Christians ruined Christianity for me. They wrecked the sense of wonder and oneness with all that is Holy that connected me to my deepest spiritual awareness. Every profound experience to do with my faith—and there have been a few—has occurred outside the church and chapel. I don’t begrudge the devout good women and men whose faith is pure. I begrudge the purveyors of hate and hypocrisy and greed who characterize the “Christian” politics of our day. Those whose aims are un-Christian but who hold the reigns of power in our nation. Political evangelicals and fundamentalists, the types who cast out loved ones for their perceived failings or failure to fall all the way into line and stay there.
Before Christians ruined Christianity for me, I held tight to a moment. I was 15, it was a Sunday afternoon in the spring, and I was standing by the train tracks outside of the Whitefish State Park. Watching the pink and golden light make paintings in the sky over the Lion Mountain range, I was struck all at once by an awareness, a sense of unity with every living thing, and a certainty that I stood in the presence of God the Creator. This powerful moment solidified my faith, my belief, my alignment with the order of Creation, and my concurrence with everything larger than me and everything beyond what my poor paltry grasp of reality could comprehend.
That profound, life-altering moment stayed with me, propelled me forward, meant something deep and mysterious and holy. I regarded my Bible as a source of truth and wisdom even as I was troubled and mystified by the violence and the contradictions. The verses I memorized were words in a certain order, but the meanings often remained obscure. The God of Love as portrayed in the Good Book could be so fierce and rigid and murderous. There was much I did not, could not, understand. But the memory of that epiphany held me steady.
I followed my heart and mind to nature, to music, to literature and art and poetry. I found God in all of those. It was my own personal Age of Enlightenment, and I was filled with a light and a purity that was singular to that short period of time in my life. It was only a matter of months, maybe weeks, before I was told for the first time that I was sure to die in the Lake of Fire. Because I hadn’t said the right words in the right order, hadn’t been baptized, hadn’t asked the Lord to be my personal savior. My own deep experiences, I was told, proved nothing, and in fact could not be trusted, as Satan longed to lead me astray and would disguise evil as good to snare me.
Worried and distressed and heartsick at these upsetting possibilities, I turned to my always-sensible mom and dad, who set me back on track, reassuring me that of course I’d go to heaven, as would the good people in the countries far away who had never heard of Jesus. Just be good and follow the Golden Rule, they said, and everything will be okay.
God in my heart told me this was true, but some certain Christians told me I couldn’t trust what my heart told me, only their specific, narrow, literal interpretation of the word of God as contained in their specific, preferred version of the Holy Bible. They are still telling me such things today. When those friends tell me they’ll pray for me, I understand them to mean that they disapprove of the way I live my life and what or how I believe. My refusal to engage in conversations on social media about my religion or lack thereof gives these peculiar disciples of Christ more ammunition for their version of devout adherence to the teachings of Scripture, yet they also believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and are blind to all evidence to the contrary.
With a mindset like that, is it any wonder there is no ability to comprehend a system of belief that is open to a broader interpretation? No, a literal reading of the Bible precludes any expansive view of a Creation or Creator or Force of Life so far beyond human understanding as to be unexplained, unexplainable, even with all the tools of science and language and knowledge in hand.
Though my fundamentalist friends say otherwise, the scientific discoveries to date do not, to my mind, negate the idea of a higher power. The incredible vast intricate systems of life do not disavow all that is Holy; no, those facts affirm the miraculous. The Big Bang Theory nicely accommodates the idea of: “And Then There Was Light!” A nod to the various prophets of the world’s great religions, who all embody the values of peace, lovingkindness, and devotion to good, does not negate an acceptance of good over evil in the great human struggle with duality.
I believe in parables, stories that explain for our poor stunted minds concepts or theories too lofty to absorb by any but the simplest means. I believe in the Golden Rule. I believe in Divine Inspiration, which I’ll find in nature or in art, thank you very much, not among a group of people telling me what is true. Shoot, those people never knew what was right for me, even when we were all seven years old. Why think anything would be different now?
All of this I must keep in mind when feeling attacked by friends whose prayers feel like judgement. They won’t look at the truths in front of them because it’s easier to “Let go and let God” than it is to confront the complexities, or admit the plain, undeniable truth: The numbers don’t add up. The science tells us otherwise. So how is letting go, exhibiting faith in a higher power, putting one’s confidence in the order of the universe, surrendering human primacy to a greater force, so different than the fundamentalist’s unwavering belief in the literal, unvarnished Word of God?
Hipshot Percussion, the black hat with a heart of gold from Stan Lynde’s old Rick O’Shay comic, had an idea about religion that rang true to my father, who also pointed out to me that “Some people believe Heaven is the time we have while we are here on Earth.” Hipshot was hands-down my father’s favorite character in the funny pages, as we called them back then. Hipshot would inevitably be seen heading out of town on his horse in the opposite direction of the chapel as the town folk scurried off to church clucking their tongues in disapproval. A final panel in the strip would show him humbled on a mountaintop, hat in hand, giving thanks to his Creator with a stunning range of mountains arrayed before him.
Like Hipshot, my dad saw the Creator in Creation. My dad liked to spend every Saturday or Sunday in the woods, spending time with his wife and kids, focused on what really mattered to him. Peace, quiet, fishing and family at some beautiful little lake in the woods—that was heaven to him.
There are old photographs of my parents and me, dressed for church on Easter Sunday, taken in the early 1960s in the backyard of our old house in Missoula, but at some time after that they must have agreed to dispense with the holiday observances, because I have no later memories of my parents pushing any specific ideas about religion, or of them becoming involved with church in any significant way. I remember them being amenable to my accompanying neighborhood friends to their church or Sunday school or vacation Bible camp, but never them instigating any such activities themselves.
Notably, I remember them telling me, in answer to my worries about not being baptized, that they had always believed their children should be free to decide on their own what they believed about God. This notion was typical of their common-sense approach to most things, but now seems almost radical in the current politically charged age of religious intolerance that is energizing many of the church-goers I know. I remain grateful for this openness, which allowed me to dabble with attending various churches to find the one that suited me best. I tagged along to services at the Methodist church with the Petersons, the Southern Baptist church with the Blacks, the Church of the Nazarene with the Applegrens, along with others I’ve lost to time. The Methodists seemed the sanest, and I went back to their white wood-framed chapel in downtown Whitefish from time to time—sometimes with friends or neighbors and sometimes on my own—throughout my junior high and high school years. The local chapter of the Southern Baptists thought dancing was a sin, and I dearly loved dancing, so they wouldn’t do, and the Nazarenes scared me when they showed the 1970s Rapture film “Thief in the Night,” certain memories of which trouble me to this day.
Later in my school years, cancer grabbed hold of my father and wouldn’t let go, and his sister Kathryn and brother Phil came out from Michigan to help out and say their goodbyes. My Aunt Kathryn saved us, one by one, her brother on his death bed, my mother the soon-to-be grieving widow, my older and younger sisters, leading them through the right words to say to accept the Lord as their personal savior. When she got to me I told her I had already said those words some time before. In fact, I had, worried about my impending dip in the Lake of Fire. I had welcomed the Lord into my heart, but I wasn’t sure He heard me. I talked with my aunt about God, about my love of reading, about enjoying school purely for the love of learning, and she seemed a little bit uncertain what to do with those revelations. I had thought that she, the daughter of a school teacher, would be pleased and encouraging as I confessed my dream of wanting to go to college to become a writer, but she seemed unsure what to tell me. So she did not save me. I missed out on that family ritual that marked an important turning point for my siblings and parents. But it was not the end of the wondering, the seeking, the resolving, and the final conclusions I was to draw for myself in the years ahead.
In the early years away at college I tagged along with friends to various churches they attended, and I remember my oldest brother appearing once out of the blue to take me to services at what he called a “Four Square” church on Higgins Avenue a short walk from the University of Montana campus. That might have been the first one I remember that incorporated a rock band into the service, a feature that was to become a draw later on as I grew more serious about finding the right church community for me. Music touched the deepest parts of me, and so a church with music was worth a visit and sometimes more.
This was a time when I first heard a Christian (my brother) utter the phrase “secular humanism,” intended as a disparagement of everything I was learning at college, that I would hear many times more during the years I was earning my degree. That phrase was to become a divining rod—a dividing rod—that turned me away from my sweet embrace of a free and innocent faith.
During this time I might have called myself a “practicing Christian.” I might have said “yes” if anyone had asked if I were born again, but I struggled mightily with contradictions and hated myself for my sinful nature that I couldn’t seem to overcome. Like many of my friends and peers, I had not saved myself for marriage and spent nearly every weekend seeking oblivion with drugs and alcohol in the name of having a good time in the only way I knew, learned while growing up in wild western Montana in the 1970s. While away at college that first year living in the dorms, I felt guilty about my boyfriend visiting me in Missoula, where we’d shack up in a nearby motel for the weekend to drink beer, eat rich restaurant food, smoke marijuana, and engage in pre-marital sex—the very definition of “living in sin.” I did it many times, but it never felt right; I was plagued by my compulsions and vices and gave into them easily. Lying in bed next to the first and only lover I had ever known, I was flooded with misery, an awareness of the great godless void, and felt certain I could taste sin; it was everywhere in me. I did not feel saved, far from it, I felt in danger of losing myself and all that I held dear.
That feeling of being drenched in sin and wrong continued to cling to me all throughout the three and a half years of my relationship with my first boyfriend. It only went away much later, when I met a new boy, the right boy, apparently, with whom the illicit acts frowned on by the church seemed blessed, not cursed, and all felt right and natural and blissfully pre-ordained.
Back home, my mother had miraculously gotten involved with a nice church that had welcomed her and her entire family in the aftermath of my father’s passing. I am amazed now to look at one old photograph of the time she had the young pastor and his wife over to our house for Easter dinner. Such a thing would have been unthinkable before and after that brief period of time. But for a while she found solace in being part of a community that offered some relief from her great sorrow at losing her life’s love. For a while, I attended this same church on visits home from college and during summer vacation. The young congregation incorporated music into the services and seemed somehow fresh and energetic in a way the Methodists, for example, did not. I became close enough friends with a number of the members and even worked with them the summer after my first year in college, helping to set up appointments for a time-share operation outside of Glacier National Park. We were meant to believe God had chosen us for this work, had brought this work our way. I was sincerely grateful. When I returned to college that fall, they sent me off with a lovely potluck and goodbye party. They were nice folks, and I remember them fondly.
The church itself, the pastor and his wife, turned out to be another matter, a problematic matter, when my mother balked at being pressured into an even more extensive role with the church. She did not want the commitment, turned down their offer of the secretary-treasurer position, and was promptly shunned by some of the few people she had ever trusted her entire life in a social or community sort of setting. The pastor and his wife snubbed my mother when they met her on the street, looked through her and did not answer her smile and hello. It hurt and stunned her and marked an immediate end to her brief time as a church-goer.
I didn’t blame her. Near to drawing my own disillusioned conclusions, I had already been put off by the services turning more and more toward congregants overcome by the Holy Spirit speaking in tongues, writhing on the floor, and other similar acts. This overdramatic carrying on seemed to me a bit much. But the un-Christian treatment of my painfully shy, painfully lonely mother was quite simply unforgivable.
The whole chapter ended completely soon after. The church imploded when the pastor, who had a habit of taking long solo hikes into the mountains to draw inspiration for his sermons, reported an encounter with a literal—not a metaphorical—demon while alone in the woods, suffered some sort of mental breakdown, and was pushed out by the congregation. I have no idea what happened after that. But when I say Christians ruined Christianity for me, I’m remembering times like those, instances when doors that had been open shut, pages turned, significant moments passed, and moods of the moment shifted permanently from receptive to remote.
The first time you lose a beloved pet to a senseless accident, or far worse, you lose a loved one, you might be able to take some small comfort in the idea that “God has a plan.” But after a few random, senseless and cruel losses, the words might start to strike you as so much hogwash. Or at least they did to me. Hogwash I couldn’t shake. A sentiment that didn’t take.
After the loss of my dad, which triggered our family’s initial forays into organized religion, there was the loss of a college friend in a fatal head-on collision with a semi. There seemed no good reason God could have wanted something like that. Then John Lennon was shot down on the stoop of his apartment building near Central Park, and I struggled to understand God’s plan for something so shocking and horrific. My fourth year of college, an entire busload of kids from my hometown endured a tragic bus crash with multiple fatalities, including younger sisters of my high school classmates. Of the great atrocities of the world I had little knowledge, but these familiar losses loomed large in my world and pointed me away from believing any of it could be on purpose. How could it?
This question returned toward the spring of my fourth year in college, reading for my senior paper in journalism, when I picked up Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to analyze as an example of a genre of reporting called The New Journalism. Capote’s recreations of the 1950s murders of the Clutter family of Kansas and aftermath of those crimes, scene by scene, in vivid detail, revealed in no uncertain terms the steps involved in an entire family being executed for the basest and most senseless of reasons. The Clutters were four innocent individuals who all contributed significantly to the world around them murdered in the cruelest of ways for absolutely no good reason. Reading about their deaths seriously and literally shook my faith forever. I could not and cannot believe that God would have a plan for such depravity. Those words strike me as so much hogwash. When people respond to tragedy by saying, “God has a plan,” that’s just people trying to find meaning in something that defies meaning. That’s just people not knowing what to say at a time when no words suffice. That’s no better than saying: “It wasn’t meant to be.” We are still left with the unbearable loss. No words can take away the finality of that loss.
I remember the moment, another Sunday afternoon, when I realized I didn’t believe in the concept of “God has a plan.” I had finished In Cold Blood and was taking a walk, by myself, in Missoula’s Greenough Park. Grieving for the Clutters, a good Christian family of four who had died horribly more than twenty years before, and whom I only knew from stories. I felt so bad for them, for the evil they had endured, that a certainty came over me that God could have had no part in what had happened to them. The horror that had befallen them could not have been by cosmic design. Only the unordered, chaotic randomness of Evil could account for such a terrible turn of events. Otherwise nothing could make sense at all. Nothing could have meaning. That is what I mean when I say I need Good more than I need God. Really, to me, they are one and the same.
My point is, the words and rules thrown my way by the Christians who ruined Christianity for me are meaningless to me. Those folks told me it had to be a certain way, their way or the highway, that the salvation I felt in every fiber of me didn’t count and couldn’t be trusted. With that, they took the wind out of my sails. They filled me with doubt and self-loathing, made me think what I knew was mistaken. Then they shunned my mother in her hour of need. That told me all I needed to know.
I am acquainted with folks like this still. If I say I’m lucky, they bristle because “there’s no such thing as luck,” but “lucky” is good enough for me. Lucky doesn’t de-value the mysteries of Creation, the Life Force or the Power of Love. Lucky is humble. Lucky is grateful. The words that give those pilgrims comfort are fine for them, but don’t ring true in the deepest parts of me. I’m okay with that even if they are not. My own comprehension of the holy is contained within. That is just a fact, not an invitation to argue, to sway my belief, to turn me to a new way of thinking. Pray for me or not, but I’ve arrived at my state and my conclusions consciously, searchingly, honestly, and in deference to Mother Nature, The Great Beyond, God the Father, the Great Spirit and my own keen intellect. I’m lucky, I’m awake, and I’m alive, filled with the creative force. None of that is blasphemous or contradictory to me.
Above: Autorretrato, Leonor de Almeida Portugal de Lorena e Lencastre, a self-portrait by Alcipe (Leonor de Almeida Portugal de Lorena e Lencastre), 1787-1790 [Public domain].