Every day I get Christian family members and former church friends and total strangers, writing to let me know me they feel sorry for me, that they’re worried for my soul, that they’re praying for my immediate repentance, and to remind me that I’m not a “real Christian.”

That used to bother me.

Now, it encourages me.

Now I see that their “real Christianity” isn’t anything I want to be a part of anyway.

 If being a Christian means embracing a man who boasted that he could grab women by the genitalia, I’m out.

 If being a Christian means denying the votes of people of color or justifying their executions at traffic stops, I’ll pass.

 If being a Christian means nurturing mindless conspiracies and shunning safeguards and stoking hate crimes, I’m gonna opt out.

 If being a Christian means pretending a deadly terrorist attack on our Capitol was just a “group of tourists,” I denounce it as a my former religion. 

I grew increasingly unable to reconcile this with a gospel that proclaimed itself “good news to the poor”. 

We’d turned a religion based on following the ultimately selfless One into an institution that validated selfishness as “blessing” and used any power it possessed to maintain its cultural and political ascendancy. Now, as in Jesus’ time, the political and religious elite collude to maintain the structural and economic inequalities that are of benefit to them. 

Jesus was overtly on the side of the poor, the excluded, the ignored, the disenfranchised and the exploited. He was on their side when it damaged his reputation, his earning potential and any hope he had of moving up the ranks of religious or political power. He was on their side when he drove out the price-manipulators and rent-seekers in the temple courts and he was on their side when it cost him his life. 

It would be hard to argue that Christians should support one party or another – to be unconditionally aligned no matter how their values and policies change over time.

However, I do believe we are called to be on the side of those who are marginalized and disadvantaged by a system designed to benefit those at the top. If we follow Jesus, we will stand with and for all who are left out, forgotten, abused and socially, economically and politically excluded – no matter the personal cost.

I have emotional motion sickness
Somebody roll the windows down 

Broad gold, the evening heavens glow
The April air is cool and tender.
You should have come ten years ago
And yet in welcome I surrender.

Come here, sit closer to me and look
With eyes that twinkle, mouth that purses,
Into my little blue-bound book
That holds my awkward childish verses.

Forgive me that I long forsook
Joy's sunny paths, nor glanced toward any.
Forgive me those whom I mistook
For you, alas, they were too many.

Stepping out, everyone can see my face
All the things I can't erase from my life
Everybody knows