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living without inspiration: the Bible and Me

When I was attending Pensacola Christian College, one of the guest speakers that came in for the mandatory four-day-a-week chapel service castigated Christians for not respecting the Bible enough. He compared us to Muslims in order to illustrate how we were failing, explaining that Muslims handle the Qur’an with extreme care, propriety, and piousness. Depending on the interpretation, only those who are formally purified can touch the mus-haf (the printed Qur’an in the original Arabic), and it’s commonly taught that it should always be kept in a safe, clean place. The chapel speaker accused us of being negligent in our reverence for God’s Holy Word and said that most of us probably kept our Bibles on the floor in our classes, or right there on the glossy concrete in chapel.

He was right. Every day I stepped over Bibles that littered the floor on my way to my chapel seat. However, I felt so smug that day because I had been taught to properly respect the Bible. My Bible had never touched the floor. If I had to set it down somewhere– even on a desk– it was always on top of the stack. Even though I took notes in the margins, I was careful to keep them neat and clean. When the bonded leather inevitably started to deteriorate I twinged with guilt at not making sure it had lasted longer. I had been taught to see this book as holy.

And it wasn’t just the physical copy I revered, of course. The Bible was God-breathed, inspired, inerrant. I thought of it in terms that bordered on idol worship. It was how I ordered my life and all my decisions, it was sharper than any sword, it was the lens through which I viewed all information.

Over time, of course, my views have … shifted. You can trace that shift here, even. Toward the beginning of my journey here I said things like “[the Gospels] pass every single test for historical accuracy with flying colors,” which in retrospect is a trifle embarrassing at how naïve that sounds. Six months later I had reevaluated some things, and had arrived firmly at “I don’t know what it means for the Bible to be a divine book, for it to be inspired.” By early in the next year I was wrestling with my conceptualization of the Bible as “a magic book,” and in another six months I found myself barely treading water. In the middle of last year I was asking questions like “if Old Testament characters could be catastrophically wrong in their views, why can’t New Testament writers also be wrong?”

I feel like I’m stuck wandering around the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time, and just when I get something untwisted I have to go back and twist it all up again, all while running around making sure a giant hand of despair and frustration doesn’t come whooshing out of the sky to smash me. Look at my bookshelf and you’ll see a theme– The Bible Tells Me So, The Sins of Scripture, Jesus Interrupted, Whose Bible Is It?, Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes, What the Bible Really Teaches … apparently I’ve had a years-long interest in trying to figure out what the hell the Bible actually is.

Turns out the fundamentalists were right. Once you give up their concept of inerrancy and really start examining the Bible, a lot of things fall apart on you. In a way I walked through the gate of hell and ignored the sign that read “abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

At this point I’ve given up on concepts like biblical inspiration or inerrancy, even broadly defined. I’ve been through the looking glass, and I can’t really go back. Once I opened the door to concepts like Paul was a man of his time and that means he was a misogynist and very wrong about some things, “biblical inspiration” became a frustrating idea to deal with. Because, at that point, even if Paul was “inspired,” it’s so loose a thing it’s ultimately unhelpful. I cannot believe that “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man” could ever have been anything but sexist, and I especially abhor the idea that a misogynistic cultural reality from millennia ago should have any effect on how I’m “permitted” to use my abilities.

Paul and Peter and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John were human, and they were bound to get some things wrong. Maybe Paul actually was talking about “loving, committed, same-sex relationships” in Romans 1– it no longer follows for me that means that being gay and falling in love and getting married are sinful because of what some dead guy thought about buttsex.

I no longer accept the Bible as a moral authority. It endorses genocide at multiple points, has laws that treat menstruation as a sin, has prophets that revel in horrific violence and infanticide, views a rapist as “a man after God’s own heart,” includes misogynistic commands to church leadership, tells a man he was wrong for wanting to escape slavery, uses ethnic slurs …  It’s filled to the brim with people doing and saying unpleasant things and getting patted on the back for it– either by the Bible itself, or by theologians for the last two thousand years.

A good story for this moment is when Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac. I’ve discarded the evangelical narrative about it and embraced the Reformed Judaic perspective that Abraham failed his test. I’m allowed to listen to what appears to come from God and reject it, based on my conscience and my belief that God is love. Like Jacob, who became Israel, I get to wrestle with God, to demand things from them. Like Abraham– who learned better, fortunately– I get to argue with them about how I think what they’ve just said is wrong. Like the Syro-Phoenician woman, I fully expect to win a debate with Jesus.

All of this doesn’t mean that I see the Bible as worthless– as the above should show, far from it. I love the Bible now more than I ever have. I love that I can be confused by it, enraged at it, and challenged by it. I love that I am a member of the same faith that brought doubters, thinkers, tricksters, liars, poets, and lovers together to create a sacred text filled with problems and contradictions and arguments it has with itself. James essentially spent an entire letter sub-tweeting Paul: “not going to name names, guys, but faith without works is dead *coughPaulcough*.”

I don’t have to waste time justifying why God commanded genocide– because I’m convinced they didn’t. I don’t have to come up with convoluted reasons for why imprecatory prayers are ethical. I’m perfectly free to ignore that Paul told a man to return to a life of slavery.

I can look at the Bible and, when necessary, say fuck that nonsense.

It’s opened up a whole new world for me. I get to rediscover everything. Did Jesus mean “you should spend all your time witnessing” when he asked the Apostles to be “fishers of men,” or by making a literary reference was he calling them to the task of restoring justice and mercy to Israel? If the Holy Spirit– who is always referred to in the feminine– was the one who visited Mary when she became pregnant, doesn’t that make God just a teensy bit gay? I can read Ruth’s speech to Naomi– the one we use in marriage ceremonies today– and think “yup. That woman is bi.”

The Bible is mine now. I can fully own what it is, and what it means to me. I can turn it upside down and inside out, create headcanons about it, and make perhaps wild, conjecturous, far-flung connections that strain credulity if I want to. I’m finally throwing off the heavy yoke of the evangelical view of the Bible, and embracing the notion that when Jesus said “you have heard it said, but I tell you that was wrong,” he was talking about the Bible.

Photo by Dwight Stone
February 17, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 85-106

Thankfully, there’s no horrifying story opening Chapter Four of Radical, “The Multiplying Community.” This is one of the chapters I remember clearly from the last time I read this book because it contains an argument I’ve employed with church leaders fairly consistently over the last few years. I don’t agree with David on much– and there is, of course, things I disagree with him on even here– but the basic argument of this chapter makes sense to me.

David makes the case that the Great Commission isn’t about simply converting as many people as possible, but that our primary focus should be on the “baptism” and “teaching” aspect of Jesus’ command– and I agree with him on that:

Making disciples is not an easy process. It is trying. It is messy. It is slow, tedious, even painful at times. It is all these things because it is relational. Jesus has not given us an effortless step-by-step formula for impacting nations for his glory. He has given us people, and he has said “Live for them. Love them, serve them, and lead them” … (93).

I don’t know how ubiquitous “witnessing” or “doorknocking” is, but in the area I grew up in the practice was commonplace, as was street preaching. Every Thursday night we would canvas a neighborhood, trying to hit as many homes as possible. We would do our best to introduce the “Roman’s Road” (Handsome had never even heard of that, which shocked me, who’d had it memorized since she was eleven) and lead them through the “Sinner’s Prayer.” At the end of the evening we would report back on how many soul’s we’d managed to save. Once a month the teenagers would take the lead on the whole shebang, which led to some of my more humiliating moments.

The last church we attended was pretty numbers-focused, as well. The number of people who attended each service was a relied-upon metric and was promoted pretty heavily from the stage as well as through the pastoral staff. How “big” they’d gotten and how many people they’d convinced to attend a small group were pretty much the only standard for success we heard from anyone. When Handsome and I brought up the problems with relying on this metric– notably, that simply attending service once a week isn’t a good way to understand how people are growing to become more like Christ, which we understood as one of the main goals of this whole “Church” business– they were always dismissed. We don’t just see numbers, we see people, and that would be the only answer we got out of anyone. That exact sentence, usually.

David thinks all of that is ridiculous, and so do I. My blog is one of the ways I try to fulfill the “Great Commission,” but it’s not just the writing– it’s engaging with all of you. Getting to know you. I know all my regular commenters, and you pick up on things over time: faith struggles, how it feels to parent children, frustrations with partners or parents. If you write a blog, I’ve probably read a bit of it. Many of you I follow your blogs now and read them consistently. For all my lurkers– you’re in my thoughts, too. I care about you. I care about the way my words might affect you.

At the GCN conference I met with several people who are regular readers, but rarely or never comment, and it was amazing getting to see your face and meet you offline. To hear your stories. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: you are why I do this.

That seems to be what David is getting at with this chapter of Radical. I’m still confused on all of what he means by “sharing the Gospel”– on page 91 he says that it’s how people “come to faith in Christ,” but then he immediately turns right and around and starts talking about a married couple who help men and women in Tanzania start businesses. He leans on conversion-style rhetoric, and then he tells a story about how they opened a booth in Jackson Square for the primary purpose of sharing “Christ’s work on the cross” (95), but that ultimately ends up with them feeding the homeless there every few days … which results in a lot of those homeless people attending his church, a fact he doesn’t fail to mention (96).

This is one of the things that bothers me about David’s stance, but it’s hardly unique to him. It seems like he sees “The Gospel” as being the act of evangelizing and conversion, but that one uses the tool of “building a relationship with a person by helping them and loving them” as a means to get there.

My small group/book club/house church (we’re not exactly what we are anymore) is going through the Gospel of Mark at the moment, and the thing that is leaping out to me every week is that it talks about Jesus spreading the gospel … but the only thing he ever does is heal people and cast out demons and shout at the lawyers about how “God made the Sabbath for man, not man for the Sabbath” and “damn right I’m going to heal this person on the Sabbath, now you sit down and shut the hell up.”

Yes. I paraphrase Jesus like that. It might be sacrilegious, but I find it delightful. Anyway, Jesus’ version of sharing the gospel seems to not have much to do with conversion, but with loving people and helping them.

I do have one pretty serious problem with this chapter, though, and in my opinion it’s a fairly egregious failing. He bases his entire argument on his interpretation of Jesus’ ministry: that Jesus’s style of “discipleship” was to focus exclusively on the Apostles (88-90). His support of that comes from John 17, supposedly:

What is shocking is that when Jesus summarizes his work on earth, he doesn’t start reliving all the great sermons he preached and all the people who came to listen to him … Instead he repeatedly talks about the small group of men God had given him out of the world. They [the Apostles] were the work God had given to him. They were, quite literally, his life.

When you read through John 17, you cannot help but sense the intensity of the affection Jesus had for this band of disciples and the gravity of the investment he had made in their lives. (88-89)

Except he doesn’t actually want us to “read through John 17.” If you read the entire chapter, the second half of it starts off with “I do not pray for them alone.” I also disagree with the argument that John 17 is about only the Apostles. The attention the Apostles receive in the Gospels isn’t insignificant, but those books also heavily emphasize the fact that there were many people that Jesus considered his “disciples,” and it definitely included women (like Mary and Martha, or the women who went to the Tomb, just for starters). David erases the women who were utterly essential to the success of Jesus’ ministry (89, 93), and he downplays anyone who wasn’t a member of the Twelve.

In a way he comes by it honestly. Most of Christian history has done the same thing.

But, it disturbs me how willing David is to completely ignore anything Jesus did or said that doesn’t jive well with his argument. He opened Radical with the claim that we’ve all twisted Jesus into something he isn’t, but I’ll repeat myself: David is twisting Jesus, too.

February 16, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 61-84

Interestingly, David starts off this chapter with another horrifying story.

In it, he relates how a pastor of a church he was speaking at responded to his to ministry in inner-city New Orleans and impoverished areas overseas:

David, I think it’s great you are going to those places. But if you ask me, I would just as soon God annihilate all those people and send them to hell. (62)

On this one example, David and I are in complete agreement. I would say “what the fuck is this shit,” but David is considerably more indirect than I am. He simply says “Wow” (63). After that reaction, though, our views of the situation diverge … as one would probably expect at this point in my Radical review. David looks at this pastor’s antagonistic and violent attitude toward global missions and argues that every Christian is commanded by the Great Commission to be a global missionary, because it says “to all nations.”

I look at that pastor’s violent approach to inner city communities and developing nations as one drenched with white supremacy and an uncritical adoption of American imperialism, colonization, and exceptionalism, along with a core-deep belief in capitalism as a moral system.

The problem is, David shares some of those problems.

He sees Christianity as an American export.

This perspective is, depending, both right and wrong. David has inherited a view of Christianity that’s very much entrenched in the western European articulation of it. All of that is exacerbated by British and American missionary movements and the indelible affect they’ve had on how American Christianity views itself. I don’t know about your experience, but in mine there’s nothing more pious than reading missionary biographies.

What those biographies failed to convey to anyone I knew was that American and British missionary efforts frequently went hand-in-hand with colonization. Many missionaries were more focused on westernizing people than they were in converting them (Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is an excellent depiction of this that pissed me off the first time I read it, back when I was still a fundamentalist). There are echoes of that in other situations, too– America and Canada have a sordid past with essentially kidnapping First Nation children and abusively forcing our culture onto them. This oppressive act was frequently justified to white people as “Christianizing” them (for a horrifying look into that point of view, there’s Janette Oke’s Drums of Change).

In another sense, modern American evangelicals are still engaged in the same exact thing. If you’d like to know more about that, God Loves Uganda (which you can stream on Netflix) talks about how our evangelical leaders have spent a lot of time and money trying to make countries like Uganda just as homophobic as us. For more on that, I highly recommend this piece by Bisi Alimi.

But, in a very serious sense, he’s also wrong. From his point of view, the United States doesn’t count as a mission field (“having a heart for the United States” is a “smoke screen” for lazy people, 75)– and woven all through chapter four is this concept that we need to think “globally” about the Gospel which, according to him, means taking our version of Christianity to other countries.

What he fails to recognize is that many other nations have deep Christian roots– but they don’t look like American Christianity, so he dismisses them. For example, there are Kurdish Christians with a religious tradition reaching back to the fifth century. Then there’s Jordan, which has one of the oldest Christian communities anywhere in the world, but were one of the targets of the Christian crusades. Ethiopian Christian history stretches back centuries– to long before they built a monastery in the sixth century.

When people like David conceptualize “the Christian tradition,” they’re most likely not including the traditions of Jordan, Ethiopia, Turkey, or India. They don’t look like American evangelicals, so they’re dismissed as “not actually followers of Christ” (76).

His view of “developing” nations is racist.

This chapter is not the first time this has come up– in every chapter up to now he’s spent a great deal of time making sure we understand how woebegone and beggared other countries are. People living in garbage pits, people without access to clean water, people who struggle to find food.

Except many people in American don’t have clean water. Ten people have died in Flint because of poisoned water, and many children there will grow up with permanent brain damage. But it’s not just Flint– St. Joseph has had unclean water for almost a decade (along with many other counties all over the South). Many children go hungry on snow days because the only place they can get breakfast or lunch is at school. America is the seventh wealthiest nation, but we’re barely capable of providing adequate healthcare to our population– more women die from pregnancy and childbirth in America than in any other developed nation.

David has this concept of evangelicalism being beset by concerns with “first world problems” like padded pews and projectors, but is blinded by American exceptionalism and a shallow, “single-story” view of Africa and Asia (which, just to be clear, are continents, not countries. Looking at you, Jen Hatmaker, with your “African” this and your “African” that). America, while wealthy, isn’t that spectacular, and other nations aren’t all shanty towns and open sewage. Just do an image search for Abuja or Vientiane or Ulaanbaatar.

He sees wealth as God’s blessing, and therefore as a reflection of God’s glory.

The principle argument of this chapter is that God created everything in order to glorify himself. People worshiping God is the “final, ultimate, all-consuming, glorious, guaranteed, overwhelmingly global purpose of God in Scripture. This is the great why of God.” He exists to be glorified, we exist to glorify. End of story. Then we get a letter from a church member who had recently come back from a short-term missions trip to Guatemala, which he uses to conclude the chapter:

After spending a week around precious childen who eat a small cup of porridge a day, the question I have come back to Birmingham asking God is why he has blessed me when others have so little. And this is what God has shown me:

“I have blessed you for my glory. Not so you will have a comfortable life with a big house and a nice car. Not so you can spend lots of money on vacations, education, or clothing. Those aren’t bad things, but I’ve blessed you so that the nations will know me and see my glory.”

… That is why God has given me income and education and resources. God saves me so that that nations will know him. He blesses me so that all the earth will see his glory! (84)

“Blessings” is a shorthand in evangelicalism for “money.” God gave this woman money instead of children who are starving because giving her money glorifies him. She had the money to go to Guatemala on a likely ineffective and ultimately harmful short-term trip and that means God was glorified dontcha know!

Yeah. Sure. That makes sense.

The problem is that David has spent this entire chapter quite literally railing against the concept that some people are “called” to be missionaries while those who aren’t are supposed to do what they can to financially support the missionary effort. And then he concludes his chapter with someone basically doing exactly that.

I’m confused.

February 8, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 23-42

And we’re jumping right back into the Radical review. After I did the introduction and first chapter, I tweeted something about how the subtitle should have been “I take hyperbole literally,” and after reading through the second chapter again (titled “Too Hungry for Words: Discovering the Truth and Beauty of the Gospel”), I’ve realized it’s not just hyperbole. It’s everything. David takes everything as literally as possible.

I have the tendency to interpret things overly literally, especially when I’m tired, and even I can recognize sarcasm, hyperbole, metaphor, and the distinctions between exposition and poetry. Like, look at this:

Jesus told us everyone who sins is a slave to sin, and Paul went so far as to say that we are captive to the devil himself. (31)

Honestly, fellow, if you have to premise something with “they even went so far as to say” maybe, just maybe, you should take a step back and ask yourself—if they’re really going so far, do they mean it literally?

David also has a pretty serious problem with taking his own understanding of Scripture and elevating it to something pretty close to Scripture itself, and that’s me being generous. There’s this:

We are each born with an evil, God-hating heart. Genesis 8:21 says that every inclination of man’s heart is evil from childhood … (30)

And this:

Why is [Jesus] in such agony and pain [at Gethsemane]? The answer is not because he is afraid of the crucifixion. He is not trembling because of what the Roman soldiers are about to do to him … (34-35).

Three things: first of all, if the verse you’re about to quote says “the imaginations of a man’s heart are evil from his youth,” running around making the claim that means we’re all God-haters from the moment we’re born doesn’t make much sense. Second, while it’s entirely likely that Jesus was also worried about whatever is in the Cup he’s asking to be passed, it seems dismissive and uncompassionate to point-blank declare that Jesus wasn’t afraid of the crucifixion. Jesus was human like as we are. Assuming he couldn’t possibly be afraid of the coming crucifixion (35) seems just a touch Arian to me.

The third and last is that David is a pretty committed Calvinist, and he’s refusing to even acknowledge that there are other approaches to Christian theology. According to him, he lays awake at night terrified for all the people who aren’t an avowed Calvinist like he is. To him, everyone who isn’t a Calvinist is completely and utterly wrong and we will die in hell.

He does this sort of thing throughout the book, and it never ceases to be frustrating. I’ve never been impressed by men who are this arrogant.

The second biggest problem I have with Radical he also introduces in this chapter: asceticism. If you’re not familiar with asceticism, it’s typically a religious attempt to abstain from indulgences or pleasure. There are varying degrees of this, ranging from things like Lent to wearing a cilice and whipping yourself. In my case, it showed up in things like my Sunday school teacher telling me to wear uncomfortable shoes in order to “mortify the flesh.”

In many respects, Radical is a modern argument for Christian asceticism. If David wasn’t so virulently Protestant he’d probably have realized he’s really just recycling St. Francis of Assisi and stopped writing the book. Here, he questions music, padded chairs, air conditioning, decorations, and a bit later on, even sermons (27, 40).

Why all of this bothers me is that it has gnostic overtones. When we buy into a harsh divide between our souls and our bodies, it’s easy to take some passages from the Bible and make them be about all bodily impulses as being evil and corrupted. There’s a long tradition in Christianity of sexual abstinence—in fact, it’s possible that at least one of the early church fathers castrated himself (Origen, according to Eusebius). Even if they didn’t go as far as castration, you can see the leftover movement in the modern Catholic requirement for priests to abstain from sex and marriage.

The problem is, this leaves out things like other Scripture passages (like Paul’s instruction that we sing psalms and hymns in Ephesians), and ignores the fact that the Christian religion is one very much concerned with embodiment. Jesus is God made flesh, God with us, Immanuel. The two sacraments we all agree on—the Eucharist and Baptism—are fundamentally about recognizing that our bodies and our souls are inseparably the same, and that spiritual acts are physical ones and vice versa.

In my opinion, arguments for asceticism—whatever religious or secular place they come from—always ignore this reality, and arguments that ignore reality can’t be successful. I’m especially sensitive to this as a chronic pain sufferer—take away indoor heating and padded chairs and I’m unable to come to your church service. Make church services last six to twelve hours like what he talks about here and I will not be able to fully participate in your church.

The third and last significant problem with this chapter is that he’s very much of the “Christians talk about how God is love too much, we need to focus on how God is wrathful and hateful and a holy judge” persuasion. Like here:

Yes, God is a loving Father, but he is also a wrathful Judge … And in some sense, God also hates sinners … On psalmist said to God, “The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong.” (29)

Leaving aside for the moment that the psalms are poetry and therefore treating an outpouring of a psalmist’s emotions as literal factual truth about the nature of God themself is more than a little ridiculous, let’s take a crack at his “God is also hateful and wrathful” assertion. He positions their wrath as being in tension with their love, as though God’s love and wrath are opposites. I’d like to posit that they are not opposites, but that one results from the other. God is wrathful because they are loving.

This springs from my understanding of the context—if you examine almost every time that God is being portrayed as wrathful, it is in response to someone being oppressive. In almost every case it’s the Israelites doing things like refusing to observe the Year of Jubilee, like in Amos. Supposedly God gave them every opportunity not to turn into an oppressive Empire that preferred the wealthy and powerful over the poor and needy, and they took every opportunity to become precisely that. And when that happens, the prophets and the psalmists spend a lot of time condemning it, writing about how they believe God feels about it, too. According to them, God’s usually pretty upset and for good reason.

During Jesus’ ministry, it seems he spent most of his time addressing the injustices he saw. He fed the hungry, healed the sick, lifted up the poor in spirit. The times he’s shown as angry are in reaction to the elite using their positions to abuse those below them—like the moneychangers in the temple, or the Pharisees giving their followers a “back-breaking burden.” Jesus loved, and because he loved, he grew wrathful when he saw oppression and injustice.

But, according to David, God is wrathful, and because someone thousands of years ago sinned, we’re all born completely and totally evil – “you are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, and in your present state you are not even able to see that you need life” (32)—and Jesus had to bear all the fury and wrath “stored up from the beginning of the world” (35) in order for God to be able to come down from his mountain again (33) and tolerate being around us.

Just … is God actually that petty?

There are a few things in this chapter that I could almost agree with him on, like his rejection of a “superstitious sinner’s prayer” (37). I’ve even compared the sinner’s prayer to a magical incantation, so obviously this idea is something we both dislike. But we almost immediately diverge from each other, because he’s a Calvinist and I’m not. He’s still viewing Christianity in terms of saved and unsaved and I’ve moved past that to being a Christian means following Christ.

Maybe somewhere in this book we’ll fall more in step with each other. I doubt it.

January 27, 2016 by
Theology

thoughts prompted by the GCN conference

I wish there was a way to communicate how busy it has been for the past few months, and how wonderful and exhausting, all together at once. Between visiting family for Thanksgiving and Christmas, business travel, buying a house, packing, moving, unpacking, painting, and all the other little odds and ends that fall along with that … it’s been a whirlwind.

Handsome and I did buy a townhome, and I am sitting in my brand-spanking new office, with my brand-spanking new bookshelves (the past few months have seen a steady buildup of book piles around my old office), and I’m thrilled to pieces. There is sunlight in my home in winter. I have windows. I’m hoping this will help with the seasonal affective disorder, but February will be the true test of that. February is really the cruelest month.

We’re mostly unpacked—technically everything is out of boxes, there’s just a pile of things on my dining table left to be hung or sold or donated. So far it’s all the tiny little things that add up that make moving exhausting. Not the rent-the-truck-have-all-your-friends-carry-boxes day, but the week and a half after of trying to find 22x20x1 HEPA filters that don’t seem to exist for your brand-spanking-new furnace.

Update on something slightly more relevant to you readers: thanks to my Patrons and the many of you who helped on top of that, I was able to attend the Gay Christian Network Conference a few weeks ago, and present on Bi the Way: What’s Next for Bisexuality in the Church with Eliel Cruz-Lopez and Sarah Moon.

The panel was spectacular, and I even got to meet and hang out with a few of you, which was the highlight of the conference for me. It was mind-blowingly weird and fun to be live-tweeted, y’all. People were quoting the things I, Eliel, and Sarah were saying, and a few folks came up at the end and said we’d started them thinking or even changed their minds on a few things. That was amazing. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from the panel, but at the end when people were coming up and hugging me and we all laughed and cried together … I felt like I was standing on holy ground.

What happened for me at the conference happens so rarely that it both feeds my soul and enrages me all at the same time. Thursday night we sang a song about God’s love for us, and listening to all those people in the room I knew that they meant—really meant—that God loved all of us, that God loved me. It’s infuriating that feeling the love of God from my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ is so rare, but it was nice to experience regardless.

Every time I feel like maybe I should just say “screw it,” and give up on being a Christian, something like going to the GCN conference happens. I’m still on the fence about a lot of things, and my faith is just as mixed-up and confused as ever, but the few moments in my life like GCN’s conference tells me that remaining a Christian is still a worthy endeavor. Maybe it won’t be that way forever, but it’s true for at least today.

Other things of note at the conference: Broderick Greer preached Thursday night. We need more theology from survivors, from the margins, as Broderick put it, because “objective” theology from the Ivory Towers of White Supremacy and Misogyny is … well, to put it bluntly, faith without works is dead, and there’s nothing more dead to me than a bunch of old straight cisgender white men talking about God as if they have the sole right to Themself. They stay locked up there and refuse to come down to where people are dying because of their so-called “objective” theologies. It’s “faith” without boots on.

One of the workshops I attended was given by a former fundamentalist, and the description in the pamphlet said it would link fundamentalism and idolatry– y’know me, I exclaimed ooo! and went. I believe he was quoting someone when he gave this line: “fundamentalists don’t believe. They know,” which he followed up with “ever heard ‘I know that I know that I know that I’m saved!’?” and I think I gasped aloud, because he was right, and it helped clarify something for me that I’ve been struggling with a ton over the past few months.

The reality that I don’t know, that, in truth, it is impossible to know whether or not god/the supernatural/a supreme being/deity exists, and in fact, believing in him/they/her anyway is probably the essence of faith … well, it’s driving me nuts. I want to know. I want to look at my world and feel reasonably confident in “yes, a supernatural being has a redemptive plan for their creation and I am a participant in that plan” or “no, there is no divine spirit guiding anything, ever, we’re all a mathematical miracle and then we die the end.” However, what’s been hitting me in the gut every time I try to think about it is that there is no way to know, and that’s sort of the whole point behind faith.

I used to think that atheists claiming that Christians accepting the existence of God on “faith” meant we were believing in something without any evidence was a load of bunk … but now I think they’re right. I don’t have any “evidence” or “proof.”

I’m not ok with that yet, but I’m getting there. I’m becoming ok that choosing to believe in the Christian Trinity is no more or less ridiculous than believing in the Greek pantheon or the ancient Mesopotamian goddesses. It’s faith. I don’t know, I believe that a Triune God exists, and that they love me.

But, moving on. Perspectives embraced by organizations like GCN (who represents both Side A and Side B positions), that it’s important for all of us to live in the tension of disagreement over important ideas, are always challenging for me. Part of that is my ISTJ-ness—I want to be right, dammit—but another part of it is that I look at platforms like Side B and think “oh hell no.” If you’re LGBT and have chosen Side B for yourself, more power to you. You do you. But the fact that the most commonly held position among straight evangelical Christians is Side B makes me light on fire a little bit.

And Allyson Robinson’s address is still making me think. Some of what she said, things like “the culture war is over,” I flat-out disagree with especially as a bisexual person who isn’t even widely accepted in the LGBT community and we’ve got a freaking letter. But other things, like encouraging us not to use mockery and derision and snippiness and trolling when interacting with bigots … steps on my toes a mite. But, it reminds me of a truth I’ve been hearing echoed in several places, from Audre Lorde to bell hooks to Brian Zahnd in Beauty Will Save the World: you cannot use the tools of Empire to remove that Empire from power.

In many ways, that was the trouble with second-wave feminism: they decided to use patriarchy’s tools to try to tear down the patriarchy. They decided to adopt the same metrics that patriarchy’s Empire used to measure success: jobs, wealth, political power, capital.

The Christian LGBT community is, in many ways, a triumph of love over hate. But it’s hard, it’s hard not to hate, especially recently. A deep, miry, black, thick and oozing place inside of me roils when I heard Trump say things like “I could shoot someone in the middle of the street and I wouldn’t lose any votes.” When I hear Falwell, Jr. say “we need to end those Muslims,” it’s hard not to choke on my hatred. I want to scream and cry and break things.

Anger is appropriate, even rage. But hatred is not. When Jesus said that hatred is like murdering someone in your heart … he was right, and it’s not ok. I’m not entirely sure how to stop, but I know that I have to be able to. I cannot use the tools and weapons of Empire.

I’m not entirely sure what that all looks like, or what all I think about everything I’ve just spilled out here, but I’m working through it one day at a time. If you’d like to be as encouraged and challenged and confused as I was for three days, maybe you can go the GCN conference next year. It’s in Pittsburg.

I don’t quite have internet at the new house yet (it’ll be here on Thursday), but I am back to a regular blogging schedule again. Thanks for all of your patience and support through the past two months.

January 25, 2016 by
Theology

“Radical” review: 1-22

The first time I heard about David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, I was in my second year of graduate school. It had been out for over a year at that point, and a colleague I worked with recommended it to me after a conversation we’d had about the corruption and greed common in American evangelicalism. This book had left a lasting impression on my friend, but I wasn’t as struck by it as he was.

Partly that’s due to the fact that I didn’t grow up in American evangelicalism, so David’s condemnations weren’t directed at me or my religious culture. He was describing a slightly different sort of radicalization than the one I’d grown up with, but, in the end, I realized I’d spent most of my life trying to live by a fundamentalist application of the same interpretations, the same principles– and I’d already figured out that, honestly, they’re just not realistic, healthy, practical, or even a way of living that reflects the whole breadth of Scripture.

However, it is a massively popular book. It’s acquired over thirty thousand ratings on Goodreads, thirteen hundred on Amazon, over four hundred on Barnes and Noble, over three hundred on Christianbook, and most most of these reviews are positive, averaging at 4.5/5 stars. Many of the Christian writers, speakers, and theologians I pay attention to have recommended Radical at some point– Francis Chan and Jonathan Merrit wrote blurbs for the book, and Rachel Held Evans has promoted it.

It’s one of the few books that seem to have bridged the audience gap between conservative and progressive Christians, and I hadn’t seen anyone critique it with any depth until I started reading the 1- and 2-star reviews on Goodreads. After all, shouldn’t someone like me be jumping all over this particular bandwagon? He talks about Jesus’ teaching for us to sell everything that we have and give to the poor– isn’t that exactly what I’ve spent a significant amount of time shouting about?

But, like I said above, I don’t think David’s approach and interpretation incorporates the natural balance that appears not just in the epistles, but in the Gospels, as well. And I think that the interpretation he advocates could be harmful to many Christians.

* * *

The first chapter, titled “Someone Worth Losing Everything For,” functions as a long introduction to the themes David will be arguing for. He opens with the contrasting experiences that prompted him to examine some of the assumptions broadly held in American Christianity (concepts like being “blessed by God” is equal to being wealthy, although he doesn’t articulate it that plainly): his visit to persecuted churches and the Sunday he became a pastor of a megachurch. His conclusion:

We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves. (7)

Abandoning ourselves is one of the themes of Radical, and as you can probably imagine it’s one of the things that sent up a red flag for me on this re-read. While I do agree with David to an extent about what’s inherent in Jesus’ call to follow him, the phrase abandoning ourselves can lead down a dark and unhealthy path. There is beauty and Christlikeness in self-sacrifice, in service to others, but while I think it’s terribly important to actively love others sacrificially, I have learned that there are limits. Even Jesus took breaks. Even Jesus withdrew and took care of himself when he needed to.

But the idea of abandonment doesn’t necessarily include the need for boundaries and the acknowledgment of realistic limitations, and as someone with chronic and debilitating physical and mental illnesses, the kind of lifestyle David says all Christians should live isn’t possible for me. People like me don’t seem to exist in David’s (coughwhite-and-able-bodiedcough) world.

While I can agree with his criticisms of American Christian greed (like his observation on one church’s new 23 million dollar building and another church’s gift of $5,000 for refugees featured on the same magazine cover), I read statements like:

We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with. (13)

 … and I can’t help but think but you’re twisting him too, David. He spends this chapter highlighting the times Jesus made statements like “sell everything that you have” and “put down your nets and follow me” or “hate your father and mother”– and yet he completely ignored people like Mary, Martha, and Lazarus who didn’t sell everything they had, who didn’t abandon their livelihoods or home or family and were still considered Jesus’ disciples. Or the numerous people (mostly women) behind the scenes who gave Jesus food and money and a place to sleep for the night.

The most significant problem I have with this chapter though, appears here:

First, from the outset you need to commit to believe whatever Jesus says. As a Christian, it would be a grave mistake to come to Jesus and say, “Let me hear what you have to say, and then I’ll decide whether or not I like it.” If you approach Jesus this way, you will never truly hear what he has to say. You have to say yes to the words of Jesus before you even hear them. (20)

That doesn’t make any sort of sense, and isn’t something Jesus required of his followers– not even his apostles, for crying out loud. Thomas demanded hard, physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection, and according to the Gospels, Jesus gave it to him. He heard “the words of Jesus” as communicated to him by the others, and said “no, I need more than that.”

What David is asking his readers to do is foolhardy and ridiculous. I think I understand the sentiment driving his words here– he’s attempting to argue that following Jesus is a package deal and we can’t pick and choose (which is really ironic right about now since it’s what he’s spent this chapter doing). However, telling fellow Christians to uncritically imbibe his interpretation of Jesus’ teachings — which is the only thing this book can possibly be — is asking Christians to forget the warnings about following Paul or Apollos or Peter.

He’s setting us up. He’s putting the idea in place that if you disagree with him, David Platt, the youngest megachurch pastor in America, you are not really committed to Jesus. Men who put themselves on pedestals like this– however unconsciously they might be doing it– should make us all skeptical, if not outright suspicious.

December 14, 2015 by
Theology

On “Different” Churches: You’re Actually Not

A little while ago I reached out to my followers on Twitter to ask if they’d stopped attending church and why. I was flooded with replies over the next few days, and many of the answers I received were heart-shattering. In the midst of that conversation, the Twitter account for Highlands Fellowship church jumped in, inviting me and another woman to their church because they were “different,” and linking both of us to a promotional video.

I decided to give this Highlands Fellowship PR person the benefit of the doubt and watch the thing, titled “What Three Words Would You Use to Describe Highlands Fellowship?” It made me chuckle because the church Handsome and I left last year asked us to be a part of a similar video, where they asked us the exact same question. We decided to bet on which words would appear– I chose “open” and “friendly,” he went with “loving” and “non-judgmental.” We laughed so hard because lordy did we nail it.

I also ended up e-mailing back a forth a couple times with Tim– the PR guy– which I won’t go into, but our private communication really didn’t go much further than what he’d said publicly: that Highlands Fellowship was supposedly different because “most churches are tradition and religion. We are relationship with Jesus and love.”

Which … that statement continually boggles me. It’s definitely far from the first time I’ve heard this sentiment– my mother’s license plate bracket reads “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord,” one of my favorite jokes as a middle-schooler was “want a taste of religion? Lick a witch,” and then there’s that “Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus” spoken word poem that went viral way back in 2012. This whole “we’re about having a relationship with Jesus, not just following a religion” thing is the exact and total opposite of “different.”

I’ve talked about my problems with this bait-and-switch approach to the “it’s not a religion it’s a relationship” concept; it’s impossible to argue that all the bedrock elements of Christianity– things like the Eucharist, baptism, or conversion– are anything except religious, and trying to ignore that is ridiculous.

But I’ve seen these attempts by (usually) non-denominational, mainstream evangelical churches to distance themselves from “all those other churches” for the bulk of my life, and it loses me every time because they’re not different at all.

If you look at the “what we believe” section of pretty much any non-denominational church, you’re going to find an overwhelming amount of homogeneity. They’ll probably pay some sort of lipservice to “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity” and then go on to affirm all the ways evangelicalism looks exactly like fundamentalism (inerrancy of Scripture, penal substitutionary atonement theory, eternal conscious torment model of Hell…) and many will turn out to basically be “Secret Baptists” with emphasis placed on Baptism by Immersion as the First Act of Obedience.

I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last six years with the church staff of these Different Churches™, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that what they mean by “different” is that they’re still sexist, queerphobic, and racist, they’re just going to hide it. They’ll take their bigotry, slap a coat of Nice and Non-Threatening paint on top of it, and continue on with business as usual. There’s a big show going on about how “open” and “loving” they are, but absolutely nothing will have changed. Unfortunately, all these Different Churches™ have learned is that being honest about what they believe makes people justifiably call them bigots and that makes them feel like they may not be Nice Christians™.

But, Different Church™, I’m not going to leave you hanging; if you actually want to be different, here’s my thoughts.

Be Serious about “In Non-Essentials, Liberty”

What could this look like? I think it looks like having a diverse array of speakers (people of color, women, queer people) who routinely introduce topics like the different ways of understanding Atonement theory, from christus victor to moral exemplar, or who introduce your congregation to Open Theism, or who talk about the alternatives to Inherited Sin like Pelagianism, or the extremely varied ways people see the afterlife, from the Eternal Conscious Torment model to Annihilationism.

Stop Maintaining the Oppressive Status Quo

A pertinent quote here is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” The baseline of our American culture is racist, queerphobic, ableist, and misogynistic; systematic oppression is the lifeblood of our economy and our religion has trafficked in it for centuries. Most Different Churches™ ignore this reality, skirting around it, preferring to think of these things– if, indeed, they think of them at all– as something that happened Before, but isn’t a problem now.

The problem is that our unexamined bigotry means that we spend every day reinforcing it. If you’re not actively fighting against these systems, then you’re just flowing along with the rest of the river, one drop of silent oppression among millions of others. You need to confront sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and racism wherever and whenever it turns up in your church.

Actually Bother to Try Being like Jesus

If you look at the actions Jesus took during his earthly ministry, you’ll find a pretty amazing pattern: he did things. Lots of things. Physical things. He healed people. He fed people. Yes, he taught, but the bulk of what he did was form relationships with people who weren’t like him, who didn’t agree with him, who even actively opposed his work and did something to make an actual, real, physical change in people’s lives. Take the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats seriously and go out and do something. Worship services and preaching are great, but as a ministry they look barely anything like what Jesus did. Learn to actually take care of each other– if someone in your congregation doesn’t have all their needs met, who are having trouble buying groceries or paying rent, then you are absolutely not doing your job as a church, end of story.

—

I get why you want to be “different.” I get why you feel the need to try to put some distance between you and the people who’ve given evangelicalism such a hateful reputation, why you want to put so much importance on “relationship” and “love.” I applaud that, I do– but you’ll never be truly different unless you honestly examine what got American evangelicalism here in the first place.

Photo by Idibri
November 6, 2015 by
Theology

“Lies Women Believe” review: 243-281

Y’all should celebrate at the end of this post because we did it! We finished the Lies Women Believe review– this is the last week. Speaking of which, if you have any ideas for which book I should do next, I’m open to hearing them. Next week will be a break of sorts, since I’ll be reviewing Man Enough: How Jesus Redefines Manhood by Nate Pyle, which I’m excited about sharing with you.

But, let’s get this over with, shall we?

The last section of the book– “Walking in the Truth”– is divided into two chapters. The first one, “Countering Lies with the Truth,” explicates the process that Christian women are supposed to use when they encounter one of Satan’s lies, something that Nancy has not explicitly spelled out for us yet. Unfortunately, this process isn’t even remotely innocuous. It’s poison.

We have seen that the progression toward bondage begins when we listen to Satan’s lies … Once we permit Satan’s lies to gain an entrance into our our minds, the progressions continues as we dwell on those lies. If we do not immediately reject deceptive ways of thinking, but allow ourselves to entertain them in our minds, we will begin to believe them. (244)

What this does is make it impossible for women to evaluate what they’re being told by Nancy and other conservative Christians. If they’re exposed to a new idea– an idea they haven’t heard in full before, say like a biblically-based argument in favor of marriage equality– they are required to immediately reject it before they could even begin to give a new idea the engagement and attention it might deserve. Nancy is point-blank telling us that a knee-jerk dismissal is the only possible reaction to anything they’ve been told is wrong, and if they don’t, they will believe it.

That last bit is especially pernicious. It is possible to fully hear out an argument, fully investigate it, and still conclude that you don’t agree with its premises or conclusions. But conservative Christians can’t risk anyone going through a process of listening and engaging, because much of that culture is based on smoke and mirrors that won’t stand up to honest examination.

For the length of this book, Nancy has never really explained what she thinks “The Truth” is– she just sort of assumes that we get it, and it is likely that many of her readers don’t need to be told what it is, since “The Truth” is this nebulous and yet somehow self-evident idea that everyone just intuitively gets.

However, this chapter makes it clear what Nancy means by it: the Truth is Bible verses taken out of context and layered with conservative evangelical interpretations that function as adages for Christians. When she says we’re supposed to counter Satan’s lies with “The Truth,” she means we’re supposed to quote Bible verses to ourselves (246-47). However, like many other evangelicals, she’s incapable of admitting that it’s not that simple, that these verses come loaded with the way conservative Christians have been applying them (sometimes extraordinarily badly) for the last fifty years. Because, of course, they hold to the “plain meaning of Scripture” and deny that, in fact, no such thing exists.

Nancy rounds out this chapter with a personal story on how she herself overcome a series of “lies,” and how she used the Truth to eventually forgive a person who had wronged her.

I knew I could not wait until I felt like forgiving– that I had to choose to obey God, and that my emotions would follow sooner or later. There on my knees, with my emotions still battling, I finally waved the white flag of surrender. (249)

Reading this, it suddenly hit me why I’ve had a problem with conservative Christian definitions of “forgiveness,” and it’s because this model of forgiveness is just gaslight yourself into ignoring your feelings that a particular person is unsafe. That’s what it takes to “restore relationships” in many Christian circles: someone does something wrong to you, they “seek forgiveness,” and you are obligated to let it go and continue exposing yourself to someone with a demonstrated willingness to hurt you regardless of what your instincts say.

The last chapter is a rehash of all the things Nancy’s already said, so I won’t go over them again. The “Resources” section recommends the now-defunct Exodus International, the book A Full Quiver, child-rearing books that advocate abuse like Shepherding a Child’s Heart, and offers no resources for sexual abuse victims that are widely recommended by professionals (not even The Wounded Heart).

Final conclusion on Lies Women Believe: it teaches concepts that can and does result in murdered women, recommends resources that advocate child abuse, and expressly forbids women from seeking other avenues of help. Every copy should be burned and Moody should issue an apology for ever publishing it.

October 12, 2015 by
Theology

the not-so-ridiculous reasons people leave church

Every once in a while, someone I know on Facebook will share a joke or a meme that makes me grit my teeth because it makes me feel dismissed. Most recently it was this one:

10 reasons

I’m sure we’ve all seen these sorts of things before, or heard something similar from a pulpit. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a pastor talk about “some bitty that got her feelings hurt because ‘the pastor didn’t shake my hand!’” I’d be rolling in money. These “jokes” have always made me wonder if I was really just that out of touch– am I missing some huge exodus from church because the pews are too hard?

So, I reached out to a few groups, posting this meme and asking if they’d stopped attending church for one of the listed reasons. I also posed a similar question on Twitter:

The responses I got back were heartbreaking. They shattered me all over again because they echoed the pain I felt on being forced to realize that church is not a safe place. I used to finish that sentence with “for me,” but sometimes, I drop the modifier. I know it’s possible for people to find a safe haven in church even though they’ve been hurt by it before, but I don’t think it’s overly dramatic to say those people are finding safe places in spite of American church culture.

The reasons I got back from people fell under a few significant headings, which are in no particular order below:

The constant homophobia and mistreatment of queer people.

For some it was because a friend or family member was excommunicated for their orientation; for many others it was because they themselves were queer and were demonized by their church. In my own case, I was constantly correcting the pastoral staff at my last church for misgendering the trans people who attended, but they outright refused to listen.

Political figures, ballot measures, laws, and political ideologies were openly supported from the pulpit.

Frequently associated with this was the not-so-implicit expectation that everyone in the church be a conservative Republican. I’m not a fan of any politics being preached from the pulpit, conservative or liberal, but in America the dominant narrative in our churches is conservative. Tied into all of this is the common belief in American Exceptionalism and nationalism– that American patriotism is a part of being a Christian.

The church protected abusers.

This is the one that really broke me. I was flooded with stories of child sexual abusers being given leadership positions and subsequently using their power to attack more children. There were hair-raising instances of church leadership point-blank lying to members asking about the safety of a convicted sex offender who went on to rape multiple women in the church. I heard about pastors being shuttled around denominations where they would continue to assault new victims. One person recounted a story of how a child was sexually assaulted by one of the Sunday school teachers, and while the child was denounced from the pulpit, the teacher escaped any consequences. This should never happen, but it does, on a level that feels almost routine.

The church refused to accommodate, understand, or show empathy to those with disabilities.

Most often I heard this from people who have autism, or are the parents of children with autism. Children with autism, or a sensory impairment of some kind, especially suffer in church, and the reactions of church members was to shame and ostracize the parents of those “spoiled rotten brats.” I know that, for myself, I couldn’t participate in church service because there was nothing for someone who wasn’t able-bodied to do. One person said that their allergic reaction to perfumes was treated like a joke.

Women are treated as less than men.

This was the biggest reason why we left our last church. They wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, and refused to even consider the idea that silence in the face of oppression is wrong. Many people talked about abusive relationship dynamics being endorsed from the pulpit or in private counseling sessions, of blatant misogyny in the sermons every Sunday, of being refused to use their talents and gifts to serve because of their gender.

The church did not care about the community.

This was one of the more repeated reasons, and I know it was something that annoyed me about the last church I attended. There was plenty of money for bulletins and pens and donuts and coffee and giving away flat-screen TVs and putting on lavish Christmas spectacles, but less than 10% of the budget was dedicated to helping either church members or the community. How many churches have I been in that had a coffee shop in the lobby but it had never occurred to them to have a soup kitchen?

They had experienced spiritual abuse.

Many couldn’t experience a church service without experiencing flashbacks and panic attacks. I’ve had to leave many a service because of a trigger. For those of us who have experienced Religious Trauma Syndrome, we’re more aware of the ways that pastors can abuse their authority. The first red flag I got at my last church was that the pastor was completely unaccountable to anyone. Supposedly the staff was in place to help keep him in check, but they were far more interested in defending his terrible behavior than they were in addressing it. For a long time I thought I was only reacting to ghosts from my past, but over time I realized that wasn’t it. I was reacting to my past being repeated. For many who shared their stories with me, this was often the case. They recognized the red flags and couldn’t stay.

~~~

In doing the research for this post I googled “stupid reasons why people leave the church,” and, sadly, I wasn’t disappointed by what turned up. Among the 24 million results there was “7 Really Dumb Reasons to Leave a Church,” “5 Stupid Reasons People Leave the Church,” and “3 Stupid Reasons Millennials are Leaving Churches.” I read through maybe twenty different articles on the subject, and I realized that many of these pieces are actually including the list I’ve given above. Except, to these people, it’s described as “being offended,” or “disagreeing with the pastor,” or “they want so-called freedom” or “their feelings got hurt.”

It’s not that the people who make these memes or write these posts are unaware of the reasons I gave here, it’s that they don’t think these reasons are legitimate. The unending putrid tide of misogyny and homophobia? Just us “being offended.” Thinking that nationalism should not be a part of Christianity? We’re just “disagreeing with the pastor,” (which, in the meme above was given as “reading a book makes me more of an expert than the experts”). Try to explain to a staff member that what the pastor just said was narcissistic or abusive and we just “got our feelings hurt.”

They look at people like me, like the hundreds of people who shared their experiences with me, and they see “7 Stupid Reasons to Quit Church” instead of listening to the pain and horror in our voices.

Photo by Phil Roeder
October 9, 2015 by
Theology

I am crucified: chronic illness in Christian culture

[content note: menstruation]

I’ve talked about being diagnosed with PCOS and dealing with that on top of other chronic illnesses like fibromyalgia, and if you’ve been reading for a while and are the sort to notice patterns, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I tend to disappear for a few days every month. I used to feel guilty about that, but, over time, I figured out that I didn’t have to. I realized that you, lovely readers, are some pretty amazing people who aren’t sitting behind your computers clicking refresh every MWF. If I put a post up, great– if not, well, you get that I’m a person and sometimes Life is a Real Thing that Happens.

What has taken me a lot longer to realize is that it’s ok to take care of myself.

Technically, my periods only feel like I’m going to die. Chances are pretty good that no matter how much pain I’m in, and how much moving around makes me want to scream, I’m not really doing anything to hurt myself if try to stand up and walk around. For years I muscled through the pain: I showed up to work, I went to class, I fed myself.

For the past few years, though, I haven’t had those sorts of obligations. I work from home. I can cook food ahead for the week and Handsome warms it up and brings it to me (usually a fantastic recipe I have for sweet potato and roasted pepper bisque). If I don’t have to get out of bed and move around … I don’t. In some ways, this has been a little more of a struggle mentally than dragging my heavily-medicated self into work. During that time, I often feel weak, useless- a waste. I joke sometimes that I feel like “an oozing amorphous blob that cries.”

But I made a sort of a breakthrough this last period. Going to the bathroom on my period is always … an adventure. I grit my teeth and scream through it, and then have to face the Mt. Everest of getting back into bed. Up until last week, even if Handsome were home I would force myself to walk to the bed, shouting something like “Never give up! Never surrender!” in my head.

never give up

I had linked my ability to “muscle through the pain” with some sort of moral quality. If I could force myself to deal with the agony, then that somehow made me a good person who wasn’t “giving up” or “giving into the flesh.” But, last week, I went to the bathroom, and then I did what, in retrospect, is only logical: I crawled back to bed on my hands and knees. If Handsome was home, I waited for him to come help me walk doubled-over, leaning on him so I didn’t have to use my abs. I’ve let him do that for me in the past, but this time, when we got to the bed, I let him lift me into the bed– another thing that hurts a lot, but another one of those things I felt that I had to do in order not to be “giving in.”

Accepting help, accepting my limitations, is something I haven’t been able to do very well, and it’s an ongoing thing. In many ways American culture reinforces this message with all its talk about “no pain, no gain” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” but Christian culture adds another layer. We call it “dying to self” or “crucifying our flesh,” and it forces a nightmare onto people with chronic illness.

I’ve had a few conversations about this topic recently, and it affects a lot of people. When I was teaching classes at Liberty, I would receive a notification about the students in my class who had some form of learning accommodations. Very often, these students would later approach me to let me know that they “didn’t need to use them.” The first few times this happened, I let them not use the accommodations. Over time, though, I realized that these students really did need them, but felt like a failure of a student if they did. I started not giving them an option. If they showed up in my class on test days, I sent them to the testing center where their test was so they could be free to take their test in a distraction-free, no-time-restraints environment.

Another friend is going through a lot of health problems at the moment, and she was worried about calling into work sick, even though she had an incredibly legitimate reason. She was afraid that her boss would see her as flaky– and while that absolutely can happen to people with chronic illness, I’ve experienced it first hand– I knew her boss has seen her show up to work during times when many other people would have taken sick leave. In encouraging her, I mentioned that “most regular people don’t think that crucifying yourself is an ideal.”

That’s really been the crux of it, for me: I was taught that I was to crucify myself, and they weren’t being entirely metaphorical. Self-martyrdom is considered one of the best virtues out there in Christian culture. I should “count my chronic illness all joy” and be thankful that God had given me a thorn in the flesh. If I could push through the pain, then I was doing something bordering on holy.

It’s amazing how many different ways Christian culture teaches self-flagellation. It’s sad that I’ve had to take so many years unlearning it. Slowly, it’s getting easier for me to not see my limitations as a weakness, but as a neutral trait. Having pain does not make me a bad person. Needing help does not make me morally weak.

[update on the hacking: I finally figured out what was going on: Someone hijacked my domain name for illegal BitTorrent download spots. The e-mail and RSS feed problem was a side-effect of that, as they are automatically sent out when “new content” is added, regardless of whether or not that content is authored by an authorized admin. I’m keeping a very watchful eye and working very closely with Flywheel to get this resolved as soon as possible. I’m so sorry you all are being affected by this.]

Photo by Eliezer Borges
September 23, 2015 by