Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Alex Camire

When God Plays Favorites

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

Let’s just admit it – we all have our favorites. It isn’t that difficult, then, to believe that God has favorites too. Consider that one of the main narratives of the Bible, as a whole, is preoccupied with the notion that the Israelites are God’s chosen people, God’s “favorites,” so to speak. Favoritism is sort of a harmless construct, but it can affect a lot, particularly when the stakes are high.

Over the last year or so, I’ve tried to limit my direct criticisms of the president and his administration. I have, generally, erred on the side of limiting my sound that would contribute to the raging noise on the subject that has seemingly overtaken all news media in the most exhausting way. But, for the moment, I must be vocal.

Over the course of the current presidency, and the election cycle that lead up to it, there have been a number of Christian leaders who have insisted directly, or passively implied, that Donald Trump was chosen by God to lead our nation. Even one of the pastors at my own church (the church I left a week after the election) went so far as to post to Facebook that Trump’s win “was a total miracle of the Lord,” implying that God’s “favor” was upon him. These beliefs, while benign in and of themselves, can lead to malignant consequences – issues we are seeing played out currently. 

This favoritism is not new, but has been a hallmark of the religious right since its inception in the 1970s. In 1973, two landmark decisions occurred that would shape the… [Read more…] about When God Plays Favorites

Shadrach, Mechach, Abednego, and the NFL

by Alex Camire in Current Events

We will soon be entering our third NFL season where the attention, for many, will not be solely on the game, but also on the conversation about racial inequality and police brutality against persons of color.

This conversation (started by Colin Kaepernick in August 2016) is still ongoing, but has taken an unfortunate turn. For this upcoming season, the NFL owners have chosen to create an internal policy requiring players to stand for the National Anthem when on the field, with the intent to prevent protests and suppress the voices of those who were calling attention to the issues caused by systemic racism.

Today, as I write, it is with the specific frustration that the acknowledgement of my white, male, Christian privilege is not shared by many of my fellow white, male, Christians. Truth be told, I wish I didn’t have to speak or write about this topic, as it generally leads to a discussion and debate among them that I am already tired of.

And yet, I must be vigilant in reminding myself of the privilege I possess. Opting to turn a blind eye or ignore a problem simply because it is exhausting is a luxury that isn’t afforded to everyone. These conversations matter as they affect the very lives of people of color; and they don’t have the benefit of looking away when they get tired.

What’s become the most frustrating thing about this topic is the way that it is regularly framed: as a protest against our actual anthem and flag, and, by extension, the government,… [Read more…] about Shadrach, Mechach, Abednego, and the NFL

The Authoritarian and the Finisher of My Faith

by Alex Camire in Fundamentalism

I have a love/hate relationship with institutionalized religion. I love the church, and I miss being part of a local church, but I can hardly abide what the church has become, particularly the modern American church.

There are times when I find myself pointing out all the bad and others when I’m defending any good. I’ve seen the church help a lot of people, yet I’ve seen a lot of harm done as well. And it’s not always clear to me who’s to blame in a system that’s built on an unseen, unheard authority figure.

We were taught in church to give “double honor” to those who held authority. We read First Timothy 5:17 to demonstrate that this was a biblical principle, followed by verse 19 where it loosely says, “don’t accuse your leaders of anything wrong, unless you have a lot of people willing to back you up.” Not that it was ever stated this directly, but, essentially, the message was fall into submission to the leaders over you and don’t question them or their directions.

Obedience was revered as a quality of a morally upright person. It was akin to righteousness, and disobedience or disobedient persons were always made the example of what not to do or how not to act. To be disobedient was to be rebellious and this was always demonized as the worst sort of behavior at the root of all other sins.

There is a study conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961, aptly referred to as The Milgram Experiment. The purpose of the study was to examine obedience to authority.… [Read more…] about The Authoritarian and the Finisher of My Faith

Hearts Without God

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

A self-fulfilling prophecy is when people blame a circumstance on a vague but seemingly objective evil in the world and use it to justify a narrative when the situation occurs (as was claimed or prophesied).

Example: in America, we don’t have a “gun” problem, we have a “sin” problem. When someone commits mass murder, and happens to use a gun to do so, the issue is never about his weapon of choice and access to it. It’s about his heart. Making the argument about sin, or the poor hearts of people in our country, positions the conversation away from gun control and into a state of learned helplessness where the rest of us are just supposed to accept the outcomes of these atrocities as normative.

And then we all sit back and watch as gun violence and mass shootings wreak havoc. And we watch everyone argue about what they think the problem is and their solutions that the prophets claim will never work. Meanwhile, nothing is done, and the condition persists. And the prophecy is fulfilled time and again while the prophets get to claim that they were right all along—that the evil in the world can’t be solved by laws or regulations, so why bother attempting to change anything? The true problem in America isn’t gun violence, it’s hearts without God, right?

Hearts without God has been the “end times” battle cry of many fundamentalists, and it’s becoming very costly. Not just relating to gun violence in America and the 30 thousand lives that guns claim annually, but even… [Read more…] about Hearts Without God

A Trauma-Informed Approach to Sin

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

I was sitting in a chair against the wall of a dimly lit room in the corner of the ER. My mom, who was sobering up and preparing to go to an in-patient detox facility at another hospital, began to recount to me some details that she recalled about her father who was, allegedly, physically and sexually abusive to her older siblings when she was a child.

My mother is an alcoholic. She started drinking late in life sometime during the period when my paternal grandmother passed away. My mom’s parents had died earlier in life so my dad’s mom was the last parental figure my mom had and she took the loss hard. She kept the drinking hidden for roughly a year or two until the day the police found her passed out in her car. She received a DUI, and that’s when her drinking became public knowledge.

For about the next eighteen months she drank on and off. Sometimes she would go a week or close to a month without drinking. But then, at some point, she would go on a bender, often for the whole weekend.

At its worst, she called out of work and remained intoxicated for an entire week. I only became aware of this when on the Friday of that week I, as her emergency contact at the time, received a phone call from her boss. My mom had called out every day that week except for that Friday, and so her boss was concerned. Fortunately, I was in the same town as my parents’ house when I received the call and I went to check on her right away. I found her drunk to the point of… [Read more…] about A Trauma-Informed Approach to Sin

Anti-Fundamentalism: Divisive, Not Exclusionary

by Alex Camire in Fundamentalism

I hear people throw the word, “divisive,” around a lot these days.

This person is divisive.

That person is divisive.

Stop being so divisive.

It sounds bad, doesn’t it? It sounds like a bad word that produces discord. In the Christian realm, I often hear a paraphrase of Mark 3:25, “a house divided cannot stand.” The implication being that if you create discord, swim against the current, ruffle too many feathers, etc., you’ll produce some evil in the form of disunity.

When did we decide that division was an intrinsically bad thing and, conversely, that unity was intrinsically good? Sure, the words carry bad and good connotations, but I don’t believe this should be the case.

In the world of partisanship, in-group/out-group social structures, and either/or, all or nothing thinking, it’s difficult to stay centered and very easy to fall into the pit of restrictive dichotomies.

As I continue to reevaluate my faith, I sometimes find that my core values as a Christian are more defined by the things I don’t believe in, rather than by the things I do. I can even look at Christianity itself and, instead of seeing what it can be, I notice the things it shouldn’t.

And so, on the surface, I feel like a contrarian when it comes fundamentalism. I tend to lean the opposite of the conservative evangelical worldview I grew up with. In order to be a part of that group, you had to speak and act a particular way:

You voted Republican, held a firm pro-life… [Read more…] about Anti-Fundamentalism: Divisive, Not Exclusionary

I Miss You Too, But…

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

I miss my former church. I do. And I don’t think I was prepared for that feeling because of the certainty I had in my decision to leave.

This is an odd thing to admit because in doing so I feel like I am opening myself up to the arguments and passionate persuasions of people who tell me that they miss me in, I sense, an attempt to get me to come back. This then puts me in the complicated position of not knowing if or how to respond or explain to people why I felt I had to leave.

Do I break out into a random theological debate?

Or perhaps talk about my criticisms of the policies and protocols that enabled our legalistic culture?

Do I talk about the larger American, Christian church’s marriage to harmful, politically conservative rhetoric and the damage that does to racial and sexual minorities as well as the impoverished?

No. This doesn’t seem like the right thing to do at that moment for me. I stand there, and I say, “I miss you too.”

That’s all I feel I can muster at the moment because I don’t believe it’s my role to push over someone’s neatly organized filing cabinet of ideas about God, faith, Christianity, and the role of the Church. So I say, “I miss you too,” awkwardly, uncomfortably — that’s all I can say. But, it is true, I do miss you.

And, I’ll take responsibility for changing the status quo. There’s a reason we don’t see each other as much anymore. It’s because our relationship was grounded on our collective proximity to a fixed point (church)… [Read more…] about I Miss You Too, But…

How I Lost My Salvation

by Alex Camire in Christian Issues

It started in 2013. I got married in January and a month later, in February, my mother got a DUI.

We came from a fundamentalist background where the fact that mom was drinking, which she kept hidden for a year, was more scandalous than her having done it while driving. Because of this, my mother carried a lot of shame. She slowly attended church less and less and eventually stopped coming altogether.

There were other factors at play during this time that are too difficult or too personal to describe. What ended up happening, though, was my parent’s marriage began to deteriorate, and they eventually divorced.

My mother’s alcoholism and her absence from church were the impetus that caused a thirty-year marriage to collapse, and it all started a month after my marriage began. Suffice it to say, this wounded me terribly.

In the fall of 2013, something else happened: I started college. I was twenty-four at the time, and for the first time in my life I became fully immersed in a culture that I had rarely been exposed to.

I started school to become a social worker. This required me to take a lot of humanities and social science courses. I took classes in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others that taught a contrary message to what I had grown up with in the church. We discussed topics like mental health, sexuality, and evolution that conservative Christians often oppose, dismiss, or ignore.

It became difficult to reconcile the traditional picture of God with the… [Read more…] about How I Lost My Salvation

I Was Wrong About Homosexuality

by Alex Camire in LGBT

I had a friend in high school. He was the closest friend I had who wasn’t a congregant at my church, and I didn’t have many friends outside of the church. We kept in contact after high school and hung out from time to time. About a year or two after high school, he said that he wanted to get together with me—there was something he wanted to tell me. We got coffee, and he ended up coming out to me, telling me that he was gay. I was the last person on his list of people he wanted to tell in person.

I grew up in a conservative Christian culture that was staunchly opposed to homosexuality. It’s hard to say that without bringing to mind an image of a bunch of angry protestors holding up signs saying “God Hates [gays].” We weren’t hostile zealots like that; we just had a particular belief like most Christians do when it comes to this topic. My friend knew I was of the conservative Christian tribe, which is why he had saved me for last. As close as we were, he was aware that this would affect our friendship.

How gracious can you be to someone while standing firm in the belief that their orientation is a sin? That’s how I was to my recollection. I wasn’t incensed or abrasive, I even pointed out that I wasn’t the type of Christian to ever stand with the signs that said God hated him (as if that would make me look better). When asked what my beliefs were about him being gay, I made all the standard arguments there were, while being as kind and respectful as I could. And at some… [Read more…] about I Was Wrong About Homosexuality

I've Decided to Leave Church

by Alex Camire in Fundamentalism

I don’t know how else to tell everyone this, so I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve decided to leave church.

I should probably preface this by telling you a few things about me. For starters, I’m nearly twenty-eight-years-old and I’ve gone to the same church my entire life. I grew up in church–my parents met, married, and I, in turn, was born and raised going to church. Church, Christianity, the faith that I’ve learned since I was old enough to go to Sunday School–these are the things that have been central to me my whole life. They’re what everything else revolved around.

Church has been many things to me. It grounded me in a faith that will always be an essential part of who I am. It was a community of like-minded individuals who were like family to me. Many, in fact, are my actual family. It was the place I was socialized. I developed my closest friendships with other church people. It was also where I met and married my wife. And in between everything else, church was a haven, a home, and a place where, for a long time, I felt secure.

So why leave? There are several reasons, but, to put it plainly, my church is a fundamentalist church. Some might say that it’s your average conservative evangelical church, some prefer the term legalistic, and I’ve even heard the word cult or “cultish” thrown out by a few who chose to leave in past years. In laymen’s terms, what this means is that I grew up in a very conservative form of Christianity. It relied on strict codes of… [Read more…] about I've Decided to Leave Church