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Why I Had To Break Up With Jesus

For those not raised in the Church, the idea of grieving the loss of your faith can sound ridiculous.

Easter always make me long for the days when I counted myself a Christian. It’s a bit of nostalgia mixed with ritual and a desire to experience again the reassurance of believing in a higher power.

This holiday season, I’ve been thinking a lot about my queerness and my relationship with the Methodist church, in which I was raised. And how, for me, the two identities could never fully co-exist. Aside from coming to terms with my sexuality, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was come to terms with my faith—which, eventually, meant giving it up.

For those not raised in the Church, the idea of grieving the loss of your faith can sound ridiculous. You look at the Westboro Baptist Church or pastor David James Manning and then you look at me, the proud queer man, and the dots practically connect themselves.

How could I not divorce myself from a religion that wants nothing to do with me?

But for most of my life, I never questioned my beliefs, which were given to me at birth by my family. I believed in Jesus. I read the Bible as truth. I saw existence as a test for the afterlife. These things were as real as the blue sky or the all-knowing wisdom of my parents.

In the Methodist church, you confirm your commitment to God in sixth grade with a year taking special classes on the Bible and what it means to be a good Christian. At the end of your confirmation year, you pledge yourself to the Church in front of all your friends and family.

I suppose it's not a serious thing for everyone: Plenty of people who go through the process end up becoming underage drinkers or everyday swearers, or even apathetic churchgoers. But for me, I couldn't just laugh off a year—and a proclamation—like that. Not without paying the consequences somewhere along the way.

My "somewhere along the way" came when I was 13 and saw Fabio on the cover of a romance novel at a bookstore. I distinctly remember his long locks and his barrel chest. Then, of course, I noticed the surprising protuberance that told me I was attracted to men.

That day began a strategy of denial that would last nearly eight years as I forfeited the natural feelings of my body for an unnatural devotion to the Church. I sang in church choir, joined a youth group, helped out at vacation bible school and even taught Sunday school.

I burrowed into the Word and hoped my faith would keep me normal. And save me from the sin of who I was.

What’s so peculiar is that I did this without anyone needing to tell me to. There were gay men in my congregation. They were affable, loud—the rabble-rousers. Sometimes they were married to beautiful women and had beautiful children. But, mostly, they were solitary figures, who never spoke about their personal lives because they weren’t asked about them and knew better than to bring it up themselves.

So these quietly-maybe-gay men became my teachers. They modeled what I came to understand as the two ways I could be: either a closeted participant in the heterosexual narrative or the outsider, who maintained his queerness with walls and deflection.

Back home in Texas, Christianity touches everything. It spills out from the pews at Sunday service into chatter at school and small talk at the local Kroger. It divides the world into good and bad, righteous and sinful, saved and damned, us and them. All without bothering to offer much to those who exist outside the majority.

As it became increasingly clear to me that my interest in men wasn’t a phase, I inched further and further from that majority. The distance provided an uncomfortable awareness of how cruelly Christians could wield their faith. I saw it decimate one of my best friends as our peers damned his soul to hell when he came out as gay. I saw it ridicule my classmates who wore hijabs and mock a girl suffering from mental illness as she stumbled over her speech on a mission trip.

Later, I would see it call me "fairy" and "queer" and "faggot."

Of course not all Christians are cruel. I was fortunate enough to be raised by a loving family guided by the kinder principles of our faith. And yet, the fear that I would one day become the target of hatred and vitriol was enough for me to reject who I was.

When I got older and left home for college in Vermont, I was exposed for the first time to a real diversity of thought on religion: My best friends were Jews, Hindus, lackadaisical Catholics, even agnostics and atheists. I had one of those epiphanies that stings with both its obviousness and its profundity: Christianity as I knew it was as true or as false as any religion, and if I didn’t want to be a Christian, I didn’t have to be.

Realizing that I had a say in what I did or did not believe was so overwhelming that I did nothing with the information for more than a year. It churned in the background, along with my still unacknowledged desire to make out with the cute boy on the rowing team and to study the mannerisms of my fabulously out RA. But it persisted, until one night as I laid in bed about to recite my prayers, I stopped and felt the last fumes of my faith evaporate in the darkness of my dorm room.

Now, some five years from that night, I still miss Christianity. But it's the way you miss the dull pain of a toothache.

When I’m home, I’ll go to church with my grandmother and sing the old hymns. And I’ll feel my faith nipping at my heels. But it’s a ghost now and will never be wholly mine again.

Even as I see LGBT-affirming churches sprouting up across the country, I know that I will never return to the flock. I feel so betrayed, so unseen by a religion that I was willing to give all of myself to when I was too young to know what a sacrifice like that would mean. I’m angry the way Christians have twisted this beautiful faith into something ugly and oppressive. I know it breaks my family’s heart to see how far I’ve drifted, and in some ways, it breaks mine too.

But if I have to choose between an unknown deity and the truth of my queerness, I will choose myself every time.

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