The Political Church

Why our child won’t be baptized, and why Christian values aren’t ours

Power is a word that you should be deeply familiar with if you grew up in a Christian home. We’re told about the “power of Christ,” and the “power of forgiveness.” The “power of God’s love.” God is all-powerful, according to Scripture. He knows all, He sees all, He is all. For many, this is a message of hope. For the powerless and the downtrodden, it is absolutely a message of joy to hear that an all-powerful being created you and cares about you, and forgives you of your wrongdoing. He is willing to take power away from those who oppress, enforce His will on those who do not turn to Him, and is jealous of other gods. As much as God is love, God is power and that power is freely given to us through the Body of Christ and faith in the blood of the Lamb, should we ask for its help.

But there is another kind of power sought by those who see hope in this message. A dark, deep power that we do not discuss enough, and is openly relished by members of the church. It can twist the mind and warp the sense of reality. It can turn love and faith into hatred and zealotry. It is rooted in the sense of obedience, the dogma, the traditions, and the desires of the church beyond the Word. The culture of the church, beset by modernity and rocked by growing irrelevance, has seen a number of changes away from being a personal religion about a hopeful relationship with a deity toward a culture of political force projection and moral enforcement. It is purity culture writ large, the anti-gay and anti-feminine agenda of parental control and fear from the 1990s and 2000s wresting political control and expanding it from the youth groups and sanctuaries into our Courts and public services. It’s the Satanic Panic political rally.

Feeling welcome in the church is not something that’s totally foreign to me. My 15th great-grandfather is Martin Luther. My grandparents are deeply religious. I grew up in the church. My mom is an ordained minister. My dad led groups and chaperoned on mission trips. Mom even worked to set up women’s ministry in Ethiopia and both of my parents have taken an active role in helping Eritrean refugees acclimate and adjust to life in the United States. I’m very proud of the work my family has done. My family is deeply rooted in the Christian Word, and often tries to separate the culture of the “man-made” church from the Word of God, but their politics follow where the church that they claim to abhor has led. I love my family very deeply. They’re incredibly important to me, and they have made every effort to set politics aside so that we can have a relationship, but it does not take a deep dive into a conversation to understand that our values today are wildly different from where they were when I was a child.

My drift from the church is barely surprising, let alone unprecedented. I’m a bisexual man who grew up around Evangelical Christians. I was heavily involved in the Lutheran Church when the ELCA split over its decision to allow gay people to be pastors. My mom faced incredible pushback as a woman pastor. I’ve seen every church I ever attended split over politics or conspiracy. I don’t mean opinion was divided, every church I’ve ever attended has broken apart. Seeing friends leave the church, seeing people I care about and respect get dragged through the mud and called “Satanists” for wanting to teach a different way, and seeing pastors lose or be forced to leave jobs for simply teaching things like empathy and compassion and forgiveness.

The other thing you’ve seen is the separation of church and state in the minds of those who attend. Too many times in my life, I heard from adults in my life that the church should be more political and it should take a more active role in furthering the Word of God through politics. It was always a taboo topic on Sundays, but it was always a striking undertone. We were told in youth groups that being gay was a choice. We were told that girls should be modest and boys shouldn’t be alone with girls and we should stay “above reproach.” Later on, we heard lessons about how God condemned homosexuality and how God’s judgment came down on people who did not seek his forgiveness. Questions and doubts were answered with “just have more faith,” and they weren’t explained or argued. We were told to trust God’s plan and follow those who God placed in leadership. Pray hard and the words would come. What this did was not create more faith, but it did get people like me to ask more questions. It created situations in which disagreement was not only blunted but openly challenged in social ways. It created a culture where someone could claim to have a “word from God” if they performed enough of the steps to be believed in their faith and those who questioned that word were seen as doubters or somehow traitorous to the faith.

This is how bubbles and feedback loops are created. Eventually, those who doubted either assimilated or left the church. Some left and came back, some left for good, but the dissent always got stamped out. For “the good of the peace,” there were agreements to disagree that almost always ended in bowing to what the most reactionary wings of the church wanted. As political polarization grew, so too did the polarization in the church. The values of the church really started to shift rightward in 2008, and it continues to spiral rightward today. The church is the linchpin of the conservative movement. It offers moral credibility to the cruelest and most antithetical policies and enforces these ideas with a bludgeon of conformity that pushes those who disagree to seek spiritual solace elsewhere. This isn’t a new phenomenon. For those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-white, or otherwise not white, straight, or cisgender, the Evangelical church and Christianity, in general, have been hostile environments for generations.

That hostility, the whiteness of the church, and the anti-LGBT sentiment, the overwhelming misogyny, turn into a spiral of reactionary beliefs that are morally justified when they’re presented to groups of Christians. It becomes a prevailing belief that the government is bad and big government is wrong unless it is enforcing Christian tenets. It becomes prevailing belief that the law must be followed and the police must be revered unless they’re protecting an abortion clinic or a Pride parade or the U.S. Capitol as votes for the Presidency are being counted. It becomes prevailing belief that LGBTQ Americans are sinners and pedophiles who do not deserve to be seen as equal because they’re not equal in the eyes of God. It becomes prevailing belief that women exist to carry the seed of men to full fruition and anything less is a denial of her purpose, and that any effort to express pride or joy in womanhood independent of the opinion of men is harlotry and evil. It becomes prevailing belief that women do not have bodily autonomy, and that it is their place to be in the home and unheard. It becomes prevailing belief that all contradictions and doubts can be answered by simply being the most faithful person in the room, or at least pretending to be the most faithful person in the room.

I grew up loathing my attraction to men. I wrestled with my bisexuality for years while I was in the church. I was gripped with fear that someone would find out and my life as I knew it would be turned upside down. When I left the church in 2014, I left for good and politics became my expression of moral values. I wrestled with questions of ethics and philosophy. It’s not that I was sure that there wasn’t a god, but I was sure that I didn’t want to be “Christian.” I didn’t want to be in the church anymore. I didn’t like the person I was when I was in the church. I don’t like the person I know I would have become had I stayed. Faced with the option of leaving or seeking to conform and feign a devotion that I didn’t possess out of the fear of ostracization, the option to leave became too clear to ignore.

My wife, too, has had these feelings. She grew up Catholic, and while she still believes in God she doesn’t believe in the teachings of the church. We don’t hold those values anymore.

Our values are expressed politically, and when the values of the church are expressed politically they are diametrically opposed to where we stand as progressive liberals who maintain that all men and women are created, and should be treated, equal. We believe, and our son will learn, that just because someone is different than you it does not mean that they’re less than you. We believe and maintain that our faith does not need to be tied to, or otherwise reinforced by, a group of people whose values don’t reflect these values simply because we want to find people who profess to worship the same deity. We don’t want, and will not entertain the idea of, our son feeling the same self-loathing or conflict that I felt as a queer member of the church for my entire life. We won’t make the decision to baptize him into a church, any church, dedicating him to a life of faith in a religion that does not believe that people like me should be allowed to exist. We will not subject ourselves or our child to a worldview that is so exclusionary, so radical, and increasingly dangerous to the lives and wellbeing of others as the Christian church has become.

What this boils down to, and to be frank I understand that this will be upsetting for some to read, is that what you preach about love and truth on Sunday doesn’t matter if your parishioners and congregation are speaking, acting, and voting hatefully and against the truth Monday through Saturday. You may ask your God for forgiveness seventy times seven, but the failure of the church to be open and loving and forgiving is why my family won’t be a part of it. Christ called us to take care of the poor and the sick, that our values should be the children and the lowest among us. He spent time with sinners and social outcasts, with women who were accused of being whores. He defended these people from the Pharisees, he argued on their behalf and tried to show them love and understanding rather than disdain. If those values are the values of Christ, why are people like myself treated as an outcast for believing that government should reflect those values by taking care of the poor, sick, and endangered? If our values are to be “Christ-like,” why is it so rare to hear of the church and its members supporting government programs that give people homes and food and medical care? These questions are rhetorical, but I would bet the answer is along the lines of “strife and struggle are all according to God’s plan, and it’s not the government’s job to fix all of the problems of the world.” I’d encourage evangelical Christians to sit on what their values actually are, and why it seems to be such a broad contradiction between what the Bible says and what the result of those values are as it pertains to political support.

Some will read this and get angry that Lauren and I would or could put politics ahead of the eternal salvation of our child. I’d simply argue that Ciarán will have every opportunity to learn and we won’t withhold information. He simply won’t be baptized as a baby, and he won’t spend time in the church until we decide that he’s ready to be educated in a faith that is accompanied by a religion that we believe requires a level of work on our part to ensure he is not indoctrinated into a political belief system that does not reflect the kind of person we want him to become. This doesn’t mean we don’t love the people in our lives who hold to Christian traditions, and it doesn’t mean that we’re forcing this on anyone else. It means that we’re doing things for our family that we find important and healthy for our child and their upbringing.

On that, there will be no compromise.