They will seize their chance.
I have written before about my upbringing within young-earth-creationist Christian fundamentalism – how deeply it hurt me and in what ways I have and have not healed. As the year 2015 draws to a dreary close, I remember what I was taught as a young “soldier of the Lord,” and I am afraid.
This has not been a good year, for me or for the world. I have been in ceaseless pain everywhere in my head and my neck for seven months and no doctor can rescue me. The world is drowning, the innocent washing up dead by the thousands attempting to escape. There is everywhere hate and fear and desperation. I cry often for myself, because I cannot escape the burning in my spine, nor the sense that I will never be well again. I cry often for the world, fast being sucked under the surface by racism and fascism and imperialism and oligarchy. I cry for my country, where politicians openly demand an inquisition of faith and are cheered on by gathered masses. I cry for my neighbors from another country, who have good cause to fear for their safety every time the word “terrorism” is heard on the news. There is always another reason to cry.
My dear one, my best friend, would remind me that not all is amiss in the world. Polio, the disease that crippled my grandmother, has been virtually eradicated from the face of the earth. The bravery of those who have stood up for queerness in all its forms continues to reshape laws and attitudes everywhere with tolerance and compassion. Black Lives Matter has not only survived the first moments of a would-be movement but flourished. I fell in love with someone new this year, someone radiant and wondrous, and that relationship prospers alongside my existing loves. My friends have always been there for me in my present era of suffering. Not everything is terrible.
My heart nonetheless wears thin when I hear of the ravages of ISIS and their subordinate Boko Haram, and of their desire to wage a holy war with the west. This is not only because I know they have already hurt and killed so many – mostly Muslims themselves, who beg reprieve of western nations and are spited – but because I know that there are within the west, within America especially, Christians who want the very same war. I know because I was educated to be one of them. I know how they think. I know what they want. I know that they sincerely believe that the end of times is at hand, and hence Satan is rallying for one final attempt to destroy Christianity. I know that they are utterly convinced that they cannot lose, for theirs is the cause of the Lord, and that – that is the most terrible thing that an embittered sect with a stockpile of weapons and a grudge against the very concept of secular government could ever believe. We are one very small step short of the endless arsons and broken windows and guns draped in the Confederate flag becoming the Christian ISIS.
From the earliest moments of my education, I knew that the Christians, that is to say, the True Christians, my culture within the American culture, final bastion against the deceits of Satan, were preparing for war. I was told in the first grade to be prepared to be tortured and martyred for my faith, because every True Christian might be called upon to fulfill this honor before the moment of Rapture. I learned many songs about marching in the army of the Lord.
I eventually escaped the grip of this isolated world, and have the psychiatric breakdowns to prove it, but fundamentalist far-right Christianity defined my childhood and hence is “my culture” in a way nothing else could ever be. I can slip in among them, this culture that I repudiate, and listen to them fume about the wickedness of the secular world filled with Muslims and Hindus and atheists and false Christians worshipping at the throne of Satan. They will spew sexism and racism and homophobia and assume that I agree with them – expecting me to consent to the sexism even as a woman, but completely unaware that I am bisexual or that one of my loving partners is anything but white. My mother once told me that Liberty University’s renowned hatred for gay people was no reason to refuse to apply for a job there. That was the night she found out I was not straight. It did not go well. She blamed the perverse influence of my new friends at a not-Christian-enough college, unaware that I had realized this about myself halfway through high school, and cowered tearfully before what I expected to be a wroth and vengeful god.
I have heard of the need to forcefully avert the dwindling of the white race. I have heard of the “one bullet cure” for homosexuality. I have heard of the need to rescue the office of the presidency and restore America to a Christian state. I have heard of the righteousness of being prepared to protect Christendom with armed resistance when the present secular government springs its fatal trap. I have heard of the eschatological obsession over Jerusalem and the ever-nearer apocalypse. I have heard, in short, of extremists preparing for war.
I am for many years now an atheist, but more importantly a secular humanist, of the sort my theology teacher specifically warned me were vile agents of Satan. My doctrine is peace and my dogma is the celebration of the human spirit. When I first left the faith I was of course angry and hurt, and it took a few years to burn through my rage at the system that had tried to hold me in subservience to patriarchy and white supremacy disguised as “wholesome values.” I am still angry, and very bitter, but now I can see clearly from the outside – and see what others, Christian or otherwise, truly believe. I believe that Islam as a philosophy has problems, and I believe the very same about Christianity; in fact I believe they have largely the same problems, expressed in slightly different ways. My theology teachers in high school went to great lengths to “prove” that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same god and have nothing in common outside that fateful moment in the camp of Abraham. They loathed the idea of being considered anything like a Muslim in the utmost. They preached the compassion of conversion but were openly accepting of the notion that almost every single one of the billion Muslims upon the earth would end up burning in hell for ever and ever and ever because of their false god and their false prophet and their false book.
The books – the Bible and the Quran – are often mistaken by outsiders to the faiths as the cause of hatred, oppression, and extremism. They are not the cause: they are the excuse. Almost any opinion can be justified by emphasizing some part of these long, complex texts and ignoring others. I know all too well how Christian fundamentalists ignore that there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” or that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” I know how they revel in the fantasies of the blood of everyone but the True Christians running as deep as a horse is tall. They gleefully read entire shelves of end-times torture porn – I know because I did so, and so did most of my peers. Liberty University proudly names entire buildings after the authors of these gory fantasies.
The Bible is a historically priceless work of literature assembled over centuries by many authors and editors. The vast majority of people who have been exposed to it are not shooting up women’s health clinics or firebombing mosques. The same is true of the Quran; in fact I myself sat down and read a large portion of it when I was perhaps sixteen. I did not feel encouraged in the least to become a terrorist. These books do not make people violent. They are held up by those who are looking for a moral justification of their desire to control or eliminate others, literally held up before crowds being incited to acts of hatred. Few Christian fundamentalists have actually read the Bible in its entirety, and fewer still have studied the broader historical context of the Bible’s composition and distribution. I did both, and stopped being a fundamentalist. The books are not the cause of the problem. The religions are not intrinsically violent and doomed to conflict. Everything begins and ends with human hearts.
Languishing at home, feeling every nerve fraying and rotting and becoming pain, I have all the unhappy time upon the earth to watch and listen, for there is little else I can do. When I see that vile man, Trump, the least “Christian” person imaginable, go before a jubilant crowd and promise to ban Muslims from the borders, I see the true face of Satan. When Christians loudly proclaim that the time has come to kill them all, I hear the shards of Kristallnacht. When I read that ISIS wants a holy war to induce the apocalypse, I know beyond all doubt that there are people here who want the very same thing. If we, as a country, as a culture, do not embrace peace, embrace the refugees, embrace integration, the fascist politicians will come to power by offering the extremists war, offering them oppression, offering them religious-racial segregation – and they will seize their chance.
America, you have been fucking warned.
