Religion and Spirituality

Those who are reading this may or may not know that I was raised as a Christian. My mom took me - and later forced me - to go to church and pray before dinner and things like that. When I transferred from college in Montana to a college at home in Oregon, I dropped the identifier of "Christian" and began to refer to myself as "spiritual" - specifically, spiritual but not religious.

The school I attended in Montana was affiliated with the Catholic church. Some of the people I knew here were a bit confused by my decision. Catholics and Christians don't always get along very well because of the differences in their belief systems. They have the same base beliefs - that God created the world and then sent his son to save humans from their sins in the ultimate sacrifice. After that things start to get blurry and the two split away from each other. Coming from a Baptist church, my experience is that Catholicism is more ritualized and focuses on doctrines whereas we focused on forging a relationship with God and developing a strong Christian family and reaching out to those around us. Not that that made us better, of course. In some ways, we were worse.

Montana was bad for me. I never should have gone. I experienced things that no person should ever have to experience. But I also experienced some spiritual attacks that originated in the Catholic church. Now, I want to be clear that I am not saying Catholics are jerks, or wrong, or bad. I know some awesome, loving, faithful Catholic people who deserve all of the good things in the world and a place in heaven with God someday. The goal of this is to simply share some experiences and observations that I made while experiencing the tensions between two religious groups that share the same history.

I went on a retreat through my college that was supposed to be open to all women of all walks of life. Being Catholic was not required. I wouldn't have gone if I had known what I would be dealing with. I already felt left out because there were so many things I wasn't allowed to participate in because I wasn't Catholic, communion being one of them, and perhaps the one that pissed me off the most. But on this retreat we had a guest speaker. I'm sure she was a great person and all, but some of the things she said were absolutely unacceptable. Ultimately, though in less direct terms, she said that if you weren't Catholic then you weren't Christian. I checked out of the retreat at that point and hid in the basement where everyone was sleeping. I got a lot of homework done that weekend. The sad part is, that wasn't the first part of the retreat that made me feel unwelcome.

That was the only direct insult to my faith during the time. The other insults came indirectly from policies within the Catholic church that controlled who could do what. I already mentioned not being allowed to take communion, so I'll use that as my example.

Transubstantiation is the idea that the wine and bread actually physically becomes the blood and body of Jesus during communion (which resulted in Christians being seen as cannibals during part of history). The Catholic church still believes this and holds onto this idea. It is one of their doctrines. I'm not an expert on Catholicism and their beliefs, but I did have this one explained to me. A significant number of protestant denominations do not hold on to this belief, instead believing that the bread and wine are merely a representation. Essentially, this is why Catholic churches do not allow other people to take communion. It may not be the intent, but the basic message is that other Christian's believe the wrong thing if they do not believe in transubstantiation. There are, of course, the classes that Catholic members have to take before they are allowed to participate in communion, but other churches have similar classes. As long as someone understands the purpose of communion and believes, they should be allowed to take it.

This, at least, is how I was made to feel. I could, of course, go up and be blessed by a priest, but why would I want to do that? If I was at a mass it was because I wanted to commune with and worship God, not be blessed by someone who was just as human as I was. On top of that, it singled me out as different, when really I wasn't. I had to show everyone that I wasn't like them by crossing my arms across my chest. That was exactly why I never got up for communion, and part of why I left mass early multiple times or refused to go at all. I participated in maybe three or four when I was in Montana, at least one of which I had to leave early so I wouldn't burst into tears.

This is a big part of why I no longer identify myself with a religious term, such as Christian or Baptist. I am spiritual, and for me that is enough. I made the decision once before, when I was in high school, but that was typical teenage questioning. Even so, there was one important person who treated me like I was a disease for that short period of time. That hurt more than anything and is yet another reason why I am no longer religious. The final reason why comes in the form of the isolated cases in which I was looked down on after coming out as bisexual several years ago.

There was at least one person who, upon seeing my Facebook page, where I openly display my values and my identity, did not think that I should be allowed to work with the kids at church. At the time I had volunteered to help teach Children's Church during service, so that the kids didn't have to sit through boring sermons and distract everyone. I would have been teaching them about God's love, miracles, different Bible stories, and more. Nothing to do with bisexuality at all. The sad part was that the people who had a problem with it didn't even have the balls to say it to my face, to put it bluntly. They hid behind my mom, who in turn came to me. While she is not completely accepting of what I identify as, she loves me and she was angry that anyone would say things like that about her daughter. I was just angry that they didn't say it to my face.

Religion opens up too many doors for discrimination, judgments of people, and hate. There are too many complexities and too many reasons for people to fight and argue and hate each other. Spirituality is simple. You believe what you believe because you value it and because you believe that it's the truth. No rules, no doctrines, no necessary rituals. It is what you need it to be. And though God and I have some issues to straighten out, I feel closer to him now that I do not view myself as part of a church.

Separation of Church and State

Today I want to take some time to talk about the separation of Church and State in terms of the federal government and why we have it. I bring this up because of the issue of same-sex marriages, perhaps one of the biggest social debates of our time. I recognize that everyone has their own opinion on the subject and their own reason for opposing or supporting it, but I believe that there are some important points that both parties have been overlooking during this drawn-out battle.

In school we are taught the story of the pilgrims and how they left England to escape religious persecution. We know these people to be puritans or protestants. Of course, its far more complicated than all of that. The point is that these people left their homeland because they were being persecuted and wanted freedom from that persecution. It wasn't just the state persecuting them, either. It was the Church. When Martin Luther nailed his ninety-nine theses to the door of the Church, there was a split. The people who moved away from the traditional church became known as Protestants, because they protested against the wrongs of the Church (not to be confused with the Puritans, a slightly more extreme religious sect that was more like a cult).

So, the Protestants found a way to compromise with their governments. They would go somewhere else and settle. They founded the Colonies on the eastern shores of what is now the United States under the principle of religious freedom. And by freedom I mean freedom to practice the different versions of Christianity. Other religious groups - such as the Quakers - were highly frowned upon.

So, what does all of this have to do with separation of Church and State, you wonder. Well, in England and other European countries at the time the Church was closely linked to and heavily influenced the government. The mixture of the Church with the government was what allowed the two to have considerably more power than either ought to have had. The government was able to punish people for religious malpractice (or what they decided religious malpractice was) and the Church was able to persecute people with the government's backing.

When the Colonies were founded, this was an important issue that they considered. Once they were independent of England and began to set up a government of their own it was something that they thought important enough to put on paper. This we have separation of Church and State.

This is important to keep in mind when we discuss the issue of same-sex marriage. One of the leading arguments is religiously based. People argue that the Bible says that same-sex relationships are wrong and sinful. That's fine. Maybe they're right and it is a sin. But it doesn't matter if they are wrong or right. What matters is that same-sex marriage is a political issue, not a religious one. Just because a same-sex couple gets married doesn't mean that the church has to recognize it as "right" or "ok". It just means that the state is recognizing a legal union between two consenting human beings. You can be married without the church. All it takes is a judge and some signatures and a witness.

My point is that Church and State are to be separate. When they are mixed bad things happen and people abuse power. Look at the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, or the selling of "tickets" to have sins forgiven (a clever guise for making money, yes, but wrong).

It is against the law to prohibit something based on religious grounds. And for those people who think that it's wrong or unnatural...well, I'm fairly certain we do a lot of things that are considered wrong or unnatural, but over the years they have become acceptable part of society anyways. And that opinion doesn't have any legal standing, anyways. It's not like allowing same-sex marriages means that you have to marry someone who's the same sex as you. I say keep your values to yourself and don't force them onto other people.

I realize that people can look at this and assume that I am saying all of this because I identify as bisexual. While that doesn't certainly weigh in on my opinion, I want to make it clear that I think each person should be allowed to live by their own morals and values without other people trying to force their opinions and values onto them. By denying people the right to marry whoever they want that is exactly what is going on. If same-sex marriage is allowed, what do heterosexual couples lose? They can still have heterosexual relationships and marriages. Nothing will change for them. The other option - the one that currently holds in many states - is denying someone the right to choose. And, being Christian myself (though I'm loathe to put a label to my spirituality these says, with as many times as I have been targeted by a Christian institution), I'm fairly confident in saying that God gave everyone the right to choose. We have free will to make the right or wrong decisions. Who are we to deny each other that free will if it isn't hurting people?