This post might take awhile because I just got a new phone and it has a bigger screen than I thought at first. Not easy with little hands and shitty motor skills. So it probably won't get published until I can get to my laptop.
- On Gayness and Bisexuality: I had never actually had a problem with any of this, believe it or not, even before I started questioning my sexuality. Even at my most conservative, it was like the one thing I was liberal about. How I rationalized it, though, was that while God had inspired the Bible, it was still written by humans with flaws and it had been translated so many times that some things were bound to be off - AND it never featured Jesus himself saying anything negative about gayness. So I just went with the parts that I still found God in, and used my faith and sense of grace, love, kindness, and humility to explain the rest.
- On Birth Control and Sex Education: I did at one point have an issue with both premarital sex and abortion, which affected my beliefs on sex ed and birth control (i.e. the morning-after pill). But in general, I just figured not every married couple wanted kids or could afford them, so they should have a way to prevent that so abortion wouldn't need to be a thing. Same for sex education, because when I was about twelve or thirteen I went to camp (a free charity camp, plus we got discounts on air fare and some hotels from my dad being ex-military; my mom was never rich enough to actually pay for summer camp) and shared a cabin with a girl my age who had never even heard of sex, a revelation that scandalized every other girl present and led us to clumsily try to explain, giggling and red-faced the whole time, that "it's like a car going into a garage, right? Except the car is the penis and the garage is the vagina and that's how babies are made." I've also heard of cases where people didn't know what sex was until they got married, which sounds horrifying, and were subjected to unwanted pregnancies because they didn't have access to birth control. I didn't want anyone to go through that and I didn't think God would either.
- On Abortion: I called myself pro-life for a long time and viewed abortion as murder, but I also had my doubts on it, since I believed in reincarnation and figured God would just put the soul into another life, and I could understand why some people got abortions. I still was way more in favor of adopting out and using birth control, though, in order to prevent the so-called murder. But the truth is, people are going to get abortions whether I like it or not, and I would rather they have it done in a safe, sterile space by actual doctors - especially if the pregnant person's life is at risk, they were raped, the pregnancy is a product of incest, or the pregnant person was in an abusive relationship.
Not to mention:
- not every pregnancy is viable
- I don't feel right promoting the idea that kids should be born as a punishment for their parents
- I know that abuse and rape cases aren't often taken seriously by the court system and that this often leads to unwanted pregnancies
- I know that pregnancy- and birth-related medical care are incredibly expensive even if you adopt out
- I know that the government tends to have awful views on single moms (especially young, low income moms of color)
- I don't think it's fair to expect anyone to risk their health and their life for the sake of religious or moral beliefs that they don't necessarily agree with
- I don't think it's fair that only one biological parent has the option of just walking away
- I don't think pregnant people should have to be on the verge of death before having access to bodily autonomy
- birth control isn't always covered by health insurance
- I know that anti-abortion laws often also lead to people being imprisoned for having miscarriages or not having access to an abortion when they desperately need one.
- On Transgender Issues: It's not so much that I had a problem with this, I just didn't really understand what being trans was until after realizing I was into girls and getting a chance to ask questions from actual trans and nonbinary people (and consequently coming to terms with being nonbinary myself). But I had always viewed it as sort of a "live and let live" situation.
Even the name and pronouns thing - I'd changed the name I went by when I was 14, and nobody had a problem with it because it was still a feminine name. So why should they care if I used a masculine name or masculine pronouns instead? Isn't what I or anyone else feels called to call ourselves between us and God (remember, I was operating from a Christian perspective back then)? And why do you care so much about other people's genitals, anyway?
- On Other Religions and Atheism: If you've ever read the Magnus Chase books by Rick Riordan, think of the characters Samirah al-Abbas and Amir Fadlan. If you haven't, Amir and Sam are an Iranian-American couple who are both Muslim and struggle with their faith after finding out the Norse gods are real, and that Sam, her half-sister Alex, and their friend Magnus are all demigods. Magnus asks Sam how she deals with it, since his own background was never all that religious and he'd previously identified as an atheist, and she explains that while she still believes there's only one God, she also can't deny what she's seen. She eventually decides that the Norse gods are actually some sort of powerful spirits that some people worship. I can relate to that because it's so similar to how I felt for a long time, except y'know without the superpowers and half-god heritage.
There are other reasons why I came to believe Christianity isn't the only valid religion though. For starters, I'd never really felt comfortable sitting through Mass. It was completely exhausting to have to be still that long, and there were so many other ways that I felt closer to God anyway, like youth group, hiking, writing, and music. So clearly, it's possible to feel God's presence outside of church - why not in other houses of worship?
But then there was the "problem" of other belief systems. A major reason why I came to be more comfortable with other religions and recognize multiple valid ways to God is my high school Spanish teacher. We were all talking about the Camino de Santiago, a famous Catholic pilgrimage in Spain that I still kind of want to go on one day. You know. After a lot of physical therapy. So I asked if she was Christian, and she said that she had been raised Catholic and still believed in God but was more spiritual than religious as an adult. She figured that all religions were ultimately connecting to the same higher power. I meditated and prayed on that for awhile and eventually came to the conclusion that she was right, and that I didn't like how my Evangelicalism felt like a burden and distanced me from other people. I knew God wouldn't want that for me, and I felt that this conversation had happened for a reason. If all religions were connecting to the same divine source, what was I trying to evangelize for? Didn't it make more sense to live a Christlike life and lead by example and with compassion and empathy, even if I was wrong about this new revelation?
Besides that, there were two other arguments that swayed me. One was that if I hadn't been raised Christian in a Christian family, I wouldn't have those beliefs. If I'd been raised in Pakistan, I might have believed in Islam just as much as I do in Christianity. If I'd been raised Sri Lankan, I might've felt the same about Hinduism. If I'd been raised in Japan, it would have been Shintoism. I felt it was unlikely that the only true religion just happened to be the one I was raised in, that the only true God just happened to be the one I'd been raised to worship.
Another was WHY there are so many Christians in America and around the world: colonialism. How could it be inherently better for Polynesian, black, Asian, or indigenous people to be Christian when their ancestors had been murdered in the name of Christianity and their native religions had been criminalized?
I also watched the Tom Shadyac documentary I Am, which helped me a lot spiritually. I highly recommend it, not just for the purposes of this post but also because it's a great documentary.
- On Premarital Sex: The way I figured it, marriage has differed so much across time and culture that you can't really definitively say that a certain sex act is or is not taking place within the context of marriage. Like, two people could be married in one culture but not in another. Same, really, for sex.
So I'm well aware not everyone looks their actual age, and I get hit on by teenagers all the time, but I can still almost always tell the difference between a teenager and a young adult, and if I still don't know I fucking ASK. Teenagers act like children. If a sixteen year old tried to hit on me, an adult, I absolutely would not be confident enough that they're ACTUALLY an adult to fucking sleep with them. Plus this poor girl's life was absolutely ruined because her sister (the sister who got pregnant was named Sharon and the other one is Marnie) ratted on her and her parents wouldn't let her get an abortion, both of which I feel really sorry for her about. But she's somehow the antagonist, just because she was a fucking child who made a mistake and tried to handle it in the most responsible way she could at the time, and an adult man was irresponsible and stupid enough to put his dick before his brain and not make sure the girl trying to sleep with him was actually of age and had the luxury to just waltz off like nothing happened afterward. His reproductive rights were never at risk.
Besides the slut shaming, pedophilia apologism, and vilification of teen girls, this book - which takes place seventeen years after Sharon got pregnant, and approximately thirteen years after Marnie started raising Sharon's son David - also has a whole thing with the Madonna/Whore complex. If you don't know, this is a sociological term for the view that all women can be sorted into two categories, pure and modest Madonnas and trashy, promiscuous whores. Marnie is the Madonna in this case. As the Madonna, she's Christian and doesn't want to have sex outside of marriage. Both of these facts about Marnie are fine, except obviously for the part where she completely slut-shamed her sister and was complicit in reproductive violence and never saw an issue with either one afterward. Because, you know, it's totally cool to force your own sister to be your personal broodmare, ruining her life and ultimately contributing to her death in the process, as long as you get a kid out of it.
And let's just forget about the ADULT MAN who totally wasn't a pedophile and hung around these two girls for a summer. I can believe he maybe for a second thought Sharon was like 19 or so, though it was his responsibility to ask, but a fourteen year old? I could've passed as MAYBE 18 when I was 14, but the vast majority of 14 and 16-year-old girls absolutely don't look or act like women in their twenties. And even if she did make as convincing an adult as I would've at that age, it's his job to ask. Once you figure out that she's never had a job, isn't in college, lives with her parents, can't drink alcohol, has never had sex, and isn't worried about things like health insurance or tuition like I started to be once I was, you know, actually an adult woman...there's just no way to not know. Plus, even if this guy genuinely didn't know, there's still a scene where he makes fun of Marnie for not wanting to go skinny dipping with him, when he KNEW her age for sure. And when he gets back and starts to fall for Marnie, he has the absolute nerve to call her sister, the dead underage girl he slept with, a slut and a whore. Don't pull that shit with me. I was a teenage girl with an inappropriate crush an adult man once, and he actually didn't take advantage of the situation because he wasn't a fucking predatory creep. But other adult men tried to, and it fucks me up to this day. I will fucking fight you over the safety of teen girls.
I'm getting really heated over this, but the reason I mention this story here is because there's a scene where Marnie and Law, the totally-not-a-pedo baby daddy, have oral sex. And not long after, Law wants to have penetrative vaginal sex, and Marnie completely freaks out over it and tells him no because she's Christian and wants to wait until marriage. Even as pissed off at Marnie and Law as I was because of their horrible treatment of Sharon, my reaction to this scene was mostly just confusion. After all, it's her body and her choice, something Marnie never seemed to realize about her sister, but she and Law just had sex, so what's the problem? Why is she saying she wants to wait to have sex when she just had sex?
What I'm trying to explain here - besides that I want a t-shirt that says "I hate Marnie Hibbs and Law Kincaid" - is that Marnie and I clearly have different definitions of sex. By mine, she had had premarital sex. By hers, she hadn't. I definitely chalk this up to straight people being patriarchal and weird and thinking sex inherently has to involve a penis, but in general, different people have different definitions of sex. Like, is it sex when you suck a titty? Is a blowjob sex? Handjob? Touching? Fingerfucking? Does watching porn count as sex? Masturbating? I've even heard of people having had anal before and still calling themselves virgins because they had never had penetrative vaginal sex.
In order to validly argue "It's a sin to have sex outside of marriage" (which it's not, and you don't get to decide that for other people, but whatever), we need to have a universal operational definition of both sex and marriage. And we don't. It's just not possible.
- On Modesty: I used to see modesty - the term I used as a way to refer to physical, clothing-related modesty - as a way of respecting God, one's body, and one's future spouse.
Something that helped me a lot with this, actually, was leggings. Nowadays, leggings are generally a non-issue, but remember that this was back in 2014 and even wearing leggings as pants at all was controversial and could get you branded a slut. That Madonna/Whore complex, again. But I was Christian, and I was also closeted and trying to look feminine - and while I don't think of leggings as inherently feminine now, at sixteen they were an easy way to fake heterosexuality and femininity. They were also comfortable and practical and no more revealing than skinny jeans, and could be worn for a lot of occasions and in any season. And so I found myself happily wearing the same article of clothing I'd once judged and shamed women for.
Something else that helped was the Airhead trilogy by Meg Cabot. I saw a lot of myself in the main character, Em, a tomboy whose brain had been transplanted into the body of a supermodel and forced to live the other girl's life. Which meant looking the part and gaining respect for the feminine part of herself that she'd never felt she could embrace. Like Em, I had suddenly been thrust into a position where I had to pretend I was someone I wasn't, someone who was a lot more feminine than I was. Straighter than I was.
But that didn't mean I hated all of it. Leggings. Dresses. I still hate the makeup industry, but it's not the fault of the makeup itself. Makeup is just paint, and when we're not all expected to look like an army of clones or hide normal features and become alienated from our own bodies, it's actually fun. The only reason I rarely wear it now is because my skin develops hives, painful acne, and rashes easily, plus I have sensory issues, so the only kinds of makeup I can handle are lipstick/gloss and nail polish, one of which nobody can ever see and gets smudged under my mask and the other always chips off when I'm working. So even though I was starting to physically look like what I had always been told to think of as a slut, it had nothing to do with my sex life and didn't mean I was undeserving of respect. I was a child just trying to be safe and comfortable and experiment with my appearance, and survive in a society that saw me as lesser because it saw me as a girl.
Once I started to embrace feminism, I realized something else about the Christian modest ideals I'd once been so proud to embrace: the advertizing and speeches and movies and books that had promoted it to me for years were almost exclusively aimed at women and girls. If modesty were really as important to God as I had been led to believe, why did the way it was carried out seem so sexist? Why did MY body need to be hidden so badly that I couldn't even have a bra strap showing, but my male classmates could wear muscle shirts that showed their whole chest? Why was it so all-important for girls and women to show "respect" to our male peers by sacrificing our bodily autonomy and covering up to protect their sexuality, when I as a gay woman was completely able to take responsibility for my own actions and respect women regardless of what they were or were not wearing?
- On Sex Work: This was actually fairly easy once I accepted that premarital sex and immodesty weren't sins, since that was my main problem with them. Also, I had definitely had the toxic mindset that sex workers don't respect themselves and don't use protection, which I quickly discovered was false.
Even if everything I've written here doesn't sway you away from evangelicalism, I want you to think about what would realistically happen if [insert your country here] was really as much of a Christian theocracy as some of you want it to be. If abortion were illegal in all circumstances, if sex work were illegal in all circumstances, if being gay or trans was illegal, if birth control was illegal, if all sex education was abstinence only, if premarital sex was illegal, if not being Christian was illegal. Whether you like it or not, people are still going to do things that are illegal. It just won't be as safe and they'll be persecuted for it.
And it will lead to (or result in an increase of):
- police brutality against LGBT people, sex workers, and religious minorities
- deaths from unsafe abortions
- a rise in teen pregnancies
- a rise in sexual assaults
- a rise in domestic violence
- a rise in homelessness
- drug epidemics
- STI epidemics
- hate crime
- concentration camps
Does that sound like something you want? Like something Jesus would want? You don't have to participate in anything I've listed above, obviously. You never have to have gay sex or get an abortion. But if you extend that to your vote, or if you use your voice and your privilege to normalize hate, then all of this will happen.
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