasn't down with the elite using their elitism against others.
Secondly, I would argue that applying my logic and structure to the Bible is just as stringent as the traditional way. When I look at the Bible as a whole and then apply the commands to love God and love others as myself, shit starts getting really hard to do. For instance, I have to truly love my neighbors who voted for Trump and who kick queer kids out of their homes onto the streets to be raped or killed at worst and simply homeless and physically unsafe at best, in the name of the Lord. That means acknowledging that God loves the people who don't accept all people into this religion just like He loves me and that those people have a place in God's kingdom. I think what they are doing isn't right and that it is harmful to their souls and to other people and I think it is outside of the commandments we've been left with. But, I also feel that way about some people in the LGBTQ+ space and I feel that way about some of the cultures that I wasn't born into. It isn't a blanket condoning of all people and all thoughts and all actions. I am not saying no one sins, I am saying that everyone sins, myself included, because every one of us falls short of resting in God's love for us and in our love for God and others.
It would be a lot easier if I just sat at home and gave rights to people I thought were right and followed the 10 commandments and went to church on Sunday morning with my pearls on. But that's surface level Christianity. That's not what I have been called to, that's not what any of us are called to. So no, this isn't the easy way out. This is the way that has me selling off everything I own, metaphorically for now but literally if I was called to it, and following Christ. It is holding myself and other people up to a different standard, asking if they love all people and not on the arbitrary facts of their birth. Am I doing this perfectly? No. If I were I would be able to write this blog without feeling angry at the people I would like to convince. My language would be more loving and less argumentative, I recognize and acknowledge that.
I have to truly love God enough to stick up for Her, to evangelize the good news of Jesus, to follow the call of the Holy Spirit. Do you know how hard it is for me, someone who is still deconstructing and healing from past religious trauma (excuse the buzzwords, but I don't know another simple way to put it), to casually work my church or something I read in the Bible, or my priest said this or God revealed this to me, into regular conversation? It's hard, y'all. I don't want to be a Jesus freak. I don't want to be perceived as a Christian in a lot of the ways that people perceive Christians. I don't want to acknowledge the beginnings of the call I have felt to leave my job and my home and my church and enter into ordained ministry at some point. That's not anything goes. That's only 2 things go, love of God and love of others.
There seems to be a lot of fear of the LGBTQ+ community. The thought seems to be that if we accept them, they are going to turn our kids gay and men are going to be walking around in makeup and dresses in broad daylight and we will be directly violating the Bible's instructions. First, what is a "dress" and who said that it was only for women? If I put on what Jesus wore and walked into a room and asked you what you'd call that piece of clothing on me, you'd look at me like I lost my mind and say, "Duh! A dress. Have you had a stroke?" Somehow, over history, the male powers that be decided that all the instructions given to women in the Bible meant they had to wear a certain type of clothing to satisfy all that humble and modest stuff. And speaking of that, if you really look at the instructions given for women in the Bible on a surface level, then men are the only ones who are allowed to braid their hair or wear gold or pearls since women were expressly forbidden from that but men weren't.
But on to the real meat of this issue. Being a gay man or a trans man or a drag queen or gender nonconforming in any way does not make you a child molester nor does it make you inherently sinful. If sin is not following the 2 great commandments, loving God and loving others as ourselves, we can hold members of the LGBTQ+ community up to the exact same standards that we all should have. Is listening to the call of the Holy Spirit and leaving your life behind to go to seminary and then devoting your life to God's perfect plan not a way to love God and draw closer to Him? Then why not let queer people do that? Would you really rather they be completely ostracized and only allowed on the outskirts, if at all, than allow them to love God that completely?
Is it sinful for a gay man to be a child molester? Yes. But it is also sinful for a straight man to be a child molester (even if he is a priest). This is something that people DO, not a way they were created and it breaks the commandment of loving others. Is it sinful for a man (gay, straight, bi, ace, anything) to wear a dress or makeup? I don't see how. A man can still love God in a dress, priests do it every day. A man can still love others like he'd want to be loved wearing a full face of makeup. Please don't conflate our call as Christians with societal norms.
This way is difficult because you have to be so much more careful. You have to be so much more considerate. You have to think about as many groups of people as you can before you speak or act. People who do this get called snowflakes or overly sensitive, but can't you see past that to what they are actually trying to do? If you have been a person who has been victimized by the incorrect Biblical interpretations or the Church or Christians or the government, you have empathy for other victims, even if their oppressor is different from yours. That's why all us "woke" kids are so "woke". I've had negative experiences and left the church because of my sexuality and my gender and so that makes me more empathetic to others who have been harmed in that way, but also in ways that I can't truly understand because I am white and cis-gendered. I may not understand it fully, but I can stand with those people. And isn't that exactly what Christians are called to do? Stand with the orphan and the widow? Stand with the poor and marginalized?
If you are a straight, white, cis-gendered person whose whole self lines up pretty well with surface level Biblical interpretation, I urge you to try to humanize the other. Look in that person's eyes and tell me you can exclude them from the kingdom of God for something they can't control or for how they like to dress or do their hair, for how they negate societal norms that don't negate the Christian call. When you are truly able to love someone else like yourself, you want to award them all the favors you've received from our culture and society. They have already been rewarded the favor of God, you just have to get out of their way so they can claim that birthright. Please put your pride aside, put your fear aside, put your surface level interpretation to the test, and make room for women and queer people at your table.
I'll give you an example before I move on. This week I was on a Zoom lesson series called Gender Justice JAM. This is was lead by people in the LGBTQ community. The primary facilitator asked us to drop in the chat where we were all from since we were joining from all over the country, so we did. And then he asked us to name the native peoples who had originally occupied this land. He did this in English, but had arranged for ASL, Spanish, and Spanish sign language interpreters to be present on the Zoom call. Because this man had experienced exclusion in one sense, he was more aware of ways others could be excluded and he took steps to show the love of God to these people by making ways for them that he would like made for him if he were in the same situation. That is something Christians should aspire to, not something they should mock.
Objection #3: Girl, you are on a slippery slope. If you start looking big picture and interpreting every story as allegory of some sort, where do you draw the line? If you start breaking everything down based on historical context, where do you draw the line?
This is probably the biggest issue, the scariest one, the one that could render all of Christianity a house of cards. I agree with you that it is scary to do that. If I think of all the Bible as an allegory or as a story to be mined to show me how better to love God and my neighbor and not as absolute fact, some of our most treasured beliefs can get moved from fact to religious fiction. My stance is that religious fiction isn't untrue, it has very real message for us, a deep and wide truth for all people. If Jesus could use parables, why can't God our Creator? So what if neither of our 2 distinct creation myths are factually true? It is still true that God created us, even if He used a big bang and evolution to do it. All that happens when you shift to this way of thinking is that you are able to see past the surface level of meaning into a deeper, more true, more beautiful meaning that is aligned with the only 2 commandments we have. You will have to give up what those creation myths have been used to say in the past (by men to keep men in power whether they want to examine that in their hearts or not, don't get that twisted for a single second) about gender and what is "normal" or "intended". By letting go of that, you are welcoming a whole other group into full participation in the kingdom of God and isn't that more important than anything else to you?
Let's now tackle the biggest problem this could cause for us Jesus followers: We have to swallow a whole lot of "facts" to be sure that Jesus was fully God and fully man and that He was the Messiah the Jewish people had been waiting for and the one we all should worship. Just to name a few:
Mary was a virgin and Jesus was immaculately conceived. BUT even so, Jesus had to be somehow from a very specific lineage from Joseph, the husband Mary didn't sleep with???? that was somehow recorded perfectly in a time when there wasn't exactly a medical records department at the local hospital
Mary and Joseph moved around to a whole bunch of places to fulfill every prophecy about all the different places the Messiah would be from
Jesus had to do a whole bunch of miracles and give His disciples those powers too
Jesus had to be killed and then rise from the dead
When you start looking at all the written records we have (not even gonna comment on common sense), a lot of this starts to break down. But so what? We know there is Something and we call it God. We had to come from Something, didn't we? Call it the Big Bang or call it God. Semantics. It doesn't matter if you think the creation myths in Genesis are actually factual true. They are true in that they reveal to us aspects of God that help us love Them. We know that Jesus existed. Who cares if His mom had her V card? He was very clearly a Son of God because He was able to deliver God's message so well. Who cares if the Holy Spirit came down in one specific room to make people talk in tongues so that people from every city in the entire world who all happened to be in one town at that exact time could understand it? All of that is lazy theology, all of that is using the Bible stories as ancient, static idols. The Holy Spirit is with us. We feel Her presence just like the wind. She wants to tell us something deeper, something wider, something infinitely harder to actually live out, but infinitely better for all people.
Is that scary? Yes. It still wakes me up in the middle of the night in some sort of loop of, well if that isn't factually true then this whole thing is one giant, very successful joke. But then I listen for the sound of the Holy Spirit descending. I feel Her hovering over me in the dark. I feel the knowledge of God saying, this is the only way it can make sense because this is the Truth. I feel the presence of my brother Jesus saying, take my hand Sister and come with me on the straight and narrow, even if you are a bit crooked. I feel the Holy Spirit whisper, I am here for you now and I will be here for you the next time you have doubts.
I am comforted. I am validated. I am cherished for my doubts and my flaws and my faith against all odds.
I am able to love because I am loved and that is my wish for all people.
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