Religion part one

I'm admittedly surprised not a lot of people have commented on my short note about religion from my post last night. That could be partially due to it being up for a whole 16 hours and people simply not reading it ("Augh, ANOTHER person thinks he should start a blog? Yeah, right!"). I will say it was up for a grand total of two minutes before I heard my roommate from across the room go, "Um. You're agnostic?"

...By the way, this roomie who I love dearly I'm sure will come up in stories later. I'll need to check with her if I ever want to post stories about her, as some of you know her. For the sake of this blog, we'll call her RC.

Side-note: RC is not just a random choice of letters. RC stands for Rainbow Connection. A long time ago, we talked about how she knows all sorts of gay men and she really should start pairing them up. We even decided that if all else fails in career goals, together we'd start a gay dating service called, naturally, The Rainbow Connection.

Side-side note: I sang "Rainbow Connection" a la Kermit the Frog for her birthday. She cried.

...Anyways...

If I'm being totally honest with myself, some of my questions about faith started permeating my mind back in high school, but I chose to not acknowledge them for fear of being seen as a "bad" Christian. Most of these questions, after all, could be met with the answer of, "Only God knows." 

Let it be known that for anyone outside the faith, that seems like such a cop-out answer, and even in the faith, it was hard for me to accept this.

I didn't dwell too much on the questioning I had in high school much, but college came along, and I faced a whole new set of challenges. Through my first couple years, I finally started to inch (okay, fine. POUR) out of the closet, and attending a Christian college didn't help me here. I'm not saying that I had this awful existence in college. I had (have) tons of friends who are incredibly supportive of me and my life, and I've even met many profs who are fully on board. What I mean here is that because I was both queer and Christian, suddenly I was that face to my friends. I was that mysterious queer person they never knew they knew. I was expected to know everything about every queer person everywhere, especially every queer Christian. Though I liked the spotlight, it became more and more overwhelming. I was only one person; I couldn't be the spokesperson for gay people everywhere.

I did meet some backlash too. I had friends who didn't want to associate much with me anymore. I had friends who simply couldn't deal with it. I had many teary arguments. None of these really happened so much the first year I came out, but since then, it's been a rougher journey. 

Prior to coming out, I spend a lot of time examining scripture, reading verses, studying historical situations, reading essays on both sides of the issue, watching movies, having endless conversations...and came to the conclusion it's okay to be both gay and Christian. It's much harder to convince others of this though. And frankly, some people simply do not want to have their worldviews challenged for fear of being wrong, so they cling on dearly to what they hold to be true and refuse to view anything else.

This never made a lot of sense to me. Doesn't God call Christians to love others and not judge--that it's up to Him to judge? This, along with other inconsistencies in the church ("Let's go change the world...by being comfortable in our own pews with our own people and never actually make any change!") led me to stop attending churches. Each time I was forced to attend was more comfortable than the last. It's hard to sit in a pew and smile when you know if the church really knew all about you, they'd judge you. They'd not be able to deal with you. That, if you weren't single, you couldn't bring your boyfriend/husband/lover to church. Of course there would be those who wouldn't care. I know conservative Christians who support marriage equality AND believe God ordains it. However, the majority of the members of any given church I was in would have hated me. This is hard to digest. After agreeing to play piano for the choir portion of a service at a friend's church, I literally stopped on the way home to buy a cigarillo and then smoke it to calm down. This is coming from someone who detests smoking.

Of course, not everyone reaches the same level of discomfort I did from churches. I readily admit I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I am much more easily affected by small matters than most people. Still. You try going to a place where your very existence is despised and judged and tell me you loved your time there.

So, though I was not attending church, I still considered myself a Christian. I could accomplish good in the world on my own, and I didn't need a church holding me back from that. I also could not have to worry about having alternative views like God loving the gays while receiving backlash. I could just be me.

But, soon, much of that changed. 

Sorry for the length of this post. While typing, I realized how much I really had to say. Plan on a part two tomorrow in which I actually go into my move from Christian to Agnostic.

-QV