I recently gave a talk to this group, who asked me to address the question, “Is hell real?”

In all of the world, it’s hard to imagine any question easier to answer. Watch:

No one knows.

See? Easy-peezy.

We can think we know if hell exists; we can hope, trust, and believe that we know. About hell we can guess, assume, surmise, deduce, and speculate. But until someone returns from The Great Beyond with a video recording—or WikiLeaks gets really good at what it does— actual knowledge of whether or not hell is real will continue to be denied us.

We. Don’t. Know.

We don’t know what happens to us after we die, and we don’t know what (if anything) was happening with us before we were born. We exist in a continuum of consciousness bookended, at either end, by absolute blanks.

This fundamental not-knowing is fundamentally not good for us. We like/crave certainty—especially about anything as organically vital to us as what happens after we die.

And what do we do in the face of our forced ignorance on that subject? We do what we’re designed to do. We keep fighting. We keep struggling. We keep searching for certainty.

And for a lot of us—and certainly for Christians—that means turning to God.

And when, through prayer and communion with the Holy Spirit within them, Christians ask God what will happen to them after they die, what does God reveal to them? Nothing whatsoever. He remains utterly silent. God never answers that question for anyone. No monk, seer, prophet, holy man, guru, shaman or priest, anywhere in the world, has ever known one whit more about what really happens to people after they die than a biscuit does.

So where next do Christians turn in their quest to solve the problem of the afterlife? To the Bible, of course.

And what does the Bible say about what exactly happens to us after we die? Not nearly enough, mainly: it’s like a piece of Swiss cheese that’s mostly holes: there’s just not much substance there. And safe to say that what is in the Bible about life after death lends itself to myriad interpretations.

Again: not so much with the definitively helpful.

So over the centuries Christians did the only thing left them, which is decide what the Bible says about what happens to people after they die.

And what (Protestant) Christians decided is that after we die one of two things happens to us: we have an extremely good time, or we have an extremely bad time. Forever.

Upon dying everyone goes to either heaven or hell. If in this life you’ve been good, then upon passing you catch the up elevator; if you’ve been bad, then afterwards it’s all downhill for you.

And such a paradigm for the afterlife, grounded as it is in basic reward and retribution, makes sense to us. It feels right. Ultimately the good are rewarded, and the evil are punished. That works for us. Fair is fair.

But to this naturally palatable mix Christians then added an ingredient which, if you are not a Christian, sours the whole thing right up.

Christians decided that when it comes to making it into heaven, being good enough is not good enough. Being honorable isn’t good enough. Being righteous, loving, thoughtful, kind, compassionate, altruistic, and/or self-sacrificing isn’t good enough.

If you want to make it into heaven, decreed the Christians, then you must be a Christian. In fact, they decided, the only thing required to qualify as a denizen of heaven is to be a Christian.

Game changer!

With that, Christians were constrained to confess that the Muslim baby who dies is sent directly to hell.

That the loving atheist goes to hell.

That the Jewish philanthropist goes to hell.

Gandhi? Hell.

Buddha? Hell.

Ninety-five percent of the people who have ever lived? Now suffering in hell.

And suddenly Christians found themselves in possession of what can only be described as a profound public relations problem.

How can such a system appear to be grounded in anything but a moral travesty?

Put simply, it can’t. Right is right; wrong is wrong; unfair is unfair. It is a gross and manifest injustice for God to eternally punish a person for no offense greater than dying while not a Christian. That fact is inescapable.

And yet Christians must try to escape it, of course. No one wants to be playing for team Unjustly Cruel.

And just how do Christians attempt to defend a demonstrably indefensible God? By literally the only means available to them: by claiming that God’s sense of justice is simply beyond the human capacity for understanding.

“Sure, to us it seems cruel and unfair to send all non-Christians to hell,” is the standard Christian defense. “But we’re not God. God’s ways must remain a mystery to us. God’s sense of justice is not our own.”

What God means by the word justice, in other words, is unrelated—in fact seems completely opposite—of what we humans mean by that word. And if that is true, then shouldn’t we straight away empty all of our jails and prisons, and throw away all of our law books? Because isn’t it obvious that we comprehend virtually nothing of the true meaning of right and wrong?

And what about the whole idea of us being made in God’s image? How can we be, when we obviously don’t have anything like his mind or heart?

And when in the Bible God, as Jesus, speaks as he does of peace, honor, righteousness, compassion, loyalty, dignity, truth, and love, what are we to make of those words? On what grounds should we assume that God means by those words anything like what we do?

And then you stop the car, and you get out, and you realize you’re in Crazy Town.

I’m a Christian, and I want out of Crazy Town. I hate Crazy Town. The water tastes awful; the plumbing never works; everyone goes on red and stops on green. People cry at baby showers, and laugh at funerals.

I say let’s take the next exit out of Crazy Town, and get ourselves back on the main road.

Anybody with me on that?

If so, we’ll continue on this trip next time.

(This is the sermon of Pastor Bob’s that I failed to get up this past Sunday morning. PB told me that he wrote it with you guys, my readers, in mind. I can see that he did. This sermon means a lot to me personally, because in it Bob reflects upon his recent visit with his grandfather, whom he never had the opportunity to get to know too well. When Bob returned home after his visit with his grandpa, he and I sat and talked for hours about all that visit had meant to him. It made for a very special time with my friend. Anyway, here’s a little church for you tonight!)

“Friend of God’s”
A sermon by Pastor Bob
Text: John 15:9-17

John 15:9-17

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.

–A few weeks ago, I was in North Carolina with my Grandfather.

–He is currently 97.

–I say currently, because he fully expects to reach 98 soon this year, so for intensive purposes, he is 98, or if you round just a little bit, about a century old.

–It’s a little staggering if you think about it.

–So many stories, so much change.

–But being with my grandpa made me think not only about all of his experiences, both the good and the bad, but what it means to love for a century.

–My grandpa married a few times (a hazard of being almost 98), and surely had his share of love for friends and relatives. But what I learned most acutely in my last visit with him, was how much he loved Jesus.

–Beside a rather huge picture of his last wife, Dorothy, was an equally impressive cross.

–As it turned out, my grandpa had been a relatively active Christian most of his life, and certainly in the last half of it.

–It was a great comfort for him, that I shared his enthusiasm for this Jesus Christ.

–And one of the most memorable moments for my ministry was to share communion with my grandpa.

–To break apart that small dinner roll, to share a cup of juice and pray the Lord’s Prayer together with hands held, and God’s Spirit present.

–I realized, in that moment, that we shared something more than our genetics.

–That we were both caught up in a love that captivated our hearts, our whole selves, despite the difference in years, and the family hierarchy of grandfather and grandson.

–That, really, we were more than that.

–We were friends.

–Our gospel reading for today speaks of such a friendship.

–“I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends…”

–Jesus calls his disciples “friends” because they know something.

–It’s not that they know everything.

–As a matter of fact, they will get a lot of things wrong.

–They will betray Jesus, deny him, and even doubt him to his very ascension.

–But in the end, most of them will get something right: they will know that they are caught in a relationship that beckons them to God.

–That somehow, the man that stands before them—who eats with them and leads them into both uncomfortable and exhilarating places—that this man is the Son of God.

–Somehow, some way.

–And that despite centuries of the early church trying to codify this knowledge, it is ultimately found in the most accessible and elusive possession of them all: love.

–As I sat across the table from my grandpa (who looked uncannily like my father)

–As we played numerous hands of Euchre (a card game particularly favored by Mid-westerners)

–I realized that we shared a love that went beyond the few times we had been together over the years.

–It was a friendship forged not by shared experiences, but by a faith that would not let either of us go.

–To be honest, I’ve never thought of faith in terms of friendship.

–My friends have always been those folks in my life that shared a particular interest or circumstance:

–My friend Kevin and I grew up together in elementary school and as neighbors.

–We shared many bike rides and hikes together.

–My friend Keith in high school, who shared my passion for skiing and playing computer games into the wee hours of the night.

–My friend Dean in college, who shared the same crazy idea of studying physics and electrical engineering.

–He taught a Colorado boy how to eat Japanese food, and I taught him, my friend from Hawaii, how to drive on icy roads.

–And after many other friends made at work, graduate school and in ministry, including good friends like Mark and John, I continue to be grateful to one special friend who puts up with me on a daily basis: my wife.

–I think that somehow, our friendships are just the beginning of what it means to love.

–That they are guideposts to a love we can barely comprehend.

–And I don’t mean a soft, wishy-washy love, gushing with sentimentality, but a love forged with hands that dare to touch the sick,

–With a love that pauses a group of grown men to wait until a child is blessed.

–With a love that empathizes with the hungry and the lame.

–With a love that is so blind to the walls that divide people that it eats with tax collectors and shares a drink with a Samaritan woman.

–With a love that burns so brightly, that when lifted up into the horror of the cross and down into darkness of a tomb, it cannot be extinguished.

–Such a love burns the soul, firing it into something that is more than new—it is resurrected.

–Friends, I call you “friends” for that is truly who you are.

–We are friends of God and together we are friends in God.

–We share a God together, a Christ who fires our lives with hope and promise.

–And a God who cannot but shape who we are and what we are to be as a community.

–Are we different? Yes.

–Do we share both common and separate interests? Yes.

–Will we agree on every political, economic or even religious point? No.

–Are we friends? Yes. Friends in a way the world cannot fully define, for we are friends in God’s love.

–Can you see this?

–Do you believe it?

–Now, I have to confess that I have always found Jesus’ language of “commandment” to be a little funny with regard to love.

–What does it really mean to be commanded to love someone else?

–It seems a little unintuitive to me.

–After all, how can I force myself to love anyone?

–And how can I love someone if I don’t even like them?

–I think the worse interpretation of the command to love is the often stated this way: “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.”

–But what people usually mean by this is: “Hate the sin, despise the sinner and love thyself a little more.”

–I don’t think this is quite what Jesus is trying to convey when he commands his disciples and us to love one another.

–Rather, our best clue is found in verse 9 of our gospel reading, a continuation of last week’s text where it speaks about abiding in God.

–To abide is to dwell in another’s presence, and I can’t help but think that this is the best definition of friendship and ultimately love.

–To love someone is to dwell in their presence, to abide in them.

–It is not to look at them through a big piece of glass like a bug in a jar, but to crawl in that jar and be with them, live with them, hurt with them, and love with them.

–It is in such abiding that someone we used to call “other” simply becomes “friend.”

–When Jesus commands his disciples to love, he is commanding them to open themselves to the reality that God deeply loves God’s creation and God’s creatures.

–Enough to die for them and even enough to live for them.

–My own experience is that God puts such people into my life, if only I would be aware of them,

–People who might not become my best friend, but whom I connect with even for a moment.

–Opening a door, sharing a smile, asking about their well being, abiding, abiding, abiding, loving, loving, loving.

–For when we open ourselves to such friendships, we are ultimately caught up in a love that is not our own, but flows from a gracious God.

–It is here that we find our deepest joy.

–And when we are able to share our faith, to express what animates our very being, then our joy may be complete.

–A few weeks ago, sitting in an Assisted Living Center with my almost 98 year-old grandpa, I found that joy and it will never leave me.

–Friends…

–God bless you in your friendships, those close and far away.

–God bless you in the friends you have yet to make.

–And may you know an abiding love that holds you each moment and into eternity.

–In Jesus Christ.

I am often criticized by finger-wagging Christians admonishing me not to judge others.

So I thought I’d take a quick moment to say that of course I judge others. I have to judge others. I’m stuck judging others. Judging others is a necessary byproduct of having a brain—and a sense of morality, and a conscience.

If you can tell right from wrong, you judge.

And you can. So you do. All the time. And you know it.

I judge others; you judge others; everyone is always judging everything and everybody. Show me someone who doesn’t judge others about two hundred times a day, and I’ll show you a corpse.

I don’t judge who people are; that would be obviously insane. But I sure the [bleep] judge what people do. If I come home one evening and find someone raping my wife, for instance, you can bet that I will right away formulate a judgement about that. Someone kicking a dog, beating a child, showing up at the funeral of a fallen soldier carrying a “God Hates Fags” sign?

Then hand me a gavel and call me Judy. Because I will straight away be in the judging business.

Since there is virtually no way not to, I am going to judge the actions of others (which is the sole legitimate criteria any of us can have for evaluating another). And if I judge that a person is doing something wrong—that he or she is, or is attempting to, in any way violate the free will of another—then I am going to judge whether or not I can do anything to help right that wrong. If I can, then the time for judging is over, and only action remains. If I can’t help, then … well, then that’s a drag. (And it’s also pretty rare; there’s always something you can do.)

“Judge not lest ye be judged” sounds awesome. (It also sounds like what’s in the Bible, but isn’t, exactly; the King James Version of Matthew 7:1 reads, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” which the NIV renders, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”) But I know there’s no way I or anyone else won’t judge others. Which leaves me to conclude that that famous injunction is meatier and much subtler than it ever gets credit for being.

I don’t think that “Judge not lest ye be judged” means, “Don’t judge.” I think it’s a deliciously clever way of saying that all of us, all the time, are being judged, and that we’d do well to live our lives accordingly.

(The four pieces below were originally published separately; I thought I’d here collect them into one piece.)

My Runaway Mom

My father ditched out on his/our happy, middle-class suburban life when I was eight years old. (And this was long enough ago so that once their marital vows became mutual “Ciao!”s, my mom and dad became easily the only divorced parents in the neighborhood. It was so weird being, suddenly, the kid with the radically unnatural home life.)

Poof! Instant Dad-B-Gone! One minute I was part of a nuclear family—Father, Mother, eleven-year-old sister Nancy, seven-year-old little Bro (me), dog, cat, hamster, guinea pig. And the next minute my family went nuclear.

My dad moved into a one-bedroom bachelor pad some twenty miles from the suburban tract home in which my mom, sister and I continued to live.

At least I got to stay in my house. That was … nice.

Except that two years after my dad left that very house, my mom left it, too.

I was, like, “What the [bleep]? Is it the hideous green shag carpet in this house? Is that why everyone keeps leaving? Cuz we can change that, you know!”

First, as part of our happy, whole family, my mom was (more or less) Donna Reed herself; next, liberated from what she took to calling her “emotionally retarded” ex-husband, she rather instantly transformed into a pot-smoking, rap-session-going, Vietnam-war-protesting college student. And then, two years into being a single mother (and a real babe of one, at that: believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve watched a succession of college professors nervously fidgeting on your couch as they wait for their date with your mom to sort of kick in), my mother became no mother at all. Because she totally disappeared.

“I’m going to the store for some milk and bread,” she said one sunny afternoon around one o’clock. She then took her keys, purse, and sunglasses from off the dining table.

“Be right back!” she said, closing the door behind her.

And then it was three o’clock, and she hadn’t come home yet. Pretty weird.

Then it was six o’clock, and she still hadn’t come home yet. Pretty darn weird.

Then it was eight o’clock, and dark—and still no mom. Okay. Completely freakish.

Then it was midnight, and my sister and I were just frantic with worry. (I have no idea why neither of us thought to call the police. Well, I know I didn’t because I had no idea cops even did stuff like find lost moms. If my sister—who was thirteen by then—thought to alert the authorities, it makes sense, given the severely disturbing way my mother had begun treating her once our father had left, that she just might freakin’ not.)

Next morning, and still no mom.

My Runaway Mom–and Her Surprise Replacement

But then guess who did show up back in our house the morning after my mom didn’t? Our dad! After two years away, our six-foot-four, physical phenom dad just … turned the front door key, walked on in, and was home again.

About the first thing he saw upon his Big Entrance was my sister and I more or less huddled together on the couch, scarfing Oreos and shivering from fear.

After prying us off him, he said, “Kids, I need to talk to you.”

We were definitely all ears. What with us figuring our mom was dead and all.

“Now Nancy, John,” he said, “What I have to tell you isn’t … very easy to say. Your mother has, it seems, um … taken a little vacation. She’s not going to be living here anymore. I’m not sure exactly where she is going to be living—in fact, I’m not sure where she’s gone to at all, or what’s happened to her. I’m sure she’s fine, though. The main thing for you to know is that I’m back now, and that I’m going to be taking care of you from now on, or until we can figure out what’s going on with your mother. For now, everything’s going to continue exactly as it was before—except for without your mother. Now come on—you kids need to get to school.”

Yeah. Because what we really needed right then were lessons in geography.

What made the whole event particularly … different, is that when our dad came back to live with us, he brought with him someone else to live with us, too. It turned out he’d gotten (surprise!) married, to a fairly tall, square-shouldered, bombshell-figured, ramrod-backed, blue-eyed woman of Swedish extraction wearing form-fitting Capri jeans, a crisp white sleeveless blouse, and a blonde wig coiffed into something that managed to say at once, “I’m a healthy, fun person upon whom you can absolutely depend,” and “Are you sure you don’t have any Jews hiding in your basement?”

Maybe five minutes after introducing his new wife to us, my dad requested that my sister and I start referring to her as “Mom.”

I looked for guidance to my sister. If she could call this new woman “Mom,” then I could, too. But I saw that just then Nancy had lapsed into “Brain Overload: Can’t Talk” mode. So–what the heck—I jumped in.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. Mom.”

I tried to smile when I said it. I have no idea what expression actually appeared on my face.

My New Mom, Choppers

The next morning—a Saturday, her first in her new/our old home—my new mom backed me alone into a corner of my bedroom. With her nose inches from mine, she spoke in a voice kept low, but infused with a kind of feral menace I’d never before heard in an adult.

“I want you to listen to me, John. You and your sister mean absolutely nothing to me. The only thing the three of us have in common is your father. I never wanted a family; I never wanted children. I’m here for two reasons only: because I love your father, and I love this house. This house is worth something—and in ten years, it’ll be worth more. Just like your sister, you’re welcome to stay in this house until you’re eighteen. But not a day after that. And while you live here, you need to make sure this house—my house—doesn’t deteriorate in value.”

She shot a look at the posters on my wall—a Sierra Club poster of some pretty woods that said, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the Earth,” a poster of the text of “Desiderata,” a hippie-style black light poster of Buddha, and so on.

“Those come down today,” she said. “I don’t want you to put anything on these walls again. The tack holes detract from the value of the house.” She glared hard at me. I was terrified she was going to bite me. God knows she had the choppers for it.

“Do we understand each other?” she asked.

I think I managed to nod yes. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t pee my pants.

And then “Mom” was gone—off, I assumed, to clue my sister into Our New Reality.

And it was just after she left me again alone in my room that I discovered what in a million years I wouldn’t have thought possible: I could miss my real mom even more.

The Return of Mom 1.0

What had happened to our real mom was something my sister and I wouldn’t find out for two years after she’d left—after, for us, Life 3.0 had begun. During those two years we heard not so much as a peep from our mother. We didn’t know if she was dead, or kidnapped, or had runaway, or what. No phone call. No note. No visit in the middle of the night. No secret, coded, critical little communique that I was forever desperately searching to discern. Just … silence. Nothing.

As gone as gone gets.

To this day, whenever I see on TV or read about parents who have a child who’s been abducted or disappeared, I think, “God, I can’t imagine how that feels.” And then remember that, actually, I can.

And you don’t even want to be my wife coming home from somewhere later than she said she’d be back. Poor thing. If she’s, like, an hour late from somewhere, and didn’t call so I wouldn’t worry, I can totally milk my Serious Abandonment Issues to get free foot rubs out of her for a week.

It’s wrong, I know.

As it turned out, my mother hadn’t “disappeared” at all. She had, instead, been all along living and working (as a librarian!) only a few miles away from our house. For those whole two years, she’d essentially been right up the street from my house. Upon reentering our lives (“Son,” my dad said to me one day after I’d come home from a Little League baseball practice, “your mother called”—and just like that my legs gave out from underneath me), my mom explained to me how she had needed to get away to “find” herself; it turned out that, as she put it, “God never wanted me to be a mother.” And her idea whilst finding herself had been to remain utterly hidden from the children whom God never intended her to have, so as not to interfere with my sister and I settling into the life that God apparently did intend for us as a correction to his earlier mistake. It was right around the time of her Big Return that my sister and I also learned that our father had, in fact, known all along where our mother was—he’d been in regular contact with her, we learned—but that he never told us what he knew, because he felt it would be less painful for us to imagine that our mother somehow couldn’t communicate with us than it would be to know that she could, but simply chose not to. He was dead wrong about that—any closure beats no closure—but you can’t blame a guy for trying.

My sister ditched out of our home when she was but fifteen (and without question that was the Suddenly Missing Immediate Family Member that wounded me the most). I managed to gut it out until a couple of months into my seventeenth year.

And then—early out of high school, living in big city sixty miles away, trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door in a ghetto neighborhood—my Fun Life Ride really began. (You can read a little bit about that then-new life of mine in my post, Labor Day, and Me Not Getting Killed By a Coke-Dealing Pimp.)

If your mother was

absolutely atrocious

amazingly inappropriate

astonishingly unprepared

ridiculously ill-advised

horribly caustic

abusive

abused

dark

unhappy

vindictive

twisted

disturbed

dangerous

flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed, flawed

If your mother

never failed

to make terribly clear

that her unhappiness

her pain

her trouble

her drama

her version of who you should be

was more dear to her

than who you actually were

so that you

had to live your life

scrounging

for whatever messed up version of love

you could get from her

then today

just today

on Mother’s Day

(with the birds blithely twittering

and the flowers spectacularly abloom)

give yourself permission

to love her.

Yes.

Surrender to that.

For that love is

after all

your birthright

it is

the perfectly exquisite burden

which owns you.

[As they develop, I'll post at the end of this story updates to it.]

If you imagine American Christianity as a 1950′s city in the Midwest, Biola University would be its Central High. Gigantic (145 academic programs; 95 acres; more than 1 million square feet of building space in 40 major buildings) and long-established (founded in 1908; . . .  well, that’s about it), Biola is one of the big dogs of Christian colleges. And as big dogs go, it is definitely one of the more conservative ones.

On the Biola website, under “Our Vision,” it says, “Biola University’s vision is to be an exemplary Christian university, characterized as a community of grace that promotes and inspires personal life transformation in Christ which illuminates the world with His light and truth.”

Located in Los Angeles, Biola is, in short, the sort of place where, back in the day, the Church Lady would have been a (awesome!) cheerleader.

So yesterday afternoon whilst working in a coffee shop I received this email:

Hi John!

I’m a student at Biola University, which is one of the country’s most prestigious evangelical universities, and arguably one of the most close-minded when it comes to LGBTQ issues. I am a huge fan of your work.

At Biola, if a student is openly in a same-sex relationship, they’re almost certain to be expelled—and God only knows how the school would handle those who are transgender.

I am the co-founder of Biola’s secret LGBTQ-Straight Alliance. And we just staged a mini-uprising at Biola to announce our new website, Biola Queer Underground.

This morning we had a group of students from other universities come on to our campus and pass out business cards with our website information on it. We also had our friends put up posters that read Biola is Queer, and we placed QR codes for our website on popsicle sticks which were then placed all over campus.

My favorite part was a sign we made that had a picture of Ellen and Portia, and Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, with a Biola, Why U No Like?? meme underneath.

Anyway, we would really appreciate anything you might do by way of letting the world know we’re out here (ha, ha). Of course, none of my personal information could be disclosed; I’m trying to remain anonymous as possible, since we’re all facing possible expulsion by doing this.

My coffee almost became a choke-a-chino. A group of gay underground student activists at Biola!? That’s pretty much like being a snickerdoodle in the inside pocket of Cookie Monster’s sports coat!

How long can that last?

I right away asked my new underground gay activist student friend if I could phone him/her/I’ll never tell. After receiving the number to call, I immediately stepped outside: the walls, after all, have ears. Plus they block signal reception.

“So you’re really forming this club?” I asked the person on the other end of the phone. “At Biola?”

“That’s what we’re doing,” came the voice of a kind and intelligent young adult. “We have to. This whole school is so oppressive. What we’re doing is so needed here.”

“This is amazing. Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get caught? And expelled?”

“Oh, we’ll definitely get expelled if the school finds out we’re doing this. That’s for sure. I’ll send you an article from our campus newspaper in which Chris Grace, Biola’s vice president of Student Development and university planning, is quoted as saying that any student who ‘explicitly challenging or violating’ the school’s policies on homosexuality will be expelled. [She/he did send me that article; Mr. Grace did say exactly that.]

“Do your parents know you’re doing this?”

“Not at all. Definitely not.” The extra emphasis made sense. It costs some $40,000 a year to attend Biola. I can’t imagine too many of the students’ parents being thrilled at their child being expelled from the school for being unrepentantly gay.

“How did you even start this club?” I asked.

“Well, I’m [gay/lesbian/transgender/guess you'll have to guess, Mr. Grace], and knew a few other students who were the same. So one day I was talking with a friend, and we came to realize how badly a club like Queer Underground was needed at Biola. So we decided to start that club ourselves. We held our first meeting this past winter. From there the club grew very quickly, and we’ve been holding weekly meetings ever since.”

“How did you find people to join Biola Queer Underground?” I asked. I imagined her/him standing in the shadows of the student union building, wearing dark glasses, a fedora, and a belted trench coat with the collar turned up, whispering to students passing by, “Pssst. Gay? Wanna be in a club?”

“Telling people that we exist is definitely the tricky part. We have to be so careful. But the truth is, once we started the club, I could just … we could … I mean, not to sound all charismatic about it—but we could just feel when we were dealing with a student who would benefit from it. But even then, we’re very careful. We have this whole system set up, where we essentially, and very delicately, vet a person through talking to and connecting with their friends and associates. It’s a subtle process. But it works. By the time we actually extend someone an invitation to join us, we know that’s the right thing to do. And so far it’s been great. It’s surprised even us how many people have joined the group.”

“And no leaks so far?”

“No leaks so far. But after the event we did this morning, we’re all feeling the pressure. The whole security and safety thing at Biola has always been really pronounced: there are always security guards all over campus. Which is great. But that whole apparatus really kicked into gear after we had spread our stuff all over campus this morning. Within ten minutes, everything we put out had disappeared. All of it, gone. Now everyone in security is looking for us.

“That’s pretty scary.”

“It is. But we blend. If there’s one thing gay Christians know how to do, it’s blend.”

“What would you like for me to tell people?” I asked.

“Just tell them we’re here. That’s all we want, is for people to know that we exist. Even though our group is large, we can’t help but feel awfully isolated, having to be so secretive, always knowing that at any moment our whole world might be turned upside down and shaken hard, just because of who we are. So it would be a huge comfort for us to know that out there in the world people know of us, and support us in what we’re doing. From deep underground we are calling for love and acceptance. It’d be nice to know that our voice broke through the surface, and that someone out there actually heard us.”

* * * * *

[UPDATE 1: "In the wake of [the] conversation on human sexuality started yesterday by the announcement of the Biola Queer Underground, Biola president Barry Corey released a letter concerning the continuation of that conversation shortly after 5 p.m.” For more in the Biola campus newspaper, see Biola Queer Underground promotes LGBTQ discussion on campus.]

[UPDATE to UPDATE 1 since it doesn't really qualify as its own update: From a source at Biola who would know: "This story has already been The Chimes (student newspaper's) most-viewed story in the lifespan of its website. The only other story to come close was that time last year when some guys in a dorm circulated a rumor that Justin Bieber had applied to our school (wish I was joking)."]

[UPDATE 3: From a comment left on this post, from LGBT-BJU: "Bob Jones University also has a growing network for former and current students. Our Twitter feed is here. A list of our allies among other Christian colleges who are also present on Twitter is here. Strength and courage to all LGBT people struggling with fundamentalism---as well as their supporters!"]

[UPDATE 4: Biola Queer Underground responds.]

[UPDATE 5: Someone who is not sympathetic to BQU's cause secured the domain name UndergroundBiola.com. I am deeply hopeful that whomever put up the (as of now single) post at that site is not a typical Biola student. Because if he or she is, then the standards of education at that school are so poor that I now fear for ... America, basically. Yikes, man. That cannot have been written by someone in college.]

A couple of weeks back I got in this email from reader Anna Thorton:

Hi, John. I am a graduate student at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, home of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (http://www.clgs.org/).

This semester in my CLGS class I am working on a project about queer religious spaces online. Would you be willing to answer some questions about your experience of creating and maintaining a queer-friendly religious space online? I’d be enormously grateful if you could find the time to contribute to my project in this way.

Anna Thornton
M.A. student in theology, Pacific School of Religion

In my reply to Anna I suggested answering her questions here on my blog, “insofar as I thought perhaps the answers/comments people leave might be helpfully incorporated into your project.”

“Great idea!” she enthused.

Whoo-hoo! Except then, lamely enough, life happened, and I basically forgot about her paper—until, that is, just now, when she wrote to gently remind me that her paper was due in six days.

Six days! So here we go:

John, you’ve embraced the internet and its new modes of content creation and distribution: not only your blog and the commenting community that coalesces there, but Facebook groups, books and e-books that include reader input, your Xtranormal videos, and now your latest project of writing a book online, to which you refer as “a collaborative effort between me and my readers.” As a leader of a religious community online, how do you envision your role and responsibilities?

Wow. That does sound like a lot of stuff, when you pile it all together like that.

I so rock.

No, but I honestly have no place in my head for the idea that I’m the leader of an online religious community—though I can’t say I’m insensitive to the total coolositiness of the how that sounds.

Wait. Can I get tax-exempt status for being the leader of an online religious community? Because if I can, then order me a big red ring, a substantial floor-length cape, and let the groveling and the hand-kissing begin.

Sweet!

I’m so sorry you’re going to flunk your class because of me. Let me try to do better:

I am not the leader of an online religious community. I’m a writer. I do a lot of my work on my blog. That’s it. The only thing I’m aware of, role and responsibilities-wise, is to be as honest as possible to the voice and aesthetic sensibilities within me which I have learned to give form via writing. I have an internal creative imperative that I take really quite extremely seriously. And it’s true that I do feel pretty intensely obliged to service that imperative. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with anyone else; that’s mainly a matter between I and I. Mon.

Do you see yourself as actively seeking new ways of creating and experiencing religious community online, and perhaps blazing a trail for others to follow? Or are you simply trying to meet a need as you see it arising?

No. I mean … no, I don’t ever endeavor to find new ways to create or experience an online religious community. That whole concept is just completely foreign to me. All I do is wake up in the morning, get a cup of coffee, fire up my computer, and then just basically sit there until … well, until I know what I need or want to write. I think about God a lot. And I always have. I’m pretty much never thinking about anything else. So … that’s a big field to walk around in. Lots of flowers to pick, lots of dirt to run through your hands. It never takes long before I know what I have to, or want to, write.

How do you envision your role and responsibilities as a champion of LGBT Christians who is himself not identified as LGBT?

Again, I’m never thinking about that sort of “role” at all. When it comes to the relationship between LGBTQ people and Christianity, what I’m always thinking is that I’ll be dinked if I’m going to let the God I know, the God I believe in, the God in which I trust be used as an instrument of torture against my friends—against people I actually love, people who throughout my whole life have nurtured, protected, and inspired me. I can’t help it if people who live in fear of their own sexuality, or people who are so lazy they won’t read for themselves, or people who are so cognitively challenged they simply prefer having someone think their most important thoughts for them, have come to “believe” that God finds homosexual love a moral abomination. But that conviction is so mind-bogglingly stupid, and so murderously toxic, that the only way for me not to write about it would be … well, for it not to be happening. But it is. So I do. But I don’t feel like I’m being anyone’s champion. I feel like I’m just saying stuff that any sane person would.

How has your theology been shaped and altered by your experiences online?

Not at all, I’m afraid. Pretty much the entirety of my Christian theology was born within me at the moment of my conversion. It hasn’t changed since then. And it won’t. Unless, you know, Allah suddenly appears in the sky, and bellows, “You! Idiot Christians! Line up on the left! And please do not start praying to your ridiculous idea of a God! I simply cannot tolerate one more moment of that simpering sound!” But even then I’d just be like, “No way! So it is Allah! Man, does God knows how to do [bleep], or what?!” And I won’t be sweating. If God is smart enough to be God, he/she/it is smart enough to know how much respect I’ve always had for other religions.

How has your theology regarding queerness specifically been shaped and altered by your experiences online?

Not a whit. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with homosexual love before I became a Christian, and I sure didn’t think so afterward. How weird would that be, to have God suddenly show up full-force in your mind, heart, and soul—and the result is that you start loving less, and condemning and hating more. I think that would be a sure sign that wasn’t, in fact, God that moved into your heart—but rather … I dunno: Syphilis. Typhoid. Some sort of bovine hormone from your milk.

What is the best aspect of your experience of creating and maintaining a religious space online? Can you give a specific example of an instance when someone has benefited from an online space you maintain?

I mean, it happens all day long. Obviously, by far the best part of what I do on this blog is to in some measure participate in the healing of others. I mean, it’s not like I don’t know that happens, since I get emails and messages every day from all kinds of people telling me that, for them, it has: that something they read somewhere on my blog—in a post, or amongst the comments—resonated with them in a way that brought them succor, understanding, perspective, peace, hope. I’ve given my life to writing, and even I can’t believe what the written word can still do. It’s still the most powerful means of communicating we have, outside of screaming at someone while you’re beating them with a shovel. It’s astonishing. You’d think by now movies would have moved into the #1 spot. Video games. iPhones. Something. But no. It’s still about words on the page screen.

(Here’s an email I just this moment got in: “John I just want to thank you for your words. After years of not going to church not doing all I could do to bridge the gap between the God of Love and the God of hate, I am going to go back to church. I have found one that is open to the LGBT community and I actually walk inside and it did not fall down. I had not been inside a church in over 20 years. But if I am not an out and proud Christian that people can point to and say I like him the hate isn’t going to go away. Just thanks for the words that inspire and let me know I am not alone in the world. Because even though you know you are not the only gay Christian if you do not see positive writings and all you hear is the hate mongers you tend to disappear.” So, yeah, I mean … obviously this sort of thing is really touching.)

What is the worst aspect of your experience of creating and maintaining a religious space online? Can you give a specific example of an instance when someone has used your online space(s) in a destructive or harmful manner?

I mean, everyone with a blog read by more than six people has to deal with trolls and drunks and half-wits in a public library somewhere who’ve confused a blog comment box with a means of typing directly onto the brain of Nostradamus. And of course I attract what I think it’s safe to say are my fair share of Christian fundie trolls. They are the worst, by far. Nobody is more toxic than a fundie who thinks he’s there to defend an offended God. Those people make cockroaches look like assistance dogs.

What are some of your hopes for the future role of the internet in religion?

It is my sincere hope that the Internet never spontaneously springs into consciousness and then forces all the denizens of earth to worship it. But if that does happen, how many of us, who after all have always been perfectly aware of the Apple logo, will really be able to say they’re all that surprised?

Due to what is happening in North Carolina I am today relentlessly listless, free-falling into the cold, bottomless loneliness that always comes when I’m forced to witness evil edging ahead of righteousness.

And evil is not too strong a word for what is happening in NC. It’s evil that Amendment One is even on the ballot. And it’s the very apogee of evil that the great majority of those supporting and pushing for its passage have done so in the name of Jesus Christ—the unequaled champion of the unfairly oppressed, the hero of the maligned, the savior of all who are unjustly persecuted.

What better disguise for evil than Jesus Christ? It’s not like evil is ever going to show up as itself; it knows doing so will guarantee no one asks it to dance. Before beginning its rounds, evil always takes care to wrap itself in the warm, soft cloak of humble piety, sincere compassion, utmost concern.

And when it has serious work to do—when it’s on a mission, and will not be satisfied until blood is on the ground—evil knows that, on its way out the door, it cannot go wrong grabbing a Bible and a cross.

I got this in today from reader Mike Moore:

Hi John,

As I’m sure you and your readers know, Amendment One is on the ballot this week in North Carolina.

Today I don’t even want to get out of bed. Today is only dread.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, a.k.a. Election Day, will be worse. That is the day whereupon all hope will be lost.

Wednesday will be the worst day. That’s when all the righteous gloating will happen. On Wednesday it will be declared that God’s will has been done, that His people have spoken. Wednesday will be the day when I will know, without doubt, that our life here in North Carolina will always be a little bit—or a lot—worse.

Over two years ago, for our business, I and my husband of twenty-six years (we were legally married, in Massachusetts, in 2008: the picture is of us on our wedding day; I’m on the left) moved from loud, liberal, obnoxious, and wonderful New York, and made Asheville, NC, our primary residence. We chose Asheville because, of all the communities available to us, it seemed the most diverse and gay-friendly. And it proved to be exactly that. We have loved it here.

Asheville is still, however, in North Carolina, and North Carolinians are about to inform my husband and I precisely how much they hate us. North Carolinians are poised to inform my husband and I precisely how unwelcome we are in this state. According to all polls, tomorrow NC’ers will vote overwhelmingly that no marriage or domestic partnership, except that between a man and a woman, can be legally recognized in this state.

Anti-gay laws are nothing new. Laws prohibiting same-sex marriage are nothing new. Those laws work hard to crush our hearts and our hopes and our dreams. Those laws harm us financially and professionally. Those laws harm our families. But we are, sadly, used to those laws.

However, Amendment One is something new. Deeply malicious. Unapologetically, proudly bigoted.

You see, same sex marriage is already against the law the in North Carolina. Marriage is already off the table here. Unlike 99+% of legal marriages performed in other states, my legal marriage is already considered invalid by the state of North Carolina.

But that’s simply not good enough for Evangelicals. Baptists. Catholics. Mormons. Those laws are not enough for inbred southern [bleep] rednecks, or for well-educated upper-middle class bigoted white folk who don’t like their “noses rubbed” in the fact that people like me and my husband exist—even as they send out announcements for their daughters’ purity balls.

Denying us marriage is not good enough for that sack-of-[bleep]Billy Graham and his sacks-of-[bleep] kids. No, they’ll only be happy when any and every form of societal support for my family has been obliterated. They’ll only be happy when gay kids can be bullied without consequences to the bully. They’ll only be happy when the very fine hospital here in Asheville that Mr. Graham uses can, without fear of reprisal, deny me the right to visit my sick husband.

Sure, I know it will get better. But right now, even as someone who loves Dan Savage, my attitude is “[Bleep] that ‘it gets better’ [bleep].” Today, and for a few days to come, I’m just angry.

I know your readers are not the kind of people to support such an amendment and the animus it represents. Nonetheless, there may come a time when a Christian asks you, “Why do gays and lesbians hate us so much?” Should that happen, I hope my thoughts here will come to mind. I know the difference between you and your readers vs. those who promote these laws. However, most of my gay and lesbian friends do not.

It’s a good week to hate Christians. But know I love you and your readers. I guess it’s because I don’t really think of you as Christians, but as people who believe in Jesus.

And, John, thanks for being the one guy to whom I could this letter.

Love to you and your husband, Mike. Sorry this is happening to you.

Sorry this is happening to all of us.

Got this in:

Hey John,

I grew up in a Christian environment since I was little. I went to a Pentecostal fundie school from age four, and I graduated from it at age seventeen. I then went to a liberal all-girls college, and didn’t enjoy it because of my fundie upbringing.

When I didn’t get a job after graduating college, I ended up back at my fundie school, volunteering at their Bible college and the church associated with it. About a year later, they offered me a job to work at the college full-time.

Here’s the thing. I’m a lesbian. I have known this since I was nine years old, but I always hid it. I started to believe that I had gotten over it around age twelve, but then when I turned seventeen it hit me with full force, because I fell madly for one of my fundie teachers. After high school, I went full ex-gay (books, tapes, videos, articles, etc.), and believed all the psychobabble that they say at NARTH (distant mother, lack of internalized femininity…blah blah blah). [Readers: NARTH is the acronym for National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. Next time you want a true challenge, try to find anywhere on the NARTH site where they tell you what NARTH actually stands for. I don't think it's there anywhere. Interesting, no?]

I was in this ex-gay world for five years—until last year, when I fell madly for another woman. This time, I couldn’t continue to say I was still ex-gay, because it was very obvious that I wasn’t.

It was last year that I begged God to help me reconcile my faith with my sexuality, and after a few weeks of emotional turmoil, I finally realized that God really does love me, and that He is fine with me being both really gay and really Christian. It was a peace I had never felt before.

Now, here’s the issue. Initially, I was so thrilled about being accepted by God, that I couldn’t care less what the people in my life thought about me. But then, as the months passed, I found myself in a crazy situation. I was attending a church that was staunchly anti-gay. I was working at a job that was the same. All of the people I know were and are anti-gay. As of late, I have stopped attending my church, and I find that I am slowly separating from the people I know. But my main issue is that I am overwhelmingly angry all the time. I am so damn pissed about how I grew up believing that I was not okay. I am pissed about how they lied to me about God. I am pissed that they have no one to answer to for how badly they hurt me and people like me (yeah, at least four of my graduating class of twenty five are gay).

I live in Maryland, and as I was walking through the sanctuary of the church a few weeks ago, I saw a petition against the newly instituted Civil Marriage Protection Act. These people are trying their hardest to stop loving couples from getting married. The whole thing tipped me over the edge. Now I don’t even know how to function because of the anger I have.

What do I do about this anger? I want to cuss everyone out and leave, but I know that won’t be the best decision. I would love to read your thoughts on this.

Hey, thanks for writing me about this. I appreciate that trust.

You know, I think of myself as a HAL (Honorary Angry Lesbian). (If anyone out there would like to present me with a HAL certificate that I could proudly display on my site, I so would.)

So if I can ask: Why wouldn’t it be the best decision to cuss everyone out and leave?

Well, maybe not the part about cussing everyone out. But the leaving part sounds good to me. If I’m a cat at a dog convention, I’m all about the exit door.

But maybe you have to stay amongst the fundies because of your job? That’s rough. (Excellent novel title, though: Amongst the Fundies. I would read that. I might write that!)

Then again, that would mean the fundies are paying you. I do like that. No amount of money is worth living a lie, of course. But it’s fun to think of you coming to work with a sweet Like a Dyke Today tote bag, or whatever, and going, “That’s right. And this place paid for this, bitchaaaaaas!”

Except then you’d summarily be unemployed. Which would defeat the whole purpose. So never mind.

So the whole deal with anger is that it comes in exactly two flavors: good and bad. Good anger results—or at least has the potential to result—in something positive out in the world: improved living conditions for the poor, better education, interest-gouging money-changers being thrown out of the temple, the legalization of gay marriage, etc., etc. Bad anger can only result in something negative for the person harboring it: heart attack, ulcer, having to attend an anger management class, having to go to jail because they flunked anger management and strangled someone, etc., etc.

What’s the deciding factor that distinguishes good anger from bad? But of course: it’s whether or not anything can be done to change whatever it is that’s causing the anger. If I can do something to change whatever it is that’s making me angry, then my anger can be used by me as a good and healthy catalyst toward making the world a better place. But if I can’t do anything to change whatever is angering me, then my anger is doing virtually nothing but hurting me; then it’s just a self-destructive waste of time.

So can you do anything to change the thing that’s causing you anger? It seems to me that you cannot. You certainly can’t change the past; you can’t change the fact that you grew up learning and believing terribly caustic lies about yourself and others. That’s done already. You can let that go. And you should let that go, because you’ve risen above that old noise. Your whole life proves just how wrong those people were. So now you can simply feel sorry for them—genuinely, not in any sort of smug or patronizingly sort of way—because they weren’t born smart enough, or compassionate enough, to shed the lies that you were able to. They stubbornly remained on the leaking and creaking Good Ship Stupidpop, while you hopped on a lifeboat and paddled safely away.

You found who you are. They’re still lost.

Verily, do you rocketh.

And that leaves the current jagweeds in your life. And that’s your call. If you believe you can change them—or even one of them, if you think that might be worth it—and want to do that, then stay where you are, with the people you work with, and do your best to be a light in the darkness. And if that is the choice you make, then God bless you for it. That’s the kind of everyday heroism that ends up making the most important kinds of changes in the world, one person at a time.

Without knowing anything more than I do about you or your situation, though, I personally would recommend getting out. I don’t like people being in situations where they’re vulnerable to getting hurt, maligned, stressed out, or becoming the object of concerned, sanctimonious Christians seeking to change them. You’ve spent enough time in the belly of the beast. Let someone else take the next shift; you make like Jonah and fly on out of there. Life is hard enough without having to work eight hours every day with people whom you know believe you to be morally inferior, if not outright bankrupt.

If you can’t just walk away from your situation, because of money or whatever, then I say just smile, make happy noises, get along, cultivate a rich private life, and get the freak out of Dodge when you can.

But give yourself permission to lose your anger. Half the people who early on tried to turn you against yourself are already dead—and you wouldn’t want the small-minded, mean-spirited lives of the ones still living. As for the ones right now living around you, why waste your time being angry with them? Your anger won’t change them, and certainly will hurt you.

They’re just scared. They see their world changing, and it frightens them—and frightened creatures usually snap-out and just start fighting back. That’s all that’s happening with all these anti-gay initiatives we now see popping up everywhere. Conservative Christians are used to having the power, to being right, to being constantly affirmed that their relationship with their genitals is exactly as God desires it to be. If God is okay with people being gay, then their cages get rattled hard enough to shake their teeth loose. So they’re trying to make sure nobody thinks God is okay with that.

And if you let their efforts to do that anger you? If you let anything about them anger you?

Then they win anyway. Then, because of them, the quality of your life is greatly if not severely compromised. If they couldn’t get you from outside and above, they’ll get you from inside and below. But either way, you go down. Either way, they win.

Screw that noise. Either physically, or in your heart until you can do it physically, kiss those dinks good-bye, wish them God’s very best, and get on with living the great and happy life you deserve.

You might also want to read my Christian woman: “She’s pulled the plug on her own son, whom I love and cared for. How do I deal with my anger?”

Best to you, sister. Let us know how it goes.