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Pieter Van Tatenhove lives in Sacramento with his fiance and daughter, Lola. He writes fiction of all types and an occasional poem.

The seeds of my doubt were sewn during my four years at a Christian University. Much of it began on one particular day when my mentor at the time, a man I still respect a great deal, brought me across the street from our campus to an empty lot. He stood silently in front of a pipe, jutting from the ground, some loose wires hanging over the lip, and asked me if I remembered what stood in that lot a few months before. I didn’t. He told me that it was a low-income housing complex. People living and surviving on state assistance.

I felt a pang of guilt that I had spent three years at a Christian school, less than a hundred yards away, and had never noticed these people. I waited for the next part of the lesson. The part where we read passages from Matthew 25. I probably needed the reminder and the conviction. Christian college could be a pretty opaque bubble at times. 

                Then he told me that it had been torn down so the church next door could have a bigger parking lot and it became an even bigger metaphor for me. One that was continuously strengthened during my last remaining year in college, and the following years as I tried to wrestle with my Faith life outside of that community.

                Eventually I decided that the problem expressed in that empty lot was a human problem, nothing more. No church or follower of Christ will ever fully live up to the ideal that Jesus represented. It was something I just had to accept.

                The problem was that once I started seeing these glimpses into the other side of the Christian community, I couldn’t ignore them. Worse, I couldn’t ignore how my own spiritual life and spiritual views had been affected.           

The most poignant example for me came as I left college. I had a friend who had been “wrestling” with homosexuality, as if it were some struggle that could be overcome. He was feeling alienated from his community and friends, myself included. I wasn’t at a point in my life where I knew how to respond to a Gay person, how to reconcile their sexual identity with their spiritual life. I was still under the impression that it couldn’t be reconciled.

                Then the Prop 8 debate started full swing and I heard pastors and other Christian friends voice their opinions, some of which seemed to be supported by scripture, which started to strike me as odd.

You can find maybe three verses in the Bible that seem to oppose homosexuality, but you can’t put your finger down in the New Testament and not see a verse about taking care of the poor. Yet millions of Church dollars and thousand of hours were being spent pushing an agenda that, at its heart, had absolutely nothing to do with Jesus’ teachings.

This false Christianity was spilling over into politics as well. Christian leaders pushing legislation, or telling their congregants to vote for legislation that often seemed contrary to Christian ideals. Voting against universal healthcare, voting for increased tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the lower class, etc. I understand that religion and politics should be kept separate, but at the same time, if your beliefs stem from a deep seated conviction, it can’t help but spill over. What I saw spilling over made me embarrassed to call myself a Christian.

                Two years ago I had a short conversation online with a pastor on the East Coast. It was at the height of the debate about Guantanamo and water-boarding. Whether the treatment of our detainees was justified somehow, or if it was flat out torture. I knew where I stood. I knew that the despicable things that went on there and in Abu Ghraib were destroying what little integrity our country still had. But I saw him posting online his own view, that water-boarding wasn’t actually torture and what our soldiers did in that prison amounted to little more than “blowing cigar smoke in a prisoner’s face.” I asked him how the same Holy Spirit could be giving us two completely different convictions. He snarkily replied that we would have to wait until the second coming for our answers.

                My conscience keeps getting in the way of my faith. I’ve seen first-hand how poorly Gays have been treated by Christians. I’ve participated in that same treatment. What right do we have as Christians, as humans, to tell another person that, although he was created in God’s image, the love he or she feels for their partner is somehow abhorrent in God’s eyes? Where is the moral, let alone scriptural, justification for torture?

                Almost every single Christian I knew from my college days, or my youth group days before that, would agree with that Episcopal minister. They would find someway to justify putting another human through hell if it protected their narrow, middle-class lifestyle. How many of them truly ask what Jesus would do? If they did, wouldn’t they be doing everything in their power to protect those prisoners, rather than let them suffer for some vague ideal that has nothing to do with Christ?

                The two greatest commandments are to love God, and love others. I wholeheartedly want to live my life following the second, but to be honest, if God looks anything like the god that the modern church points to, then I can’t help but feel that he’s not worthy of my love.

                I fully accept that my objections to Christianity as an institution are subjective. That there are plenty of Christians who don’t share those anti-Christian views that have become the norm, and there are growing movements within the Christian community towards a more loving, inclusive Christianity that puts the love of God and the love of Others above all the grey-area. My problem is that I feel it might be too late for me to care. I’ve lived outside of structured Christian community for a number of years now, and it hasn’t affected my ability to love those around me. Instead, I feel better equipped to explore spiritual and moral issues without the filter of the Church. I think that’s necessary sometimes.