When I was Corinne’s age, my dad started a church. It would be the center of my life for the next decade until I went to college. Sunday service, girls’ Bible study, youth group, any fellow homeschoolers. It was my first job, too - on the books as the secretary, age 14. Hours spent in my dad’s company that we both look back on with fondness.
For my whole childhood, I was straight and I was conservative, and those were both taken as a given. I was an evangelical. That was the only way to be. I was going to have a bunch of kids and stay home with them. Maybe I’d even be a pastor’s wife. I had all the training. I knew the faith.
Losing that faith in college broke me down to my core. It went hand-in-hand with losing my straightness and my conservativeness: a total inverting of my world as I’d known it. I’ve long since found my footing again, but I’ll never forget how it felt to be so shaken. Like an earthquake in your soul.
It enrages me when people talk about “turning away from God” as if it’s just a frolic, somebody desperate for premarital sex, wantonly tossing aside what they still know is true.
If only those people knew hard I fought to keep it.
If only they knew what it feels like to watch your entire sense of self crumble.
If only they knew that it didn’t feel like a choice in the end, after all.
I had a conversation with one of my brothers not long after I graduated college, when Victoria and I were living in Cincinnati. He’d met her on more than one occasion, but only as a friend. Now that we’d graduated and were no longer under the threat of losing scholarships or being kicked out of school, we were happily in love and more public about it. In two more months, she’d propose to me.
This brother told me that I knew better. That I shouldn’t make decisions like this - I’m still not exactly sure what ‘this’ was, but I suspect ‘being a lesbian’ - haphazardly or when I knew I wasn’t right with God. Automatically assuming he knew the story of my deconversion. Refusing to contemplate that there might be more to the story than ‘girl decides to live in sin for fun.’
Let me tell you how fun it is to hold your sobbing girlfriend after her mother has told her she’s disappointed Jesus.
How delightful it is to suddenly have to sleep on different floors of the house when visiting your mom after many trips spent sharing the guest bed.
The sheer joy of losing people you thought were your closest friends.
Seven years ago, that brother’s wife told me that she hoped I didn’t feel offended by who she voted for, but she had to prioritize getting pro-life judges on the Supreme Court. Fetuses, one; bi sister-in-law, zero.
Tell me more how your faith is all about love. So loving, to deny the humanity of the person right in front of you. Your love is you not slamming the door in my face, and I’m supposed to be grateful for it.
Over Thanksgiving, while visiting Victoria’s family, her uncle tried witnessing to her (now atheist) brother. We laughed about it later, all us black sheep youngsters, but the undercurrent of frustration was there. Did their uncle think this was news to him? That we were all off on a lark and if he just used the right words, everything would click back in place?
Please don’t insult my intelligence by assuming I made anything other than a clear-eyed decision. Painful as it was at the time, none of us walked away from our faiths because we just felt like it or because we thought it would be fun.
Fifteen years ago, give or take a few months, is when it began. Ever since then I’ve been putting myself back together, choosing the pieces that still feel relevant and letting others go. Victoria and I married young - at 22 - but as I’ve told people: once you’ve seen someone (female) confess to their exceedingly Pentecostal parents that they have a girlfriend, there is no higher proof of love.
My brother, who I had that conversation with years ago, now has six kids with his wife. I can’t think about them without getting anxious. Especially the two youngest, the girls. I’ve lived that life. Will they recognize their innate worth? Will they feel like more than the sum of their virginity and their submission? Any of those children, if they dare to be anything other than straight and conservative, my heart breaks knowing what they will go through.
And yet. It is so worth it on the other side.