When my son was little I was a good person and I took him to church every Sunday. We talked about Jesus at home and read Bible stories and I was a good, Christian mother.
Despite all that I was often looked at through sideways glances in church. Being the young, single mom that I was, I don't think many people within those walls viewed me as a good, Christian mother. I was the teenager who'd gotten herself knocked up out of wedlock, quickly married the man involved and divorced him two years later.
No one was interested in why I got a divorce.
My son's father later married a woman who was a Wiccan. This is to say she believed in witchcraft and not in God or Jesus. I tried to protect my son from what I felt was a dangerous conflict of belief systems that would confuse him. His father and I would fight every time I asked him to try to limit our son's exposure to his wife's religion, not because I deemed the religion inherently evil, but because I thought that a child as young as he was needed some consistency in the messages they were receiving.
Over the years my views on religion have changed. I am less religious than I've ever been, which is not to say I don't believe there is a God. But I think we've all got it wrong. The Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Scientologists, all of us. We are all wrong. There is a certain arrogance in our collective belief that any of us can really know who and what God is, much less what he wants of us. There is a certain arrogance to organized religion- in particular, any organized religion that claims everyone who disagrees with their book is going to Hell.
I am a good person who doesn't go to church. I haven't gone in years save for last week when my mother left me feeling like I had no choice. If I was a good mother I would take my son to church. (My own childhood was sprinkled with years of church going and years of sleeping in on Sunday mornings. This assertion that in order to be a good parent I must attend a ritualistic gathering once a week is a new one.)
My son's father, because of the teen-bride, now goes to church every Sunday. He is a bad person sitting in a church pew, pretending to be good. This, it seems, is why I need to go to church. Somehow the fact that he sits there once a week while wreaking havoc on the lives of everyone around him (his son included) means I also must sit there once a week.
And I just can't believe that man is going to Heaven and I am headed to Hell because I would rather sip my coffee, do some writing and take a walk on Sunday morning than sit in a room full of people pretending to be better people than they are. (No, not everyone in church falls into this category, but enough of them do. And their presence sours my taste for the ceremony.)
My father was molested by a deacon of his church as a kid.
I was molested by a man who taught the youth group at his church.
My ex husband used the word of God to justify his beating me when we were married. (Wives, obey your husbands...)
There are countless cases of molestations by priests.
Ted Haggard led tens of thousands of church goers, all the while visiting homosexual prostitutes on weekends. (His sermons tended to be full of anti-gay rhetoric.)
Jimmy Swaggart attacked and exposed both Marvin Gorman and Jim Bakker for their alduterous indiscretions while simultaneously cheating on his own wife with a prostitute. All this before the revelations that brought Bakker to prison for effectively stealing millions of dollars from his own congregation.
And all of these people are "good Christians."
I don't want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that all Christians (or Jews or Muslims, or Buddhists or any other religious followers) are bad people. Just that I do not believe the connection between going to church and being a good person is really all that strong. The correlation is tenuous at best. And I am not sure I want any part of it anymore. Organized religion is at the root of so much of the world's evil. Hitler killed based on the religion of his victims. Bin Laden killed based on his interpretation of the religious text he was brought up on. The Sunnis and Shiites may never stop going after each other and they are part of the same religion. Back through history the story is redundant. We are right, you are going to Hell and that is why we must kill you.
I would like to believe that we are judged by the way we live our lives. Not based on whether we show up with all the other sinners once a week. Not based on which book we read (which is largely determined by which part of the planet we began our lives on). And I feel more connected to the larger picture of humanity and creation while taking a walk, alone on a sunny morning than I do while listening to the same sermons over and over and over (because really, if you've gone to church for 52 straight weeks at any point in your life, you've heard at least one variation of every sermon you'll ever hear).
Church is not what makes me feel the presence of something larger than myself. Church makes me feel manipulated and judged and judgy. And it isn't where I want to be on Sunday morning.
Having said all of this to my mother, she is all but forcing me to start going to church with her on Sunday mornings with my son. This morning, back in Ohio, she must have sensed my resistance. But her words were hardly comforting. "You don't have to come with us today. That's fine. We'll start going next week once you're settled back in Colorado." (As if I needed more reasons to feel like Colorado is not where I want to be.)
When I was a kid, during the years or months when we were going to church, it was always my mother who brought us. My dad stayed home. When asked about it, the views I heard from my dad at that time were similar to those I now hold. One thing I remember him saying to me over and over is support of his decision not to ascribe to any organized religion was, "God is all knowing, all seeing, all powerful and he needs your money!"
And I don't want to. I want to spend my mornings with my coffee and my laptop and my own thoughts on life. I don't believe that homosexuals are automatically going to Hell and I don't think that going to church on Sunday mornings makes you a better person. I can stand behind a God that judges us based on how we treat each other and whether we improve or disable the lives of those around us. But I don't know how I feel about a God who picks and chooses based on things like our sex lives or which religious text we were born into.
I remember from my church going days there was a man in my congregation with a bumper sticker on his blue van that said, "Sitting in church on Sunday and calling yourself a Christian is like sitting in your garage and calling yourself a car." He was a good, Christian man calling out the hypocrisy of the people I listed above.
And yet....
I can say with a fair amount of certainty, based on the teachings of that church, that he believes all homosexuals, Muslims, teen mothers who do not repent, Hindus, people who commit suicide, people who do not gather in church once a week with their fellow Christians, and anyone who is not baptized (which includes quite a large number of Christians) are all going to Hell. The church I was attending at the time felt that female ministers were an abomination and musical instruments during church were a sin- sorry to all you church goers who have guitars and drums as part of your service (which is becoming more and more common). Catholics were wrong, Baptists were wrong, Lutherans were wrong.
The truth is, we're all wrong.
The biggest value I see in organized religion is the comfort it can bring. Having a ritual that makes you feel sure things are going to be alright can help you through really dark times. But I no longer receive that benefit from going to church. I don't think a cracker and some grape juice is going to save me. And I would rather simply be a good person who looks for the good in the people I encounter than be a religious person who sees only sin in those around me. After all, I am pretty sure the Bible tells us to stop being such judgy assholes.
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