The Early Years

This is the first in a series of essays regarding my thoughts, feelings and experiences with faith and religion. As such, it is a statement of personal belief and I have no interest in debating or justifying my beliefs. This is in no way a cry for ‘redemption’ and any attempts to convince, convert or otherwise ‘witness’ to me will be met with severe hostility.

When I was twelve, I was in junior high school and profoundly awkward. I did not have an easy time of things and unfortunately, I did not have much in the way of self-confidence and found myself invited to a large Christian Church. At first, it seemed like a neat place; everyone was friendly and nice and I suddenly had cool friends. It was nice. My parents had long before discarded the religions of their respective upbringings, and they felt that if I wanted to explore issues of faith, it was okay unless things got out of hand. Their support and open-mindedness made an indelible impression that resonates to this day.

About once a month, us junior high kids had some sort of activity, from sleep-overs to all-night parties. One warm, sunny Saturday afternoon, they loaded all us kids into church buses and then drove the buses out into various neighborhoods in San Jose, with a very specific mission: We were meant to go door-to-door and invite people to hear the “Good News” at our church.

It felt very wrong to be doing this; I didn’t think it was right for me to do that because I had questions about things I was reading in the bible and by that point, no one had been able to explain my concerns. I was just supposed to accept what was being told to me as God’s word, God’s will, etc. The problem, as it was explained to me, wasn’t that the bible seemed contradictory, vague and poorly-written – the problem was that The Enemy (that’s what we were supposed to call the devil) was in my heart, and that’s what was making me so confused. The surest way to remedy this, my new friends told me, was to accept Jesus Christ in my heart as my personal savior and be baptized. That, they assured me, would clear everything up. I was also advised to destroy my ELO and Eagles records, because of their Satanic influence. Not long thereafter, I did get baptized. However, the records stayed.

One Sunday, toward the end of the general sermon, the pastor informed us that the junior high parishioners should go to the media center, for a “very special” Sunday School presentation. When we assembled in the media center, we were told that we were going to be shown an important film, which was vitally important to our very survival as Christians living in a secular world. When the lights dimmed, we were shown a real, uncensored film of a woman having a spectacularly graphic, painful abortion, from beginning to end, with the final, lingering shot on the removed fetal material. A slide show of more aborted fetuses followed this ‘film,’ each photo more gruesome and disturbing than the last. We were given no warning. It was simply dumped on us without any explanation or understanding of the process. The only narrative, aside form the screams of the woman having the procedure, was our beloved youth minister telling us that what was happening was an abomination to God.

We were children, and most of us had been innocent when we walked into that room. Thirty years later, I can still see the images. I can still hear the screams. And I still cannot understand what made these people think they had the right to do that to us without warning, without thought to our emotional well-being.

Not long after that John Lennon, one of my heroes, was murdered in cold blood for no sane reason whatsoever. The following Friday was one of our sleep-overs and one of the guys made a point of talking about how certain he was that Lennon would be burning in Hell for all eternity because he dared to imagine a world without religion, even though he knew how much Lennon meant to me, and how deeply the loss had affected me.

I went home the next morning, and never set foot in that church again. Any church that would willingly exploit children to fill seats on Sunday, any church that would see no issue in showing innocent children what amounted to a snuff film, any church that was so intolerant, so callous and hurtful and mean-spirited that it truly believed anyone whose philosophy wasn’t strictly in line with theirs should suffer eternal damnation, well, I realized it wasn’t a church I wanted to be affiliated with. The way that they were able to interpret scripture to support their political and social beliefs was to me, so foul and so profane that it almost defies description.

A year later, the pastor of Los Gatos Christian Church resigned in disgrace after he was caught having an affair. This judgmental, hypocritical loser now works as a children’s minister elsewhere in California. Just imagine what he is filling children’s minds with these days.