Losing My Religion {it happened on a sunday} Day 7

That's me in the corner

That's me in the spotlight

Losing my religion

Trying to keep up with you

And I don't know if I can do it

Oh no, I've said too much

I haven't said enough

In the 90's, I discovered alternative rock music and I fell in love.  Until we moved to Ohio, I had only ever listened to the Christian music my parents preferred.  My first concert was Amy Grant.  I can remember doing dramatic interpretive dance in the living room to my dad's Carmen tapes.  I was vaguely aware of Michael Jackson and Madonna; after all, I attended public school and there's only so much bubble a kid can exist in.  But I was certain that Steven Curtis Chapman and Sandy Patti were bigger deals in the music world than The King of Pop and The Material Girl.

NKOTB puzzle, t-shirts...we were obsessed

Our move took us away from an area with a Christian radio station.  Couple that with my parents' decision to get cable, and I became transfixed by MTV and VH1, brand-new to me at the age of 12.  (Interesting side note:  Music seemed to be the only area of pop culture my parents were concerned with.  We watched TV shows and movies that were occasionally too mature for us and read whatever books we liked.)  My best friend through middle school and high school, and college and adulthood too (love you Melissa!) was a total audiophile, and she spent much of our friendship educating me on all the music I had missed.

At the time I began to hear it on the radio, I felt grateful to the REM song "Losing My Religion".  On first listen, it was as shocking as the day that boy said "crap" outside of church.  Losing one's religion?  Was that even possible?  If so, surely it was a straight road from there to eternal damnation.  But the more I began to question and doubt my beliefs, the more that song offered hope that someone else had felt the way I did.

There were many things that affected my feelings about church and religion.  Hypocrisy was a big one.  We listened to sermons about how Jesus said to love one another, but from my point of view, I couldn't point to many examples of people actually living that way.  There were too many rules about the external and it seemed to me that no one really cared about the internal.  And why is that?  If our hearts and souls are invisible and inside us, then why do we care how someone dresses on Sunday morning?  Why were we fighting so hard to keep prayer in schools while turning a blind eye to bullying, some of it perpetrated by the students wearing cross necklaces and WWJD bracelets?  Why was abortion wrong and capital punishment right?  If church was a community of believers, then why did I feel so lonely there?

Something else shook my confidence in the infallibility of church.  As a teenager, I sat in services and listened to our male pastor.  Our choir was directed by our Music Minister, also a man.  Then there was the Youth Pastor, the Children's Pastor, the ushers and elders, even the Sunday School teachers once we hit middle school were all men (only if a husband-wife team taught together or we got divided by gender did I get to have a female teacher).  And yet, as I looked around my church, I saw smart women, capable women, hard-working women.  I saw women given secretarial roles and shuttled to the nursery or the kitchen, because apparently being in possession of a vagina limits your abilities at church to cooking, typing, and changing diapers.  

Yet at school I had a woman principal and female teachers leading and performing their duties to the same level of excellence as their male counterparts.  I saw women elected to Congress and serving as Supreme Court justices and climbing the ladders of corporate America.  I watched my own mother rise early every day and work hard at her job before coming home to make dinner and read the Little House on the Prairie books to my sister and me before bed.  Why were women passed over again and again to teach and lead and give a voice to key decisions?  I was directed to 1 Timothy 2:11, where Paul explicitly says he does not allow women to teach, as the basis for this church-sanctioned discrimination.  In practice, though, I could never quite get on board.  Especially when I saw teenage boys passing Communion and collecting offering, looking awkward with their ill-fitting blazers and sudden religious authority.  As their peer, I knew first-hand what immature idiots they were (being an immature idiot myself).  And I could not believe that it was better in the eyes of the church, in the eyes of God, that these boys should be placed in positions of authority over mature, intelligent, God-fearing women.

It happened on a Sunday morning, as I sat in a sanctuary feeling disgusted with all of it, tired of trying to do the mental gymnastics to believe, sick of the hypocrisy and hating myself for being associated with it, that I made a choice.  This was not my religion.  This was no longer something I could claim to have faith in.  There were many small moments that led up to the big one.  I held strong feminist beliefs, but couldn't call myself the F word that was almost as bad as the first F word.  I didn't want to get married or have children, and briefly wished I was Catholic so at least I could become a nun without becoming suspect.  I wanted travel and adventure instead of dogma and duplicity.  I was beginning to think that my intellect might be greater than God's ability, and I'd be better off forging my own path going forward.

It took years, a decade or more perhaps, to realize that losing my religion was not something to regard as a failure or a source of guilt.  I had to lose the toxic practices and beliefs that had somehow gotten wrapped around God to wipe the slate clean.  Only then could I build something based on my own experiences and discover what real faith is.

*Imagine my disappointment recently when I discovered the song is really just about someone who is at the end of his rope and not a sacrilegious ode to abandoning the faith tradition of one's youth.