The other day, my husband and I were watching television together when a commercial featuring an affectionate same-sex couple filled the screen. My husband groaned and got up, exclaiming that he can’t watch it. And that’s his right. I groaned too, but for an entirely different reason. I felt frustration and sadness and a renewed desire to help others, who unlike my husband, aren’t willing to at least tolerate an expression of humanity that doesn’t harm others.
But the reality is that we are in a continuing battle to determine how our society will function with its relatively new reversal of legal discrimination against women and every kind of minority group. At the forefront are important issues surrounding the legalized freedoms, equitable treatment, and inclusion of minorities, women, and poor people throughout our society. I admit to being a progressive when it comes to equal access to opportunities, to dignified and just treatment, and to the freedom of human beings to openly express who they are so long as they do not endanger the lives of others.
I’m also a Christian. But no longer in the conservative evangelical Christian sense. I grew up listening to a self-serving chauvinistic view of Christianity that infantilized women, demonized homosexuality, and sanctioned tyranny as God’s order. I think I was about sixteen years old when I began to reject this view of Christianity.
I recall a conversation with my eldest brother after one of those sermons about men being the head of the household and how wives had a Christian duty to obey their husbands and to follow his lead as though they were following Christ Himself. I told my brother that I would never marry if that was the case. I couldn’t understand why God would give me a brain and a will if I wasn’t allowed to use them after I got married. That mindset carried through to their belief that women were unsuitable for leadership over men in the church, the workplace, and in public life. For me, this relegation of women to second class status was without regard to a woman’s intelligence, talent, and wisdom and it was the first crack in the worldview of conservative Christianity.
I was also taught to believe that the wages of sin was eternal damnation in a fiery hell, but that the gift of God was eternal life through the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. I was taught that our job as believers was to share this “Good News” to save sinners from their inevitable fate. The difference between evangelical Christians of my youth and those today is that we didn’t try to legally force “sinners” to live as saints or to at least hide their sinful behaviors to make us feel more comfortable in society. In the more conservative society of my youth, we could simply remove ourselves from situations and segments of society that were offensive to us. But things started to change as society loosened its restrictions on what was considered decency and legislatures codified civil liberties around speech, marriage, and access to opportunities.
I recall ministers spending a lot of time telling us what music we couldn’t listen to, what movies we couldn’t watch, which television shows were inappropriate. One time our youth choir was not allowed to sing on a Sunday morning because they were caught enjoying a secret dance party the night before. School became difficult. In fact, I gave up drama class and drama competitions because the material I was being asked to perform was too offensive. Conversations with non-believers became difficult. Parents began home-schooling their children to protect them from exposure. Ministers began preaching against higher education as a corrupting force to be avoided. But I intended to go to college and my family understood higher education was an economic necessity for good employment. The list of restrictions kept growing as society became more openly accepting of the full spectrum of the human condition. Churches began to fracture over what constituted sinful behavior and what didn’t. Conservatives worked to produce contemporary music, movies, television programs, spiritual dance teams, and to build schools that would educate young people.
However, the revelations of sexual and monetary improprieties were exposed among prominent church leaders across the nation, including in my own church. Political pundits stepped in and offered a return to public decency through government. They asserted that this was a “Christian” nation, and that the nation would be destroyed if Americans didn’t repent and return to “God’s ways”. I eventually left what was obviously an institution full of self-righteous hypocrites who had adopted a “do as I say, not as I do” model of leadership. I decided to follow Jesus’ teachings and not those of self-serving controlling men. And once I left, I met decent people who thought differently and lived differently. I took a world religions class in college. I traveled abroad. I experienced secular music and movies and television and broadened my worldview. I learned that I could love and mingle with people from a wide range of backgrounds and not be contaminated by them.
I learned to trust myself and to listen to the voice within to decide how to be a good Christian. I could decide for myself what music and shows inspired and encouraged me to do good and what was a bit too much for me. I gained a different perspective on what sin actually was and wasn’t. I now view sin as intentionally doing harm to others. I discovered that I don’t like violence. I don’t like seeing people intentionally hurting others. I realized that I don’t like things that are too sexually explicit. I don’t like exploitation of any kind. And I especially don’t like the tyranny we are witnessing today.
A tyrannical form of Christianity has joined with white nationalists against freedom-seeking people in a fight over how this society will function moving forward. These white conservative evangelical Christians and white nationalists want to move about freely in the country without having to see gay people, transgender people, or women and people of color in positions of power. They think their bigotry, sugar-coated as morality and “greatness” is more important than other people’s civil liberty and so they vehemently argue that their religious freedom is being challenged by someone else’s same sex marriage or abortion or sex change operation. They demonize teachers who teach equity and inclusion as “groomers” and they think everyone is trying to recruit children into homosexual lifestyles or to confuse them regarding their gender, as if that was even possible.
I realize that their hatred of Jews stems from the prominence of Jews in the media that produces music, movies, and television shows that showcase the spectrum of humanity. They blame Jews for helping with the Civil Rights Movement, for promoting diversity, and for rising to economic power through education and business acumen. White nationalists in particular are frustrated that they are no longer the ones pulling the strings. Their chant in the Charlottesville march was, “Jews will not replace us!” However, in a free-market democracy, those with the capital and the creativity get to produce the products for consumption. This is precisely why they are now willing to terrorize minorities, demonize “wokeness”, and throw out the democracy.
My message to Americans is to first protect the democracy against religious tyranny and white nationalists and then choose with your feet and your pocketbooks what you will consume. If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one. If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married. If you don’t like sex-changes, don’t have one. If you don’t like violence or explicitly sexual movies. games, and music, don’t consume them. Jesus never forced anyone to follow Him; He was all about our freedom of choice.
