When The Bad Looks Good and The Good Looks Bad

In last week’s blog post, I wrote about an experience I had in college that started my religious deconstruction and reconstruction. In this blog post, I’m going to write about another college experience that validated that journey. It is ironic to me that many people in the fundamentalist denominations of my youth thought higher education was a sin, especially for women. They thought it gave a person’s mind to the devil. Education saved my mind from the influences they saw as demonic. How can we grow and gain wisdom if we hide from knowledge? I remember a grandmother putting dozens of prayer cloths in her granddaughter’s books, clothes, luggage, etc. when the granddaughter went to college to become a physical therapist. That behavior was repeated every time the granddaughter came home for a visit, a holiday break, and summer recess. As I gained wisdom, I realized the grandmother was disrespecting the granddaughter’s boundaries, especially since the granddaughter repeatedly begged her grandmother to stop. In addition, the granddaughter was learning how to help people’s bodies heal – a profession that embodies the spirit of Christ. I realized that fear of the devil can cause people to sin as they try to stop what they perceive to be sin in other people. Sadly, I saw that dynamic repeated in the propaganda that became common in too many churches as they tried to control the sins they saw outside the church. I later learned that’s a violation of 1 Corinthians 5:12 that tells Christians to leave the world alone and judge only sins in the church. My college experiences left me wondering if church leaders preached against education, especially higher education, as a way to keep their flocks from gaining wisdom that might reveal things they didn’t want revealed. My second college experience that fueled my deconstruction allowed me to look at my faith objectively, which is really what deconstructing is. This can lead to spiritual growth and help us avoid stagnant faith. One of my classes taught the art of debate. Our teacher had read about a missionary decision made in a polygamous, tribal culture that he wanted us to debate. Every man who got saved was instructed to cast out all but their first wife and her children, because they believed teaching marriage as being between one man and one woman was the top priority. Christian education, especially in the area of acceptable marriage, was such a high priority that this missionary group didn’t offer assistance with physical needs to the cast-off wives and children. Since the culture was patriarchal, there were no job opportunities for women. Historically, destitute women and children were taken in by a husband. Due to this, there were no social agencies to help them. The missionaries were so accustomed to having social safety nets in their culture that they assumed every culture had them. Due to these factors, all of the women and their children who were cast out passed away. Our teacher asked for volunteers for both sides of the debate. He received one volunteer who agreed with the missionary’s decision, and the rest of the class volunteered for the side that didn’t agree. Since that didn’t work, he assigned sides. He instructed those who were assigned to the agree side of the debate to move their chairs to the left side of the room and the rest of us to move our chairs to the right side of the room. All but one student assigned to the agree side of the debate didn’t move. As our teacher encouraged us to do what he asked, the agree group shared that they couldn’t in good conscience argue something so unconscionable. The one woman who was on the agree side of the debate stood up and screamed, “I’m a Christian.” She held the Bible she always carried with her above her head and continued, “I follow God and this Bible. If this book tells me to cast out women so marriage will be between one man and one woman, then I will cast them out. If they die, they die. It’s God’s will. If we don’t abide by God’s will, our values decline. The next thing you know, this culture would have been letting men marry men and women marry women and wouldn’t cast those abominations out even after they were told it was sin. Marriage is between one man and one woman. Those second wives and children deserved to die. Yes, I would have cast them out, too. If people die because I stand up against sin, then that’s God’s will. I will do what this book tells me to do. If this book tells me to kill, I will kill. I will do whatever this book tells me to do.” A young man cleared his throat before he said, “How can you say marriage is always only between one man and one woman? I may not be a Bible scholar, but I know that many Old Testament characters had more than one wife.” His question left the screaming woman standing with her Bible in the air above her head and her mouth hanging open. During her moment of silence, our teacher came out from behind his desk, pointed to the young man and said, “Now you’re getting it. That’s a possible argument for debating that the women shouldn’t have been cast out.” His words revitalized the woman’s anger. She slammed her Bible down on her desk and screamed, “You must both be faggots to defend such evil practices. Marriage is always between one man and one woman, and anyone who doesn’t live that should be cast out . . . “ Her screaming didn’t stop there, but I can’t remember everything she said after that. I became distracted by people gathering their belongings and leaving the room one by one. I hadn’t yet learned that a person could walk away from someone who had triggered in the verbally violent way this woman was doing, because it had happened so often in places from my past. As I discussed in my blog post two weeks ago, I had learned to surrender myself to these types of behaviors, so I could avoid retaliation. Therefore, I froze. I sat like the passive, submissive and obedient statue my church and culture had taught women to be until the classroom was empty except for me, this woman and my teacher. My teacher laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “You can leave now. I’ll see you next week.” I had been so well trained to be submissive to personalities like hers that I looked at her, because I was feeling like I needed her permission to leave so she wouldn’t retaliate afterwards if I displeased her. I assume my staring made her uncomfortable, because she stopped ranting, picked up her books, and left. I picked up my books, but my hands were shaking so badly I dropped them.

As my teacher helped me pick them up, he asked, “Are you okay?

I nodded, took the books he had picked up, and left.

I continued to feel shaken for several days. I had been taught what the woman in class had screamed, but it no longer felt palatable when it led to the death of women and their children. My conscience led me to pray. My prayers were simple – God, I don’t know what to do with this. It feels wrong to make decisions that kill women and children, but I don’t want to displease you. I couldn’t bear to attend church in my denomination the next Sunday, because I was haunted by the ghosts of women and children who had died due to the types of instruction I received there. I felt like the Holy Spirit led me to that decision in answer to my prayers, because I had always been afraid to visit other denominations because of the horrible things I’d been told about churches that sprinkle instead of dunk in baptism. After the service, I felt more confident that Divine Intervention had led me to that church for that Sunday service. The pastor began his sermon by telling a similar story about missionaries from their denomination. However, this denomination’s missionaries had developed a plan the Pastor said he had watched in a documentary titled “How Lutheran’s Interpret The Bible.” He taught about an ancient Jewish and early Christian tradition called the binding and loosing of the law. He said that’s what Jesus was referring to when he told people to live by the Spirit of the law instead of the letter of the law. They decided that since many Old Testament characters had more than one wife, it wouldn’t be a sin to allow each husband to keep all of his wives and children; however, they needed a plan that would allow them to eventually mold into modern Christian culture. They decided this could be done by instructing husbands with multiple wives not to take new ones and instructing single men to take only one wife. This would allow the situation to be resolved within a generation without unnecessary suffering or loss of life. That made sense to me. I spent the next week researching the binding and loosing of the law. I learned that it was a tradition of the early church that allowed Christians to lose the law to meet human needs, especially where harm would be caused if the law was bound. I should have known there was something I didn’t yet understand when I read Luke 11:37-53 and saw how Jesus told the Pharisees off for the way they burdened people, but I had been taught to accept the interpretations of our religious leaders. The more I accepted those legalistic interpretations, the more my heart was burdened by the suffering I saw it cause. It took an extreme example of harm, combined with God answering my prayers on that subject, before I could begin to accept compassion over legalism. I will never forget that woman’s angry outburst. When I see people ranting on social media in a way that doesn’t leave room for discussion, they remind me of that woman. The harm they cause by the inaccurate beliefs they spread makes me angry. On the other hand, I feel sorry for them that they are not capable of having a discussion that might allow them to learn a more compassionate way.