Before my dad died, my family was never really religious per se. Indeed, before he died I can't remember ever actually going to church. But lurking in the background somewhere, all the time, was warm and fuzzy Charlie Brown Christmas Christianity. God loves us all, so be nice to everybody. That sort of thing.
When dad died, my mom and I got a bit more spiritual, as will happen in dark times. We went to church now and then, but never joined anywhere, and it petered out. This would have been the early 1990s. When I went to college in 2000, I got interested again. Probably as much out of loneliness and homesickness as anything else. Instead of going to church, though, I would up falling in with *ahem* a Christian student group. As memory serves, I ran into them at one of those student life fairs, and decided to go to a meeting.
They were very, very nice. And it was great how accepted I felt. I had friends! As time went on, though, things started happening that didn't sit so well. Once, one of the guys in the group explained to me that on Judgment Day, when Jesus returned, all the saved souls (and you'd better believe he was planning on being one) would ride with Him on white wing'd horses to smite the unrighteous in, essentially, a world-ending, supernatural cavalry charge. The Jesus I'd grown up with was a hippie, this guy's Jesus was Patton.
Satan in his tank and me in mine.
And then they started in on me about "confessing with my mouth." Now, bear in mind that this is the first I'd ever heard of such a thing. Growing up, from my parents and even all the churches we'd ever been to, you were a Christian if you "believed in" or "trusted in" God. You didn't really have to do anything besides be a good person and believe, and you didn't even necessarily have to believe! Good people went to heaven, be they nonbelievers, Jews, Muslims, whatever. Now these people were telling me that the difference between salvation and damnation was two sentences. And that I couldn't abide.
That summer I went home, telling no one of my evangelical adventures, thinking a lot about religion and its place in my life. I wanted to believe in something (if I'm being honest, I still do), but I didn't want to believe in a Jesus who apparently cared more for leading the Jehovah's 1st Household Pegasus Hussars on maneuvers than the fate of the poor and downtrodden.
One day at work that summer, it was slow and two of my coworkers were talking. The subject of gay people came up. At this time, I self-identified as a Republican, though a socially-liberal one. I was timid, too, and let them talk, but eventually let it be known that I disagreed with their thesis, which was that gay people were weird and bad and immoral and going the hell. The one guy was merely an idiot, the other guy was a college-educated evangelical. I asked him, "Well what about 'judge not lest ye be judged'?"
He looked at me, almost with pity, said "Actually, that's misused," and turned back to my other coworker to continue their homophobic riffing.
And that was the end. As I think back, that was the day, the minute, the instant, when I lost respect for and interest in Christianity. Because I will tell you something: in the King James Version of the Bible, that passage reads "Judge not, that ye be not judged." And in the New International Version: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." Now, nearly 400 years separate those translations, and I'm no biblical scholar, but I know my way around the English language, and that's clear. And don't forget: this is Jesus Christ Himself talking, not some moldy Old Testament 3rd cousin-twice-removed of Abraham. The sheer unmitigated gall required assert that line does not mean what it appears to mean disgusted me, repelled me.
I have never forgotten that moment, and I don't believe I ever will. Evangelicals have no principles except those that they make up as they go along, to suit the situation they're in and support the things they wish to believe. And it is ironic, I think, that an evangelical, who is supposed to want nothing more than to convert me, drove me off.
Since then, most of my friends have been agnostics, atheists, apatheists, humanists, Unitarians, lapsed Christians and Jews, and they're all kinder, more decent and more Christian, than any evangelical I've ever met.
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