the home I was raised in was only nominally Christian (in the sense that virtually all Southern American homes are nominally Christian. My father had been raised Southern Baptist and my Mom AR Presbyterian.
We spent every weekend with grandparents (my brother and I) alternating between the two as the grandparents were actual practicing Christians.
I was "saved" as the Baptists call it when I was nine, in what was probably my first attempt to get "normal" (I knew already i was trans but didn't know what it meant that i was supposed to be a girl, or that anyone else ever felt that way).
Through my teen years, I tried to reconcile my "perversion" with my faith (which was sincere if ill-informed) with varying degrees of seriousness.
When I was 22, after having spent about 3 or 4 years "backsliding" (another Baptist cliche) I attended a crusade at which an evangelist named Freddie Gage (who's still at it i believe) told me (from the pulpit, not personally) that God would heal anyone of their "besetting sins" (listing off a long list which included alcoholism, drug addiction, and homosexuality) if they would give it to God and serve him wholeheartedly.
I took that seriously and re-committed myself to my faith at that point and for the next 21 years, I pulled out all the stops. Faithful church attendance, years of tithing, teaching classes, going into the ministry and preaching, you name it. also, of course, getting married and starting a family (married a little over 3 years after the crusade) based on my faith that God would in fact rid me of my unfortunate condition.
Along the way I privately prayed, begged, pleaded, bargained, - you name it - with god to somehow get him to do what the preacher had promised me he would. He didn't. Meanwhile I was publicly towing the SBC line and repeating the same lies I'd been told ("It's a choice" "no one is born that way" and etc). Even when I had clear evidence those things were not true.
Eventually, I had to ask myself - do i serve a God who will command you not do or be a thing which you can repent of for 20 years and still not be free from?
Makes no sense.
Do I serve a god who, in spite of all the teachings about grace, would condemn me for being something I desperately dfid not want to be?
didn't add up.
Is there any other explanation which would account for how i fel other than a condition present from birth?
Nope.
the obvious conclusion then, is that I was botrn this way - and that any God worth following wouldn't condemn a soul for something they were born with.
In short, if i WAS born this way, then the church had it wrong. now, for a believer, it's no mean thing to assume that centuries of scholars and experts have studied the Word and reached an incorrect conclusion - BUT given my situation, I had no choice but to re-examine the record. and not just as it related to being trans but the whole thing.
In point of fact, it's not a matter of the Bible being wrong, it's the people. Throughout the history of the church there's a track record of people reading their cultural bigotries into the word and dressing their bad ideas in the robes of religion. (Racial bigotries, for instance, or the state church, or forced evangelism).
If i looked with a more skeptical eye, I had to note that various groups of Christians, all professing to faithfully follow the Scripture, could not agree even on the most fundamental foundations of Christianity (how to be reconciled to God, the proper mode of worship and prayer, the proper form of Baptism and what it meant, the nature of the afterlife).
If that was true, how could anyone state with confidence what God had to say about trans people (or Gays)? Heck, in my part of the word different denominations couldn't agree on how people were supposed to dress. Clearly there had to be SOME reason why this bunch said a woman shouldn't wear pants and that bunch said it was alright. The obvious conclusion was human beings seeing in the word what they wanted to see - that which confirmed their own biases.
Once those "scales fell from my eyes" I had to look at the whole book differently, the whole nature of what God intended vs. what man did with it.
i've always been of the opinion that the divine was far more than humans could begin to grasp, and we know if him only that tiny sliver which he decided to reveal of himself. i still think that's true, but in an even broader context.
I view the Bible as a series of object lessons, in a sense, like fables. I do not think that it is necessary to believe that Noah, or Job, or Joesph were actual people to learn the lesson God would have us learn from the stories about them.
I do think it is his word, and i do think the ultimate truth is the God paid the price for us that, as imperfect beings, we could never pay for ourselves (there's a lot deeper theology behind that but i won't bore you) - but the details of any given story are not the point - the point is that (1) God is, (2) he helped us where we could not help ourselves in terms of relating to him, and (3) he tried to give us a picture of how we are supposed to live and relate to each other. the bible is not a history book, it's a lesson book in how to get on in this world - illustrated by both positive and negative stories.
And, most importantly, only to be understood in the context of the original audience who would first hear it. Whatever we get from it is secondary.
By religion now is basically a sort of Christ-centered deism. I don't think any Christian denomination gets it right and i think most of them are very obtuse in insisting that they do, with very little flexibility for re-thinking traditional doctrines.
also - and this is surely self-serving, and might be just an emotional stage I'm going through - I've found myself with almost a hedonistic attitude. I'm so disillusioned with rules-based religion that I have a hard time respecting ANY moral rules right now. If i had the equipment and opportunity, I'm pretty sure I'd be a notorious slut. I simply am burnt completely out on "proper behavior"
I'm assuming this will pass.
