Let me start out with a little bit about myself. I am a Christian in the most basic sense: I believe in God and that Jesus Christ is his son. I belief in life after death. Heck, just look up the Apostle's Creed and you'll see what I believe. As for everything else values-wise, I'd like to think I'd be the same regardless of my faith, though I can't deny that growing up in a Christian household didn't have a big impact on who I am today.
After what I write here, some of you may say, as someone did to me in the past, that I am not, in fact, a Christian. However, I believe that religion is self-defined. If someone says that he or she is a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim, then that is what he or she is.
In any case, I grew up (and still am) an ELCA Lutheran. Living in Minnesota, I was surrounded by other ELCA Lutherans (to give you an idea, the St. Paul Area Synod is the smallest synod in the ELCA geography-wise but is one of the largest member-wise. We jokingly call ourselves "the synod with the densest Lutherans"). I went to church every Sunday and was in Sunday School/Confirmation from age 3 all the way until I was confirmed at 14. My parents' friends were almost entirely from our church.
To put it simply, it was very easy to be a Christian when I was growing up. The church I attended was very liberal and I was surrounded by a support system grounded in that church. To me a Christian was someone who was there for friends and family, who celebrated with them in good times and supported them in bad. If I ever needed help of any kind and couldn't go to my parents for some reason, I had any number of their friends who would be there for me. It was the very epitome of a village raising a child.
And then I got to college. Being someone who had already been to around 45 US states and had been to Europe twice, had toured Auschwitz, been to a battered women's shelter in Budapest, spent two weeks in high school putting roofs on houses in the Yucatan peninsula, and had helped my mom serve lunches at a battered women's shelter in St. Paul, I never considered myself to be sheltered. But I was wrong. Apparently not all Christians were like those I grew up with. And it baffled me.
I remember the first time I heard a "fellow" Christian call Israel "an entire screwed up country." Or the first time I saw a skit in the ministry group I was in that showed a person not getting into heaven because her friend hadn't taken the time to tell her about Christ before she died (I mean seriously?! A person is punished because of ignorance and a friend's inaction?). And then I had a friend who started labeling her other friends as either "Christian" or "non-Christian." I actually lost a friend because I wasn't Christian enough. No, he didn't tell me that outright, but his actions certainly did. None of this was right to me. I never believed that you had to be a Christian to get to Heaven. That always smacked of predestination to me. I never believed that non-Christians were less deserving of anything simply because they weren't Christian. That belief seemed, well, unChristian.
Which brings me to today. If anything I'm even more liberal than I was growing up. I don't believe that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. Sure, I believe the Gospels and the history in Acts, but Paul's letters are just the opinions of one devout man due to his own experiences and colored by the beliefs of his own time. Some of the Old Testament may have been inspired by God, but they were filtered through man. Adam and Eve are an allegory to the creation of the world. As my 8th grade earth sciences teacher pointed out: a "day" in Genesis does not necessarily have to mean 24 hours (he probably never realized that his little speech that day is what started me being able to square my belief in God with what I learned in science).
Compare that to the people who profess to represent my faith to the rest of the world. Murderers and adulterers are to be forgiven (though they break God's explicit rules stated in the Ten Commandments) but gays are going to Hell (because God apparently said so in some obscure passage that also states that you can't wear mixed fabrics, can't eat shell fish and can sell your daughter into slavery). Jesus was a free-market proponent even though he cursed money traders, turned over the market tables in the synagogue and said that rich men have the same chance of getting into heaven as a camel has getting through the eye of a needle. Paying taxes is evil even though Jesus said to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," not to mention made a point of making friends with tax collectors. Poor people are lazy and deserve what they get despite the fact that Jesus said "whatever you give to the least of these you give to me." People are to be judged and deemed either worthy or unworthy even if Jesus said "judge not lest ye be judged," "let he who is free of sin cast the first stone," and "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
With this kind of open and loud representation of Christianity, it makes it very hard to be a Christian. I have no desire to be like these people. I don't want to be associated with them in any sense of the word. Why would I want to be a Christian when Christians are some of the biggest hypocrites out there? However, I can't change what I believe any more than most of those people will change what they believe. The most I can do is live my own faith and hope to lead others by my own example, by advocating for equal rights, helping the poor and standing up for the weak as Jesus did. I can hope that I will make a difference in my own little corner of the world one act at a time, all the while trying to prove that not all Christians are horrible, even if the loudest ones are.
But I got to say, it sure was a lot easier when I was a kid and didn't hear all this noise.
I'll leave you with this great clip that contrasts religion with a belief in Jesus: