I frequently read the website “Daily Kos”. It’s more than just a single blog; DKos is a political site that’s open to anyone that wants to write a “diary”. They have articles and opinion pieces that run on the front page, but if you submit a diary it goes into a system where anyone can read it, comment on it, or “recommend” it for inclusion in a list of that day’s “top” diaries (meaning it gets featured prominently on the front page for a day or so, and read by many more people.)
Sometimes a diary can even be promoted to the main listing and published right there on the front page, instead of just linked to in the “rec” list (the top recommended diaries) or in the general listing of recent diaries.
Now he’s trying to figure out what his life is all about, he’s not living with his parents (his aunt has apparently taken him in), and naturally he’s really wondering about his place in the world, his faith, etc. He was raised Southern Baptist and taught that homosexuality was a nasty sin and a choice; of course his own life disproves that. He knows he’s just gay and that’s all there is to that.
He also always thought of himself as being fairly conservative and believed that liberals are mean nasty scummy people. Of course, what he’s finding is that the conservatives in his life are treating him like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe while his liberal, progressive, Democratic auntie is the one who’s treating him with kindness and respect. The liberals on DKos are being nice to him and telling him to hang in there, etc.
This isn’t to say that all conservatives are like that; there’s plenty out there who would treat a gay kid who’s just coming to terms with his sexuality quite well. Unfortunately for him, those nice conservatives aren’t in his family.
Anyway, tons of people are no doubt emailing the kid (I say “kid” but he’s 18, so legally he’s an adult) with all kinds of advice about being gay, political thought, etc. I figured I’d chime in and wound up writing an essay.
Here is is now. Hope you like it. If you’re curious, it explains a lot of how a Buddhist guy (me) came to think what he thinks, and how I can wind up married to a lapsed Mormon gal like my lovely wife, and how/why we’re reasonably comfortable with where we’re at in terms of religion and faith.
Hey, man… I just read your diaries on DKos. I haven’t read your aunt’s diaries, so I don’t know the whole backstory, but from what you talked about I can guess how things are.
I won’t bore you with tons of stuff about your sexuality- other folks are a lot more qualified to do that. The people on DKos are, by and large, pretty good folks and you’ll get plenty of good advice. You might get some bad advice, too, but part of where you’re at in life is figuring that stuff out on your own. Hell, this email might contain some bad advice. Again, you’ve got to dope it out for yourself. 
What I want to yammer on about is faith.
I’m a Buddhist. I grew up Lutheran, which is a pretty mellow religion. It was a compromise, because my mom was quite Catholic growing up and my dad grew up mostly in those midwestern, slightly “holy roller” types of nondenominational Protestant churches- not really really out there, but certainly churches that looked on Catholics very negatively.
I fell away from Christianity ten years ago when my girlfriend of five years died in a car accident. We had lived together all that time, planned on getting married, the whole bit- bought a house, started a business, you name it. Her death was the worst thing that ever happened to me and Christianity didn’t seem to fit at all. It was my “midlife crisis” and pretty tough times.
I wound up a Buddhist because to me, it was the religion and philosophy that made the most sense. I’ve always been a pretty logical thinker, or so I thought, and Buddhism has a way of explaining how and why the world works the way it does that doesn’t rely upon lots of supernatural mumbo jumbo for explanations. (At least my branch of Buddhism does- turns out there’s about as many different branches of Buddhism, maybe more, as there are branches of Christianity.)
Fast forward several years. I met a fantastic woman and we wound up getting married. She is a lapsed Mormon who still thinks that way, believes in God (I don’t), and so forth. Before we decided to get married one thing that we talked about a lot was children and our beliefs and our faith. What would we do if we were married? Would it work? Could we agree on how to raise a child?
These things are obviously important because the parents (as you know) have a lot of influence on the child.
What we wound up deciding is that the individual religions themselves are not as important as the VALUES that underlie our basic thinking. In fact, I believe there is a difference between true “values” and what are basically rules that religions start to try and put onto people.
Your task, my task, everyone’s task is to try and figure out which rules make sense based on what our underlying values are.
My wife and I came to find and believe that our value system was very very much in sync. For example, take sexuality. We both believe that being gay is perfectly okay, that it’s just something about how you are, and that gay people deserve every bit as much love, acceptance, and caring as straight people or anyone else.
Now, my wife believes that people are the way God makes them, and I believe they’re just the way they are because of what’s more or less random happenstance, but the point is that these explanations stem from the religions that each of us have chosen. She still pretty firmly believes in God; I don’t believe in God. The explanation itself doesn’t make any difference in how we believe we should ACT, what we should say and do.
More importantly, it means that if we had a child, we’re in agreement on the values that we would teach that child- that gay folks are just folks, that being gay is not shameful or some kind of “sin”, and that our child needs to treat a gay person just like any other person. In fact, a person is a person FIRST and their sexuality is secondary, just something that in combination with their hair color or skin tone or whatever that’s just part of their overall makeup.
What my wife and I found is that this shared set of values drives us to live the way we live, and even though we have some pretty different religious thoughts overall, since our VALUES are so common the important thing for us would be to raise the child with those values and then let them choose their religion for themselves. We figure we’ll just expose the kid to many different religions, but enforce the values that we believe in, and when the child is old enough, they can choose for themselves.
(It worked out pretty well for President Obama, who was raised this way by his agnostic/atheist mother but wound up a Christian.)
About now you’re probably wondering what the point of all this is.
My point is this: If you choose a religion that goes considerably against your values, in the long run you’re not going to be happy with that religion.
I think that a religion is merely a tool that humans use to try and put their spiritual thinking into a framework that they can understand. Spiritual questions about where we came from, why we’re here, what happens after we die, that kind of thing- that’s big, big stuff, and it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it sometime.
So we create religions, tens of them, hundreds of them, thousands of them. There’s a ton of branches of Christian churches, there’s Muslim schools of thought, Jewish ones, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Taoists, and that’s just the bigger world religions… think of how many different religious stories or traditions there used to be when practically every decent-sized aboriginal tribe had their own stories and religion.
Plainly there are a bunch of ways to put spiritual thought into a framework we can understand, right?
I mentioned that my wife was a “lapsed” Mormon. She grew up raised Mormon, went to BYU and everything, but eventually fell away from the LDS church. Why? Mostly because she couldn’t stand the way they choose to preach and act and think about certain things. Homosexuality was a big one, because she had close friends that were (and still are!) gay and she knew that they weren’t horrible sinful people- they’re just folks like anyone else, trying to make it in the world.
She had to look at her base values, look at the church she went to, and decide for herself whether or not to continue taking part in that particular religious tradition. She chose not to.
We have friends that are Mormon, and we value and love them. For them, even some of the teachings that they disagree with aren’t quite enough to drive them out of the church- and that’s okay. That’s how it should be; the vast, vast majority of Mormon folks are very nice people just like anyone else, and their church has a lot of things that are pretty good about it or else it wouldn’t be doing so well.
Ultimately, you are going to have to pick a church or a way of thinking about religion and religious thoughts that fits in with your values.
You might turn out Buddhist, like me, or Muslim or Lutheran. You might stay Southern Baptist, or go Methodist, or Catholic or Jewish or UCC or Presbyterian or who knows what else.
You might even turn out to not believe in much of anything, just be agnostic or atheist and not worry very much about it. I dated one girl who was perfectly comfortable with her religious thought and she basically barely believed in God, not much else, and never went to church at all- and she was pretty happy with that.
My point is that this is an intensely personal choice for you. In fact, it’s far more of a choice than being gay ever was, I’m sure!
But if you wind up rejecting the individual church that you grew up in, please understand that you are not rejecting your own VALUES. Your faith in what you believe isn’t shattered if you leave your church; your baseline values are what matter the most.
Find those values. Get comfortable with them. Know them, love them, embrace them, understand them and why they work for you and what they mean about how you should act in the world.
Then go out and find a church or religion or faith community that shares as much of that kind of thought as possible.
Please believe me, people are going to challenge this assertion. Even your own doubts will tell you, in your head, that if you even think about turning your back on your church that you’re somehow turning your back on your values and your faith.
You’re not. Your faith is what it is. If you really believe in (say for example) the ideas that Jesus taught, then you’re a Christian, and changing your church doesn’t change THAT. More importantly, it doesn’t change those baseline values.
So as you move into this next portion of your life, hang in there, hang tough, and don’t freak out if you find yourself leaving your church behind. Those values that you grew up believing probably still have a great deal of worth.
The individual rules that a particular church might have laid down are going to affect your choice- for example, if you believe that men and women can both be ministers/pastors, then you’re probably not going to wind up staying Southern Baptist, or Catholic for that matter. Some rules might bug you but not be enough to drive you away- like you might believe in total immersion as the way to do baptism, but you might wind up in a church that just sprinkles some water on a baby.
The point is that it’s UP TO YOU. You are the one who’s got to decide which rules that you disagree with, and how much you’ll put up with before you choose to join or leave a particular religion or church.
Just be sure you base that decision on your core VALUES.
Hang in there, amigo. You’ve got a tough time ahead but from your writing it sounds like you’ve got enough of a head on your shoulders that you’ll do okay. You’re very lucky (or blessed, if you prefer) that you have such an awesome aunt who’s willing to demonstrate her values by no doubt pissing off the family and stepping up to help you. Maybe someday you can help someone else like that, or help organizations that do so. For now, just keep doing what you’re doing, and remember those values.