In defense of Christ's too-high standards

Dear M,

I had a dream last night, and in the dream I was defending my parents. I was on a bus full of black people and lesbians and found myself surrounded by a hostile mob after questioning the facts of a police shooting.

This was when things blew up. One of the riders, a short, fat one with pink hair, began pummeling me with questions about my childhood. She’d found that I was homeschooled in a Christian home, and that meant my parents had taught me Christian sexual ethics. She rolled her eyes and said of course, there it is, he was homeschooled. Then their methods changed, and I was getting pummeled over gay rights.

I responded as follows, while the brown hills of southern California whizzed by the bus windows.

Yeah mom was strict — too strict, if you ask me. But do you know where morals came from? They came from pain. Not from laws handed down to us from Mount Sinai. I mean from experiencing all the messiness of life and desire and wanting to clean it up. You can live without rules, but eventually you’ll find them. And if you won't take them, your kids will "invent” them. It’s just a matter of time and mechanics**.

So you shame my mom, but you know what? She was born out of wedlock. She always wanted to be loved by her father, but he had a whole other family. So she felt unloved, and spent time hiding in closets from his wife. You can blame Jesus for the strictness, but really it was her father. She saw the way he loved and hated it because it hurt her, and the hate came from love and birthed new kinds of love — a family that would have been impossible had the hatred not been there in the first place.

And note this has nothing to do with you in particular anyway. It has to do with all of us. She didn't raise me to hate gayness. She raised me to be afraid of straightness. You’re a side-note on a war larger than anything you can or ever will be. You never had a chance being what she feared most. But you're against what she loved, the family she built and fought for, and you put yourself in her crosshairs. Is this her fault — the kid who loved dad and wasn't loved back? Or is it yours?

Jesus did have something to do with this. He gave her a creed to go with her fear. A belief that God was crusading with her. It made me neurotic because I felt filthy and ashamed, yeah. But it also gave me the tools to hide my feelings and channel them elsewhere and have a family of my own. Am I perfect, her way? No, and I don't believe her way is even perfect. But I’m better than I would have been, and that counts for something.

And yeah, I think Jesus was too radical. But was He wrong? When He said to lust after a woman is to commit adultery with her, was He lying? Can you ever have a tree without a seed? He was looking at the whole act from beginning to end, and you can't have the end without the beginning. And when He said to hate your brother in your heart is murder, was He wrong about that too? Or was he just telling us what we all know — that anything inside us can turn into anything outside us?

You say Jesus is too strict, too bigoted, too unloving. But how do you love someone who's killing himself? You tell him what’s killing him — his desires, even if he drives you away; even if he won't believe you, or thinks you're a prude. Even if he can't fix it himself. Well, Jesus loved us like my own mom loved me. And I’m proud that she did. I will always be proud of her. And you can never take that away from me.

Then I woke up. And I realized, at that moment, that Jesus Christ was never here to kill me. In fact I had Him all wrong. Christ just wanted me to know what was killing me, and for me to watch out for it.

There are others out to kill me. There are people who are against homeschooled families like mine, which amounts to the same thing. There are people who don't want me to have good standards, which is my life-blood — standards that exclude lots of “their people” from my admiration, my company, and support. An exclusion of my desires that amounts to an exclusion of my life. Jesus was never this to me. He always told me to stand up straighter. Unlike the lesbians, he never once told me standing straight was a problem.

And I think it's safe to ask here, is Jesus even the “worst” of the so-called bigots? Jesus Christ refused to accept parts of me**. The Buddha was here to accept none of me. They both said that real pain comes from wanting something, but at least Christ said I could want it the right way. No idea what I’m supposed to do with the man who wants me to want nothing. No idea what I’m supposed to do with the lesbian who wants me to want worse things.

Yours,

-J

*That's why civilizations rise and fall. You discover what hurts, then you discover how to avoid it. And when you get rid of the hurt, your children forget why you were avoiding it in the first place.

Morality, so far from being uniform, is cyclical, like the seasons. Nature will give you or your grandchildren morality again — but She will have to cut your heart out first.

Steinbeck has a beautiful passage to this effect in The Grapes of Wrath about families on the road, looking for work and meeting other families in camps and splitting in the morning.

At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique. Then leaders emerged, then laws were made, then codes came into being. And as the worlds moved westward they were more complete and better furnished, for their builders were more experienced in building them. The families learned what rights must be observed—the right of privacy in the tent; the right to keep the past black hidden in the heart; the right to talk and to listen; the right to refuse help or to accept, to offer help or to decline it; the right of son to court and daughter to be courted; the right of the hungry to be fed; the rights of the pregnant and the sick to transcend all other rights.

And the families learned, although no one told them, what rights are monstrous and must be destroyed: the right to intrude upon privacy, the right to be noisy while the camp slept, the right of seduction or rape, the right of adultery and theft and murder. These rights were crushed, because the little worlds could not exist for even a night with such rights alive. And as the worlds moved westward, rules became laws, although no one told the families. It is unlawful to foul near the camp; it is unlawful in any way to foul the drinking water; it is unlawful to eat good rich food near one who is hungry, unless he is asked to share. And with the laws, the punishments—and there were only two—a quick and murderous fight or ostracism; and ostracism was the worst. For if one broke the laws his name and face went with him, and he had no place in any world, no matter where created. In the worlds, social conduct became fixed and rigid, so that a man must say “Good morning’’ when asked for it, so that a man might have a willing girl if he stayed with her, if he fathered her children and protected them. But a man might not have one girl one night and another the next, for this would endanger the worlds.

**It’s said that Christ won't accept parts of me. But He also said

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

There are no qualifications here, no asking that you be the "right kind of person” first, no promises that you’ll be perfect the rest of your life, no revelation to make you understand everything about God, no guarantee you’ll fall into the right denomination, or that you’ll avoid making horrible errors in doctrine. Just ask, seek, knock — maybe even keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. If this doesn't mean what it says then it and the Gospel mean nothing. So this is what I lean on and what I ask for, day after day after day.

I don’t claim to be a Christian. I only claim that I’m claiming.