At Truepenny’s request, I’m going to write a bit about my teenagedom with Jesus. This isn’t quite as entertaining as yesterday’s post, I’m afraid, but it’s not really dull or depressing either. It’s a happy middle ground.

I grew up in the church, actually, so I don’t have a miraculous conversion story to tell. Christianity is something I eased into and then grew into. I’ve never really had a period of falling out with God. This is odd, because when I hear about other people who haven’t had a real falling out with their faith, I tend to think that they haven’t given it enough thought. I have a pretty strange outlook on faith.

Before talking about my teenagedom with Jesus, though, I have to explain. I moved around a lot as a kid. I grew up in Hawaii, going to public school from first grade through fourth grade. At grade five, my parents moved me to a private Christian school. Halfway through that school year, we moved to a different country (the Cayman Islands). After a year and a half there, we moved up to Florida. Bearing in mind that I’m a severe introvert, you can imagine the havoc this wreaked on my social life. I developed flaky, superficial relationships based on essentially nothing.

At age 12 or so, my family moved up to Florida and I got involved with a youth group for the first time in my life. Socially, I wasn’t doing so well in school at the time, so the youth group provided me with a nice safe grounds to have a social life. I remember showing up with my horrible mullet in sweatshirts that didn’t quite fit and finding socially healthy people who were actually pretty excited to see me. So it was good for me in a lot of ways, really.

(I started doing the puppets at around 13, for reference.)

Around age 14, I started to actually become self-aware. I started realizing the superficiality of my life, both in church and out. It wasn’t an easy realization, partly because I never wanted to think of myself that way, and partly because I didn’t know how to get out of it. Given the structure of my life, it’s really no surprise that the first thing I deconstructed was my faith. I had always gone through the motions, but I started asking a lot of Why questions: Why do I believe this? Would I believe this if my parents didn’t? Am I just doing this to fit in? I took what my pastor and youth pastor said as law and based my answers around that.

This is also the time in my life when guilt became a motivator for many of the things I did. They won’t admit it, but fundamentalist Christians have realized the changing power of guilt and frequently measure the spiritual success of their communication by it. They have a very healthy respect for God and a knowledge of the scriptures that puts many of us Methodists to shame, but they’re quite fond of the guilt.

When I turned 15, my parents got divorced. This was a shock to just about everyone, including our family. Before my soul-seeking year prior, I had simply believed what my parents believed; now, my deconstruction and eventual reconstruction of faith was necessitated. So, while this was a painful time in my life, it actually gave my faith—and my life—some substance.

What I was really surprised to find was that all of this actually made me a leader in my youth group. I later realized that this was because I could explain my faith without quoting other people, and that I knew that shit happened, and that that was biblical. (Seriously, the book of Job can be summed up in two words: Shit happens.) Unfortunately, this new insight also gave me a new outlook on many of my fellow church-goers. So while my church was drawing me in, I began this love-hate relationship with it. That sets the stage for the rest of my story.

So I started asking a whole slew of new Why questions: Why do we hate gay people, even when we say we don’t? Why do we preach joy at the expense of dealing with our pain? Why do we let blind faith become an obstacle in honestly talking to God? I can’t say I got a lot of answers from my church, or from my friends. So at about that time, I left my church for another one that a few of my friends went to. (That was the rock band I left for as well.) That church actually served me well for a few years.

At 17, I left for college, but was still close enough to return on the weekends and see my friends there. My dad was a little skeptical with this whole college thing because he was afraid that I would spend too much time with liberals and get infected with their ungodliness. And, much to his chagrin, this is exactly what happened. I started spending time in the inner city, talking to homeless folks and the urban poor, and talking to people trying to help that first group of people. I realized that most of my political beliefs were based on assumptions that these people didn’t really need to be helped until they helped themselves.

I started talking about these things with my church friends. Some were receptive, some were not. Almost all of them had a problem with me saying I would be voting democrat, though. This is all about the time that Bush got elected for the first time, so you can probably see where this is heading. I don’t actually want to talk too much about this, because frankly, I’m sick of the division due to politics.

One day in church, my pastor was talking about marriage, and referenced a study conducted in Massachusetts that pointed at the importance of a strong marriage. He followed this by saying, “And that’s just a bunch of liberals who don’t have a clue who God is!” I had some words with him after church. A few people overheard, and that started the rumor mill on me. I was a rebel as a kid in Sunday school, and now, despite my best efforts and intentions, I was still a rebel in church.

My personal hero, Soren Kierkegaard, was a theologian who grew to loathe his church community so much that he joined an atheist organization just to get away from them. He never really lost his faith, though. I think I know how he must have felt. As the political climate of America polarized, I found myself drawn to the left pole while my church found itself compelled to become really, really Republican. This all culminated in a sermon against gay marriage in which my pastor used verses which talked about divorce to condemn gay marriage. He mentioned divorce once and only once and actually apologized to anyone in the congregation who might be divorced. I had some more words with him after that. (I know for a fact that there was a bisexual in the congregation that day. She never came back.)

I forgot to mention that I discovered in college that I liked girls at least as much as I liked Jesus, which was an awful lot. I really got to know girls in ways that my church didn’t really approve of. (But the girls approved. Oh, how they approved.) Needless to say, guilt was not the motivating factor it once was. This was a rather difficult balance to maintain and is a little more than I care to discuss here.

By the time I hit 21, I was leading Bible studies in coffeehouses and counseling friends of all ages. I found myself actually starting factions within the church, largely unintentionally, but unrepentantly nonetheless. I actually gathered my little group of followers and had my critics within the church. Looking back now, I can’t believe I did that. It was a petty thing for me to do, and I took a very adversarial approach to my beliefs (probably ingrained in me from my fundamentalist upbringing), and it didn’t really help the church as a whole.

It didn’t help that I had fallen in with a missions organization and was now a complete missions freak. I was the religious equivalent of a PETA or GreenPeace member. Mind you, I wasn’t tirading against people who didn’t want to get saved—I was tirading against saved people who didn’t want to support charity work. I spent a month and a half one summer traveling around to different Christian concerts telling people about translation and literacy work in third world countries. It gave me a strong sense of purpose, but also a sense of moral superiority, which is a very dangerous thing for anyone with a fundamentalist upbringing.

At the tender age of 23, I left Florida with few regrets for the great state of Kansas to work for a new church plant. The story there is a long, complicated, and frustrating one, but it involved me reconciling my adversarial beliefs. The past few years have mostly been about finding and promoting balance. Balance was something I lacked my entire life, so this hasn’t exactly been an easy process, but I think I’m making some progress.

I like to think of the general Christian community as my bratty little brother. I’m sometimes proud, and sometimes ashamed of him; there are times I love being around him, and times when I want nothing more than for him to go away; there are many times when I just want so badly to help him grow up, and other times when I realize that I’m the one who needs to grow up. Through it all, I can’t deny that this is my family. There’s good, there’s bad, and everything in-between, but in the end, blood runs thicker than water, and I think I’ve finally come to grips with the fact that he will always be there for me and I will always be there for him.

So that is my extremely long spiritual journey thus far. My deepest thanks to any who have read this far. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to discuss any of this further. I love talking about it, even if we’re not in any sort of agreement, so don’t feel like you’re going to offend me or turn me away, no matter your viewpoint. Actually, I take that back—if you’re just going to talk to me about how I’m slipping away from a solid Republican faith, then you can take your conversation elsewhere. Otherwise, I’m all ears.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Church, Spirituality. 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.