Dionysus on a Bike

In my last entry, I wrote that I would post about the three types of reasons I left the evangelical* campus church I attended while in university—intellectual reasons, moral-political reasons, and reasons having to do with sexuality and lifestyle. I’ve decided to forgo that post and go a slightly different direction. You, the reader, can imagine what kinds of intellectual, moral/political, and lifestyle qualms I might have had with a conservative Calvinist/Baptist community, as I became more aware of the world and acquainted with a greater diversity of people.

Instead of dealing so much with abstractions, I want to relate several anecdotes from that time in my life when I was immersed in conservative evangelical community and culture that led to my eventually leaving. At that point in my life, I got around almost exclusively by car, and my car was the family’s hand-me-down beat up old Chevy station wagon that I would eventually drive into the ground. I covered that car in bumper stickers. Most of the stickers were for bands or had vague Christian-ese platitudes, but I had a bumper sticker that didn’t quite fit with the others, though at the time I was too naive to realize it. One of those bumper stickers simply said “Fight Racism.” It’s a fine sentiment, but in the form of a bumper sticker, it is purely performative, a virtue signal to let everyone around you know where you stand. Even though I failed to see the emptiness of expressing it that way, I had no idea that anyone in my life could or would object to the sentiment itself. I was wrong. As I mentioned last post, I worked at a Christian bookstore part-time while I was a student, and the owner pulled me aside one day and told me that I should lose the bumper sticker because I didn’t want to give people “the wrong idea.” I knew immediately what he meant; being against racism was a “liberal” sentiment, and even though, yes, racism is wrong, to express that it is wrong publicly like that might make people think I had less than conservative views in the political realm. That wasn’t the image this bookstore with its conservative owner and clientele wanted to project.

What could be wrong with hating racism? Yes, I was conservative on lots of things at the time, but not so conservative that I didn’t want to publicly denounce bigotry, prejudice, and inequality. Expressing that, however, broke the conformity to an image of correct values I was expected to have while representing this Christian business. The particular version of Christianity this bookstore embodied communicated to me that conformity was required in other ways as well. I was told that I could not have painted fingernails as a man while on the clock or dress any other way than a “respectable” Christian should. Having a dress code for a retail job is not unique to the Evangelical world, but I have never had a job that policed my appearance so much. I was told to shave, get a hair cut, tuck in my shirt, and “clean-up” there in ways I never have by anyone other than my mother before a wedding. This family-owned Christian business’s demand for conformity didn’t just extend to me their employee. I was told to find excuses to turn away Mormon business or the business of any religion or ideology that did not conform to Christianity. We would reluctantly special-order a Catholic Bible, but a Koran or a book of Mormon were unacceptable, even if someone brought their own copy to be engraved, a service we were happy to provide for a Bible or a religiously neutral book.

This is just one business owned by one family, so one shouldn’t leap to judgments about the whole of Evangelicalism based solely on my experiences there. The evangelical church I was a part of was a campus organization made up of mostly students. There were some former students too who continued to make that their church community even after graduating. Finally, there was the church leadership, the pastor and his family and a few people close around him who did the preaching, the organizing, and set the tone for doctrine and practice. We were not part of a denomination per se; we were part of a loose association of like-minded Evangelical, non-denominational churches centered around university campuses throughout the country. Though they had no denominational affiliation to ground their doctrine and beliefs, they were basically Calvinist Baptist without the name, squarely in the evangelical tradition where the emphasis is on a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ based on conversion with a believer baptism by immersion to follow and a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God over all things.

Like most churches in conservative Evangelicalism, every question of importance had an answer in the Bible. I mention this church’s Calvinism because every difficult question about how to understand the Bible received a response about how God is in charge and God gets to do what God wants. There was no nuance, no mystery, no tension. God was Lord over all creation, and if God wanted horrible things to happen to people, that was God’s prerogative. No questioning allowed. We could express how difficult it might be for us to have faith, but what we had faith in, what God was like, was beyond question. It was clear that anything that called into question their particular picture of God was better squashed and set aside. Conformity of thought was required.

Conformity was required in other areas as well. If I missed a worship service, a small group meeting, a prayer group, a leadership meeting, or any other sort of official church event, there were questions about my faith and my commitment to the church. When I tried to date, I was told to get permission from my pastor first and that I probably wasn’t ready to date. When I “fell into sin,” I was expected to confess to one of the other members of the church. Guilt was prevalent and everywhere. It was palpable in how people expressed themselves that they were unworthy and miserable. This included sexual sin, and the pressure to talk about the intimate details of my sexual life with church leadership creeps me out to this day. All of this, while my sincere questions about the problem of evil and other tough theological nuts were answered with nothing but “What does the Bible say?” and “You have to trust that God is in charge.”

I started attending this church less and less frequently as its presence in my life became more and more oppressive. As I spent time with people who were not part of Evangelicalism, I started to meet queer people, leftists, and people of other religions and no religion at all. I realized that the line I had been told over and over again about queer sexuality, that it was opposed by scripture and was against God’s plan for humanity, was flat out a lie. I realized there were actual calls for justice and the liberation of the oppressed outside the church, not in it. And most importantly for me at the time, I realized that kind, generous, hospitable people of all sorts would accept me for me without demanding conformity of belief, religion, or particular “biblical” ideology. It really didn’t matter how I dressed or what bumper stickers I put on my car. And telling people that they weren’t saved or that they were going to hell was really one of the most unkind things I could do, not something I was called to do by the creator of the universe.

The last straw at this church, when I decided to fully cut ties, came after a conversation with my small group leader and “mentor.” I had lots of questions, and a lot of them were coming from the stuff I was reading for my philosophy major, ideas in Nietzsche and the existentialists and sophisticated, modern versions of the problem of evil. Eventually after another round of those questions, my small group leader said “Reading non-Christian philosophy is a temptation from Satan. You should avoid it.” That was it. I was done. Telling someone to avoid opposing viewpoints and arguments was a red flag, and I knew it. Telling people that their questioning was a lack of faith was a red flag too. I left that community and never looked back.

It wasn’t long before I stopped identifying as a Christian altogether. I immersed myself in the philosophy they told me was from Satan and enjoyed one of the most fruitful periods of personal and intellectual discovery and liberation I have ever known. I began to see that the real calls for peace and justice for the oppressed were not coming from the conservative world or the Evangelical Fundamentalist world. The calls for a better world were coming from people who read widely, thought critically and openly, and knew that the Bible didn’t have every answer. Most importantly, I learned that diversity and difference were not simply to be tolerated but embraced. It is a good thing that there are multiple religions and philosophies and worldviews, and it is wrong to want to force others to conform to my particular view of the world.

There is a paradox there to be sure. If we make embracing difference a value, then we have to reject that which inhibits difference and tries to oppress it. This means that there is one difference I must oppose, and that is oppression. The next years after leaving the church were a quest for three things: 1. A voracious hunger to learn as much about the world and how to think about the world as I could; this hunger led me to study philosophy in graduate school. 2. A struggle to understand how best to oppose oppression and fight for justice; this struggle led me to embrace a leftist political philosophy that rejected capitalism and the colonial imperialism it motivated. 3. How to express myself as an individual in an authentic way. I had to find myself again after losing myself for those formative years of religiously imposed conformity.

I was 20 years old when this happened, two years into five years of undergraduate study. The world was an open place for the first time, and I was hungry to embrace it. And embrace it, I did. Through my studies and my decision to embrace the diversity of people around me, I was discovering new and exciting things every day, many of which I had sheltered myself from in communities based on conformity and uniformity. All of this discovery awakened in me a desire to see as much of the world as I could and experience as much of it as I could. These twin desires, a desire to express myself authentically and a desire to see and experience as much of the world as I could, would guide the decisions and path that I would take for the next 20 years. Along with those desires was a knowledge about the sources and means of oppression in our society, and with that knowledge came a third desire, a desire to fight. The tension between the light and joyful desires of self-discovery and world experience and the sad and weighty desire to fight oppression would hang heavy on me during that time as well. At first, the joy of discovery would consume as I met people who would show me how to love and live with joy again.

*I use the term “evangelical” in its American cultural context. Other movements within Christianity self-describe as “evangelical” that have nothing to do with the Conservative Fundamentalism of the American variety. I take issue with the term being used to describe what I use it to describe if only because it is anything but “good news.”