The Road to Hell

Part III: Falling Short

The signs seemed to pop up overnight. Purple and black "No on Measure 36" littered the well-manicured signs of our community. Neighbors, of whom had never mention politics, had bumper stickers, and signs and rainbow-colored flags hanging from their windows. Our TV was filled with ads that both quoted the bible (with a half-opaque flame running behind the words "Gay" and "Hell"), and quoted the articles of freedom in the constitution. All of the sudden, local politicians had a stance on it, friend's parents had a stance on it. Of course, our church had a stance on it. We saw bumper stickers and signs appear everywhere.

"Protect the sanctity of Marriage, NO on 36"

And

"One Man, One Woman NO on 36".

And

A religious person thought themselves clever and came up with, "God made Adam and Eve, not ADAM AND STEVE!" Parents and parishioners alike would use this phrase akin to Jesus's "Get Behind me, Satan" when tempted by the Beast himself.

We talked about this often in Youth Group, and this debate was one that perplexed me. As far as I was concerned, there are loads of things that should have been bigger issues, like poverty, true sexual deviance, hunger, clean water, shelter, illness, domestic abuse, marital adultery, insincerity, depression, PTSD, and war just to name a few.

In Youth Group, being a fifteen-year-old with absolutely zero life experience, I was against it. Not that I was against gay people or considered homosexuality a "perversion." But from a binary, childish perspective, I saw it as such: the bible says homosexuality isn't OK, so they shouldn't get married. A command and action. In my mind, marriage was something created by religion, and so religion got to make the rules. And they did. They said marriage was between a man and a woman, the only two qualifying features.

I wasn't against partnership, as I believed they should be given the same rights as men and women who got married. They just needed to call it something different. What's the big deal? Just call it a partnership and give them the rights and be done with it.

It's easy to make polar stances on things, to say "Yes" and "No" when there isn't a human face you have to look at.

This is often the problem with religion: when God is involved, it removes humanity. It makes it OK to look at someone and say, "You are disgusting" because the eternal being that created the heavens and the earth said premarital sex is wrong. It's the ultimate playground argument starter and ender, the "My dad is bigger than your dad" or "My mom says your family is trash." It removes the shame of saying, "You're going to burn in hell" because it's simply parroting what the religion text says, much like the call and response traditions of my Lutheran upbringing. It emboldens and separates, it puts a line in the sand and places the righteous on the side of the Right. Whatever "Right" means. It takes the onus off the Christian. This is my problem with Christianity.

As a Christian, I have no doubt that Christians are some of the greatest hypocrites. It's a religion that is based on grace, based on understanding humanity's many flaws, but instead of saying, "Repent, sinner," it says, "I love you." Its stories teach of God's infinite grace for sending down his only son to die for our sins.

Jesus himself says the two most important commandments are, "Love your God and love your neighbor." Everything else is for God.

And yet we condemn. We have churches that outlaw dancing. We have churches that admonish the non-Christian. We have churches, of the same religion, that abhor one another. And, most often, we have churches that condemn homosexuality. All the while, our religion, whose name is based on Christ, demonstrates anything but Christ-like tendencies. Jesus hung out with the sinners, the infirm, the weak and the outcast. The only thing that drove Jesus to anger was not whores, or homosexuals, or tax collectors, but instead the religious elite, those that sat upon the pedestal of their religious power and took advantage of the aforementioned. They put him into such a rage that he flipped tables and cast them out of the temple with a whip he fashioned from cords. Badass. One of the most common words said by Jesus is "hypocrites." It's his ultimate insult, one he uses dozens of times against the religious Pharisees.