Lord help us: They say it's not polite to talk about religion or politics, but—hey—we've already talked politics, haven't we? Prayer's up.

Religion Narratives From Anonymous Authors

Religion

“What would you give,” sings a rough tenor, and then another responds with falsetto keen, “in exchange!” Then they harmonize together, the voices intertwined, stretching for heaven. 

     What would you give in exchange for your soul?
     Oh, if today God should call you away
     What would you give in exchange for your soul?

The song is an old Monroe Brothers number from the ’30s, but my favorite version is a 1963 duet; Doc Watson provides the slow, delicate guitar strum, and Bill Monroe adds distinctive crystal mandolin runs and high tenor. It’s a song of almost unendurable longing, which manages to be both delicate and ragged, dreamy and bleak. 

It’s also a song about how I, personally, am going to go to hell. When they sing, “Mercy is calling you; won’t you give heed?” my answer is pretty clearly, “No, thanks.” I’m a Jewish atheist; I don’t believe Christ is lord, and I don’t even think I have a soul. Watson and Monroe are singing lovely harmonies to my wrongness and my eternal damnation.

You’d think it would be off-putting to have people tell you that your life choices are going to lead to such catastrophic consequences. But I’ve long been a fan of both white and Black gospel music and of other Christian performers as well. I love Johnny Cash’s “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),” with Anita Carter providing heavenly high notes. I adore the Soul Stirrers’ “By and By,” with R.H. Harris’ sweet yodel urging on Paul Foster’s gospel shout. I can listen over and over to the hoarse, chesty bellow of Rev. Sister Mary Nelson or the icy quaver of Lloyd Chandler, even though I am definitely not ready for judgment and am unprepared for eternity. And I’ll wail along with Ozzy when he declares, “Your world was made for you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love!” 

I don’t think the world was made for me by anyone in particular, but if, like me, you’re obsessed with roots music, and with music in general, the Christians are hard to escape. Four-part harmony in Western music came out of the church, as did seminal pop vocalists, from Sam Cooke to Beyoncé. 

I don’t just like Christian music because I can’t avoid it, though. Like most Jewish people and most atheists in the U.S., I’ve spent the bulk of my life in a culture with a preponderance of Christian people. It seeps in. Christian aestheticization of wounds and death and despair is my weird death cult, too, from Grüenwald’s twisted crucifix to The Omen. 

When Roberta Flack sings, “I told Jesus/‘Be alright/If you changed my name,’” I’m moved by Flack’s light voice pulsing and soaring over Ron Carter’s soulfully ominous bassline. But the message of transformation, ostracism and triumph amid degradation (“He said, ‘Your father won’t know you, child/If I change your name’”) is meaningful too. 

You can’t live your whole life surrounded by crosses and not end up feeling like Calvary is meaningful. Even if you’re an atheist and a Jew, you end up carrying the cross around. When I curse, I often do so in Jesus’ name, and when I think about redemption or forgiveness, it’s bathed in Christian imagery and references to a heaven that Jews mostly and atheists definitely don’t think exists and are supposed to be barred from. Jews aren’t major targets of bigotry in the U.S. like some other groups, so the sense of disorientation isn’t hugely traumatic or something I have to think about a ton. But you do occasionally remember the dominant culture doesn’t consider you to be a part of something you are, in fact, a part of. Like all those Jewish people who got their patronymics anglicized by immigration officials or for their own convenience, your name gets changed whether you want it to be or not. 

So yes, part of the reason I like Christian music is that I’ve been assimilated into a culture that kind of thinks I’m damned (“Mercy is calling you; won’t you give heed?”). I enjoy Christian music because it’s my music, somewhat despite myself. 

But I think I also enjoy it because it isn’t my music. My wife, whose family is from Appalachia and who has honest-to-God Bible thumpers among her relatives, finds my enthusiasm for Christian music positively perverse. When the Louvin Brothers sing, “That word ‘broad-minded’ is spelled S-I-N,” she hears it in the context of some decidedly small-minded family members and their views on out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or queer people, or even going into bars. 

For me, though, Christian music is a lot less fraught. Yes, I live in a country with a lot of Christian people, but to the extent that religion has irritated me in a close personal way, my resentment is directed at Hebrew school, not church. There are definitely Christians in the political realm who would like to make my life and my family’s lives and the lives of most people in the country a misery, and I cordially hate them. But having people just preach at me doesn’t trigger any particular trauma. I wasn’t there when they crucified your lord. It’s not about me.

In her book Dialectic of Pop, Agnès Gayraud argues that part of the pleasure of pop music—by which she means music made for records, basically—is that it’s always both about you and not about you. The whole point of a record (or an MP3) is to get music out of its original context and take it somewhere else where it didn’t originate and where it doesn’t quite belong. That’s why there are so many pop songs about traveling. Pop is always motorvatin’ over the hill or leaving on a jet plane or, in gospel, putting on its travelin’ shoes.

Yes, Marion Williams and the Clara Ward Singers in “Travelin’ Shoes” are talking about walking right into heaven. But they’re also talking about leaving their selves behind and becoming disembodied voices. The joy of the song comes in part from a sense of togetherness in the community of the saved. And the joy comes in part from a sense of being freed from any one community, as you cast off the dust of this world for the next. And in part, it comes from the tension between them. It’s “the unresolved dialectic between roots and uprooting,” as Gayraud puts it, swooping between Williams’ earthy growl and the high pitched “ooooooo!” The song belongs here, and it belongs to everyone, at the same time, divine and human at once. 

Marion Williams’ producer in her later years, and her greatest fan, was Anthony Heilbut, another Jewish atheist. “What we admire is so clearly beyond our own reach,” Heilbut writes in his most recent book, The Fan Who Knew Too Much. That’s part of the wonder of it; the music isn’t yours. And then if you love it enough, in part because it isn’t, it is. Much great Christian music is about telling me I don’t belong. But it’s also about stepping out of those immanent boxes, Jew and gentile, to all be one in some divine something. You don’t have to give your soul in exchange. You just have to listen.

Best of 2021

I’m a Jewish Atheist: I Love Gospel Music

Looking back, it is difficult to put into words what it was like to leave the Jesuit order after only a short stay. What I can tell you is that it was one of the most formative and influential times of my life. What I can also tell you is that when I left, I was certain that I had been there for the right reasons and certain that I still had a long way yet to grow. The lessons in patient trust that I learned there remain. I forget them from time to time, but the essence of what I was striving for—to live a life dedicated to improving the lives of others, to give voice to those unseen and unheard—remains deep, deep within.

I am certain that had I been born in another country, or under the auspices of another religious tradition, that I would have found my way to another way of giving back to my community. I came to the Jesuit tradition because I grew up Catholic—forced church outings with the family, stuffy starched shirts for holidays. I was by no means a religious person. If asked, I would say, “I was raised Catholic,” a clean way of signaling that I was forced by my family to do Catholic things, but I certainly never went to church on my own. We were not a terribly religious family, but we had a tradition, which provided a lens through which I could imagine trying to live a life for others. When my high school and college history studies inspired in me a deep concern for my community and filled me with a desire to find an outlet for helping others, I turned to this tradition.

I had the great fortune of encountering fabulous and daring teachers in school, who wanted us to explore, read and gobble up every drop of knowledge we could find. Through this process, living in a world of privilege, excommunicated from reality by the manner in which I was raised, I discovered, rather naively, that the rest of the world did not live as I did and, even worse, would never be presented with the opportunities that I had. This angered me. I felt deeply that something had to be done, and done now.  

Everywhere I turned in college seemed dedicated to an idea of self-absorbed consumption. “How do I afford to live in fancy oblivion?” It was only the voice of a distant past in my life, a tradition long forgotten, that helped me find another path. Religion made it OK for me to walk away from material wealth and the desire for a job that gave me nothing but a paycheck. It filled me with the hope that I could one day actually help people who actually needed help. 

And so it was, in the most circuitous of ways, I found myself learning about Jesuits, an order within the Catholic machinery that sets itself—or seems to set itself—apart from the rest of the priesthood, dedicated to a proposition that a life worth living is a life in service to others. This tradition had been there, in the background of my existence, for a long time, but until then, I had mostly ignored it. Now, fueled by a desire for change in the world, I began to reach out. 

When college ended, and others were scrambling to find internships or jobs or pay their rent, I was packing my bags. Through contacts from my childhood and new Jesuit friends, I had made arrangements to live and work at a school in Quito, Ecuador. The school was dedicated to teaching the poor and ignored the needs of the wealthy. This, for me, was a dream: to turn the world upside down, to make genuine opportunity a practical and obtainable reality.

My time in Ecuador was short. My days were filled with the routines of teachers, the most underappreciated of professions. Herding children between classes, trying to teach, trying to grab a quick bite between classes. Every day was a mess, and every day was filled with laughter and hope.

Resolved to continue this tradition, I informed my very shocked family that not only was I feeling religious, but I was feeling religious enough to live the vows of a Jesuit priest. I set off for Middle America to live and work in what many would call a seminary, but the Jesuits call a novitiate.  

While I was there, the romance and grandeur of it all swept me away. I was a novice, working and living with other novices: Class during the day, meditation at night, mentorship from Jesuits who had been living this lifestyle for years, decades even. For a few months, everything seemed to just fit into place, and I found myself in a place of growth. But as I would discover, it is the law of all progress that one must pass through some stages of instability that may take a very long time.

Part of the Jesuit tradition includes prayer, or what I might call meditation. This daily “examen” calls upon the individual to focus on what worked today, to be grateful for that and to use that gratitude to focus on tomorrow. I was lucky enough to be in a place where I had the opportunity to meditate as a part of a daily routine. This was coupled with work for local nonprofits, classes and other volunteer opportunities. And through this process, I discovered a deeper passion within myself to be an unencumbered voice for others. It would lead me to walk away from the Jesuit order and the traditions I had found there.

One of the most deeply held values with the Jesuit priesthood is that of obedience. It is a vow to serve the pope of the Roman Catholic Church and, by extension, all the people of Earth. This promise requires patient trust that the machine of the church is moving in the correct direction. This is both a beautiful and intimidating promise. And as I meditated on this tradition, I began to learn the deep value that these traditions held for those close to me at the novitiate. Many of my now dearest fellow novices came to the Society of Jesus seeking this tradition and depended upon it as a bedrock for the work they would go on to do. I was not coming to the Jesuits from the same direction. My bedrock was a deep desire to help others, and through that desire, I had found a tradition that gave power to the voiceless. 

I discovered that my trajectory and the trajectory of so many of the lives of my fellow novices overlapped. I also discovered that if I remained, my impatience for immediate change, my impatience to be a voice right now, would create friction in my life that could eventually fester into a bitterness that would then sap my passion and leave nothing but a bitter husk, unable to articulate how or why I had wanted this life in the first place.

It was a beautiful—and, I’ll admit, terrifying—moment for me. I remember sobs shaking through my body. There was bitterness of the distant future I saw but gratitude to be lucky enough to spend time on myself, meditating and pondering the next deliberate steps of my life. When I reached out to my mentor and others, what I received was not only love and patience but an understanding that astounded me. It was as if they already knew and were only waiting for me to discover my path. They could see it before me but wanted me to see it first. 

As I sat among peers, friends and Jesuits, saying goodbye to a tradition and a lifestyle, there was a moment of happiness. Our lives had been brought together for a reason, maybe a reason we didn’t understand or comprehend. But that is how all growth is. It takes time. There will be stages of instability on the way to finding something unknown, something new, and that was happening to us before our eyes. It was a moment where all of us could accept the anxiety of feeling ourselves in suspense and incomplete but on our way, and it was beautiful. 

The Jesuits were gracious enough to offer me a path and allow me to walk alongside them for as long as my life’s work coincided. As it turns it out, my time did not last terribly long. But more than anything, when I did decide it was time to go, I was awed by their patient trust and happiness to see me on my way to whatever lay ahead.

“You are like a race car,” my mentor and dear friend told me. “Some fancy, awful red thing on a mountain pass, so excited to speed along your way. But you are stuck behind a truck filled with chickens in the truck bed, discarding feathers and odors into what you had planned.”

Why I Left the Catholic Priesthood

On March 11, 2020, a significant development was drowned out by the sound of COVID-19 coming straight for New York. While we were battening down the hatches that day, The New York Times reported that an “analysis of 27 studies involving 10,565 participants” had found that people in Alcoholics Anonymous experienced deeper and longer abstinence compared to subjects in other forms of treatment. Members of AA were also twice as likely (or three times as likely, depending on the data) to stay sober than people trying to get clean some other way. 

What hit me about this study was not a sense of validation, in part because many AA folks don’t believe in studies like this. (My sponsor at the time immediately told me he didn’t pay attention to scientific appraisals of AA, right after he tried to convince me that COVID-19 was no big deal. He was not my sponsor for long.) The remarkable thing about this good news is that a spiritual program has a medical outcome, one that can be measured.

The program of AA does have a strong nonreligious, social component and some behavioral suggestions; it uses more than one method to bring an alcoholic toward sobriety. The central concept, though, is of “turning it over,” of abandoning the best thinking that got you here and admitting that some larger force may be at work. The genius ecumenicism of the program means that there is no specific faith that anyone needs to follow in order to get sober, just a higher power of your own choosing. 

There is some hair-splitting to be done here, as so many unnamed, untagged iterations of faith might not qualify as religions—nor do they need to. What AA did was to break apart the idea of organized religion, toss out the doctrine and hang on to the spirit. AA also threw out all the power and money, which may explain the lack of pedophilia scandals. 

AA is an anarchic, decentralized cloud of homemade faiths, and it runs better than any company I've ever worked for. It would not be true, however, to say that AA introduced me to my concept of god. Since I was fairly young, I had a feeling that god was beneath everything, like a river of fire that flowed into the trees and grass and animated whatever needed animating. God is simply a placemarking word for me, as this force is not a person, nor does it respond to questions or prayers or curses. My god is what is true and what actually exists and what makes alive things be alive. Trees are a fairly good way of capturing the tenor of this god, though god isn’t the same as nature, for me. God has to do with how we interact and the ways in which we might better incline our behavior.

But until AA, I didn’t think this god had anything to do with me. I assumed god would simply rumble on, and I had no chance of aligning myself with this power. My time in the program allowed me to slow down—in fact, slow all the way down to stopping—and to abandon my thinking in favor of a blank space where only god might be, a place I could turn over my tangled and cracked ball of anxieties. When I stop thinking, the world goes on. And that’s god going on.

AA allowed me to mark the place where I could find this god again and again—a church, in the form of a meeting. The AA format was taken, at least 10 steps of the 12, from the Oxford Group, so it is fairly logical that AA itself feels like a kind of worship. Removing reference to any specific faith was a major innovation of the early AA boys and is no small tweak. A few wanted to hang on to the Christianity of the Calvary Church in Manhattan, where Bill Wilson met the Oxford Group, an explicitly Christian organization. But sticking with Christianity would have doomed AA to obscurity and possibly even the same kind of internal anguish and abuse that has more or less laid waste to the official church.

Faith, set free, flourished in the program of AA, and it seemed necessary.  Connecting with others is often defined as the opposite of addiction, but the fellowship itself couldn’t get the job of sobriety done. We all have to carry a sense of purpose outside meetings and beyond sobriety itself. We are not here simply to be sober, and the presence of an articulating and generating force is more important to me than sobriety itself, on many days. The idea that this feeling is a connection that has nothing to do with judgment or power or success or wealth is in the Bible, of course, but was brought back into action by AA in the early 20th century, when the Christian church was stumbling headfirst into lust and greed. Kind of insane that the drunks got the point, or brought the point back, rather.

So how to see religion and sobriety together? Would AA merit being called a religion without an organizing schema? Perhaps the legacy of AA is more as a faith with a practice than the adherence to a text or set of principles, though the program has that, too. Lord knows AA has enough sayings, and there is one that answers these questions. “Faith without works is dead.” Straight out of the big book. (And, originally, the other big book: James 2:26.)

This feels like the place where AA made things richer by making them simpler. In the program, we only have to stay sober and help another alcoholic to achieve sobriety. We have a task, and we can carry it out. This gives us purpose, and because AA has such a specific focus, it allows members to feel a sense of achievement. Life outside AA is a more sprawling affair, and feeling a sense of spirituality depends on different parameters, which end up being set on an individual basis—or, for anybody following a faith, a set of principles. 

This is how I began to see that a religion is, in its most benevolent iteration, not faith alone, but a way of organizing behavior, of giving the gift of purpose. What we all want is what dogs want—to be put to work, to have an assignment, to have a list of things to do. Practicing that in AA has reinforced my faith, as I need to feel my faith almost every time someone challenges me to explain why I might have any at all. Called upon to explain it, I feel it. Called upon to put it into practice, I help another alcoholic. 

Outside the program, I can use these exercises to call up my faith when I want to be connected. It’s right there. And when I need to help others, it comes more easily. My selfishness is more easily peeled away now because I have become accustomed to my faith being paired with work. It’s a slightly corny comparison, so forgive me, but it’s the best one I’ve found. The gym of sobriety gives me muscles for life and my faith is what keeps the lights on, what keeps me going. 

This is my way of explaining that I don’t know if an abstract faith is likely to work. Meditation brings me closer to my god, but I don’t know how long that would last if I didn’t have obligations as a sober person and as a human. If religion has faltered in the 21st century, it isn't just because the church fell on its own depraved sword. It’s because we find it so hard to conceive of or discuss a purpose separate from profit, and outside of AA, few really have a viable plan. 

If your faith is healthy and thriving, then God bless, literally. If it’s Islam or DSA or sword-smithing, keep doing what you’re doing. But the most reliable path I've seen in my lifetime is through a program by and for drunks, who realized that the point of life was faith and works powering each other. My god is always working. I am joining in and following suit. None of it is my idea, beyond that first decision to surrender and let something else do the thinking.

Drugs & Alcohol

Alcoholics Anonymous Is My Religion

One of my earliest memories of knowing that there was something awfully wrong with me was on a Friday.

For as long as I can remember, my dad took me to the special weekly prayer service, Jummah, where I absent-mindedly sat through a half-hour lecture followed by the actual supplication. Attending these prayers was just a normal part of life and I never paid them that much thought. However, on this particular Friday, the words of the imam changed things for me.

Finishing off his list of everything that was wrong with the world, he decided to target homosexuals with a tone of disgust at the end of his sermon. His words describing people like me as being “mentally ill,” and a sign that Judgment Day was near, are words that have stayed with me for a long time.

Sitting cross-legged amongst a sea of muscular, bearded men who silently nodded their heads in agreement with the words being spoken, I had never felt more ashamed of who I was than I did on that particular day. I tried to avoid eye contact with everyone around me as I hung my head low, pretending to be distracted again. My cheeks burned in embarrassment.

About to start high school, I was already at the age where I was beginning to question my sexuality. Growing up, I had always known that something about me was a bit special. A desire, in my younger years, to be like the sporty boys with the spiky, gelled-up hair had slowly grown into a longing to simply be with them instead.

Accepting one’s queerness is a difficult process for anyone. But understanding that not only are you queer but that your fellow Muslims also believe that your identity is a sin worthy of hellfire is a much more complex reality to grapple with as an adolescent.

The Muslim community around me was not helping me come to terms with this reality.

Whether it be my dad calling me up moments after the Australian marriage equality vote was announced to tell me how disappointed he was in the country’s decision to vote “yes,” or my mum physically shuddering when my dad bought up how “unnatural” he thought gay people are—I have always hidden how I truly felt when around them. I never told them that the “mentally-ill, unnatural” people they were speaking of with such hatred was someone they birthed and raised. Someone they were speaking to at that moment.

I have always been too scared to tell them my truth. They still don’t know.

However, this feeling of alienation was not something that I felt exclusively from the Muslim community. The LGBTQ+ scene in Sydney has always made me feel just as out of place.

Whenever the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade was shown on TV, my parents hastily changed the channel, believing something comparable to pornography was being broadcast. Those nights, once my family was asleep, I watched the highlights of the parade on incognito mode on my laptop. Instead of feeling pride in who I was, I felt more alien than ever watching those images. I still feel the same sometimes.

Handsome, six-foot, muscular white men with glittered six-packs and tight briefs parade down Sydney’s Oxford Street, promoting a society with more diversity and acceptance. As a young, brown gay man with a very average body, I still can’t relate to the feeling nor experiences of these men who have essentially become the face of the LGBT community.

They remind me of the men who turn me down on Grindr because brown guys “aren’t their type” or harass me on apps to find out “where I’m really from” before the conversation can go anywhere. They remind me of the men who tell me they fantasize about having sex with a brown boy, who objectify me and see nothing in me beyond the color of my skin. The men who make me feel so sick of being me.

I am not the palatable, attractive, white gay man that this country has grown to accept. With my color and faith, I am too foreign and too divisive to be celebrated. The world simply isn’t ready.

The nights I stay up Googling the words “gay and Muslim” in a desperate bid to find some commonality online are some of the nights when I experience the most self-loathing. Comment after comment under news articles or YouTube videos focused on queer Muslims add to my negative self-perception. We are called “oxymorons” who “deserve to be thrown off buildings” according to some strangers online.

Sometimes it makes me crave validation from all the wrong places, and from all the wrong people. My desire to feel accepted has been so strong recently that I feel I am throwing away my values to finally feel normal and accepted—particularly during this past year.

I found a random 31-year-old man online, ten years my senior, who I traveled over an hour to meet. He didn’t treat me the best, but I still chased the feeling I had when he gave me attention. For two nights, I let him do whatever he wanted. He was my first kiss and the first man I slept with. As someone who had never even held a boy’s hand before, I lost my innocence that night I met him.

Despite being with an older stranger who I met online, the simple act of holding this man’s hand made me feel safer and more like myself than I have ever felt before. It wasn’t the most perfect experience but for the first time in my life, something felt very right. It felt real.

As a young, gay Muslim guy, things certainly are not perfect for me. But they are getting better. When events like Imaan Fest (the world’s first Muslim pride festival) are popping up on my Facebook feed, I have hope for the future.

I have hope that my identity is not something that will always be anxiety-inducing but, instead, will be a source of pride for me one day. I have hope to be the queer Muslim role model for kids that I never had growing up.

I dream of the day I will walk towards my future husband on our wedding day as a saxophone cover of Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” plays in the background. My parents, seated in the front row, proud of the man their son grew up to be. My friends, seated alongside them, being there for me one more time. The day I can finally celebrate my identity and my love.

LGBTQ Voices

Being Gay and Muslim Makes Me Feel Alien

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

At 2 a.m., my 7-year-old son shook me gently. 

“Mom, I heard a noise in the kitchen.”

“It’s probably one of the neighbor’s dogs,” I said and pulled back the covers. “Get in bed with me.”

My 2-year-old daughter was asleep in her room. The bathroom light that I left on sent a sliver of light into the hallway. I covered my son with my quilt, and, just as I was closing my eyes, I saw a shadow intersecting the light beam. Thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me, I sat up. A black figure was moving toward me. My eyes adjusted to the dim light. I saw the outline of the knife he held in his hands and the open zipper of his pants.

“Take a blanket into the living room,” he said. “Tell the boy to stay in bed.”

“Stay here,” I said to my trembling child.

I wanted to scream, but I knew a terrorized scream might wake my daughter. I stifled any sound, except the pounding in my chest. Heart attack. Scared to death. I could hardly breathe. Faint. And then what? Have this monster be so angry, he’d go after my kids?

“Spread the blanket on the floor and lay down.”

Silently, I made a “good act of contrition” to meet my god. I begged god to spare my children. 

When he was done, he told me to lay still. I heard the back door close. He didn’t have to tell me not to move. I was paralyzed.

I looked up and saw my son standing in the doorway. What had he seen? He was never obedient. He saw it all.

The cops should have called an ambulance. A rape specialist. SVU. All of that. They didn’t. It was 1972. I waited four hours alone in the police station hallway waiting on a medical examiner. They’d called my mother to come get the kids. There was a small pile of laundry in the hall. 

“You couldn’t have cleaned up?” she said as she passed by the sofa where I was sitting holding my sleepy-eyed daughter. My son was at her side. As dawn was breaking, a man in his 50s led me to an examining room. 

“At least you had enough sense not to wash away the evidence. You’ll need a VD test. He ejaculated. Do you take the pill?”

“You’ll need to know if you’re pregnant too. Get to a doctor. Soon.”

My children had medical coverage through covered welfare. I didn’t. “Alright.”

Waves of nausea, anger, disgust and shame surged and ebbed as a young cop drove me home. “A sex crimes investigator will contact you. Tell the truth.” The truth was, if I was pregnant, I’d either have an illegal abortion or kill the child. And I wouldn’t have to see a doctor for a test. I’d birthed three children, one a stillborn, and if I was pregnant, I’d be throwing up by this time tomorrow. 

I needed a shower. His sperm was beginning to smell as bad as the vodka on his breath. My mother handed me a mop. “The dishes are done. But you need to get these floors clean. The detectives already talked to Steve,” she said. It was her way of telling me she’d changed her mind about watching my kids while I went to school. Yesterday, I’d gone to orientation at San Diego State. After years of navigating the system, Chicano EOP agreed to help a white woman with expenses.

“You mean you’re actually going?” Mother had said. It meant two days a week, she would have the kids for the afternoon. “Do you think you can do the work?”

At her feet was a bucket that smelled of Pine-Sol. “I’ll mop after I shower.”

“I hope you don’t think this is going to bring your husband back. He doesn’t love you. Get that through your head.” My ex was already living with a girlfriend.

But college would now have to wait. My spirit had been murdered. I needed someone, and there was no one to call. “Get out of my house,” I told her. “And don’t come back.” She knew I never pulled stunts. She chose to believe otherwise, to ignore reality as people always do when you’re not important to them. With the testimony of the detective assigned to the case, welfare agreed to move me into another apartment. Upstairs. Clean. Safe. 

I phoned the OB-GYN who delivered my kids. “I need a pregnancy test. I was raped,” I told the nurse. Silence. “Are you there?”

The doctor answered. “Yes. I don’t see rape victims. I’ll write you a prescription for some pills to bring on your period. Take them, and if you don’t get a period after a week, the nurse will refer you for a D&C.” The thought of being dilated and scraped brought on another wave of nausea. “You’re a Catholic too, right? I try to forget my own…experience. Do the same. I can’t tell you what to tell Jesus.”

The pain in her voice led me to the same question: What would I tell Jesus? As I gleefully bought tampons, I shelved the question with a prayer of thanks for 52 years. 

With the recent SCOTUS decision, however, and informed by a decade of college education, the question again demanded an answer. Not for the feminists or the pro-life zealots but for ordinary Christian women like me who firmly believed the rape and incest exception to abortion bans must become the rule for all state legislatures. To ensure that, there must be reasoned arguments that satisfy their constituents. Here are mine.

Pro-life zealots maintain that all abortions are the murder of human life. To deny that abortion does, indeed, involve human biological material would be nonsense. But even though it takes two people to create the human material, only one bears the physical burden, and to force the psychological burdens of pregnancy by rape on that same person is tantamount to torture. It’s also abetting an ongoing felony.

Be that as it may, there are situations where taking human life is not considered murder, like in self-defense, when we and/or others are in danger of imminent death or in war and capital punishment. “Aha!” zealots counter, “but babies are innocent, and it’s innocent life we must protect.”

OK. Split hairs. Regarding rape, only half of the nascent human is innocent. Consider that the weapon of the rapist is his penis, his “gun” as it were, thrust into a vagina where he deposits millions of his bullets that attack an innocent ovum. Did my rapist intend for these bullets to engender new life? It doesn’t matter.

In law, there are two forms of transferred intent. One theory asserts that if there is an underlying commission of a felony, then a succeeding felony, even if unintended, must be treated as part of the first. The second theory is that the underlying felony indicates the malice that evidences the intent to commit the second felony. In any case, we have come to understand that the result of a bad act is as bad as the act itself: Intent follows the bullet. It is much the same with court rules that say illegally obtained evidence cannot be admitted at trial, as it is the fruit of a poisonous tree. In other words, pregnancy as a result of rape makes it a poisoned one.

The fact remains that since I had the right to kill the rapist after he fired the bullets to protect myself from further harm, I have the right to remedy the harm of those bullets—the guilty part of the human life within me. Would we refuse to treat a gunshot wound and tell the victim to live with a bullet lodged in his testicles for nine months and then remove the bullet himself? Any law that punishes the victim in such a manner would be deemed an injustice.

The Bible is replete with references to the nature and preferences of God. For example, Isaiah 61:8 says, “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and wrong; I will faithfully give them their recompense…” And Proverbs 21:3 counsels us that “to do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”

It’s not enough to be or do right. We must be and do what is just. Our decisions regarding punishments and rewards must be reasoned and fair as well as what is moral and lawful. God never said it was going to be easy to mete out punishments or make rewards equitable. He does, however, hold certain categories of people as especially vulnerable and in need of special protection because of it: the poor, the sojourner, the fatherless and the widow.

What would I tell Jesus? I qualified for special protection as a poor, unmarried woman of two fatherless children. I was innocent. I did not know my rapist. I didn’t drink or do drugs, hang out in bars, wear skimpy clothes or have boyfriends. I was a fatherless child, and, as it turned out, in spirit, a motherless one too. I was visited by the devil and impregnated with a demon.

I believe my case would be compelling, not just for me but for the second victim of the rape: my son. He, too, suffered nightmares, night sweats, panic attacks and depression. I slept on the floor between his bed and my daughter’s crib, a chair braced under the doorknob, the front door triple bolted. What would I have told my child as we watched my belly swell with the devil’s child inside me? He wouldn’t be helping me choose onesies and booties this time. 

We both were diagnosed with PTSD. As there was no DNA bank then, the cops said the rapist would never be caught. There was never even a suspect. A thief had come in the night and stole my dignity, my safety and cruelest of all, my belief in justice. As for my mother, she went to her grave never saying what I yearned to hear: “I’m glad you lived.” It’s my private hell.

My hope is that, though rare, rape pregnancy victims understand that their right to justice trumps any state-imposed virtue. They need not surrender their right to bodily integrity to any rapist, least of all to an elected official, and Christianity supports their decision to abort the devil’s spawn.

Women

When I Was Raped, I Became Pregnant: A Christian Perspective on Abortion Bans

My friends would be over in a few minutes, and there was evidence everywhere. Those stupid photos that I hated so much. Damn those photos. Frantically, I ran around removing them until the truth was hidden once again.

They were of me as a 13-year-old. A doppelganger of Pugsley Addams. Shaved head, chubby cheeks and a little potbelly — a supermodel I was not. 

But it wasn't my resemblance to a TV character that I was worried about. It was my surroundings. And what I wore on my head. 

I had to remove the evidence. The truth could not be revealed. 

Why couldn't I play football with my friends? 

I pleaded with my parents. Tomorrow was a Saturday, and we had an important game against our archrivals. Instead, as they were entering battle, I would be forced to sit a scholarship test. A test on a Saturday! 

Despite my protests and threats to fail the test on purpose, I missed the game and sat the test. And my competitiveness shone through — I was awarded a scholarship.

So instead of heading to the local public high school to start seventh grade with all my friends, I would be heading to an elite private school in a wealthy suburb, where I knew no one. 

I soon learned the school practiced two forms of religion — Christianity and money. I followed neither. 

Hey, watch me throw this one-cent piece in the gutter and see if it attracts any Jews.

This was the schoolyard banter every day. “Jew jokes” were de rigueur, and as I progressed through the grades, they got increasingly racist. Soon, they revolved around the Holocaust and the atrocities that occurred.

Hey guys, I heard a new one last night. What do you call a Jew that…

In my stomach, I felt sick. Even typing it out now, I feel awful. At the time, I would offer a weak smile and a fake laugh. I wanted to get out of this situation.

I was a coward. I was spared my self-loathing as the bell would ring and we would shuffle off into school assembly to begin the day.

Each morning would begin with the Lord's Prayer and some school hymns. At first, I would pretend to mouth the words, for I didn't know them. I had never been taught — I didn’t even celebrate Christmas. But I needed to fit in, so I studied my lines like an actor playing a role, which I guess I was.

I was constantly in trouble at school. Detentions, threats of suspension. Part of it was to prove to the others that I was cool, for there is nothing cooler than the attention seeker who disrupts the class at school. 

I created an image I wanted my classmates to see—a rebel, cool kid, prankster, clown. A range of characters who could mask the real person, all so they wouldn't ask questions or ever uncover the truth.

In an attempt to not turn me into a hymn-singing, Lord’s-Prayer-reciting, 100 percent Christian, my parents made me join an all-Jewish football team.

Here, too, I was an outsider. All the other boys on the team went to a Jewish high school. I was the pseudo-Christian who sang hymns each day. A fake Jew who masqueraded as a Christian. 

One day, the all-Jew crew and I played a side that featured a classmate. As we ran onto the ground, Greg saw me and looked shocked. I wanted to do a U-turn and run straight from the field. My parents watched from the sidelines, cheering, rugged up in the winter chill. 

My secret was uncovered. I barely went near the ball, and when the siren sounded to end the game, as my teammates headed to the change rooms, I sprinted to the car park.

The next Monday, I called in sick to school. And the next Tuesday. Eventually, my parents forced me back to school, and I had to face Greg, who knew the secret.

It was just before the third period when I crossed Greg’s path. Greg looked at me and kept walking. Perhaps he felt sorry for me. Maybe he didn't care. 

He kept silent for the next four years. I continued to laugh at the Jew jokes. 

At the age of 13, according to the Jewish religion, a boy becomes a man. This is celebrated by having a bar mitzvah.

Over several months, for two nights a week, I learned Hebrew in order to recite a passage from the Torah for my bar mitzvah. It made me long to take a scholarship test. 

On the day of my bar mitzvah, we celebrated with my family, and a photographer was on hand. A photographer who I would curse for the next few years. She captured the moment perfectly. 

Chubby Kid, with a kippah on his head and tefillin wrapped around his arm, standing in a synagogue next to an Orthodox rabbi with a bushy beard and a big black hat.

My mother loved this photo — the synagogue one, not a naked one — and had it blown up and hung on our living room wall. 

“Look at the chubby Jew!” the photo screamed.

So whenever someone from school came over, I had to take down that damn photo and several others and hide them. If they uncovered the truth, my school life would be over. My entire life would be over. 

My secret remained for the six years I attended that high school. Aside from Greg, none of the other kids found out, and not even my mother realized how often I removed her precious Chubby Kid photo collection from the wall. 

It was just after I graduated from high school that my grandmother was interviewed for a documentary on the Holocaust made by Steven Spielberg. She had survived Auschwitz but had seen her parents and younger brother die during the Holocaust. As she told her tale with tears in her eyes, I watched on and felt ashamed. 

She had bravely fought on despite her loss, survived numerous horrors and fled her home as a refugee to start a new life. What would she say if she saw me nod along at the Jew jokes — particularly the more offensive ones?

It was the moment I knew I had to come out of the closet, something I should never have entered in the first place. If someone made a racist joke, I would tell them off. If someone asked what religion I was, I would tell them. I was proud to be Jewish. The fake characters were banished, and the mask was removed. 

I had hidden my identity, something that many people cannot do. Something my grandmother didn't do. She had stood proud despite the atrocities she faced.

It was weak on my behalf. I would no longer be ashamed. 

And that damn photo of Chubby Kid the Jew would remain on the wall of my parents’ house for all to see.

I Hid My Jewish Identity Throughout High School

There are two definitions for the word “church”: It can mean a building that serves as the house of worship for a community of Christians, or the actual community itself. 

The former doesn’t hold much value in the grand scheme of things. Church buildings are useful and can be apogees of religious architecture. But Saint Paul doesn’t advise the early Christians that they should have a mandatory house of worship. But the community? Absolutely. 

A place of worship sounds like something of true spiritual beauty, and I had been longing for this feeling for many years. 

My family is of a particular Christian denomination that is culturally and ethnically exclusive to South India. But it is also of a lineage tracing back to the first century A.D., during the early spread of Christianity. 

As a child, being raised in a specific denomination can either make or break you. The younger me had no autonomy, so I could only rely on my parents to take us all to church every Sunday. Remembering the 16 years of attending this church makes me wonder how I tolerated it at all. I had to follow the dress code for women because anything else was deemed inappropriate. Women must cover their hair with a scarf or a similar garment. Our liturgy and doctrine were rather strict and structured too. Sunday school was no different to being at regular school, with tests and exams and scolding when we didn't memorize our Bible verses. I also ended up traumatized while in a vulnerable position. 

As a growing adolescent, I would come across individuals on the internet sharing their experiences as Christians in our church. The majority of the stories were sadly horrific, about the way they were made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe. That’s why many young people decide to leave the church once it is possible for them to do so.

I’m quite surprised that my faith itself never wavered. Given how frequently people abandon their religion due to oppression, it would’ve made sense. But I sought out faith. I believed in God—it was the people who nearly ruined it. 

Churches can also hold conservative views on subjects like LGBTQIA+ rights, abortion and perspectives on other religions and atheism. The judgmental manner in which these topics are discussed leaves no room for dialogue and has caused a decrease in church attendance. I fully support the LGBTQIA+ community; they are all loved by God and deserve to be happy. Everyone has free will and one can’t decide for others, so being pro-choice makes more sense to me as a Christian. I take no issue with others following other religions or those who are atheist or agnostic. I’m not trying to say, “I’m better than the hateful Christians.” I just want to practice Christianity as Christ taught and to have a space to worship where that’s encouraged. 

The church is described as the body of Christ, and the teachings of Christ are that of love. We are also called to treat others as we would like to be treated. We are called to be welcoming and humble in our faith. When church bodies represent exclusion and moral superiority, they shouldn’t feel surprised that many people turn away from God altogether.

I needed a church that takes the Lord seriously while also ensuring the congregation is accommodated so anyone can participate in worship. 

Sure, church isn’t supposed to be a place to party and do as one pleases—that would render the church as a community redundant and make the church just another building. Routine and ritual can greatly aid in ensuring that God remains the sole focus. At the same time, there is no one way to construct a church doctrine and liturgy. Each denomination has its own way of practicing its Christian faith, and individuals have a preference. Some may find the strict structures appropriate; others may prefer a relaxed approach.

I knew that the church I was raised in was not the right one for me. I value its history because it is closely connected to Christ himself. Given the whitewashed image of Christianity in the West, this is something I still hold on to, as it’s also part of my heritage, alongside being a person of color. But I find it a real shame that the church's practices overshadow this heritage and that they kept me from feeling like it was my home.

The blessing of becoming an independent adult meant that I was able to make my own decisions for once. As lockdown began in 2020, church moved to Zoom, and some Sunday mornings, we would watch live streams of the service. Even then, it was irritating to sit through. 

As restrictions were lifted and churches could accommodate people again, I decided to attend a different local church near our home. As a family, we had attended the services very rarely, perhaps three times in total. It was a real turning point when I walked into this local church for the first time in years.

Although the church congregation is predominantly white and older, I was immediately welcomed into their little community. I had worries that I would stick out because of my skin color, my youth and my shyness, but there were zero issues. Many members even came up to me and started conversations.

I’ve been a part of the church for nine months now. I’m friendly with many members. We converse after the service and occasionally meet up at events. They hug me. The latter especially surprised me because physical acts of affection were almost nonexistent at my previous church. Back there, conversations were centered on people who tried to measure everyone’s success through academic and professional success. Other times, there would be no conversation at all as I stood amongst other kids my age, staying silent or contributing very little. 

To experience this love I’ve been shown at my new church has been a huge relief, to the point where I get emotional. Circumstances may change in the future, but I remain excited to worship the Lord with this new family. I pray that others who wish to leave their church, whatever their beliefs, can find a home the way I have.

The church should be a welcoming and safe space for believers and nonbelievers alike. It doesn’t matter the denomination, unless it strays far from the teachings of Christ. When the doors of a church are ignorantly shut, it cannot become a safe space for those who seek a relationship or an understanding of Christ.

I Finally Found a Safe Space in the Church

Six months ago, I spoke the unspeakable. I looked my parents in the eyes and told them I’m bisexual and have a girlfriend.

My mom and dad were the kindest people I’d ever known. They taught me to respect people fully and deeply under any circumstance, but that day, I saw them stripped of everything they’d taught me.

It was a six-hour-long conversation. Though I’d call it a football match, where my mom and dad kicked me back and forth until the clock painfully struck 6:00 a.m.

From midnight to 6 in the morning, they insulted me until they’d consumed all my self-worth and pride. Everything was so painful that I started scratching the skin around my tattoo with the golden bracelet my girlfriend had gotten me. I desperately wanted to erase that mother-daughter tattoo when my mom said, “So, I have a retarded child, and there’s no cure?” My bisexuality was a plague to our family.

Nothing has been the same since. The child my parents were most proud of was gone and replaced with a nostalgic idea of their old daughter—before she came out as queer.

I’ve become a ghost to my parents while I’m still breathing, still flesh and bone.

Growing up in Muslim culture, I knew there was no space for queer people. I constantly woke up to the news of trans men being murdered or gay teens being kicked out of their homes.

One night, a trans woman drove through the Bosphorus Bridge and committed suicide. Minutes before her surrender, she recorded a video for her mom. Crying and with a hopeless voice, she said, “I never wanted this, Mom. They made me do it.”

Although our religion was founded on respect and kindness, Muslim culture struggles to accept queer people. Knowing that my fellow Muslims would see me as sinful damaged my mental health. Knowing that my own parents might leave me unprotected left me suffocated.

So my sexuality never came to me with a full pride badge. In a culture like this, being cisgender or heterosexual, which fall into the normative gender spectrum, are the requirements for pride. When you fall outside these definitions, it feels impossible to be proud.

Instead, I hid and repressed my desire for women, hoping I wouldn’t have to reopen those doors.

Follow Us