A Former But Not An Ex: Leaving the GOP

My time as a Republican has come to an end. But it wasn’t all bad.

It’s interesting how you can go through periods of life and feel like you’ve done this before. I believe there are parts of our lives where history doesn’t repeat itself as much as starts to rhyme; they are similar in many ways, but they are not the same.

It was about 30 years ago, that I made the move from my evangelical upbringing to move towards more liberal/mainline Protestantism. In some ways, it wasn’t a huge move, since I went from a liberal evangelical to a moderate mainliner. But in other ways it was. This was around the same time that I start to come out sexually and I knew that at least in 1992, there was no place for me in the evangelical world.

When I’ve heard other gay men and lesbians talk about their own leave-taking from the evangelical world, they always seemed to be bitter and look at everything they went through as horrible. Maybe for them, it was. But I didn’t want to look back at my childhood and early adulthood as a waste. I felt that I learned a lot of good things, things that helped me as I was coming out and help me to this day. I wanted to see evangelicalism as imperfect and flawed, but not worthless or even evil. I didn’t want to be like some of the people I’ve seen on Twitter, who call…