To The Christian Communities That Raised Me:

What happened?

When I look around at the church in America, I do not see people who are living the words of Christ. 

No. 

I see people who are so obsessed with personal freedoms that they can’t be bothered to put a piece of cloth over their face in order to protect those who are not strong or healthy. I see people who have rallied around a racist misogynist and claim he was martyred for his Christian faith, when in fact he was horribly and tragically gunned down while speaking in favor of the very thing that killed him (he who lives by the sword and all that, amiright?). I see people who have fooled themselves into believing that the current president of the United States is a new messiah, rather than what he really is: a con artist who assaults women and children and quite likely has committed literal treason. 

Tell me why it is worse that a Puerto Rican man sang in Spanish during the Super Bowl than the fact that the US president is listed thousands of times in the Epstein files. 

There is no possible universe in which the former is worse than the latter. 

So I ask again: what happened to you?

What happened to you, who wanted to “champion Christ” and spread the good news to all? To you who taught me that the Lord will protect the fatherless and the widows and feed the hungry but the rich he will send away empty?

You exalt yourselves like the pharisee who points out the tax collector’s faults, praising God that you aren’t as bad as all that. You stand proud, a camel expecting to be led through the eye of the needle, a brother resentful of the grace extended to his sibling, all while claiming to be the salt of the earth.

Hypocrites! Brood of vipers!

You filled my head with the wild thought that God stands with open arms, calling all in to him. You preached that he was welcoming to everyone, whether they came at the first hour or the eleventh. You had me chanting verses about how God remembered us when we were strangers in a strange land. 

You taught me that as much as I had done “unto the least of these,” so I had done unto Christ.

But now I am forced to ask: do you even know what that means? By your actions it would appear you don’t. When did abortion become the one and only evidence of Christianity in your eyes? (Actually, let me answer that for you. It’s the 1970s, but that’s another topic for another time.) Cheering the dehumanization and kidnapping of immigrants is antithetical to Christ’s teachings. Honestly, it’s antithetical to the teachings of the Old Testament, where the command to care for foreigners and refugees is repeated multiple times. Casting out those of us who are LGBTQ+ is not tough love. It is distinct lack of love. It is lack of God. 

My word. You have lost the plot.

I firmly believe that if Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, was on earth today most proclaimed Christians would not recognize him. If he preached the Sermon on the Mount now he would be run out of town for being “too woke.” 

You defend literal pedophiles, you protect abusive pastors and predators, all while claiming your actions are for the children. If you really cared about the children you would vote for their protection when it comes to common sense gun laws. You would fund services to provide kids with food at school, and you would not vilify the parents who need benefits like WIC and SNAP, while proclaiming that somehow the single mother is not worthy of our aid because she just should have kept her legs shut.

Or were you lying to me when you said that faith without works is dead? It is easier to sit in a pew every day than it is to begin the work of unravelling ideology in religion, but my goodness I hope you find the courage to do the hard thing. 

I don’t know what my religious beliefs are anymore. I am figuring it out, slogging through the mess I was fed as fact but was in reality facade — a facade it seems “good Christian people” can’t even keep up anymore. But there is still a part of me that believes that at the end of our lives we will all come face to face with God. And then we will have to answer, not for the religious purity we proclaimed, but rather for the harm we caused others.

I suppose now there is really only one thing left to say, and I am sure you know it very well. But just in case you’ve forgotten, I’ll be the voice crying in the wilderness on your behalf. 

Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.