I am always happy to find confirmation anywhere that other thinking women with brains, a leftward-tilting sensibility, and a devotion to progressive goals have struggled as I did and do with the chagrin of being Christian in an age when the label conveys to the people I respect "intolerant, narrow-minded, embryo-hugging-at-the-expense-of-sentient-humanity, climate-change-denying, taxes-nonpaying, liberal-baiting, logic-denying middlebrow moron." Bill Maher, for example, was all over the whole God issue as usual Friday night, in the very first Real Time of the season. Every time he gets on the subject I feel less and less affection for Bill Maher (even though he is still my hero) and more and more irritation that I can't be there to rebut his many, many wrong assumptions (and no one else ever has to my satisfaction).
I am slightly soothed to note that most of his guests admit---shyly, as a rule, and with a certain shame---to a belief in something besides hot tubs with twins and so on. But not by much I'm not. I'm an intelligent person and I can tell a hawk from handsaw regardless which way the wind blows, but the sometimes it's hard to hold shame at bay, even though Jesus---understandably---explained, as he had every right to do, that if his followers were ashamed of him, he would be ashamed of them.
For one thing, as I would expect Jesus to understand, I'm married to a Brit---i.e., an atheist who not only doesn't believe in God, but views any discussion of, or casual reference to, one's religious beliefs as a solecism of the worst sort----and I am surrounded by lovely, non-God-bothering liberals who are prone to announcing their nonbelief in a tone of really insufferable smugness, as if their lack of faith somehow set the final seal on their credentials as progressive thinkers with a sky wide tolerance for all faiths.
So I was happy to see this article by Sara Miles in Salon, since both her experiences trying to be a Christian in secret and the reasons why she let it happen to her are painfully familiar to me.
First, just to get it out of the way, the traction-like pull of the original fisher of men (and women) once you let him get his hook in you:
[quote begins from "My Daily Bread" by Sara Miles at Salon.com]
But the Christianity that called to me, through the stories I read in the Bible, scattered the proud and rebuked the powerful. It was a religion in which divinity was revealed by scars on flesh. It was an upside-down world in which treasure, as the prophet said, was found in darkness; in which the hungry were filled with good things, and the rich sent out empty; in which new life was manifested through a humiliated, hungry woman and an empty, tortured man....
[quote ends; link in original]
