The Arrogant Church
Finding My Voice Amidst Callous Piety
If you had told me several years ago, hell, even 8 years ago, that I would leave the church to seek God in my own personal wilderness, I would have been incredulous at the thought. Eight years ago, I was on my second stint of passive conversion therapy, a practice that the evangelical church engages in to attempt to support the sexual “reintegration” of queer people. This practice can play itself out in a number of ways but for me, it was being bounced from one support group at the church to another. They were categorically unprepared for me to join their ranks. Even on the day of my baptism, I was shocked by the pre-baptism interview with the pastor, the other people being baptized, and of course myself. None of the people could get even the basic answers right about substitutionary atonement or the key pillars of Christianity or even the basic historical structure of canonical scripture. Regardless of our answers, we were all baptized and given a T-shirt with the church’s logo emblazoned across the chest. None of us shared our testimony in a truly vulnerable way; we were quizzed and dunked. Feel free to fight me on whether or not I believe churches are effectively untaxed businesses in the United States.
During the time of my conversion therapy, I read books by Joe Dallas and Alan Chambers, two prominent figures in the movement, both supposedly former gay men who had reformed their identity to that of heterosexual identity. The science used was laughable, if you can call it that, and the books had a horrific subtext. See, one of the things in these books was the underlying desire to point to where same-sex attraction comes from and how it perpetuates into the “lifestyle”. Whenever people refer to my gender identity or sexual orientation as being a lifestyle, I always find myself thinking, “I don’t feel like it’s a lifestyle. Now owning a timeshare or an expensive, exotic sportscar, or being part of Kiwanis or Shriners, that feels like a lifestyle!” The books missed the point entirely of understanding trauma, particularly neglectful and/or abusive fathers or mothers, or sexual trauma that happened to us at a young age. Trauma does not make a person gay or straight, cisgender or transgender. Trauma can cause a heightened emotional response due to an evocative factor that reminds you of a triggering event but it does not in my experience inform sexual practices or conceptions about gender identity.
My desire to enter conversion therapy came on the heels of an ex-boyfriend attempting to unalive himself. He and I had broken up a few months before largely due to his inability to remain stable in our relationship, showing me intense warmth and in a split second pulling away from me entirely. It reminded me of my relationship with my father, except for the warmth part. My father was never warm. When I agreed to meet him, we chose a public place, a coffee shop to get beverages. I can’t remember whose idea it was but we chose to go on a walk. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been having I said No, Oprah always says to never go to a second location. Fortunately, it was daylight and we were just walking the promenade at CDA park. We reach a park bench and we are finishing our teas and I notice his wrists. They sutured shut with large titanium staples. I asked him, “Why do you have staples on your wrist?” He replied, “About a month ago, I became severely depressed after our breakup. So I took a bottle of muscle relaxers, drank a fifth of whiskey, and slit my wrists in the shower.” Reportedly, his neighbor heard him collapse in the shower and they responded to the event. At some point, I told myself the story that I had caused him to do this. I believed that if I left the community and tried to ‘straighten myself out’ that they would be better off, that I was simply too toxic to be good for anyone, romantically. What a fucking martyr complex. At age 23, I was not getting any more mentally healthy. After an unsavory incident where my sister had taken mood stabilizers and drank heavily at the bar, resulting in her collapsing into an unconscious state, I broke all my ties with the queer community. It was during this time of instability and uncertainty that I sought God in the path I thought I was supposed to take, not the path I was meant to take.
You see, my path had been predetermined long before my parents. Long before anybody knew anything about me. But my parents, thinking of their connection to God as the strongest signal in the room, sought to imprint their plan for me that they seemingly had arranged with God subconsciously. Like some form of liturgical ESP. As though, through some mystical conversation, they were absolute and certain in who and how I was to be. From a young age, I was exposed to red-faced, arrogant ‘men of god’ who caterwauled about the pit of hell, children obey your parents or get a holy ass-whoopin’, your life is full of false idols, and my personal favorite, extolling the virtues of being generous with tithing, which in retrospect was the ecclesiastical smokescreen of “reverend needs to remodel his house’ or ‘the church overspent sending those people to Ethiopia, despite the fact that they had the scriptures before we did.’
I longed for a different way to access the divine and I would eventually find it but in unexpected places and people.
