4) On a related note, I have never seen single mothers, gay people, or anyone who was just a little bit different treated so badly as I have seen them treated in church. Judgmentalism is the besetting sin of the church, it is the main reason most people abandon Christianity entirely. This point I am absolutely passionate about because I've known too many people who didn't fit the mold, geeks who were judged and condemned for playing D&D (which I'm sorry, if you can separate fantasy from reality is generally harmless), friends who were told they were going to hell for being gay, girls treated like pariahs for getting pregnant in their teens, or worse, blamed for being raped because they weren't home where they should have been, and I get so mad because I know them now and they're wonderful people who completely abandoned their faith because of the way Christians treated them. I talk about my faith with them, and they're fine with my faith, but for their own part they want nothing to do with Christianity. They're atheist, agnostic, or Buddhist, because we have turned Christianity into something that is incompatible with those who don't measure up 100% of the time. I talk to these amazing people and all I can think about is the millstone reserved for those who turned the seeking children away. I don't care if a person is gay, pregnant out of wedlock, or geeky about things you don't get, Christianity is not incompatible with their lives and Christians need to stop treating these things like an affliction. At the very least remember we are called to love the unlovable, and trust me, there is really a lot to love in the people we've driven from the church.
3) Thinking for oneself is not encouraged in general, but particularly if you're a woman. I have literally sat in sermons where the pastor said that the trouble with women working outside the home is they start talking to other women and thinking for themselves. At fourteen I challenged my youth pastor when he said that baptism was basically pointless. I was respectful and gave theological background for my disagreement - I treated him like a fellow thinking person and for some reason assumed he would respond in kind. He generally ignored me, and the next week when I wasn't there told the rest of the youth group I was an uppity girl in rebellion and that they should have nothing to do with me. I can't tell you how many of my friends, people who question, not out of any divisive desires, but in good faith who have been mistreated - and generally they're women. Women are condescended to, manipulated, and behind their backs it is passed around that they are in rebellion or some other malicious untruth simply because they are dissatisfied with the pat answer or disagree with a theological point. Beyond this, in quite a few churches I've been to there is a low level but continuous demeaning of women. If you're not a girl, or are among the privileged few who are considered beyond reproach, so I don't expect you to understand, but if you're sensitive to it you begin to pick up on the undertones in sermons, that we shouldn't be listened to, in marriage or anywhere else, that having a body is effectively a sin, that we exist to be property. Even as teens, people listen to a serious sounding guy, they patronize girls, pat them on the head and send them on their way. And once you've been hurt, once someone has been blatant enough that you can't help but see their bias, you start to see it all around, deliberate or not.
2) I've sat in a lot of pews listening to pastors manipulate the bible to preach their agenda rather than Gods' and I've been down that road too many times. Because we're trying to learn we assume that our pastors have learned more, understand more, have more revealed to them an so we second guess our own judgment. I know better now, I've been hurt, misled too many times. I attend the Episcopal church sporadically. I'm a charismatic at heart so I find the services boring, but the only charismatic church in town has theology I disagree with enough that I've walked out so mad I was crying more than once. The Episcopal church tends to require at least a masters in theology for it's priests, which means the theology is sound enough I can relax. Because that's the thing, every time I sit in a new church I am tense, on guard, constantly listening for skewed theology or a misused bible verse because I don't trust Christians anymore. I don't trust them not to use the bible to manipulate, judge, or hurt me. I go to the Episcopal church, participate in the service, enjoy the message, but I get there a little late and leave a little early - I can't tell you the name of a single one of my fellow parishioners. I'm sure they're perfectly nice people, but I don't want to do the dance. I don't want to shake hands with a bunch of people who all pretend to be or think they are perfect, hoping to meet one who unbends enough to let me see they're human too. So I go to church occasionally, read whatever theological article or book pings my interest, and I talk about my faith with anyone who will listen. I tell them what I've learned about God, I tell them I'm so sorry that Christians have hurt them in the past but that God's not like that. I love God, I enjoy theology, I LOVE a good worship service, but I don't really enjoy church, and I no longer like or trust people just because they're christian. Most the time that doesn't bother me, but sometimes it makes me so upset because I know that the church should be my refuge, and instead it feels like a torture chamber.
1) Your God vs. mine: I'm not a resentful person by nature. Despite the fact that I have many problems with aspects of my religious upbringing there is only one thing that I genuinely resent. See through my teen years I struggled with God, with the inflexibility of the law and the concept of God that I had grown up knowing - the one who demanded unquestioning obedience, complete sacrifice of self (which often translates to loss of individuality), and the knowledge that my own inability to unquestioningly agree with what my spiritual elders told me meant that I would never really fit in with the 'good christian' ideal - in my own mental idiom, I would never be a good 'Grace girl'. I struggled with the concepts of predestination, omnipotence, and the generally accepted idea that a God who was 'willing that none should perish,' who in his omnipotence could see the length and breath of existence, would still create a world in which he knew the vast majority of his creation was already doomed to hell. I went to church, I prayed, and in my heart of hearts I wished that God wasn't real. I wished there wasn't a part of me filled with the absolute knowledge of my creator, because every thought hurt but I could no more stop thinking than stop being. I had to get away from the constant battering of dogma, to step away from fundamentalism before I could regain my footing. For two years after leaving home I attended church only sporadically - generally only worship services and the occasional prayer or special service at various charismatic churches in San Diego. I remember asking my best friend one time how she, the most insightful person I've ever known, never seemed to struggle with faith or the nature of God. Crystal told me that she remembered her mother crying out to God, struggling with feelings of inadequacy and worrying that God could never love her. She remembered just knowing absolutely that as much as Crystal loved her mother God loved her more and that what he wanted more than anything was for her to be happy. That was a revelation, and it is the one thing that I resent. I may have had bad experiences in church, but I generally recognize that despite how injured I might feel the people themselves are good people trying the best they can, and I can't be upset about that. What I resent is that it took until my twenties to truly hear the most fundamental message of all - that God loves me, wants what's best for me because he wants me to be happy. Twenty years of church, years and years of struggle because "God so loved the world" is always under emphasized in favor of telling people that they're wrong, they're not good enough, that God is waiting to punish them. Even now, years later this understanding blows my mind, it moves me to tears just writing about it. This concept opened my eyes, because it's easy to love a God who loves you for who you are. Even the terrible things in the world are evidence of his love, that he loved us as individuals enough to give us complete free will, the free will to screw up, to hurt ourselves and others, because God in his infinite understanding knows that without choice everything else is bondage and slavery and true love can never tolerate either. The shackles of law fell off and I was left with a doctrine of love, and I refuse to attend any church that preaches otherwise - which sadly limits my choices. The way I view God is so changed from the way I was brought up that I mentally consider them almost different entities. My God is not the God of my parents, and I wouldn't change that for the world, because my God brings me joy, comfort, and the unconditional love I need to truly have a personal relationship with my creator. I always confessed with my mouth and believed in my heart, but this is the way that God really saved me not only from sin but from religion as well.
3) Thinking for oneself is not encouraged in general, but particularly if you're a woman. I have literally sat in sermons where the pastor said that the trouble with women working outside the home is they start talking to other women and thinking for themselves. At fourteen I challenged my youth pastor when he said that baptism was basically pointless. I was respectful and gave theological background for my disagreement - I treated him like a fellow thinking person and for some reason assumed he would respond in kind. He generally ignored me, and the next week when I wasn't there told the rest of the youth group I was an uppity girl in rebellion and that they should have nothing to do with me. I can't tell you how many of my friends, people who question, not out of any divisive desires, but in good faith who have been mistreated - and generally they're women. Women are condescended to, manipulated, and behind their backs it is passed around that they are in rebellion or some other malicious untruth simply because they are dissatisfied with the pat answer or disagree with a theological point. Beyond this, in quite a few churches I've been to there is a low level but continuous demeaning of women. If you're not a girl, or are among the privileged few who are considered beyond reproach, so I don't expect you to understand, but if you're sensitive to it you begin to pick up on the undertones in sermons, that we shouldn't be listened to, in marriage or anywhere else, that having a body is effectively a sin, that we exist to be property. Even as teens, people listen to a serious sounding guy, they patronize girls, pat them on the head and send them on their way. And once you've been hurt, once someone has been blatant enough that you can't help but see their bias, you start to see it all around, deliberate or not.
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