Perfection
Why I left the Christian faith (Part 1)
What is perfection?
Is it something you can strive for
Something to strive for
It was 2003. I was 21, still chock full of hormones, and completely lacking in worldly wisdom. This poem was for the boy that, according to purity culture, should have been the one for me.
I thought you were perfect
at least for me
And you were
I thought we had perfect love
in this imperfect world
I thought nothing else matters
Have you ever written something that completely captures an emotion you’re feeling at the time? It’s quite cathartic. And there is something weird that occurs (or at least occurred for me). That stanza, that paragraph, becomes something you’ll go back to again and again. When you’re again feeling an emotion similar to the one you felt when you poured yourself onto the page — you can read what you wrote, and feel a similar release.
So why did I spend so many nights crying over you
Why did you hurt me so many times?
Eventually I stopped going back to re-read this poem. Not because it was no longer relevant. I had memorized it!
When I needed those lines to center myself, to make the hurt less deep, it was rarely about romantic love. I am logical enough to realize that people and relationships are never truly perfect. Love hurts, and that’s fine. It’s pain, but it’s also joy and beauty. I have accepted that from a fairly young age.
My name, Kristina, literally means “Christian”. For the first 19 years of my life, it was true. My relationship with Jesus was an integral part of my life, my soul. I lived within “Perfection”, the perfect framework, the perfect lens through which to view life. I was kind, caring, joyful. I believed with all my heart, and I wanted to share the joy of living with Jesus with everyone I knew.
Then came reality. Christians let me down. Repeatedly. And that was okay. Christianity is of course perfect, but people aren’t perfect. It would be unrealistic to expect to never be hurt. I can continue to suppress the voice in my head that wonders: if Christians are following perfection, then why, in my personal experience, are they more likely to hurt me than people outside the faith?
When I struggled, I would turn to the Bible. I would find wisdom and strength within its pages. Then I would find something that made me stop, and think. This verse, this passage, could be used to justify hurting another human being. In Christianity, we often hurt people to help them, to bring them back into the fold. Is that really justified? Is that really okay? It has to be. Christianity, after all, is perfect.
God is good. In the Bible, God repeatedly murders people. That’s okay, because he’s God, and we are his creation. We are bad, and only trusting and following God can make us good. We cannot begin to understand God’s plan, God’s perfection, and if that includes wiping millions of people off the face of the planet, we accept God’s judgement.
How can I continue to believe this? I must. It is part of my perfect Christian faith.
I continued to grow. The questions inside me continued to grow. Going to church made them get louder and louder. Worship was sweet release — using my voice to sing praises, create beautiful art with my beautiful Christian friends in praise of the Lord. Then came the sermon, which was pure torture. Every time.
I remember a specific moment when it clicked. The pastor was using the story of Abraham and Isaac to illustrate always following God, even when we don’t understand his plan for us.
I thought, emphatically, well, if I ever hear a little voice in my head telling me to sacrifice one of my children, I believe I’ll check myself into an insane asylum and get as far away from them as possible…
Well, obviously I’m not supposed to take the Bible quite. that. literally…
But the voice of my conscience asked, where do you draw the line?
I had too much experience with life outside the fold. I could find inconsistencies. Circumstances under which following the message of a sermon would hurt other human beings. I had decided that not hurting other human beings, for me, would trump my faith each and every time.
But wait — am I going outside the Bible, outside Christianity, to find a moral compass, to find the #1 rule by which I will live? That is wrong, isn’t it?
But wait. Surely I can find a simple admonition not to hurt other people in the Bible. I looked, and I found it. Be kind to others, love them, etc. But I also found passages saying it was kinder to cut other people off than continue to let them live “in sin”. I found passage after passage that can easily justify hurting people — abusing them — in God’s name.
The last stanza of my poem was about being let down by the person I thought was God’s intended for me, but it was also about being let down by the people who were supposed to love and support me, in God. Let down by God himself, when I read all those Old Testament moments in which he was truly cruel, truly uncaring towards his own creation. It was about breaking my promise to love and follow Him for the rest of my life. It was:
I told you my hope would never die
I lied
You killed it.
I realized, there is no perfection. Christians are not perfect, because the Bible is not perfect. God, as described within this holy text, is not perfect. For the first time, I felt the truth of these thoughts deep within my soul. And I broke.
