I'm converting to Christianity in 2018. I'll work out such details as my intended denominational affiliation later. If I'm doing things out of order, so be it.
If I'm "marrying" Christianity, it's a "shot-gun wedding," though nobody is forcing me to do anything. I am stepping up to do what I see as the right thing, in what I see as dire circumstances, to save my beloved from what I see as sure ruin and to legitimize our progeny.
The religion of my youth had us teens competitively rifling the King James, to find chapters and verses to decry behavior of those who heeded the Bible, but who were "reading it wrong." We aimed to denounce their error. "I have a friend that...believes in free love...chase!" And we were off and running, each wanting to be first to find a suitable verse, from either Testament, to trounce this infidel and her slutty ways. This clamor to shame the stoner, the blasphemer, the cheat, was supposed to rivet me. It didn't. I sat in back in my folding-steel chair, "chasing" lethargically, picking my nails and thinking ahead to breakfast. The Bible told rich stories. It spoke timeless poetry, and it offered nuanced counsel. How, I wondered at the time--without finding words yet to ask--could discussion about it be so shoddy and so impoverished?
The inevitable happened. In college I stopped going to church. Others separating from literalistic religionist dogma call the process "agonizing." They report "spiritual crises" overtaking them when they first realize they don't actually "know" things the teachings always told them were "true." I recall no such decisive break, merely dawning awareness that the creed of my youth and I "had grown apart." It was time to make my own way.
By my thirties, I had abandoned any pretext of "searching for the right religion" to replace the one I'd been raised in, and walked away from. I was agnostic, with emphasis on the "ag-," Greek meaning: "not." It was a negative self-definition.
During these years, I heard a Zen monk succinctly evoke the religious impulse. He did it by asking the question, "Why is there something, instead of nothing?" The rest is humanity's awed, flawed reckoning with the unanswerable. Though I was slow to admit it in those days, it was "awed, flawed reckoning" in which I still engaged.
For years, I surfaced here or there, at a Eucharist under a soaring vault, straight-backed and motionless in an ashram-hall, all ears at a comparative-religion lecture. The disparate input inspired me, while my "agnosticism" gave me a certain cover. Because of it I felt no reciprocal duty to enrich any one faith-community with my voice, to nurture it as it nurtured me. I was without a spiritual home. I didn't feel the lack; but for November 7, 2016, and horrors since, perhaps I still wouldn't.
My overriding sense of my duty to "marry" Christianity fortunately coincides with my affinity for her and my contentment at the prospect--as commitment-anxiety jitters subside--of "settling down" with her. Christianity complements my progressive activism well.
Much of the New Testament actually counters Christianist leaders' fixation of believers on Heavenly rewards, to keep them from worldly sedition. It does this, for example, in Jesus Christ's bold promise to a shabby criminal, spoken as both were hanging in execution:
Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Even more jarring than the word paradise in this utterance is the word Today. Here and now? How? Christ's dying challenge animates my puny, temporal likes with ageless wonder and ageless questions. It is bigger than all discussions of morality and ethics, bigger than politics.
Christianity to this day fosters the radicalism of the lowly speaking for themselves; upon conceiving miraculously, Mary praises the Almighty for favoring the meek. Christianity's long, vibrant, and still-diversifying traditions of heterodoxy--learned discussion of scripture and teaching by believers--link it to the past, present, and future of the human-rights discourse.
Christianity is especially handy and accessible to me as a Westerner. In the sense of infusing every nook and cranny of Western culture, the Christian tradition already shapes me. Christianity's Judaic and Pagan roots run deep. Through participation in myth and ritual, they link Christians to the very oldest layers of culture.
Islam may avail itself to another as well as Christianity does to me. Still another religion may serve still somebody else, guiding them in reckoning with the unanswerable and encouraging their full participation in the world. Christians owe the Emperor Constantine a debt for first spreading the religion far and wide, but do his bloody conquests define the faith, now, or in the future? The notion that we Christians have to convert other people to believe as we do, with implied necessary measures of force, predates Constantine. The belief that Christianity is "better" than other religions has been part of its DNA, at least since Paul wrote his texts. Unfortunately. It's a sticking-point for me, and partly what has delayed my embrace of it.
I "walk the aisle" now, because Christianity, in its ubiquity, is attracting unwholesome attention. We're seeing the tradition hijacked by those who would use it to excuse and justify the worst in human nature, the authority-worship, the spite, the greed, the scorn of the weak. The Christianists are so loud in the current political climate, they stand to drown out those of us who would approach Christianity in a sober and principled way, and those who are not Christian. The Christianists would degrade Christianity's legacy. I am at a loss. I have no words, except these: I do. I stand with Christianity, to shepherd and defend it.
Christianity is as much mine as it is yours. I order you to stop using it as a tool of oppression.
Resist.