“Woe unto those who call good evil, and evil good” – Isiah 5:20

Dear Christians,

It’s official. I am that reprobate. The one of whom the Bible warns. The one who dares to think that maybe being gay is okay and child abuse is not. Who believes in sexual autonomy and that those who “cover the sin” and “forgive” rapists should be held accountable. A member of the great falling away.

You look at me with emotions that range from pity to outrage. You heard me preach, you believed in my future ministry. Now, I’m the enemy. Now, I’m a cautionary tale to scare the youth group. Someday, you’ll ask me where I “went wrong”, allow me to answer to the best of my ability.

I don’t have a date, or a time. Maybe it was when I watched my sister pull her head out of the drywall one of the many times one of my parents decided she was too rebellious, or immodest, or out of order. Maybe it was watching my mother so internalize the blame for her own assault, that when she beat us for a cape dress that was “too tight” she genuinely believed it was loving. Maybe it was when I watched my own faith twisted to strip me of my autonomy. Maybe it was when my pastor refused to help the rape victims in his church, but invaded the lives of anyone he thought “might be gay”. Maybe it was when I escaped that church, only to watch my new pastor wish he could “round up all the gays and set them on fire”, then sit on my couch and explain how rape is a woman’s fault. Maybe it was when I watched the church refuse to care about people suffering and dying in the streets, all because their new god Donald J Trump said not to. Maybe it was when I saw “Jesus Saves” signs and “Six Million Wasn’t Enough” tshirts at the same riot. Maybe it was when I read history, and all the genocides and evil committed by the church.

Or maybe it was when I looked to the Bible to condemn the evil I saw in the world, and found only support of it.

Maybe it started much earlier. Maybe I began to lose faith when I read in all five books of the Law, that if an engaged woman is raped in the city, she is to be stoned, and if she isn’t engaged she has to marry her attacker. Or when I read in those same books the God-approved process of buying wives. Or in 1st and 2nd Kings, or in Titus 2, or 1 Corinthians 11, or 1 Peter2 and 3, or 1 Cor 14, 1 Timothy 2, when women are consistently presented as second class citizens or less than human. Or again in 1 Peter 2 when the divinely inspired apostle wrote to servants to unconditionally submit to their abusive masters. Maybe it’s the biblically endorsed genocides. Maybe it’s the fact that the Bible does not have a single prohibition against pedophilia and child marriage (provided it’s straight), but has whole chapters dedicated to killing anybody who doesn’t worship your god.

You say that I am twisting morality to fit my worldview, while your highest ideals bully children into suicide.

Your faith is stained with the blood of nations. People whom you killed because they worshipped the wrong god, or loved the wrong person, or had the wrong mental disability. But because I think children don’t belong in cages, I’m the reprobate?

Maybe I don’t know what good is. But I know evil. I have looked it in it’s face. I’ve seen it on the news and in history books. And every time I’ve seen it, it looks like cruelty. It looks like gas chambers and mass graves. It looks like swastikas and burning crosses. It looks like abusers standing with God’s blessing on platforms, secure in their piety.

I am simply disillusioned with American right-wing Christianity? Maybe. But what am I to do with the Bible it’s based upon?

If your morality has done nothing but steal and kill and destroy, what am I to make of it but that it is evil.

And what am I to make of your god but that he is a liar.