I’ll tell you something that most people who know me as a design instructor probably wouldn’t guess, which is that I’ve spent a significant portion of my life reading religious texts that weren’t written for me, not because I was shopping for a new faith but because I couldn’t honestly call myself a Christian until I understood what I was choosing and why. I read translations of the Quran. I worked through Jewish writings. I sat with Buddhist texts and tried to understand what detachment actually meant in practice. I read Hindu philosophy. And when I picked up a book on Wicca, my ex-wife was, let’s say, really freaked out, which I understand, because from the outside it looks like you’re drifting, but from the inside it felt like the most honest thing I’d ever done.
Because here’s the thing, you know, I grew up in a culture that handed you your religion the same way it handed you your name. You didn’t choose it. You inherited it. And for a lot of people that works fine, they grow up inside it and it fits and they never feel the need to question it, and I don’t judge that. But my brain doesn’t work that way. It never has. I need to understand why I believe what I believe, and “because my parents believed it” isn’t an answer, it’s an inheritance, and those are different things.
And so I explored. Not casually, not as some kind of intellectual exercise, but seriously, with the same intensity I bring to everything else, reading and questioning and sitting with ideas that made me uncomfortable, because the uncomfortable ones are usually the ones that have something to teach you. And what I found, after years of this, was that I kept coming back to the same place. Christ provides a good framework for how to treat people and how to live. Not the institution. Not the politics. Not the denomination. The actual teachings, the ones in the Gospels, the ones about compassion and forgiveness and treating your neighbor like they matter. That’s what I believe. That’s what holds up when I push on it. Can I prove it? No. Does it feel right? Yes. And after exploring every alternative I could find, that’s enough for me.
What I can’t stand, and I’ll say this plainly because I think it needs to be said, is the hypocrisy. People who call themselves Christians and whose words and actions don’t align with anything Christ actually taught. People who use faith as a weapon or a political tool or a club to beat other people into submission. Those people are chasing away everyone who might actually benefit from what the Gospels have to offer, and they’re silencing the people who could lead by example, and they’re scaring the people who need faith most from ever exploring it, and as someone who genuinely tries to live by New Testament principles, that offends me deeply. Not as a critic of religion. As a Christian.
My personal theology, if you want to call it that, is pretty simple. God created ten billion people to share this planet. He made them a hundred and eighteen different hues. He gave them hundreds of different languages. He made some men. He made some women. He made some straight. He made some gay. He made some somewhere in between. And out of those ten billion people, nine and a half billion just want to get along and be left alone. That’s it. That’s most of us. And the half billion who can’t seem to manage that are the ones making it complicated for everyone else.
I got ordained at sixty, which sounds like a bigger deal than it was. A friend needed to perform a wedding, paid twenty-five dollars online, and became a minister. I did the same thing. I’ve never performed a ceremony. I’ve never stood behind a pulpit. But that ordination completed something that started when I was a teenager, when I identified preacher as one of three things I wanted to be, and it turns out the version of it that’s honest for me isn’t institutional at all. It’s personal. It’s the way I try to treat people every day, the way I try to teach, the way I try to show up. The faith lives in the doing, not in the title.
So if you’re someone who’s questioning, someone who can’t just accept what was handed to you without understanding why, I want you to know that the questioning isn’t disloyalty. It’s the opposite. It’s the deepest kind of faith there is, the kind that says I care enough about this to make sure it’s real before I build my life on it. Go read the things that scare you. Sit with the ideas that don’t fit. And if you come back to where you started, you’ll come back with something you didn’t have before, which is the knowledge that you chose it, and that choice is worth more than any inheritance.
