Good news

California lifted the ban on gay marriage, which I think is fantastic.  This has been one of the serious frontiers for the Evangelical culture wars, and I have to admit that I see every little victory like this as a defeat for the Evangelical political agenda.  Why do people of this ilk want to impose their own views on everyone else?  I have to admit, I find this very perplexing.  I am not at all interested in telling other people that they can’t have an abortion, can’t get married, should not have sex.  It baffles me why this particular group (Evangelicals) is so keen on impressing their own philosophies onto others who need not share their beliefs.  Certainly there must be something in the “missionary spirit” of certain enthusiastic Christian groups that causes them to believe that spreading their way of life is not only a desirable, but a necessary part of their worldview.  It really bothers me, in the same way that I bristle over the notion of Prohibition in the US in the 1920s and 1930s.  The analogy is an interesting one and similar to some arguments in favor of prostitution–the “evil” behavior goes underground, is not safe for many because it is not regulated and becomes extra super duper tantalizing such that otherwise rational humans crave it.  You have then this culture of secrecy and fear that dominates.  And I don’t get it.  The free will of humans is that they do things they want to do.  The basic premise of Evangelical Christianity has in some ways diminished into a set of rules for people to follow.  (My tongue-in-cheek references to commandments 11-79 comes in this context, my parents grew up in the era of “Christians don’t dance or go to movies”).  Which is all fine until you think that somehow your rules are so fundamental that you try to impose them on other people.

One of the most disappointing encounters I have had in recent weeks was with a Catholic “bioethicist” who gave a talk and then was available for small group discussion afterwards.  I left the discussion realizing that the meaning of the word “ethics” had totally escaped him, and he had misplaced “morals” for “ethics”–a common but unfortunate mistake.  Ethics is concerned with the greater good and achieving an optimized balance of this.  More on this subject soon, I’ve been quite riled ever since this particular encounter but have not had time to write a well-constructed and researched post on the subject.  Regardless, the issue here is morals and the attempt to impose your own moral judgments on others.  

I digress a bit, but I really do wonder.  Why is it that these Evangelicals feel the need to impose their views on others?  What exactly are they trying to achieve?  A world that is “safe” from things that they find distasteful?  State-mandated sequestration of their own children to prevent them from hearing about sex, gay love, unplanned pregnancy?  Exactly what good to they think it will do the world to be rid of these things, when their persistence in culture demonstrates their common-ness?  Humans come in a variety of flavors, pardon my expression.  We sit across the full range of the Kinsey scale and some logical combination of this and the normal distribution would suggest that most of us are in the middle.  If people want to form stable, legal partnerships with people they love, that is their business.  Casual marriage and cheap divorce are far greater threats to the institution of marriage than gay partnerships.  Full stop.

 

What sealed the deal

The “best” Christians that I knew were my grandparents.  They read the Bible in its entirety every year.  My grandmother became very upset if someone ate anything without praying and giving thanks.  They were active in their church to the point of beatification, and affected the lives of many people.  I am having a hard time trying to capture their spirit and their faith as I write this, so perhaps I won’t even try, but trust me they were inspirational.

They died in a car crash.  

One very bad night that lives with me forever, two people who meant the most to me in this human world gone forever.  No matter how much time elapses, the raw pain of this ordeal does not seem to decrease. 

My life has never been the same.  In some ways, it was the best thing that could have happened to me, which sounds odd and certainly twisted.  They were my best friends on earth–a 60 year age difference did not matter at all.  As soon as I got my own car aged 16, I started driving the 60 miles to visit them more often.  I brought all my puppy-love boyfriends to meet them.  They served a unique purpose in my upbringing–my parents were pretty unstable and frankly unsuited for the task at hand, so my grandparents were in some ways more like my parents.  

When they died, my parents became more religious.  When they died, I walked away from Christianity.

When they died, I learned how to live.  The cliche is to live like each day was your last, and that I really believe and I feel that I learned it the hard way.  No regrets, no qualms, embrace this opportunity we have been given.  Now I live enthusiastically and encourage others to do so because the alternative is the place that I come from.  I used to be frightened of so many things.  Of flying, of strangers, of walking around alone at night.  I have learned to embrace the fear as part of the sensation.  Recklessness is bad, but overly cautious behavior is equally diabolical.

The best Christians I knew died a horrific death and left behind a huge mess.  Although for me, the mess has been the most beautiful thing I could imagine.  It was this even that catalyzed my getting out of an abusive marriage and embarking on life with a new spirit.  Without such a shake-up I would likely still be where I was, or dead myself as I sank lower and lower into depression.  

Music saved me in some ways.  They loved music and our shared passion carried me forward.  Gardening helped too, they were farmers in the early days and my tending to my plants also felt reverential.

But it was also ironically enough the death of my beloved and most admired Christians that probably at least a little bit caused me to question Christianity.   And not in the manner of “if God could let them die like that how can we believe?” but more generally in the sense of questioning everything when the senseless takes place.  I don’t blame God directly for what happened, but I do see a random, human element in the world that did not appear to me before.  And I don’t feel the need to attribute all, good and bad, to God.

I had odd premonitions that someone close to me would die in a car accident, although in my childhood dreams it was my father, not my grandparents.  I was very upset when a plane would crash, that being similar, and I was oddly distracted by the death of princess Diana even though at the time I had never stood on English soil.  The element of sudden-ness, of surprise, was a constant fear and theme in my life.

When your worst nightmare takes place in the flesh, and is worse than you actually feared, then you learn to move on.  You find solace in the fact that you are still alive, and so are many people around you.  You reassure yourself that your grandparents knew how much you loved them even if you missed their last phone call before their death.   You cling to a voicemail message from a voice that no longer exists, a letter from someone who can no longer put pen to paper.  You move on with your life but you’re changed forever.  You no longer see the world as intrinsically good.

When I found the courage to leave my ex-husband, and get out of a nasty abusive situation, even though my grandparents were gone it was their legacy to which I turned.  I spent four months living in the basement of my uncle, another in the family who had been divorced and eventually found love and life again.  He had stayed in the spare room at my grandparents’ home when he got divorced, so it was strangely comforting to me to know that they would have understood what was going on with me and supported my staying in my uncle’s home.

I miss them.  I know that, they being old when they died in the car crash, I was spared seeing them decline and die the way that most elderly people do.  But the rational knowledge of that does not make it any easier.  Yes, their lives influenced me profoundly when they were living and again in their demise, but I would give back some of the knowledge I have now to have them back again.

It’s Mother’s day in the US, and I feel the need to make a special appeal on behalf of my grandmother.  She had breast cancer, and a mastectomy, shortly before I was born.  She then went on to be my inspiration in several “race for the cure” events both before and after her death from a car crash.  She was a “25 year survivor” in the first races I did in her honor, and a survivor to death in the later ones.  Rather than send money to a church, send it to a competent medical research authority.  They are not all good, but in general we have learned things in the last century that allowed a story like mine to even take place.  

 

 

Secularization and Christians

This week presented another quite surprising does of introspection and self-awareness from a major church leader.  (The previous one was the Evangelical manifesto, discussed here.)  Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, had this to say:

He suggested, however, that Christians were partly to blame for the prevalence of modern atheism, which was a product of a “distorted kind of Christianity”.

“What did we do to generate unbelief? We need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading idea of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of our believers.” 

It is the “what did we do” part that I find the most interesting.  It appears as though there is a growing realization amongst church leaders that the world has become almost largely secular, and that this may have been something that was actually caused–at least in part–by Christian behavior.  It goes back to the classic:

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
(Gandhi)

Has this message finally gotten into the heads of church leaders?  Will there be a new wave of Christians who stop being so insular and actually reach out in charity and Christian spirit.  Perhaps.  I am not holding my breath, especially concerning the Evangelicals.  But I am definitely finding this discussion interesting.

The excommunication of divorce

I guess I was lucky.  I have not been fired from my job from refusing to discuss the details of my divorce with anyone.  (Admittedly I was in graduate school at the time so I was not really employed.)  A professor at Wheaton College in Illinois faces this particular problem–as he notes, his refusal to accuse his (soon-to-be) former spouse of adultery or another wrong-doing is actually the issue.  The college does not explicitly ban divorce, but wants there to be a biblically-sanctioned reason for the divorce in order to keep the professor in his job.  He refuses and leaves.

Wow.

I’m stunned on this one.  I remember at the time of my divorce how badly I wanted not to discuss it.  I remember my evangelical relatives trying to suss out the reasons for it.  They had the same problem.  They were only going to be okay with divorce if it fell within one of their categories of “divorce-able”.  Ironically enough, none of the articles on Wheaton college have mentioned the grounds for my divorce (abuse, as opposed to adultery or abandonment… why are they all A words?) so perhaps I as the battered wife would not have been able to stay employed at Wheaton.  How totally twisted.

I never did tell my parents.  The idea of marital sexual abuse would have been too difficult to explain.  I’m not sure they would have even believed in the concept.  I have this “lie back and think of England” idea of marital duty that would have set well with them and thus allowed me to tolerate this treatment for years, if not indefinitely, rather than get divorced.  It was only in opening up to other people in my very small world of non-church friends that I was able to identify the badness in what was taking place in my own daily life. 

So my family does not know why I got divorced.  And let’s give them credit, not for their lack of trying.  My mother asked me flat out at one point if I had been abused, because that would have been acceptable justification.  Now interestingly enough (for a mother-daughter relationship that is not close) she was spot on, but I was not going to give her the benefit of the evangelical doubt by confirming this to her.  Call it a stubborn-ness on my part but I will stand behind my right to privacy in the face of Christian judgement.

My friends know the truth, gradually in my own sexual awakening I have been able to speak up more about the atrocities that I experienced thanks to my teenage Christian marriage.  But the truth still hurts: I have been excommunicated from my evangelical family for not telling them the gory details.  I have been lectured on the sins of divorce.  I have been ostracized for my decision to leave my ex-husband.  I have been made to feel as though any relationship I had after the split was tarnished by my loss of purity and lack of commitment to marriage.  I have been made to feel like a failure.  I have ended up in therapy.  (Although ironically that has been the best thing to happen to me in a very long time!)

As such, I feel for this professor.  Whatever the reasons for his divorce, it should be between God and he.  This is not the business of the college or of any administration.  If he says he is right before God, that should be the end of the discussion.  This prying amounts to no more than Christian gossip and it is far worse than anything associated with the breakdown of the professor’s marriage, in all likelihood.  Relationships end for many reasons.  Trying to codify an acceptable reason for divorce assumes a level of knowledge of a private couple’s relationship that can never be supported or sustained.  Stop gossiping and get back to the books, oh midwestern college.  The truth is often far more complicated than you know.

Slightly off-topic

I have several things preying on my mind that are less about being an ex-evangelical Christian but more or less are just about being me.  So with my apologies to anyone who would rather I stick firmly to topic, well, you can just stop reading now!

I’ve become slightly obsessed with the idea of getting married again.  It’s gotten out of hand lately, I’ve now bought the last two issues of “In Style Weddings” and on Sunday I read every single wedding announcement on the New York Times online.  These are hours I’m wasting that I could be spending on far more useful pursuits.  I have no idea whatsoever why this has come up so strongly in my head.  I’m tempted by the possibility of “legitimizing” my love relationship, which would be a huge shock to my parents, and I’m also tired about my life being completely about my job.  I’ve had such a hard time staying motivated in the last few months–thus the daydreaming.  I don’t even really know why I am doing it, especially the magazine part.  I had the big white wedding and the poofy dress the first time, and I don’t really have any conscious interest or intention of doing that again no matter what were to happen.  But clearly I’m still fantasizing about it a bit.  Especially the part that involves jewelry.  And housewares.  The brain is such a crazy thing.  

I can blame it on the whole evangelical mess, at least a little bit.  When I did get married before it was under such duress, I was so young, there was no money, and I was absolutely focused on the wedding and not the marriage.  Now I’m mostly concerned with the relationship and have a completely different view of both weddings and marriage.  Before they were things that had to be done to put things in place for a “right” life including the only allowed place for sex.  The relationship really was secondary.  Now I just want to be with the person that makes me happier than anyone in the world.  It’s a totally different feeling.

To that end, I just sent off an unsolicited resume for a position for which applications closed months ago, but which would have been ideal for both my job and my partner’s physical location.  The odd thing is that my job is going well right now (aside from my motivation problems!) but I worry that I’m losing the mojo to be Ms. Independent Career Woman.  When last I visited my love, we had this idyllic occasion when we bumped into a young married couple in Crate and Barrel (my boy works with the man) and we had this lovely chat about cooking.  I kept thinking “if I lived here we could have a dinner party and have them over!”  In my wedding obsessed fog I also desperately want to register at Crate and Barrel!  

I guess this is why the whole “have a baby” thing can look so good to a mid-thirties woman of my general character, ennui sets in and breeding seems like a nice change of pace!

The other thing really troubling me right now is my apparent inability to act like a normal human around the person who I dated last year on hiatus from my current relationship–of course at the time I did not know it was a hiatus, I thought it was a permanent split!  But Mr. Last Summer, who is a perfectly wonderful human being although for reasons that I will never understand he just didn’t love me, is still amazingly able to unnerve me and cause me to act “off”.  And I’m torn between wanting to hang around him and force myself to normalize things, and wanting to not hang around him because it just feels too funny.  It’s a mess.  It was oddly easier hanging around my ex-husband after we got divorced.  I guess this is one of those “time heals all wounds” things and I am being my usual, impatient self in wanting the whole thing to go away and for life to continue as though it was a continuum and not a nasty bunch of stops and starts.

The wedding fantasies are far more fun than trying to deconstruct that mess.  I’m taking my bridal magazine to bed now.

Surprising Evangelical Honesty

I would have been more surprised by this week’s “Evangelical Manifesto” if more of the ‘classic’ leaders in the field had signed on; the absence of such damaging luminaries as Dobson means that for a large number of the sheep in this fold, the document will go unnoticed.  However, there’s enough of interest in the draft, as reviewed by the AP, for me to excerpt and perhaps put a bit of commentary (although I think many of these statements speak for themselves!)

The statement, called “An Evangelical Manifesto,” condemns Christians on the right and left for “using faith” to express political views without regard to the truth of the Bible, according to a draft of the document obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

“That way faith loses its independence, Christians become `useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology,” according to the draft.

Amazing recognition of the decreased separation between church and state.

“All too often we have attacked the evils and injustices of others,” they wrote, “while we have condoned our own sins.” They argue, “we must reform our own behavior.”

Shockingly candid, acknowledging one of the single greatest complaints that are ever-voiced by people like me who are tired of having our “evils” attacked by two-faced zealots.

I will be very interested to see the final document when released, along with the list of signatures. Regardless, it’s easy to see how this will not actually trickle down into the rank-and-file believers, who believe they are right on all things and feel no need for self-examination or change.

 

 

Boundaries and professionalism

I sometimes on a Saturday surf the more-or-less random posts on the front of wordpress.com, especially things about technology, travel, religion, science and other topics that interest me.  (Not as much about family, sports, politics etc.)  I stumble on all sorts of interesting things when I do this, and I sometimes comment on one of these posts and even more occasionally add something or someone to my blogroll.  Yesterday, though, I found one that disturbed me because it seemed to describe with apparent pride a blurring of professional boundaries between Christian evangelizing and practicing medicine:

Our mission here is called Ukraine Medical Outreach and we have the goal to reach the medical professionals (an unreached people group!) for Christ. He also teaches them how to share their faith with their patients. The Ukrainian physicians will reach many more people in a day than one missionary ever could!

 The part about sharing faith with others in the same profession does not bother me in the slightest.  Although I continue to find it interesting the way Christians feel compelled to constantly go for conversions, it’s more of an annoyance than anything else.  It’s the part where medical professionals are proselytizing to their patients that I found remarkably disturbing.  I am appalled by the idea of a clinician trying to “witness” to their patients.  I would think that this would come close to violating some aspects of the WHO bioethics guidelines although perhaps it has not come up.   So much has been written about paternalism and how doctors abuse their roles as authority figures, especially when dealing with vulnerable populations.   Hopefully someone out in blog-land who is a practicing clinician of some sort can let me know if their professional bodies do or don’t offer any guidance on this subject.

What a surprise

So the government of the US has spent $1.3 billion on abstinence-based sex ed and it doesn’t work.  

“Vast sums of federal monies continue to be directed toward these programs. And, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that some of these programs are even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active,” Dr. Margaret Blythe of the American Academy of Pediatrics told the committee.

This thinly veiled attempt to break the church-state barrier by forcing (completely misplaced and completely harmful) Christian puritanical attitudes about sex on all children in the US is a very bad use of public money.  Just think of what could have been done with $1.3b.  You could actually get behind the America Competes initiative.   You could try to address the gap in health insurance coverage.  You could do so many things that would be valuable and effective.  We all knew that this was not going to work, and yet the government kept throwing money at it.  And keeps throwing money at it, of course Bush supports this.  Sigh.

Catholic weirdness

Growing up in an Evangelical household, we were told that Catholics were not actually Christians and that their worship of saints made them cultists.  Even if I hadn’t been told that as a child, I would probably still feel odd about this news story about how a possible saint (or possible fraud and self-harmer) was dug up years after his death, fitted with a rubber mask to hide his decomposed face, and put on display to “pilgrims” coming to see him.  Eew, gross.  Who thinks this is a good idea? 

More cross-posts

I have posted two things over on de-conversion this week, which was not intentional but just the way things go.  I had one thing I had been preparing in the background, about science, proof and religion.  It’s called The Thrill of Discovery and it maps my life from a young evangelical creationist (gulp, how embarrassing!) to a modern scientist who does not believe proof can be found for either the origins of life or the existence of God.  It was actually started in draft form before the recent hubbub over “Expelled” but I hadn’t gotten around to posting it until last night.  The other post is a direct copy/re-posting of my views on abstinence, originally published here  back in August when I first starting writing this blog.  In a funny coincidence, another writer had written something called “My abstinence education” on de-con and so I thought the follow-up repost was an interesting parallel–very different take on things.  I only mention it now because the subsequent discussions on both posts were pretty interesting.