Birmingham Blues

(Dear Husband makes his debut here at the Blues today. Yay! — Kathy)

Several times over the years, Kathy has asked me to write a post for Birmingham Blues on issues related to faith and current events, but I wouldn’t. I have prided myself on not being one of those political types. My faith was too sacred to pollute with an unseemly activity like politics. That was for the nut job fundies, not for us real Christians. I let the political class that I looked down on debase itself without me. And I focused on God. Oh sure, right wing wackmobiles pimping my faith drove me crazy. But while the rest of my family was out protesting Roy Moore and Fred Phelps, I was content to give money to the opposition to those pernicious cretins and avoid being involved.

Over the past year, I have had a sense that my faith was not enough. Not for me and not for my God. And I couldn’t explain it. I hadn’t felt so spiritually impotent in a decade. I guess as one approaches fifty, it is natural to try to emphasize the important things more. And what I was beginning to see in my faith, both my personal faith and the Christian faith as a whole, was a monumental shallowness. And it is because of people. People are so inconvenient sometimes. I have spent a lot more time on the internet in the past six months, largely because the news media has become so ridiculous. And there I have encountered awesome, smart wonderful people who think a lot like I do with at least one major exception. A lot of them can’t stand Christians. And I’ve had my feelings hurt more times than I can count by internet friends or acquaintances I really value putting down Christians. And I’ve had people I dearly love in my non-virtual sphere hurt me with their comments about Christians.

And then I read this wonderful piece by Leonard Pitts. And late last night it hit me. Reverend Lawson is a heretic, at least by what is considered “Christianity” in much of America in 2008. Just like I’m sure he was considered a heretic by many when he worked with Dr. King. He thinks that it is not a threat to his faith that two people who love each other want to get married. He thinks that my two wonderful brothers-in-law should have had the same legal and religious rights that Kathy and I have. Gee, that sounds pretty radical to me. It’s particularly radical compared to the “mainstream” Christian opinion of Reverend Wicker who considers gay marriage worse than slavery. And then I was hit by the most liberating thought for my faith in a long time.

I am a heretic.

I have listened ad nauseam for the past three decades to the most noxious venom passed on by self serving hate-mongers and right wing politicians as Christian orthodoxy. The average young person who doesn’t have a Christian world view can’t help but think of Jesus as a self-centered, mean-spirited asshole. After all, he believes in nuclear weapons because he wasn’t a “sissy” (Falwell). He is obsessed with tax cuts for the wealthy (Bush). He thinks feminism causes women to kill their children (Robertson). He wants us to cure homosexuals of their “disease” (Dobson). He wants to execute gay people (Moore). He hates fags (Phelps). The list is long and singularly undistinguished.

But I didn’t yell back at them. I should have been screaming at the top of my lungs. The late Reverend Falwell had one thing right about Jesus in his infamous nuclear weapons comment. Jesus wasn’t a coward. He had the courage to say love your enemies and mean it. That really doesn’t fit well with blowing them up. The tax cut business is just a joke from a true Christian perspective. Scripture is filled with pages and pages (and more pages and more pages) about individuals’ and society’s responsibilities to the poor. That calls for people like me who are blessed materially to our share through our churches and, heaven forbid, our taxes. Being a feminist has not yet led Kathy to murder our daughters. And the fact that I strive to be one has not led me to do so either. But I suspect feminism wouldn’t actually make me kill my children because I’m a man, right Pat? And the worst lie spread by modern Christianity is that God and Jesus do not love gay people. Some of the best Christians I know are gay and lesbian. Some of the worst people I know are straight. In my form of Christianity, God loves them all. Good and bad. Gay and straight. And I am supposed to love them too. It wasn’t my goodness that made me work with AIDS patients. It was the goodness and the example of Jesus that showed me to do it. Can anyone honestly look at someone who served lepers in first century Palestine and think he would not serve AIDS patients in twentieth and twenty-first century North America?

But there was more I should have done. I knew God wanted me working with AIDS patients. I knew he wanted me to contribute to Equality Alabama and a number of organizations that serve and speak for the poor in our state and country. But I was comfortable with all of that. Where I let God down was in not speaking out. I should have been with Kathy and Ken confronting Moore and his minions in Montgomery. I damned sure should have been there to help counterbalance the Phelps clan any time it desecrated my State with its presence. Instead of being offended with Soul Force “disrupting” a big meeting of my denomination several years ago, I should have been there with them.

I told my nephew recently that my goal for the rest of my life is to somehow show him and others that Christians aren’t all crazy hate-mongers. I’m afraid I have my work cut out for me.

You see, it’s so easy for me. I am an affluent white male heterosexual Christian. What privilege do I not have in society? I’ve got it easy. It’s time for me to show some courage. It is long past time for me, and for other followers of Jesus, to stand up to the blasphemous highjacking of our faith. It’s time to be a heretic. After all, Jesus was.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 9:01 am and is filed under Religious Wrong, Straight but Not Narrow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.