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My Journey Away from Church
...I live in a very conservative part of southern California. The average church here is conservative at best, hard-core fundamentalist with homophobia, racism, and nationalistic zealotry at worst. Thus, I deliberately sought out the only United Church of Christ congregration, hoping for a refuge from that kind of close-mindedness.

And I found that refuge among some members of the church -- notably the senior minister and many of the people who later formed the core of our local peace group. However, the church as a whole was not prepared to be the kind of church I was looking for.

In truth, it's a small minority of people I'm talking about. A group of military families -- ardent war supporters whose psyche requires them to cheer on the Iraq war or else face up to the fact that their loved ones were participating in a decidedly unChristian venture -- were the loudest source of complaint whenever pro-peace, anti-war sentiments were expressed.

I got griped at because my political blog linked to the church site. The senior minister got lambasted because he made reference in a sermon to the number of homeless, hungry people who could be cared for with the money spent on a single cruise missile. ("That's anti-military!") And my announcement before a Sunday service of a peace group meeting apparently triggered some sort of church crisis, leading to folks threatening to withhold financial support for the construction of a new church building.

I can accept that there is a diversity of views within any church -- that's part and parcel of being progressive. Diversity is a virtue, not a fault. The problem is not that people within the church had views that differ from mine -- the problem is that they were willing to use their power and authority to make it clear that my viewpoints were not welcome.

See, the thing is that this small minority of more conservative-leaning folks, mostly those whose spouses are members of the military, are also the folks who took great interest in serving on the church board itself and other positions of responsibility. When they criticize the senior minister for his smart bomb question, they're not just angry members of the congregation -- they're people who can fire him. When they decide they don't like my peace group announcement, they're not just going to shrug and say "I have no interest" -- they had long church board meetings to decide on the "new policy" for announcements, apparently designed to stifle any such "controversy" in the future.

Lucky for them, they get to decide what's controversial and what's not. Our church bulletin asked us weekly to pray for church members in the military -- not once can I recall us ever being asked to pray for the people of Iraq who those church members were waging war against. That would be controversial, see.

So I wrote this all down in my letter to the chairperson of the church board. Who, by the way, is married to a Navy officer. Oh, and that junior minister who was so rude in email? She's married to a marine.

Apparently the chairperson of the church board couldn't reply via email -- I'm supposed to talk to her in person about this. I don't really have a desire to do so, and that's part of why I haven't been back. I don't feel like having a personal confrontation; it's hard enough writing email....