Dear the Members of the Church I Loyally Attend,

There is a poem, and I think you ought to read it. It's called Possible Answers to Prayer, and it's by Scott Cairns.

Your petitions—though they continue to bear   

just the one signature—have been duly recorded.   

Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent   

entertainment value—nonetheless serve   

to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath   

a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more   

conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,   

the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes   

recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly   

righteous indignation toward the many   

whose habits and sympathies offend you—         

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend   

how near I am, with what fervor I adore

precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

I go to your church every Sunday, and I have to tell you: the culture there sucks. Where is your boldness? Where is your respect for those not like you? Where is your art?

But anyway. One of you said to me, the other day, "It's only fair that we get a chance to share the word in the schools, what with what the GSA is doing." And it caught me off guard. What the GSA did was hand out shirts that said, "gay? fine by me." No capitalization, no graphics, pretty simple and understated. And it's true, they do read a little bit like, "By the power invested in me as the judge of such matters, I hereby grant thee permission to by gay," but they also read like, "Hey-- your sexuality doesn't change my opinion of you, and I will still respect you." Quite frankly, church-goers, that's a message you'd do well to endorse.

My grudge against the church comes out the church culture, and the way they see an "us", perfect, saved people, and a "them", sinners, all those who disagree with us. And that's almost fine-- the Bible does describe an us of saved people and a them of those the us should try to show God to, but you're missing something. You're missing that you don't get to up and be condescending and feel awesome once you're a Christian. The gospel is built on love, and on valuing people simply because they're human, and imagining them the way you imagine yourself, and being kind, and caring for others, and I don't see it. That project where you're going to preach Christianity in the schools is called the Ethos project. I looked up the word Ethos. It means, basically, a culture's mindset, values, and assumptions. Your assumptions as they reveal themselves in your implications and actions suck.

Blogreaders, I'm sorry to whine so much about Christianity. I promise to whine about some other stuff soon.

Sincerely if the slightest bit regretfully,
Claire