Independence Day 2000

Yesterday was my country's Independence Day. As we've done for over 200 years now, citizens celebrated the day we gave Great Britain the finger with bright displays of cheap explosives made in China, entirely too much beer and barbecue, and all too many swells and surges of unthinking patriotism. (I spent the day contemplating the Bill of Rights. That doesn't make me special, for the record.)

But this isn't about the nation's independence day. This is about a smaller, more personal independence.

I don't write much here about my first marriage. I write about my Notorious Bible-Thumping Ex-boyfriend (or NTBX for short) plenty, since he was such an excellent example of everything bad about fundamentalist Christian misogyny; I suppose I figure his misdeeds and general lack of remorse make him fair game. But I haven't said much about either my former or my current spouse, mostly out of a sense of privacy. Yet today I feel moved to post about the impact of Christianity on my first marriage.

My first husband and I had been friends for years before we first started dating in college. I was a Born-Again Christian at the time and had recently ended a very rocky relationship with a mutual friend (who was Catholic, which made for its own interesting dynamics). I will not delve too deeply into the details of our courtship; I will only say that after some time dating we got serious, and talk of marriage arose.

It was at this point I began to experience a great deal of spiritual anxiety about the relationship. My ex classified himself as a Deist at the time; it suited his rational personality and his high intelligence to be so. There was nothing particularly offensive about his beliefs, but for evangelical Christians, nothing less than another evangelical Christian will do as a marriage partner. All the verses about being unequally yoked with nonbelievers reared their ugly little heads, and I started fussing and worrying about whether or not he would be doctrinally sound enough to marry. I loved him very much, but I also loved God, and God's holy book told me that if my intended didn't convert I couldn't marry him.

I am ashamed to admit that I couldn't just leave well enough alone and not worry about it. My ex was and is a highly intelligent, independent man quite capable of making his own religious decisions, but my own worries about not wanting to enter into a marriage that wouldn't be acceptable to God prevented me from understanding that. To this day I regret the pressure I put on my ex to explore Christianity and adopt it if he could. It gave me a unique perspective on missionary dating - I understand both sides of it - but such perspective was bitterly earned.

Nonetheless, my ex did explore, and did find something that satisfied him, for he eventually converted to Christianity. We began attending a Presbyterian church together and later married there.

Our marriage didn't last. I will spare also the details of how it deteriorated; when it boils down to it my ex and I were simply not suited to be marriage partners and could not make our relationship work. Furthermore, I suspect that we both bought into some very damaging unspoken beliefs about the roles each of us should fulfill as husband and wife in a godly Christian marriage.

As a Christian wife, I can recall feeling a great deal of pressure to be responsible for keeping my marriage intact. In a healthy marriage both spouses are responsible for making sure the marriage survives, but I often felt as if I were solely responsible because I was the wife. I felt that my proper godly duty was to succor my spouse, giving him endless emotional support without expecting it in return. I can't say that there was ever any demand that I submit or obey him, and he wasn't the autocratic type anyway. But when I realized that my marriage was failing I felt a great deal of distress, not only because it was failing but because I was a failure at fixing it alone. Desperate prayers and entreaties to the almighty God were met with a thundering silence. Giving my marriage up to God didn't change anything.

Being Christian didn't save my marriage. What it did do was perpetuate the situation, not relieve or heal it. It was very clear to me that no matter how broken, painful, neglectful, or irretrievable our marriage was, divorce was not an option because the Bible said it wasn't. So I hung on and fought to revive a dead relationship long after it was healthy to do so. In fact I didn't actually leave until things were so miserable that the only other options left to me were suicide or homicide.

When it got that bleak my eyes opened up, and I realized that a god that would rather have me dead than divorced probably wasn't a god worth obeying. We separated in January of 2000. I post this on July 4th because in the state I live in, a divorce hearing is not allowed until a minimum of 90 days have passed since first filing. My 90th day was July 4th, 2000: Independence Day.

I am blamed for the failure of my marriage to this day. I was certainly blamed for it by a furious ex who wondered why I couldn't spend decades of my life waiting for God to make me into the godly wife my ex just knew I would eventually grow to become, and who my ex could be happy with. I am blamed for it by Christians who are sure that I didn't try hard enough to be a good wife or who "know" that I didn't make Jesus the center of my marriage, because if I really truly had, my marriage would never have failed. I am blamed for it by a culture that holds women responsible for maintaining relationships, keeping the emotional connections alive regardless of whether or not we have support or help from anyone else (least of all our spouses). I have had Christian men (including my ex) chastise me that God didn't want me to divorce, and tell me that I'm still married to my ex in the eyes of God no matter what, even though I've remarried by now.

Christianity promised us that if God were part of our marriage, it would survive, and if we put him at the center of our marriage it would thrive. It was a hollow promise. I now realize that there is no god out there to help fix people's marriages. The work required to keep a marriage thriving must be undertaken by the couple themselves, even if everyone else in the world abandons them. One spouse cannot save a marriage alone, but it only takes one spouse to end it, whether by years of neglect or by the act of divorce, or both.

I no longer place the responsibility for my current marriage in the hands of any deity, savior, or religion. I am an atheist, my spouse is a lapsed Wiccan, and we both know that if we want it to work, we have to take our marriage into our own hands. And we do. And where my godly Christian marriage failed, my godless heathen marriage is thriving.

Go figure.

You're Not Being Persecuted, You're Just a Jerk

Speaking of assholes...

There's this tactic that I've noticed is common among Christian trolls on the fora I browse. They'll log on, perhaps start with a few inquisitive posts here and there, maybe an introduction or an "innocent" question about atheism... then before you know it their true colors come out. They get rude, abusive, mean, or manipulative. They start asking deliberately misleading questions and start making deliberately inflammatory remarks. They start insulting everyone who posts, all the while claiming that they're "just interested in honest dialogue - no rly!"

Then, when other users get fed up and call them on their shit, they cry persecution. When other users get angry at their insults, they use that as proof that atheists are angry, bitter people. When folks stand up to their homophobia, racism, or misogyny, Christian trolls whine that others are intolerant for not tolerating their intolerance. When it really gets heated and the gloves come off, the Christian troll howls with indignation, insisting that he's being persecuted for being a Christian, just like Jesus said he would be, and it proves the Bible is right.

Allow me to address Christian trolls everywhere on this matter:

If you go into a forum somewhere and start acting like an ass, you deserve every ounce of ridicule and contempt you get in return. You've brought it on yourself by treating people like playthings for your own gratification. People aren't mad at you because you're a Christian, they're mad at you because you're abusive and manipulative. They aren't persecuting you, they're standing up to you and your bullshit. And they aren't on your case because of your faith - they're on your case because you're an asshole.

It has nothing to do with Jesus at all. We can tell the difference between you and Jesus, believe me - and you guys have nothing in common whatsoever. It has nothing to do with your being a Christian - unless, of course, becoming an asshole was a requirement when you adopted Christianity. As I recall, though, that wasn't a prerequisite for signing up back in my day; becoming an asshole was still optional for those entering the fold, and was largely a matter up to the conscience of the individual. It was not a doctrinal requirement. But, maybe times have changed since then, who knows.

Really, though: Jesus isn't responsible for you being a jerk. You are. Don't try to hide behind your Savior, because nobody's fooled.

"Unaffiliated"... or Just Invisible?

In April of this year, the Pew Forum released Faith in Flux, their latest study on the demographics of religious affiliation in America. Among their findings, they revealed that the "unaffiliated" category has grown most rapidly; an earlier Religious Landscape Survey puts the percentage of unaffiliated at about 16% as of 2007.

On the surface of it, this might seem to be good news for the atheist crowd, as it would suggest our numbers are growing - and they probably are. But consider this observation from the Pew Forum:

One of the key findings of the Landscape Survey was that the unaffiliated population is a very diverse group. Not all those who are unaffiliated lack spiritual beliefs or religious behaviors; in fact, roughly four-in-ten unaffiliated individuals say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives. Source

Note the bolded bit there: some 40% of folks who describe themselves as unaffiliated are still religious to some degree. A bit more digging into the demographics and beliefs of the unaffiliated (click around in here to find it) indicates that the percentage of theists among the unaffiliated is actually higher: some 70% of people calling themselves unaffiliated still believe in god, to one degree or another. (Only 22% are outright atheists.) 25% of the unaffiliated believe that their chosen holy book is the word of god.

So what you have here isn't a massive increase in the number of atheists and agnostics. We've gotten louder and our numbers may be on the rise, but the Pew Forum data show that the unaffiliated aren't a godless mass by a long shot. That particular demographic is comprised mainly of religious individuals who just don't feel they have any current attachment to a particular religion.

I have to wonder how many of these people are born-again Christians who do attend a particular church, but simply refuse to admit it. I remember when I was a born-again, many of us had a distinct aversion to any association with the term religion; what we had was not a religion, it was a relationship with the living Christ. Religion was what the Pharisees and Sunday Christians had: a dogged adherence to inflexible doctrine, or a tendency towards Biblical legalism, or a shallow and essentially meaningless association with the empty trappings of a particular denomination.

So if someone asks a born-again Christian what their religion is, chances are good that they'll say they don't have a religion. (They might even add that they have a relationship, not a religion.) Chances are also good that if you ask a born-again what church they belong to, they'll respond with "I am the church" (in accordance with the belief that the church is the Body of Christ, and Christians are its members). If they are attached to a church or denomination, they won't necessarily say so.

This isn't an absolute, of course; not every born-again will respond this way, nor will every born-again reject the idea of religious affiliation. But it does mean that there are probably quite a few very affiliated Christians hiding in there along with the atheists and agnostics.