Frying Pans From Heaven: When A Transgender Person Sends You An Email…

K became a Christian four years ago in a Charismatic style church that you’ve probably heard of if you run in contemporary, Evangelical circles, and she lives in a sphere of mostly right wing Republicans. Although many disagree with her politics, most of her friends support her identity. What’s messing with K’s head is not so much her experience as a transgender person — she’s walked through that awakening and coming out — but the Right Wing ultra-conservatism that has been her experience with Christianity, and the way that the ideology of “excellence” doesn’t allow for things like justice, grace, or mercy.

There’s lots of self-righteous language in my community that blames the victim and the hurting person for being hurt, the unsuccessful person for being mediocre and stupid. Which fundamentally clashes with everything that I am…Really, it wasn’t the theology against my rights as a queer person, as much as the theology forbidding me from having sympathy for newbies and children, that caused me the most distress and estrangement from myself as a Christian…

Right now I am Not A Christian, very vehemently so. But I still love Jesus, and I’m still too much in love with Love, and Uncertainty, and all the other chaotic-poetic gifts I got from living with Jesus completely outside the limits of human reason, to really be comfortable as an atheist. And I see you, hashing it out there raw and real, backing down neither from the responsibility of loving our neighbor and the least among us nor from the challenge of loving God in a world like this. What are you? What am I? What do I do with this lightning?

– K, email dated 7/20/16

 

I realized as I read K’s words that one of the reasons I refer to myself as a Jesus Freak more often than not is because I, too, sometimes want to distance myself from the ideology of the religious right, this politico-religious machine that seems to have hijacked my beautiful Jesus and made him so very American, so very white, so watered down.

And I don’t mean a baptism kind of water.