Yes, and much to my surprise, too. You're going to be sorry you asked, because I really want to tell about it.
I was a Christian when I came here, and intended to stay one, though I'd been struggling with peace and justice issues for some time. My partner and I had agreed on five criteria for any church we might join:
- Equal treatment of women. If they have clergy, women must be eligible for ordination. Women must be eligible to hold any administrative office in the church.
- Equal treatment of homosexuals. Same as above, and if they celebrate marriages they must celebrate same-sex marriages on an equal basis with opposite-sex marriages.
- A solid commitment to peace: a firm anti-war stance and a commitment to non-violent resistance to injustice.
- No creedal requirements for membership. Our problem wasn't with the Creed or statements of belief as such, but with their being using to exclude people. We had already decided to substitute the Beatitudes for the Creed in our worship at home.
- A firm "No" to Evangelical Christianity. This was a long-standing opinion of mine, and my partner felt less strongly about it, but we had agreed we'd go to church together or not at all, and I just can't identify with that kind of Christianity.
We hadn't found any Christian church that met those criteria. We were all ready to join the United Church of Christ when we learned that the UCC's Association of Western North Carolina had a policy against ordaining homosexuals. That was a deal breaker for us. We could accept, reluctantly, a denominational stance that those issues were up to the local congregation, even though we felt that a policy against ordaining homosexuals should be just as unacceptable as a policy against ordaining African-Americans. It was a compromise, but one we were willing to make. However, this was a case where an Association within the UCC overrode congregational polity to take a stand against homosexuals, and we decided that it just wasn't acceptable.
So we tried starting a church at home, and we had friends who wanted to participate, but it quickly became clear that I was expected to be the leader and driving force, and I wasn't prepared to become a clergyman, even an unofficial, unordained one. I felt that the house church was more trouble than it was worth.
At this point we were basically left with three options: no affiliation at all, or joining either the Unitarian-Universalists or the Quakers. We decided on the Quakers -- though to this day we haven't followed through by joining our local meeting. The main factors in that decision were (1) our attraction to the Quaker tradition on peace and justice grounds, (2) John's aversion to sacramental worship, (3) my strong attraction to the silent meeting style of worship. Coming from a liturgical type of church, I have expected to have a great deal of trouble giving up Communion, but I was surprised to find that it wasn't so.
This is about the point where I joined RF. I still identified as a Christian, and for liberal Quakers as for Unitarian-Universalists that's fine, as long as you don't try to push it on everybody else.
Then came the Beth Stroud case. Beth Stroud is a lesbian who was a United Methodist minister; she had been in the center of that denomination's struggle over the issue of homosexuality for some time, and had been defrocked in 2004 and restored to the ministry in 2005. On Halloween 2005, the Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church defrocked her again. On the same day, they ruled in favor of Edward Johnson, a minister who had been suspended by his bishop for refusing to allow a gay man to join the church.
It was the last straw.
I decided that I could no longer, in good conscience, identify as a Christian. I came to believe that belonging to a religion that has this many problems with equality for homosexuals was like belonging to a restricted country club, or even to the Klan. It was not enough to be personally in favor of equality, it was necessary to separate oneself from policies of inequality. Note that this decision had no effect on membership in any congregation; it was purely a matter of self-identification.
And then I found, to my surprise, that most of the remnants of my Christian faith came away as easily as removing an old t-shirt. In rapid succession, I found that I could suddenly appreciate much of Muslim spirituality, that Ebionism held a strong attraction for me (historical though it was), that I no longer found Trinitarianism a useful way of talking about God, and then that I no longer found theism a useful way of talking about anything. It had been many years since I had believed the scriptures were infallible; now I found that I no longer believed Jesus himself was infallible. I no longer believed that religion was any more important than stamp collecting, though I still found it infinitely more interesting.
It was like all this had been building up for years, and that identification as a Christian was the dam holding it all back. Once I took down that dam, the flood rolled in. I haven't experienced it as a loss at all, but as a liberation. Suddenly, things make sense. I don't expect that this is the last stop on my pilgrimage, or that I've "arrived" in any meaningful sense, but my apostasy from Christianity is -- right now -- the defining moment of my life. The captive has been set free.
