Faith Talk and More

In December 1974, my dad's job took him—and what remained of our family at home (two younger brothers and our two pups, Mopsy and Toto)—to Pottstown, PA. My father allowed me to stay behind and finish my senior year of high school. I was a troubled kid, so I'm not sure why he placed any amount of trust in me. I had been actively using a variety of recreational drugs up to just a few months before this point (primarily speed, LSD, mescalin, etc), but I had stopped all of that activity after a frightening trip on LSD one night where I prayed to God that if I survived, I would straighten up. And I did. 

My parents allowing me to remain behind felt like they were ready to be done raising me. While I was grateful not to have to uproot my life and move with them, I quietly harbored resentment about it for years. It felt like they had given up on me. I recall them stopping by the apartment they had rented for my sister and me on their way out of town—one last goodbye. As my dad and mom made their way down the stairs from the hallway outside our apartment to their car, my dad yelled up to me, something about making them proud and that I was a man now. "This is how my childhood ends?" I remember how sobering a moment that was for me for a variety of reasons. Actually, I was still just a kid. I was 17. 

Unsurprisingly, I ended up in the military, enlisting in the Navy for a four-year term six months after graduation.

My mother was a Lutheran her entire life, and my father was raised Catholic, but he had nothing but disdain for the church, where nuns used to occasionally ridicule him as a young boy for being poor. He had lost both of his parents before the age of ten. Father Quilty, the Father at the church, was my dad's father figure. He left such a mark on him that he kept an old sepia photo of him in his wallet for the rest of his life. I never saw my dad as having a strong faith, but I could be wrong. To me, he seemed to play the role of a churchgoing husband as a favor to my mom. I respected him for that, as all marriages have some give-and-take.

The one thing I took away from my childhood, thanks to our weekly church attendance at St Michael's Lutheran Church in Bloomington, was a faith in a higher power—God, or more specifically, Jesus. As I ventured out into the world as a young adult, I always had the sense that I was being watched over and that God had a plan for my life. I still believe that, and I still believe in a higher power, but my belief in Christianity is a dying ember now, and that saddens me because my faith and my time spent quietly praying to Jesus used to be so integral to my life.  

I started the process of leaving the church and the faith in the 2010s. This series of posts about the marrying of religion with politics that I witnessed at Hosanna, my former church, helped to put me firmly on the road to deconstructing my faith, even if I didn't realize then what I was doing. I thought I was merely questioning it.

I know I'm not alone in this. Many people are leaving the church for a variety of reasons, and I think chief among them is the coupling of Christianity with politics for the purpose of power and control. The church has a long history of wedding religion and politics, going back to the rule of Emperor Constantine, who used the faithful for political power. We're witnessing the same thing today with the current administration in a very gross and off-putting way. I've tried to put aside what evangelicals are doing; still, I can't get beyond the understanding I've come to, that Christianity is a religion derived from men with agendas, and not so much God-inspired. I don't come to that belief easily. It's taken me years to get here, but I'm not at any sort of destination yet. My faith walk is a journey.

It's not my purpose to cause anyone to stumble in their faith. I know how important it is to many. All I would ask that you clearly see what's happening on the streets of some of our major cities here in the U.S., as ICE agents/thugs whisk away people—people who in many cases have only ever known this country—out of their peaceful law-abiding lives and take many of them to lands they've never been to where they don't even speak the language. As I said in my last blog post, any church that is ignoring what our government is doing to these people, and skipping over the matter like they do the red letters of the New Testament, that's a church devoid of Jesus. If it's yours, find a new church.   

So, I find myself at an uneasy place at this stage in my life. I had hoped to have questions about salvation and eternal life figured out by now, but I'm as far away as I've ever been from an understanding of such matters. 

And I worry about losing our form of democracy. I think about it regularly throughout the day. I see the militarization happening on our streets with tanks and men with weapons, dressed for war in a fascistic display of power. And I cringe. I see a president taking heavy machinery to the East Wing of the White House—the People's House—and demolishing it and its history, and I'm saddened, all to make way for an obscenely large ballroom that seems to thumb its nose at the ordinary person. Most of us saw the images of the destruction and thought of it as a metaphor for what he's doing to our nation. 

As I keep hearing, if we're waiting for the courts to save us from what's coming, don't. They won't save us. And the media is seriously failing us. Much of our media has been neutered by threats of retaliation if they color too far outside the lines of what the administration deems acceptable, or they've been bought out by billionaires with eyes fixed on compliant politicians who will make them even wealthier. 

It will be we-the-people who either uphold our democracy or allow it to die. Please, if you're not able to get involved, try to inform yourself through reputable media sources so you can better recognize the threats this administration poses to our government, our democracy, and our freedoms. You will not find those voices in conservative spaces. Be sure of that. 

We're in a bad place. I hope you can see that. If not, let's talk. 

Dan McClellan is a biblical scholar whose online content I find compelling, as he uses his knowledge to challenge misleading dogmas within the church, such as the misplaced focus on same-sex relationships and, a big concern of mine, the issue of scriptural authenticity. He also uses his platform to push back on what many of us see as a slide into fascism under an administration that is looking more authoritarian every day, while proclaiming a faith that would cause Jesus to overturn the merch tables of these false Christians. Please watch Dan's recent video below if you have the time. 

That's all I've got.