“I had a friend that…got born again and evangelical, and it broke my heart.”

People in Pain

My goal in this blog project is to tell in a loving and compelling way why Christianity is both true and good, offering help in responding to objections raised by people made and loved by God. But I do not want us to lose sight of the real people who inform our conversation.

Several focus group participants expressed great negative emotion toward Christianity, like the Phoenix male who said, “I had a friend that actually got born again and evangelical, and it broke my heart.” But it is perhaps the story of a lesbian woman from Austin that best displays the deep pain behind some of the objections we hear to the Christian faith. She explained that her problems were not theoretical or historical. “It’s very emotional for me,” she said. “I lump all religious people of any kind together…. I probably do stay away from them because of my experiences…. I have a negative association with even the word God. I don’t even care for that…. I’ve had many negative experiences with religious people, but one person in particular, and it’s very vivid in my mind.” And then this woman told her story:

“When I was about 14, I was walking down the street with my girlfriend, holding hands. We stopped and sat down on a curb. We were having a discussion…I had a really tough upbringing. Some lady came around the corner in a Suburban and was screaming out of her window, ‘You’re going to hell,’ and cursing at us every profanity and got about two inches from us in her Suburban and tried to run me over. ‘F–you’ and ‘You’re disgusting’ and all these things. ‘You’re going to hell.’

She continued her thoughts with a mixture of fear and graciousness:

“I realize it’s a very dramatic example. I feel like even on a much smaller level that most religious people have those thoughts even if they don’t act on them to that extreme. That’s just one example…. My family is all very religious. They think I’m the one who has gone astray and they keep telling me I’m going to be saved one day. The clouds are going to open up and I’m going to find my true self. Honestly I will. I appreciate whenever they tell me, ‘I’m praying for you.’ I say, ‘Thank you very much. I need all the prayers I can get.’ I don’t know that I believe in all of that, but it couldn’t hurt.

Most people would agree that her encounter with a hateful SUV-driving Christian was grievous. Her story lets us into a world where religious people are considered anything but safe.