the new conundrum, same as the old conundrum

The born-again narrative I grew up with was inherently linear:

1. I'm a sinner,
2. bad bad bad stuff,
3. Jesus saves me,
4. hallelujah,

-- often with the epilogue that,

4b. since I was so bad but now am saved through the blood of Jesus Christ, He and I are here to tell you how you are bad and should not get those food stamps/be allowed to get married/avoid prison for your drug-related, non-violent crime.

Okay, but let me stop with the snark and vitriol. For whatever reason, right now I'm really mad at Christianity, mostly, I think, for things it didn't do. At one point when I was more ensconced in Christianity, reading my Bible and etc, I was close enough to it to identify that the Bible itself doesn't endorse pettiness and hypocrisy, and to at least make a half-hearted attempt to understand the people I kind of write off now as petty hypocrites.

I always come back because, for me, God and Christ are bigger than my frustrations with people. For me, the pain in the world challenges my faith, but doesn't ultimately destroy it. I understand why a person might look at the world and conclude that God seems like an unreasonable proposition. I also understand why another person looks at the same world and concludes that only God resolves the world into something coherent. And I feel certain of God in a way that runs deeper than intellect and that I can't ever really talk myself out of.

But when I try to be Christian, I feel I'm asked to adhere to practices and beliefs that seem so wholly unreasonable to me that I can't deal with them. Like, deny myself and pick up my cross? That's a thing to struggle with, but it's something I can accept as worth struggling with. Believe that my son is inherently evil and deserves to die? My mind short circuits.

Tell me to sell my stuff and give it to the poor and I'm like, right there with You -- or, You know, not, but I get that I should be. Tell me that we live in an evil time as evidenced by Obama making health care more expensive for the wealthy and more accessible for the poor, and by gay people getting married, and I'm kinda like, you know, I've got a bridge in my own private heaven I'd like to sell you.

For me it's a cycle: God pulls me closer, I feel like I'm called to love everyone, I try to understand those who claim to represent Him, I feel more alienated.

And I'm told: well, the fact that you don't want to believe this thing just because it is wholly incredible and contradictory is proof that you Lack Faith and are Worldly and Sinful. The fact that you can't tolerate beliefs that violate your moral code is proof that you haven't become obedient, haven't really gotten the message.

It doesn't matter if you find bigotry intolerable, if you can't stomach the idea that God endorses an economic agenda that presumes that Mitt Romney deserves to keep his money more than the least-fortunate 20% of American children "deserve" to eat, if you think a woman shouldn't have to die because her pregnancy is endangering her life. The fact that there is something I can tell you about God that you would need to reject in order to maintain your faith means you're not a good Christian. The fact that you would choose your own principles over what I'm telling you about God, means you're not a good Christian.

I feel like I would rather be a bad Christian than a good bigot. these days, my faith seems to fluctuate as a function of my ability to perceive the possibility that I don't have to be either.