I feel like I’m often in the closet about being an ex-Christian. I don’t feel I have to hide this from my family or my friends. I think my family is actually quite relieved I don’t practice Christianity anymore. It freaked out my mother and I was mean to my brother at times. I regret that very much. And I regret getting messed up on Jesus in the first place.
I know a couple of people who are Christians and I don’t discuss my Christian history with them. My building manager, whom I get along with very well, is a devout Christian. She never proselytizes her tenants but she is vocal about things she believes and her involvment in her church. There is the professor I worked with at City College. He and his wife (who just graduated from the MFA program last year) are Evangelical Christians. I haven’t said anything about my “former life” because I don’t want to open up a whole can of worms. It’s easier to be seen as simply heathen than it is as an apostate.
A buddy of mine and his girlfriend had some discussions with the professor and his then fiancee a couple of years ago at a party. My friend’s girlfriend was raised Christian and went to Point Loma Nazarene for for undergraduate degree but she no longer practices Christianity. She’s more interested in Buddhism now. When she mentioned this to the professor’s fiancee, my friend told me she was very mean to his girlfriend. He told me that this woman made comments that Buddhism was a pagan belief and some kind of reproving comment about my friend’s girlfriend not practicing the faith she grew up with. I’ve never dealt with this from the professor or his wife but they may just tone it down for their colleages. Or they are not as severe Christians as they were a few years ago.
Every once in a while, I run into people I knew as a Christian. I tend to keep the conversation pretty banal, hoping they never bring up Jesus or what Church I’m going to now. When the question comes up, it’s just more comfortable to say I’m not going to church. I don’t feel like hearing “It’s not too late to come back to the Lord.”
Posting on the ex-Assembly BB has been interesting but “outing” oneself in an online medium is much different than “coming out” in real life. It has been interesting what kind of insecurity an ex-believer can evoke in some people, hence the really offensive posts from some die-hard Christians. From my perspective, I find it amazing people can leave the Assembly and remain unchanged in their beliefs and the way they treat others. The only thing for them that has changed is Brother George is wrong. Yeah, he was wrong but so were his cronies and everyone else under them that perpetuated or enabled the abuses within that “church.”
I wonder what is it about Orange and San Diego that cults and Christian fundamentalism flourish? It is scary to think the Assembly got started in Fullerton and then spread out through the entire nation and some cities in Canada. Even scarier was that it found its way to the UK, France, China, and Africa. Then there is Calvary Chapel, which also seems to have a fundamentalist influnce nationwide in a more mainstream sense. There’s some of these churches (and similar ones) in San Diego and they are always full of people. And then they produce bands like Switchfoot, which I wish would just go off the air radio-wise.
Several years ago, when I was losing my faith, it seems like every Christian I knew just got too damn nosy and they had something proselytizing to say. It made me wonder if I should move to Stockholm or Japan, anywhere where this type of mentality is not prevelant.
