Dear Fundamentalist Christian
Do you struggle with other people’s ‘lifestyle choices’?
Let me be clear. I’m not interested in winning this debate. It’s not a debate at all when you’re not interested in talking to me, instead of over me.
I have no aspirations towards holiness. If that indicates any kind of shortcoming as a Christian, let it be said that at this point I am not even certain I would call myself one.
You always want to know: “why do you not love the Church more than your lifestyle?”
Never, not once, have you asked me: “why do you not love Jesus anymore?”
Semantics aside (for lifestyle really is a poor word to use), you struggle with the idea that I never had a moment’s hesitation in walking away from judgement, hypocrisy and above all, from the man-made decision someone else made for me that meant I must forever abstain from all Sunday morning cartoons, which is something I still deeply resent. That wasn’t hard. What was harder was continuing to sit in that room while the Armani-suited pastor continued to tell me about how I was definitely going to hell for not checking off on all the boxes of what a Good Christian should be. The thing is, I don’t think any of you do either, and the difference between us, which is quite simply just that you try a little harder and call it faith, doesn’t qualify you to tell the rest of us just what terrible human beings we are.
What I’d really like to know is, why do you love your lifestyle more than God? Why do you love your Sunday routine where you round up the kids and stand in line and pretend to listen to someone only to then socialise mindlessly with other young parents and then lay hands on everything that moves, in fervent prayer? Too harsh? Because it’s untrue. It’s untrue because I don’t think that’s a lifestyle at all. It’s untrue because I know that’s just how you’re wired. You enjoy that, for reasons I will never understand. Just as you will never understand why I do the things I am built and wired for.
I am not of that world. I do not like it, I do not enjoy it. I am not a heterosexual young parent, I do not have heterosexual church-going lady problems. I quite literally puke in my mouth when someone says “submit to your husband” or that men are the “heads of the house”. But that’s just how I’m wired. I do not post Facebook messages saying the opposite of homosexuality is boringness.
My lifestyle is what it is: I have made choices I am not proud of, and I have made choices that I will defend to my grave. In all of them, the only constant has been that I have never been able to choose whether I am attracted to a man or to a woman.
Imagine if you will, that you live in a world where all the church-going people were lesbian and all the families were lesbian families and holiness was measured by how much you loved vagina.
But! You like penis very much, yet it is outlawed and you don’t know why. You, and all the other rebels of your kind (and you knew only a handful of them as children, then you knew more and more of them in time), gradually became bold enough to step forward to declare: please don’t make me a lesbian! For I love cock. Only to have all the church-going lesbians decry your lack of holiness. The Pope issues a stern warning against penis every week, even though his people not so secretly molest penises in the back-rooms of their supposed temples of God. Every time you take a breath, you’re accused of destroying families, killing babies, blamed for tornadoes, hurricanes and wars, all because of your unchangeable love for penis. To top it all off, all the church-going lesbians want you to know that your lifestyle choice is a sin. Yet how is it a choice? How will they ever know that you would not choose your penis-loving lifestyle if only they knew how many of your like-minded friends had tried to kill themselves in shame, or still live in it, or have had their adult lives substantially altered in some way or other all because of what other people thought of their love of penis?
Who in their right mind would choose that kind of lifestyle?
So, Dear Fundamentalist Christian, let me tell you about the lifestyle I’m supposedly choosing. You’ve never really asked, you’ve just assumed.
Every morning, I wake up after hitting snooze on my alarm a couple of times. I grudgingly put on clothes. I purchase coffee. I work. I cuss at traffic. Also unholy. I have a glass of wine with friends. Also unholy territory. I pay too much to get home after midnight (I don’t holy drive) and I fall asleep, sometimes I play a video game or read a book before I do. I spend a substantial chunk of my time wondering about when I’ll meet Ms Right, as you perhaps did before you met your husband, and I fret a little about it. I go on dates. When I am in a relationship, I think about the possibilities of spending the rest of my life with this person. I ask them if they want marriage and kids, if that’s even on the cards. If they say no, I take them off the table. I have sex. I have a lot of sex. I’d be having a lot of sex even if I was boning men instead of women. I’m just not that kind of holy.
No, I don’t believe in waiting for marriage. In fact I don’t believe in waiting for anything at all. I think ‘good things come to those who wait’ is a myth invented by the greedy to beguile the rest of us into waiting. I do my best in haste. I am a sprinter. I do very, very well at it. As for abstinence, which you still force on the rest of us in spite of it not working terribly well in policy or in real life, I’ve quite simply never believed there to be some kind of magical force field waiting to happen when I finally have sex. I chose at sixteen to make my own magic, on a daily basis, if possible. I taught myself what I should do despite the information you deliberately withheld from me, thinking ignorance would serve me better. I got lucky, but tell it to the teen moms and STD-laden kids who aren’t, why don’t you, about just how much you love them that you had to withhold information which could have saved their lives? But no, you were too selfish for that. You thought God would give you extra brownie points if you bossed people around for Him. When did you get the memo?
Also, let me say this one last time: I don’t fuck everything that moves. You Christians and all your dichotomies. It’s not always just yes or no, or slut or damsel, hell or heaven. There is a midpoint most of us recognise as just being human. It has no particular shape or form, which is perhaps why organised religion is so popular (for ‘guidance’), but perhaps it is okay for others to revel in the formlessness of being and in the vast variety of human experiences, the ones you seek to deny.
Dear Fundamentalist Christian, you are not fundamentally different from the people you hate. You have in common with your fundamentalist brothers from the other Abrahamic religions, the inability to differentiate love from hate, and you have in common with us, the people you want so desperately to change, the utter and complete inability to change your mind or your lifestyle. What we would never do is ask you to become like us.
We just want you to stop thinking about other people having sex, and just have more of it yourself. It’s getting kinda gross, fundie, and I can’t even look you in the eye anymore.
P.S. Try something other than missionary, someday.
