It’s kinda funny. I was in church today, and my pastor was preaching about how it’s fundamentally unchristian to dwell on anger towards other people. The entire point of today’s sermon was that Christians have given up their personal rights to God so they can spread his message of love, so there’s no use staying angry when people slight us. You can’t very well be a bastion of love and kindness when your default mindset is negativity. It’s hard, yeah, especially in cases of horrendous abuse and mistreatment. But that’s also what we have other people for; to be there with us in working through that trauma so we can achieve some measure of peace.
It’s such a radically different message from what I’m seeing in the LGBT community these days, which is characterized by “righteous” indignation and a metric fuckton of infighting. Everyone is so quick to anger and point fingers, especially at each other, rather than practicing any form of real acceptance. I grew up Catholic, and also LGBT. For most of my adult life I’ve never had any desire to engage in Christianity of any type. I only started going to services again because my fiance is religious and I wanted to be able to understand that part of his life more. But the church we go to actually feels like a really safe place for me.
It’s also a radically different message from what most people see as the stereotypical America Christian (especially of the Evangelical bent, as my church is). I realize that Christianity in America still has a massive road ahead of it when it comes to LGBT acceptance, but I like to think there are more congregations like mine that people give the religion credit for.
And hey, even if you don’t want to be a Christian, don’t believe in God, or disagree with the beliefs of a lot of Christian denominations in America, I think there’s still a fuckton of good lessons people on this site could learn from Christ himself. The guy founded an entire freakin’ religion by loving the crap out of people who would stomp on him. That’s one hell of a legacy to leave behind, don’t you think?