I Thought All Christians Were Terrorists
I made up my mind to take the communion. About 10 rows of wedding guests sat in the pews ahead of me, and they were emptying out one by one. An usher moved down the aisle and when he got to your row he would nod his head to summon you into the single file line. That line snaked around the church and ended with you standing in front of a pastor who would give you an edible blessing — the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
The usher gave his signal to the folks two rows ahead of me. They stood up, swaying to the soulful rhythm that came pouring from the organ. And I decided right then: when my turn came, this time I would go through with it. I would actually let the robed man insert a cracker into my mouth. Even though I didn’t know where his fingers had been, out of respect for the bride and groom, I would put aside my Christophobia and partake in the ritual.
It seemed like a great day for my first communion. In all my years I had pretty much only gone to church for weddings and funerals, and during those occasions, when they bowed their heads I would look straight ahead, and when they said Amen I would purse my lips in silence. But that day I felt some deep camaraderie with the people in the church. We were all coming together to celebrate my boy getting married. Together, in our swaggiest clothes, we assembled to join in marriage a dude that I had known since high school with a brilliant vibrant woman. The family and friends of bride and groom were here for the same reason, all of us unified with the same sacred mission. Would it really kill me to join in on their religious ritual thingy?
I got to the point where my mouth was actually watering to taste the wine and crackers. But then something happened. As the usher called the row ahead of me to take the Eucharist, I watched a forty-something-year-old light-skinned gentleman just sit still. As the other folks in his row bee-lined towards the preacher he stayed put in his seat and let them step over him. Why was he refusing to participate? Was he a Muslim, a witch, an atheist, or all three? The light-skinned pagan dude crossed his legs and sat confidently as an outsider.
In that split second, triggered by his rebellious protest, I became aware of my own non-Christianity again. I began to think about all the reasons I’m terrified of the cult of holy ghosters — the time my sister went to church as a child with her friend’s family and was cornered by an adult who told her if she didn’t bring my family to church next week we would spend an eternity in the lake of flames. I had dozens of personal experiences like this involving church ladies with big hats, crooked smiles, and devious plans to convert us — or kids at school terrorizing me because I didn’t celebrate Christmas. But I was also terrified of Bible bangers for historical reasons — you know, a few small eras in time like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and Colonialism. This stack of personal and historical reasons caused me to have such a strong reaction at the wedding celebration.
Suddenly I was all alone. These guests around me, who minutes ago felt like my big happy family joining together to support these newlyweds, now seemed to be joined together, but with me on the outside of their circle. All of a sudden they seemed to be brothers and sisters in Christ, an insular secret society that me and light-skinned-pagan-dude would never be able to penetrate. The usher gave our row the signal. I sat still, fastened to the wooden pew, letting my crackers and wine pass me by. I was peacefully resisting the communion.
The sun shined through stained glass windows, and cast a multicolored gleam on my face, spotlighting me as the center of attention. And as I sat there, it felt like the entire community of wedding guests had their eyes locked on me. Suddenly the organist started playing a spooky version of that old Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the others.” And one-by-one the entire congregation of wedding guests began to sing along, and dance along in a choreographed number that looked like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. The Christians were pointing at me and singing, “One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong.” Without a doubt, I was that one thing.
This is how I felt: like everyone was judging me at once. But in retrospect, I bet very few people paid attention to me at all. Pious Christians focused their attention on reaffirming their own personal commitment to their faith. Sunday morning Christians were yawning through the long ceremony, just ready to get the cracker and wine dropped in their mouths so we could get on with the reception. Most likely, many of them paid very little attention to the cracker or the wine. Their minds were elsewhere — on the football game, on the drinks and food that would come during the reception, or on the plunging neckline of the bride’s younger sister.
So why did I feel so paranoid and persecuted? Why did I feel so singled out, like they were all on one accord and there was zero similarity between me and their point of view? Since the time I was a child whenever I have been in a church I have felt circled by judgments. In no other setting do I feel so judged, so misunderstood. And in no other place do I judge others so viciously. I wonder if my paranoia has anything to do with my childhood. That’s where it always starts right? The inclination to distrust religious others is usually learned. Our suspicions are implanted in us by the people who care for us the most, as they instruct us about whose beliefs are legitimate, and whose are loopy:
- When the boy asks his mother “Why can’t we have more gods like the Hindus do?” Mom replies, “Worshipping a hundred gods is like a bastard who treats every hobo he meets on the street like his father.”
- When she asked her master what made the Buddha any better of a teacher than Jesus, her master replied. “The Buddha taught forty-five years, Jesus only for two or three. Who do you think was the most accomplished teacher?”
- When he was standing in the dealership he asked his father why they couldn’t just buy the car he loved so much. His father replied “We are not buying from a Jew. If he hands me a pen to sign the lease, he will charge me a fee for the ink I use.”
- When the girl waited in line at the convenience store, she heard the cashier joke with the customer in front of her “What’s the difference between a Muslim and a vampire? Vampires are only bloodthirsty at night.”
We all grow up around these comments. Most times they are said in passing, matter-of-factly without much malice, but we remember them as valuable lessons about how we should distrust religious others. We hear stories of their treachery, comments about how nonsensical their beliefs are, warnings about how they are likely to mistreat us, and jokes at their expense. Our minds are nurtured in an environment filled with stereotypes. It is mostly our parents’ fault. But before we condemn our caregivers for their bigotry, shouldn’t we acknowledge that sometimes these comments have a hint of truth in them? If they are only stereotypes, why do they feel so real?
My fear of Christians is real. 10 generations ago my ancestors were captured from our West African homeland by mysterious people, with weird names like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; with pale skin that reminded us of ghosts. They bound us in chains, piled us up on top of each other in the bowels of slave ships, and shipped us like cargo across the Atlantic Ocean. Those slave ships were named Jesus of Lubeck, Mother of God (Madre de Dios), Jesus Mary and Joseph (Jesus Maria Jose), the list goes on and on. The vessels that kidnapped my forefathers and sold them into bondage bore the names of Christian saints, prophets, verses, and symbols.
In fact, that song Amazing Grace that stirs your soul so much, was written by the captain of one of those slaveships. Yes, that sacred hymn that Barack sang so sweetly at a Charleston funeral in 2015 was initially authored by John Newton, a man that spent 14 years captaining ships with human beings beneath the deck wailing in terror — a quarter of whom would die in transit. He saw nothing but harmony between his twin hobbies of worshipping Jesus and dehumanizing Black lives.
Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist who freed himself from human bondage, spoke candidly about the relationship between Christian faith and the brutalities of slavery:
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, — a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, — a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, — and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.
- Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
My parents’ families had been Christian for generations but when Mom and Dad read the words of Frederick Douglass, when they heard about the hypocrisies of the Christians who had captured, enslaved, and converted our ancestors to worship a white God, they removed themselves from the church rolls and retired their Bibles. When my sister and I were born they taught us to think for ourselves, to fear white Jesus and anyone that prayed to him. And, you know what? That was great. It raised me to be generally skeptical of truths handed down to me by a society that has tried to oppress me for so long.
In the parent lottery I definitely hit the jackpot. They taught me to be forever vigilant about finding a worldview that fulfills me and my community. But like any human beings, my parents had their share of half-truths as well. I would hear Mom and Dad saying:
“Them crazy Christians are trying to get all of the kids in school to pray to their God again.
There’s something about that Christianity that makes those Priests molest them little boys.
The Christians don’t care about faith and good will during Christmas. All they care about is consumerism.
And I never heard them saying:
The Christians are creating sanctuaries to protect undocumented immigrants from being deported.
There’s something about that Christianity that makes people want to give to charity.
The Christians are having a bake sale with some bomb ass bread pudding.
The critical things my parents said about Christians included some important truths, but it was only half of the story. Up in my house, Christians were mocked sarcastically. We felt sorry for them patronizingly. And we suspected them of all types of shenanigans. But for some reason we ignored the beautiful things Christians had done throughout history —including the sermons on civil rights by the preacher from Ebenezer Baptist church. In my house we seemed to avoid those facts. They just didn’t fit with our narrative. Our narrative told us to fear Christianity, because a snake that bit you once, may very well bite you again.
Psychologists have come up with a term to describe the tendency of human minds to behave like this. The term is confirmation bias. Once we have a stereotype for how a group of people behaves, we basically enter in to any interaction with a person from that group with a strong hypothesis about who they are as a person. As we collect information about the person to form a judgment about them we attend to the details of that person that confirm our hypothesis more than we attend to details that defy our expectations. We also selectively remember things, remembering the stereotypical features much more clearly than those features that defied the stereotype.
This makes me wonder if my fear that Christians are terrorists has been influenced by confirmation bias. Since I learned the word Jesus, my brain learned to associate Christians with the following:
And since I learned these associations so early, my mind has a way of retrieving memories that confirmed this stereotype much quicker than those that didn’t. The few bad experiences seemed to weigh a lot more in my assessment of the faith than the hundreds of friendly saints I had come across. Somehow I could keep an irrational stereotype (Christians are terrorists) when most of the people in my community are Christians and they had treated me just great.
I’m willing to admit that my mental apparatuses are biased and that my flawed perception may have been responsible for transforming a room full of wedding guests minding their own business into a ghoulish insular group of people, dancing and pointing at me, condemning me for my non-Christianity. This may well have been a hallucination. But then there are other stories from my life that make me think that Christians actually are secretly judging me and plotting to convert me.
On New Year’s Eve 2005, when I was still a few weeks away from being able to legally drink myself, a very drunk man in a Ford Explorer was speeding 85 miles an hour going the wrong way on Livingston Avenue. Maybe the alcohol in his system made him feel like he was in Europe where they drive on the left-hand side of the street, but it just so happened that I was going the “right way” on that street. He came barreling head-on into my Honda Accord. What could have been the end of my life, had I not been wearing a seat belt, instead left me in the hospital for two months recovering from a disease called bone doubling. Bone doubling is basically what happens when most of the bones in your body, even bones you never knew you had, are broken into two.
As I took up permanent residence in Grant Hospital, what I remember the most from that time was the shout outs of love that I received, by text, by phone and by facebook. I never felt so loved. But more than anything I appreciated the tangible gifts — the flowers and greeting cards, the letters and tokens. I would wait everyday for the mail to come and leave me with a new gift. Something to hold in my hand that would reconnect me with the world outside of the hospital walls. One day my mother came to the hospital with the delivery. As she handed the stack over to me it was clear that one of the pieces of mail stood out from the others. It was in a manilla envelope and had a little heftiness to it. It was addressed from Ben, one of my good friends at college. Impatiently, I ripped the envelope to shreds and then looked down into my hands at a book. Some book called The Holy Bible: An Edition for New Believers.
I knew what it meant to get flowers or a Hallmark card that said “get better.” But I had no idea what this gift meant. What does it mean to get a Bible from a friend who knows you are not Christian? My mind began to work through the Christian related concepts it had stored to interpret this event. The most applicable concept I could come up with was the “forced conversion.” Ben was trying to prosceletyze to me when I was at my most vulnerable. Ok sure, it wasn’t a baptism at gunpoint but dammit I was under duress. Ben was not beating me with a bullwhip until I accepted the Christian name Toby. But somehow I still felt like Kunta Kinte in Roots. Ben had waited until I was at my most vulnerable. He waited until I was broken and injured and desperate for a miracle. He waited until I was drowning in an existential crisis and then dangled a life jacket down in front of me. All the confusion I was feeling about my purpose, and he used it as an opportunity to expand the Christian empire. This was the move of a devious missionary.
I sat in my hospital bed staring down at the book, feeling tears of frustration creep into my face. “Maybe I shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I thought. I remembered the pain meds that were coursing through my veins and that I wasn’t really operating with a full emotional deck. I began to doubt my interpretation a little bit. Psychologists recommend, when you think you might be engaging in confirmation bias, right there at that moment when you recognize it, you should do one thing: actively try to think of alternative explanations that defy your stereotype.
My mind could easily jump to the conclusion of Ben being a missionary imperialist. But what was an alternative explanation for Ben’s behavior? Ben saw me as spiritually sick, suffering from the soul-shattering disease of living without the grace of God. If I had died in that car accident without finding Jesus, then my sickened soul was going straight to hell. So he wanted to do all that he could to save me from myself. I was his chronically ill friend that refused to take my medicine, and he was going to do everything he could, short of forcing it down my throat, to convince me that I needed it. No matter how much I told him that my spirit was perfectly healthy, and there was no disease at all, he had been trained to see it that way.
For some reason, imagining Ben as a good hearted but overzealous snake oil salesman felt so much better than imagining him as an imperialist. The path he took towards trying to convert me was paved with good intentions. Now let’s be clear. Seeing Ben as good-intentioned didn’t necessarily make his actions feel any less intrusive or hurtful, but I guess it allowed me to see him less as a malicious Christian terrorist and more as benevolent narcissist. There is a difference between terrorist and zealot — between someone who is forcing a medicine down your throat with violence and someone who is so passionate about their remedy that they scream from the rooftops “Snake oil is the only cure for Demon Pox!”
I deserve to live in a world free from terrorists, but I wonder if I deserve a world without zealots. Maybe a world populated with zealots who don’t hurt me is the best world I can ask for. I certainly desire something greater. I desire a world where everyone respects the viewpoints of others. I want Christians to stop saying that their religion is the only way to salvation. They are suffering from a great deal of narcissism. They need a large dose of humility, most likely in the form of a World Religion course. But I’m not sure I can force them to take this medicine without their consent.
Let’s say I’m on the train looking at the guy sitting across from me, and I notice the crucifix chain dangling from his neck and suddenly the image of a burning cross flashes across my consciousness. Right when I’m about to relive my ancestors’ Ku Klux Klan related trauma, and I notice that my Christophobia is being triggered, here’s what I do. Immediately at that point I try to remember the story of Thích Nhất Hạnh, a brilliant and compassionate Buddhist monk from Vietnam. This mild mannered monk has taught me how to forgive Christianity for all the terrorism it has wreaked on the world.
Nhất Hạnh’s first exposure to Christianity was the French missionaries that came with French colonizers. While the colonizers extracted natural resources like rubber from the Vietnamese people and exploited their labor, the missionaries took on the mission of trying to eradicate Buddhism from the country and force Christianity down their throats. This was Nhất Hạnh’s first impression of Christians, self-righteous zealots that felt that their way of life was more civilized than the Vietnamese people he lived amongst. In his book Living Buddha, Living Christ he speaks about how hard it was for him to recognize the beauty of Jesus’s teachings, when his initial interactions with Christians were so negative. But somehow he was able to see past these first impressions, and notice the beauty of the Christian tradition. He eventually went on to write words like this:
Jesus said, “I am the door.” He describes Himself as the door of salvation and everlasting life, the door to the Kingdom of God…The Buddha is also described as a door, a teacher who shows us the way in this life. In Buddhism such a special door is deeply appreciated because that door allows us to enter the realm of mindfulness, loving-kindness, peace, and joy. But it is said that there are 84,000 Dharma doors, doors of teaching. If you are lucky enough to find a door, it would not be very Buddhist to say that yours is the only door. In fact we have to open even more doors for future generations. We should not be afraid of more Dharma doors — if anything, we should be afraid that no more will be opened. It would be a pity for our children and their children if we were satisfied with only the 84,000 doors already available.
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ
Nhất Hạnh does not believe that his Buddhist philosophy is in contradiction with the doctrines of Christianity. He thinks that even with all the disagreement over theology, over prophets, and over diets, the various philosophies of the world are all legitimate doors through which to cross through into right living. These are the words of a man that at an early point in his life witnessed a Christian (American) soldier spit upon his fellow Buddhist monk’s head. After experiencing this type of oppression, Nhất Hạnh eventually came to respect Jesus as his spiritual ancestor, as another legitimate gateway to a divine path. On his altar, right next to his picture of the Buddha, there is one of Jesus of Nazareth.
What if Thích Nhất Hạnh’ is right? If there are 84 thousand doors, wouldn’t it be courageous to walk through another door besides the one our parents guided us through? We have a burning curiosity, to at least peak through them. Wouldn’t it be nice to go through the front door of our Muslim neighbors’ house and celebrate Eid with them? For those of us that have lost touch with our spiritual traditions wouldn’t it be nice to walk through the door of our old church home to figure out what it is that pushed us out, and why perfectly reasonable people stayed?
One of the most important doors I feel inclined to enter is the door to the damn public library — to inundate myself with sources of information that might contradict my point of view. For most of my life I had very strong opinions about Christianity, but for the most point I had only ever read critiques of Christian theology. At that moment in the hospital room, my 20 year old self stared down at Ben’s inappropriate gift, and I realized that I had even avoided the most important source on Christianity of them all. I looked down at the book sitting on my lap, opened it up to page one and began to read.
“In the Beginning there was the Word. And the Word was with God. And God was the Word.”
Still one of my favorite quotes to this day. As a writer, it is amazing to think of words as the very foundation of our universe’s origin. I read Ben’s gift from cover to cover. And it inspired me to go on to read other spiritual texts for the first time — the Bhagavad Gita, the Kebra Nagast as well as the insights of Thich Nhat Hanh. Every door that I have entered has given me life. At this point, I’ve gone through maybe one hundred of the 84 thousand dharma doors, and right now, I’m knocking on the next one.
In all of my searching, 13 years later, I am still trying to reform my relationship with Christianity. I still have a lot of trauma and baggage I’m trying to unpack, and enduring stereotypes that I’m trying to unlearn. Sometimes I feel like a sucker doing all of this work to understand Christianity. Especially when it feels like many of the American Christians I know are not willing to come outside of their comfort zone to better understand me and light-skinned-pagan-dude. But it’s their loss because with every door I go through I am becoming a little bit less scared. I’m no longer scared to take the communion at a wedding, to read and re-read Ben’s book, or to acknowledge the tolerant Christians that inspire me and instruct me. Once upon a time, I thought all Christians were terrorists. But now, after much reflection — I think that only some of them are.
And that is a whole lot closer to the truth.
