Why I’m Still Glad I Was Raised A Baptist
Via Ex-Gay Watch… Steven Fales was excommunicated from the Mormon church when reparative therapy failed (surprise, surprise) to make him heterosexual. He divorced, was separated from his children, and then his church…
“When I was getting excommunicated, I found it so bizarre and fantastical, I could not believe what was happening,” Fales says after a recent rehearsal of "Mormon Boy" alongside his Tony-winning director Jack Hofsiss.
“Part of me as a man of the theater was like, ‘This is a good story,’“ he says. “And the budding activist in me, who was starting to get it, was like, ‘You know what? This is happening to all kinds of people—someone needs to write about this.’“
The theater also proved to be therapeutic, offering him a “soft place to land” after being excommunicated, which he calls “a medieval, barbaric practice.”
“What do you replace the church of your birth with? That’s how fragmenting it is to be no longer Mormon,” Fales says. “It’s a cult tactic used to control and suppress, and if you buy into that mind-fuck, then it can really do a number on you.”
Thankfully, theater offered Fales a new sense of communion.
No offence to my readers of different faiths, but this is why I am eternally thankful I was born into a Baptist household, and one that believed, as Baptists always used to believe, in soul competency, and the primacy of the relationship between the individual believer and God. It’s not that you cannot be excommunicated from the Baptist faith, it’s that the concept itself is utterly meaningless. At worst you can be tossed out of your local church, which can be traumatic enough; but you are always free to find another, more welcoming congregation. A Baptist does not regard the church as an instrumentality of God. It is a community of believers, important in it’s own right, but not an instrumentality. There are no instrumentalities. There is only the personal relationship you have with God which is always direct and intimate. No one can take that from you. No one. No one can stand between you and God. No cleric, no church, no authority of state or church, no one, nothing. That is bedrock. Or used to be anyway. It’s what I was taught all through childhood, and though I no longer regard myself as a Christian (I have a hard time with forgiveness, otherwise today I might be a Unitarian…), I still believe it.
I have no idea what I would have done, what I would have become, if I had to face excommunication, and actually believed I was being separated from God. I think it might have killed me. Fales is right. It is medieval and barbaric. I’d call it grotesquely arrogant as well. He is one strong hearted soul. I so much admire all the excommunicated ones who made it to the other side of the pit of heartbreak, still holding on to their humanity, and their spirituality. It speaks so much to the strength of the human spirit.
