I seem to always be outside of someone's standards, even when I used to try and fit in. With a whole and gullible heart in my younger days, then with a more pragmatic and strategic one later. Didn't work, anyhow. I've declared the whole project a bust.
It's often phrased as though it is about identity. I don't think it really is about defining what one is; I have come to the conclusion that such rules are always exclusionary, sometimes thinly disguised and sometimes not at all disguised attempts to keep certain people out, not in. And nothing is safe; something that fell within normal variation in one generation becomes the next generation's heresy. When I was a kid, Lutherans in the US seldom fell cleanly into the categories of conservative or liberal as defined by popular religious culture. We were our own thing, with our own theological reasoning and politics. By the time I began seminary, it had all fallen apart; and I found that I was expected to fight in a pointless battle for "identity" on someone else's terms by virtue of which seminary I had enrolled in. And it looked suspiciously like the same politics and issues that were ripping the country apart politically at the same time. Which makes you wonder whether anyone cares about theology at all.
I avoid calling people by a label I haven't heard them use to describe themselves, and outright refuse to deny someone a label they claim, regardless of circumstances.
