I love your writing. I find my values totally in alignment with yours, though perhaps I am not quite as strident in my criticism of Christianity as you. I am a mass of contradictions in many ways. My formative years were spent in the Northeast. My family moved to Florida when I was in the second grade for my father’s health reasons. He needed a warmer climate. I spent grade school in the South and was sent back to the North for Secondary School education. My parents did not trust the quality of Southern Schools.

When we first moved South, my mother had a black housekeeper who watched me and my two brothers. My mother wasn’t much into parenting. She was always off doing something else. I remember thoroughly enjoying getting on the bus and heading downtown to the library or to see a movie on a weekend or during the summer. I thought it was neat because we always sat in the back. My parents made me sit in the front. I didn’t realize we had to because Agnes was black. So many things I did not know. I remember going downtown and eating at the local Woolworth. They had these signs saying whites only and colored only on the lunch counter and the bathrooms and the water fountains. It always struck me as quite strange. Why? No one ever explained it. Apparently it was just the way it was in the South. It wasn’t like that where I came from. I always thought it was cute that Southerners would talk about the War of Northern Aggression rather than the Civil War. I thought they were being funny. I took the idea they were still fighting it as an irreverent joke. I didn’t realize they were serious.

My family were atheist, though I converted myself to Christianity because I went to private parochial schools when I was a child. As a young adult, like many, I turned my back on the Church, but less out of disgust than a desire to explore other belief systems. My first degree was philosophy and religion with an emphasis on East Asian religions. I am basically a scientist by nature, so I followed it up with three medical degrees and a law degree. As I approached 40, I became reimmersed in the Church through various renewal movements. These were based upon the idea that God loves us and we love each other, and we were all in this together. They were about affirmation, not judgment. They were about becoming your best self, not controlling other people. As my good friend the Catholic priest liked to say, “Love. No buts...” That was really all you needed to know about the Bible and God. Everything else was incidental details of no importance. I spent 30 years working with inmates in medium and maximum security prisons and started a construction company to give them work when they got out. I gave them all the profits. I kept nothing for myself.

My version of Christianity was all about people. I used to tell Church building committees that they should take the millions they were raising and dedicate them to programs for the homeless and immigrants. I said the building was just an unnecessary expense and impediment. We should tear it down and just meet in the empty lot. This, of course was viewed as heresy. My ideal was the example of the life of Jesus. A humble Carpenter who spent his life with the disadvantaged and the despised. A man who actually cared about people and did all that he could to help them and make their lives better. He was a thorn in the sides of the authorities. I am too. The one thing I do not tolerate is hypocrisy, and I see too much of it in the Church. I am not shy about calling it out.

I am a faithful Christian, but also a transgender woman. I see nothing incompatible between the two. What I do see is an intolerant cult basking under the label of Christianity, which has become more prominent with the rise of Trump. I don’t know what that religion is. It does not in the slightest resemble my understanding of authentic Christianity—the part of the Bible that has the ability to uplift the human spirit and give purpose and meaning to life. It has become clear that the historical parts, mostly in the Old Testament, are viewed by too many as being as sacrosanct as the higher ideals expressed in the gospels. The two are so different, I have often questioned whether they should even be part of the same “holy“ Text.

I always understood the historical pieces as being mere background to describe why Jesus came to the world and what God would have us truly embrace and understand. To my mind they have no particular authority. They were written by a bunch of fallible men in a patriarchal time who were completely ignorant of science and how the world really works. Anything they did not understand they attributed to the hand of God at work. Rather than being enlightened, they were superstitious. They have nothing to offer modern society or any compassionate and thinking human being. There are too many groups professing to be Christians, but who are actually unthinking fundamentalist literalists. “God said it, I believe it, it is written in the Bible, end of discussion.” Whatever power Christianity once had to improve the lives of every person has been subsumed by a doctrine of hate and regressive intolerance. I’m not sure the religion is salvageable without a major overhaul. In the meantime, I will continue to love people as you do and to push back against those who want to use their Bible as a club to beat me over the head with. To borrow a favorite quote of the evangelicals, “Get thee behind me, Satan. I know you not.“