I am re-reading Thomas Merton’s "The Seven Storey Mountain" for the first time in well over a decade, and I am chuckling at (and skimming through, when my patience is short) some of it. He sure waxed poetic (in an overbearing kind of way) about his view of people and places through the lens of his devout Catholicism.
I am also chuckling because his religious fervor reminds me very much of myself in my 20s and 30s.
During those years I was a Pentecostal, then an evangelical Christian. (I can’t say I was fundamentalist, because I have been a universalist for as long as I could remember.) I tried to convert every non-Christian man I was romantically attracted to, as well as my own cousin-sister, whose spirituality I was SURE was lacking. (Hat-tip to my arrogance, there.) I tied everything back to my faith, no matter how far-fetched the tie had to be to make the connection. The main thing I did not do was try to convert people of other religions, because of my deeply-held universalist beliefs. (I also did not want to be responsible for turning someone away from what may well have been their only tie to God!) And I also questioned whether we were wrong in our assumption that LGBT people who acted on their same-sex attraction or non-conforming gender identity were, by default, sinning.
These days the only people I would like to de-convert are fundamentalist Christians, Pentecostal, evangelical, or otherwise. But just like I stayed away from de-coverting people of other religions even at the height of my religious fervor, I am beginning to wonder if attempting to de-convert them isn’t the best approach. After all, what if that would lead to them entirely divorcing themselves from any kind of good they get out of spirituality? I don’t wish a life of unmoored, meaningless wandering on them. I just want them to stop using their beliefs to invalidate LGBT people, our lives, our loves, and our identities. If they dropped that part of their belief system, I wouldn’t have much problem with them being Christians. (For example, I have no desire to de-convert the Christians I fellowship with at Riverside Church, because our church teaches the radical acceptance of God towards LGBT people, our lives, our loves, and our identities.)
Perhaps I have to allow (though certainly not validate and always push against when they attempt to force them on the rest of us via legislation, etc.) their abhorrent beliefs in order to allow them the peace they find in the other parts of their religion.
Is this what it means to "live and let live"?
One response to “To De-Convert or Not”
You are describing what I feel like is the worst aspect of what Rome, by which I mean the Roman Empire not the Roman Catholic Church per se, has imparted to Christendom. That driving sense of urgency to colonize and grow by force. I’m sure you are familiar with both the heavy handed and light handed approach to spreading the gospel. There’s the stand on the street corner and beat your drum approach, and then there’s the live your life in such a way as to let shine that transformative light through. Folks on either extreme end of the spectrum will tell you that it can only be done their way. My feeling is something like you let folks know a door is open and you get out of their way whether or not they want to walk into it or out of it. Any notion that one person is truly responsible for the choice that another makes, especially when it comes to the relationship with the divine gets really close to hubris. On the other hand it think that we don’t influence and aren’t influenced by other people is also really close to sloth.
So, ah, no easy answers.