had kept me from these questions all my life: certainty that the church was The Truth, and that I was a child, and that for me to challenge or contradict their established wisdom was nothing more than a tantrum.
I had to keep going.
I thought again of the arguments C.G. had made about our lack of compassion, gentleness, humility. How had I so easily dismissed him? How could I have missed what had been staring me in the face for over a year?
And most important: If the church was wrong about all those things, what else were we wrong about?
The question felt like an iron key sliding into the lock of a long-sealed door. I could almost hear it swinging open on hinges groaning with age, unleashing a surge of memories buried inside—as if they had been deliberately locked away so as to cause no disturbance. They flashed through my mind one after another:
• A pointed Twitter exchange with a Jewish blogger called David Abitbol: I was defending Westboro’s call for the government to designate homosexuality a capital crime, in accordance with Levitical law—DEATH PENALTY FOR FAGS. David was an Orthodox Jew, and surprised me by quoting Jesus: He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. I had seen this as a general call to humility, and I couldn’t believe I had never connected that Jesus was specifically arguing against the death penalty. I was mortified. When I approached my mother, she doubled down. She repeated verses that seemed to support our position, but never answered what Jesus had said. Her stridency took me aback, and I walked away shaken. It was the first time I was consciously aware of inconsistency in our doctrine, but I was certain this sign was unscriptural. I had quietly stopped holding it—and put an end to my arguments with David—but this was a relatively small point of theology. I had set it aside, immediately and instinctively suppressing the memory.
• A conversation with my mother during a walk to an evening picket: Why did we have a sign declaring FAGS CAN’T REPENT? Couldn’t God give repentance to anyone He chose? Isn’t it misleading and dishonest to say otherwise? Again, she seemed not to hear me, repeating the verses we used to justify the sign, but not addressing the contradictory verses I had quoted. And again, I’d been afraid to pursue the objection—who did I think I was?—but I had stopped holding this sign, too.
• A Bible reading with my grandfather one summer afternoon: Gramps was making lunch in the church kitchen, and I’d walked in with some papers my mom had sent me across the block to deliver. “What’s that Matthew 5 say about divorce, love bug?” he asked me, pointing to the collection of super-large-print Bibles and concordances always stacked on the counter. I’d plucked one up and sat down and started to read to him, eventually coming to a perplexing phrase: pray for them which despitefully use you. We had been earnestly praying for the destruction of our enemies for years by then—but if that was right for us to do, what did this verse mean? My grandfather paused: “Well … it doesn’t say to pray for their good.” In the context of Jesus’s command to love your enemies, this argument made no sense. When I asked my father about it that evening and told him what Gramps had said, my father skeptically confirmed what I’d known was true: “That’s clearly not what that means. It does mean to pray for their good.” I was relieved to hear my father say so—but now that I’d resolved the immediate controversy in my thoughts, the contradiction flitted out of my mind like a butterfly, never to return again. Why had I never pursued it?
And with that, the most powerful partition in my mind—the one that had kept me from seeing the most grievous contradiction of all—dissolved.
We had been claiming to love thy neighbor all my life. We claimed we were the only ones who truly cared about anyone else. “We’re the only ones that love these fags!” Gramps would say in his Mississippi drawl.
But at the same time, we had been wholly dedicated to antagonizing the world. We mocked and delighted in their suffering. We demanded they repent, and then asked God to preserve them in their sin. We prayed for Him to destroy them.
Two diametrically opposed positions, held strongly and sincerely by the same mind at the same