My Life as a Christian Fundamentalist

When I was about 12 years old, my oldest brother joined an independent, fundamentalist, bible church in Manhattan. My brother is 10 years older than me, so I looked up to him a lot. Subsequently, I started attending the church with him. By my high school years, my brother and I were both fixtures at the church. He was a deacon and in charge of sound production and I was highly active in the youth group. I even went to the church's high school for my senior year. By my senior year I highly regarded as a good christian and even won the school's Most Spiritual award.

When it came time to pick a college, I really didn't know what to do. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University offered 50% scholarships to anyone from my church that wished to attend and it seemed like the answer that I was seeking. I visited the school with a group of other teenagers and frankly, loved it.

The school really inundated its students with religious meetings in addition to the typical class load. There following were all required:

- Sunday morning service,

- Sunday evening service,

- Monday night prayer group (small groups held in the dorms),

- Wednesday night service,

- Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning chapel services,

- Bible classes during your freshman and sophomore years, and

- A required christian service class usually requiring 2 or 3 hours weekly.

I quickly became a prayer leader. Eventually, I became a resident assistant (RA), which was good because it came with a $12,000 scholarship that covered tuition, room and board and up to $200 worth of textbooks. What a godsend that was. Obviously the competition for these positions is huge so they put us through a very rigorous process before selecting just a few. More is expected of RAs at Liberty U than of typical universities since the RAs are also supposed to be the dormitory's mommy and daddy, first line spiritual counsellor, and the primary enforcers of the schools many, many rules that would have shocked most students of other schools.

I definitely struggled with my sexuality while in school, even as I counselled others. Luckily, my mind compartmentalized my gayness such that I could survive in this homophobic environment without being completely traumatized. Somehow even as I would occasionally go through cycles of buying gay porn then destroying it, there was a part of me that had no idea that I was gay.

Interestingly enough what drove me from the church had nothing to do with my sexuality, but my eventual inability to accept the judeo-christian version of God. My argument is as such, if God exists, then he must be as far above us as we are above an ant. Therefore, our understanding of the nature of God, his desires, his motives, and his goals must be as incomprehensible to us as an ant trying to understanding that humans must go to work to buy braces for their kids and pay the mortgage. Hell, my dog can't even understand why I have to leave every morning. I don't say this to try to convince anyone, which I know would be futile, but to describe how I came to believe what I believe.

Anyway, I am not saying that god doesn't exist, because I have no way of knowing. I only state that I cannot buy the image of god that has been taught to me. It just seems way to convenient. It seems exactly like what god would be if humans invented him. I now consider myself agnostic.