I Don’t Hate Christianity*

*Or at the very least, I do my damnedest to recognize when negative experiences with Christianity have led me to have reflexive emotional responses as opposed to rational feelings about the religion.

Many people have some really awful experiences with Christianity and I am no exception. Granted, I am somewhere in the median of experiences for people of my demographic (by my own estimate from stories related to me by other ex-Christians). There are definitely people who have experiences that make mine look like a walk in the park and others who haven’t really had bad experiences but were able to gracefully walk away from Christianity as they would an awkward first date. From what I gather, it depends on a lot of things: denominational affiliation, political affiliation, cultural and social pressures, etc. To be clear, just because one person seems to not have much of a struggle and another seems to have the worst experience doesn’t negate the suffering of one or other. It’s not a competition to see who has suffered the most as a metric for what counts as legitimate suffering under Christianity.

There are lots of things that make people want to leave Christianity. For me, it was the anti-LGBT and sex shaming attitudes pervasive throughout Christianity that made me really feel like this wasn’t a religion I could get behind. Other things came up after the fact that diversified my reasons for not wanting to be Christian anymore, but I basically couldn’t sit in any more services or Bible studies talking about how Christ wants followers to reconcile and make restitution for racism while completely ignoring LGBT people. I couldn’t stomach the thought that people were praising InterVarsity Fellowship for its progressive stance on racism and immigration while LGBT people in the organization had to meet in secret.

Last night I was listening to a podcast, Heathen Talk as I continue to learn about the reconstructionist religion Ásatrú, and I heard them talk about an important step for new heathens is overcoming their christohate (hatred for Christianity). Listening to the hosts of the show talk about christohate and explain the importance of moving on from it made me ask myself about my own hatred for Christianity. Hatred has no place in my own religion. No matter how justified that hatred may seem, that justification is exactly that, an illusion. I have maintained for some time now that I don’t hate Christianity but that I am still healing from the damage Christianity did to me. This episode of the podcast made me reflect on my feelings about Christianity especially in light of my most recent experience in grad school.

For those not in the know, I attend Abilene Christian University (ACU) and I’m studying for my Masters of Education in Higher Education with a specialization College Student Affairs. Last week I finished a course called Introduction to Spiritual Development in College Students. The course really tested my patience and asked me to reflect on my own spiritual development. As you might imagine, ACU tailors their courses to Christians including Biblical teachings and the like. In my previous two classes I didn’t find it particularly obstructive in doing well, but this course was asking me to reflect on my relationship with God and Jesus Christ, two figures whom I pay no reverence to nor do I believe to be beings that I should have a relationship with (although if Zombie Jesus wants to join me for a beer, I’m game).

Friends on Facebook might have heard me talk about how I felt like the course left me “spiritually dead inside.” It’s true. The course kept asking me to give, give, give; improvise, improvise, improvise; compromise, compromise, compromise; it all left me feeling like I was putting everything into the course and getting nothing out of it. I learned a few nifty things about spiritual development and spiritual formation, but I spent the majority of the time learning about how Christians think of spiritual development and spiritual formation and often had to try to answer questions of spiritual development that were intended for Christians from a non-Christian perspective. It was especially nerve wracking because there was one assignment I felt I just could not do and so I sat it out. Unfortunately that meant getting a zero on an assignment that was the second highest point-value assignment in the course. It meant that I had to get perfect or near-perfect scores on all subsequent assignments to pass the class.

There is no shortage of reasons for me to dislike Christianity and my experience with this course was yet another reason, but it’s not another notch in my belt. It’s not my proverbial 96th Thesis to be nailed to the door of the church. I suspect there are and always will be asshats and abusers in Christianity, but I don’t think Christianity has the monopoly on it. I think it’s most apparent in Christianity because it’s the dominant religion in the Western world. Some might argue that if Wicca or Quaker were the dominant religion that we wouldn’t have the problems we have with evangelical Christianity. I disagree. I think anyone with the will to use religion as a tool to manipulate and harm people for their own benefit will do so regardless of what religion it is. There are asshats in my religion; people who manipulate and abuse others for their own benefit exist proportional to the total number of people who claim to follow the same religion.

I will say that for me, Christianity can get a bit annoying. It’s like an ex-partner who just shows up everywhere, calls you randomly, and basically can’t be avoided even though what you want most is to have a nice break from them. There are times when I really just wish I could live in a world where Christianity didn’t exist. Not in a destructive way, but a place where I could go where people didn’t talk about Christianity and it was nowhere to be found. There are times when this desire becomes fairly intense, a bit like gasping for air in a stale room. Despite my occasional jokes about abolishing Christianity, I really just want to have more room to discuss things other than Christianity. I also want a religiously neutral environment where Christianity is not assumed as normal. I don’t want to walk into an all-purpose prayer room and see a cross/crucifix. I don’t want to walk into the faith section of a bookstore and see several dozen offerings on the topic of Christianity while only have one or two selections for Islam and Buddhism. It’s really alarming when the biggest bookstore chain in my hometown doesn’t have anything on the Talmud or the Tao Te Ching.

Do I hate Christianity? No, but I don’t think there’s a clear moment when I stopped hating Christianity. I think there will always be a temptation to hate Christianity, but I also know that that hate is self-destructive and I know plenty of people who really set a new standard for Christians of tomorrow.