Five years ago, I wouldn’t have identified myself as Christian. Oh, I believed in God, and I loved Jesus. But I didn’t want to be mistaken for or associated with the extremists that had taken over the Christian “brand” here in the United States.
My parents came to Colorado from the Midwest. My mother had been raised as a Methodist and told us Bible stories, singing songs like Jesus Loves the Little Children and Jesus Loves Me. My father had been raised Baptist. By the time I was 14, I’d attended a Baptist church, spent seven years studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and had gone to my parents’ new church, a conservative Presbyterian congregation.
None of it had been inspiring or brought me any closer to God. On the contrary, I had experienced sexism, elitism, and hypocrisy. I’d share examples, but that is perhaps the subject of a different column.
The last straw came during a conversation with my parents’ male pastor. In tears, I confided in him that I had been sexually assaulted at age 10 by an adult man, the father of a third-grade schoolmate. The assailant had invited me inside to play with his daughter, but she hadn’t been home. As a child, I didn’t have words for what had happened next, leaving me with fear, trauma, and grief that wouldn’t heal.
How did the pastor respond?
“Don’t worry,” he said. “God forgives you.”
God forgives me?
That was it. I was done with hypocrisy, the misogyny, and the lack of compassion that seemed to plague Christianity as I had experienced it. As my parents became more conservative, self-identifying as fundamentalists, I did all I could to avoid church and religion. I refused to go to church during that time, calling myself agnostic or “spiritual but not religious.” However, I didn’t give up on God, privately praying almost every day to what I feared might be an empty, unfeeling universe.
I was folding laundry one day in the early 1990s and contemplating mortality—how each of us is unique and how all that we are disappears when we die—when I felt as if I’d been hit by lightning. I was knocked to the floor, and there, in my very humble living room amid the folded socks and underwear, was God—immense in power, boundless, loving.
The universe wasn’t empty after all.
God was real.
I became a different kind of agnostic that day—one who doesn’t know what she believes but who knows that God exists. Still, I wouldn’t have said I was Christian.
While I explored spirituality and this new relationship with a real and living God, ultimately finding a home in the Episcopal Church, people calling themselves Christian were using their newfound political power in ways that seemed decidedly un-Christian to me, treating the taxes they didn’t want to pay as more sacred than the lives of the poor, the homeless, the migrant, the single mother, the prisoner. The same people that screamed “Whore!” and “Murderer!” at strangers entering women’s clinics rooted for capital punishment, war, and cuts in support programs. They told us God doesn’t make mistakes when speaking of unwanted pregnancies but were vocal in their dehumanization of LGBTQ people, Muslims, and other nations.
I didn’t want to be associated with those people because the God I’d met that day in my living room is more expansive, more loving, more inclusive.
Since then, the situation in the United States has only gotten worse. As I see it, fundamentalists and evangelicals are one of the greatest threats to The Way today—modern-day Pharisees who use their literalist interpretation of Scripture to bludgeon people with whom they disagree, while missing the greater biblical message, which is love.
We see the consequences of their actions as church attendance continues to drop nationwide and fewer young people identify with any single faith. By their fruits you shall know them, and a lot of young people know they don’t want to associate with a religion that ignores climate change, supports nationalism, and promotes unreflective, exclusivist theology.
“If you spend too much time needing to prove that … your race is the only race that God loves, you’re the only religion that’s going to heaven, you’re the only gender that’s worth considering—whatever it might be—that, by almost any criteria, would be called narcissism,” said the Rev. Richard Rohr. “But people get away with it for some reason if they speak it in favor of their group. So, there is only one thing more dangerous than individual narcissism, and that’s group narcissism—when you all agree to tell the same lie together, that your particular ethnicity or racial group or country or religion is the only one going to heaven, the only one God cares about. We can’t handle this kind of stupidity. This is one planet, and we’re clearly all creatures of the same God, and either we start seeing Divine identity in all of God’s creatures, or we’re in trouble.”
That’s why I speak out now. I cannot allow fundamentalists to claim Christianity or to “brand” my faith. Some of them believe they have that right, informing me in online comments that I cannot be both Christian and feminist—or pro-choice or a Democrat or supportive of my gay, Muslim, or migrant neighbors. I’ve even been told that the Episcopal Church is no longer a Christian church.
But the people making these pronouncements aren’t God. They don’t get to decide who gets God’s love or grace. They aren’t the judges of who’s truly Christian or who receives salvation. Those decisions are far above their pay grade, far beyond their understanding and mine.
Other moderate and progressive Christians have already spoken out, working to reclaim Christianity and return it to its loving roots. The Rev. Bishop Michael Curry calls it “Reclaiming Jesus” and urges us to join the Jesus Movement. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has been open about his faith as a gay married man. Rachel Held Evans used her too-short life and her powerful voice to open the door for thousands who felt excluded from an unloving, judgmental, and hostile church. Pastor John Pavlovitz has taken up the political fight and been outspoken about the hypocrisy and, yes, heresy of far-right evangelical Christian politics.
Now I’m stepping into the ring after six-year hiatus from journalism and opinion writing. I’m not going to suggest in my columns that any political party or candidate is the answer. Although political commentary is certainly relevant when one side claims God is behind their political victories and legislation, Christianity isn’t partisan. It has nothing to do with political parties and their petty squabbling. It transcends that fight for ephemeral earthly power and embraces not just all of humanity, but all of creation.
Jesus didn’t spend his brief time with us urging us to get political. He told us to love God with all that we are and to love one another. Given that we’re close to having exhausted all other options, let’s try love for a change.
So, today marks my coming out. I’m Pamela White, and I’m a Christian feminist.
