I’m cheating. I shouldn’t be posting this today, I should wait and make you read it in my newsletter that will be coming out in about 8 days. But I just can’t stand to sit on this any longer. Below is an article that a good friend of mine wrote. Jennie is a skilled writer, so please don’t compare her quality writing with what I put out there! Her article will make some angry and with others it will resonate deeply. As a lifelong churchgoer, as a preachers kid, as a church planter, as the penultimate “insider” her words stung a bit. Jennies voice is incredibly important, her words are challenging, and above all what we’re able to read below is her journey. I hope you read it and enjoy think.
I pray all the time. I don’t get down on my knees; I don’t make the sign of the cross; I don’t light candles to demonstrate my faith to the world. I pray, and sometimes my prayers must seem like attacks, tirades even- the kind of rant that happens at drunken family reunions. Sometimes my prayers must seem like the anxious queries of a child afraid of nightmares, desperately trying not to fall asleep in her father’s arms. Whatever the length or tenor of my prayers, I must do it. I need God. I crave him. I am stubborn in my love and dependence on him. But I will not attend church.
Growing up, religion seemed to be a kind of spiritual extortion. People did not go to church simply to practice the giving and receiving of love from something mysterious but powerfully real, it was a way of hedging their bets, of making sure their cosmic pool of luck did not run out. It felt, eerily, as if God was a bully on a playground and all the people who attended church were the schoolyard sycophants tiptoeing around him, making sure they weren’t the ones who pissed him off. At the same time, it seemed as if the people in these churches were in collective denial about how you can’t really love something that you fear because love, if one thinks of it as an action and not a state, requires that you have enough self-agency to choose. In turn, if God punished or rejected you because you thought or acted in a way that displeased him, that would itself clearly demonstrate his own inability to truly love you because the desire to dominate someone’s life and will is not reflective of a loving heart but of a covetous one. In other words, if God withholds love because you’ve challenged him, God doesn’t love you; he just wants you to love him.
However, the fact remains that today I am in conflict. I believe and trust in a loving God, but I do not believe or trust the institutions that insist they are the only conduit to him. Today, I can take a walk in the woods or by the river, pray, reflect, and feel deeply loved, my doubts profoundly answered. But if I go to a sermon in a church, I feel mentally and spiritually immobilized. I trust God but distrust churches, and I believe I can pinpoint the exact moment where that disconnect happened.
When I was eight years old, my mother moved our family to a small Kentucky town. We had only been in this town for a few days when my sister Sheri and I took a walk with my mother along a relatively quiet highway at night. Suddenly, a speeding car swerved onto the shoulder of the road and hit my mother. She flew into the air, struck the car again as she came down, and landed at an odd angle which caused a bone to break through the skin of her leg. The driver of the car did not slow down or stop but left her bleeding and semiconscious on the side of the road. I am still not sure if the driver was even aware that he had almost killed someone.
There are two things that I remember most vividly about that night. The first thing is the complete terror I felt as I ran with my sister in the dark searching for someone who would help us. The second is the overwhelming relief and gratitude I felt as I lay sobbing in a roadside waitress’s arms as paramedics worked on my mother. My ambivalence about God could probably be summed up by these two opposing experiences. On the one hand, God seemed to be the intentional arbiter of cruel and vicious punishment, or at least a passive and indifferent observer to the outrageous brutality of random luck. On the other hand, God could also be perceived as a merciful and loving protector. After all, my mother not only survived a blunt trauma that could have instantly killed her, but my sister and I were also lucky enough to get timely help from the staff of a closing restaurant. If the accident had happened just half an hour later, my mother might have bled to death.
I believe that many of us come across this paradoxical experience of God at some point in our lives and it is at this moment that we get to choose whether God exists for us or not. I believe that it was at this moment that I chose God. I say this knowing that this statement may not sit well with either fundamentalist Christians or atheists. Fundamentalist Christians might take offense that I would presume to have the power to choose God. To them, I am merely a speck in the universe. I do not get to choose God, he chooses me. Atheists might disparage my naiveté. To them, I am merely demonstrating my fear based dependence on traditionally created hocus pocus. But when I listen to their rhetoric, I am left equally cold and dissatisfied. Ultimately, I believe our faith is a personal expression of our choice to love and believe in something higher than ourselves. If it is arrogant to love God in the way that I do, then the God I love will forgive me. If it is naïve to believe in God at all, then I hurt no one but myself by doing so.
But the fact remains that my personal understanding and relationship to God does not explain my aversion to churches. The bottom line is that when I am in a church, I feel completely disconnected to God, and this feeling can be at least indirectly attributed to my mother’s accident. The day after the accident, Sheri and I ran into a woman in the trailer park we were living in. She was looking for children to attend bible study at her church’s youth group. When she found out about what had happened to my mother, she volunteered to take me and Sheri in while my mother was in the hospital. The woman and her husband were incredibly loving and kind. Looking back, I realize what a gift this woman’s generosity was for me and my sister not only because she gave us a safe place to live while my mother recuperated, but because the normalcy of her household offset the trauma of my mother’s accident.
However, the church that she took us to was a Kentucky Southern Baptist church that taught that everyone in the world who did not receive Jesus Christ as their one and only savior was a vicious sinner who was doomed to burn in the fires of hell. According to this church, everything was a sin. If you smoked, you were going to hell. If you cussed, you were going to hell. If you listened to rock and roll, you were going to hell. If you roller skated and listened to rock and roll, you were going to go to hell twice. I still remember the self-congratulatory nature of certain church members. They were delighted that they had been “saved” because it meant that they were going to heaven and their enemies were not. They would mill around after the services, their eyes lit up with fanatical delight, as they gossiped about their neighbor who was having an affair and wasn’t saved. Oh, he was definitely going to hell! Once again, religion felt like a kind of horrible power play. People were simply happy to be on the winning team. There was no compassion. There was no love.
What I also remember about this particular church, was how the people in this congregation always seemed restless and on edge and how their anxiety would often manifest itself through hypocrisy and rebellion. My favorite memory is of the bible study teachers secretly lighting up cigarettes behind the church school bus. My friends and I would hide, giggling hysterically, behind a row of parked cars to spy on grown women furtively but doggedly smoking a succession of cigarettes down to a tiny nub, their faces guilty but glowing with ecstasy. Today, I am still struck by the ridiculousness of grown women fearfully hiding behind a bus to smoke cigarettes, but I am also saddened by it. One of these women was the woman who had taken us in. Here was a woman who was truly loving and good but who could not trust that the love that she had within her, and that she gave so freely, was enough to “save” her from eternal damnation. Instead, she lived in a perpetual state of anxiety so stultifying and horrible, that even committing a comically insignificant act such as smoking a cigarette frightened her so much she literally crouched in fear.
I do not mean to suggest that all churches, or all congregants, promote or practice neurotic obedience or self-defeating hypocrisy. However, I will say that in my personal experience both neuroses and hypocrisy has been a staple of most of the churches I have attended. Throughout my life, I have gravitated towards religions that endorse qualities such as loving kindness, mercy, forgiveness, and tolerance. Intellectually, I understand that these same values can be found within the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Yet too often I have been in churches that overlook teaching love and kindness in favor of teaching fear and intolerance. I have encountered too many people from fundamentalist Christian faiths who insist that those who do not think or believe, feel or live, exactly the way they do will go to hell. These “good” Christian people will lie, cheat, steal, and commit all manner of immoral acts, but they have somehow convinced themselves that not only are they superior to everyone else, they are exempt from living the very values they push so stridently. The idea that certain religions insist that sincerely good people who commit themselves body and soul to the service of others can go to hell simply because they happen to love someone of the same gender or read the Koran instead of the bible is completely repugnant to me. Perhaps, I am naïve, but I feel that a unifying thread in our human lives is that we are vulnerable beings who need love. God is supposed to be the most unadulterated and powerful source of this love, and I believe that it is possible to find him everywhere. I have often found God in the loving words of a friend, in the reflection of light on the surface of a lake, and in the passages of a beautifully written book… But I have rarely found him inside the walls of a church.