Who really has the knowledge?

A few years ago, someone asked me what religion I was, and I replied “I’m an agnostic theist.”  Truthfully, the reply surprised me just as much as it seemed to surprise him.  I was raised Christian – Assemblies of God pentecostal, to be exact.  (I always preface pentecostal with “Assemblies of God“, so as not to be confused with United Pentecostals, with all that long hair and no makeup and women only wearing skirts stuff.)

Since then, I have consistently replied this way when questioned about religion.  Most – if not all – Christians who hear me say this become instantly offended, and a hailstorm of insults and condemnations usually follows, especially since I moved to southeast Texas.  This is typically because the people are confusing the definition of agnosticism with the definition of atheism.  Sometimes they actually ask me repeatedly how [dare] can I be an atheist, and sometimes I want to grab these people by the shirt collar and scream “Atheism is the rejection of theism!  How can I be an atheist if I just told you I was an agnostic theist??” – but I don’t.  I just nod politely and make another mental note about not getting into conversations about religion or politics.

But I digress.  Whenever someone is not too busy yelling at me or explaining to me in detail just exactly how I will burn in hell (so much for “thou shalt not judge”), they ask me if I was raised in church.  I, of course, say yes I was.  And then… well then they want the story.  And they know there’s a story, who grows up in an Assemblies of God pentecostal church and then decides to be an agnostic theist without a good story?

Usually I don’t tell the story.  Usually I explain what agnostic theist means, usually I explain that while some agnostics don’t believe in the God that Christians believe in, I do – however I believe in our vast lack of knowledge about said God, which is exactly what being God means, isn’t it?  I do not want to hear about how the Baptists have it all wrong and the Catholics are the true children of God, or about how the Catholics have it all wrong and the Lutherans will beat us all through the pearly gates, or whatever.  I do not believe that any one of us has this knowledge.  My parents often argue that the denomination doesn’t matter, that the only thing that matters is that I am “in church”.  But the older I get, the more I think that the last place I will ever find God is inside the four walls of a church.

Well.  Picture this:  It is summer. You are a teenage girl.  You are 13 years old.  And you have just been ousted from your group of best friends.  I mean totally cut off.  I’m not talking about getting a few less invites than usual, I’m talking about completely, totally, wholly ostracized from the group of teenage girls who are your best friends in the whole entire world.  These are the girls that you have stayed up all night with, talking about boys and parents and shhhhh! even sex and other things that you’d be severely punished for if any of your parents ever heard the topics come up.  You have pinky-sweared on secrets, you have done makeovers, you have let them fix your hair and do your makeup and then have gone out in public without looking in the mirror first, and believe me that is trust.

Sound like a scene from an 80’s movie about the woes of adolescence?  It’s not.  It’s what happened to me – not in school, but in church.  At 13 years old, here is my life:  There is a group of girls in the church youth group that have started calling themselves The Fab Four.  I am the 5th and only remaining girl in that youth group.  None of the other girls will talk to me, and none of the boys really talk to me all that much because, at a mere 123 pounds, I am “the fat one”.  I know this because I’ve heard the boys say it out loud to each other, and even worse, to the other girls who will not speak to me.  The girls rarely ever even look at me, and if they do it is only to give me that look that teenage girls have been perfecting for generations, the one that makes you feel like you have a strange and horrifying disease, as if your skin is rotting off and smelling all disgusting (remember stories of lepers in the bible?).

But why?  Why did they do this?  After years of friendship, what changed?  I will tell you.  There were 5 of us girls.  All the rest had graduated high school and left for college, or just left.  One girl was older than the rest of us.  She could drive and had a boyfriend who was older than her.  We were teaching VBS (Vacation Bible School) in the gym, as we did every summer.  The kids were having lunch.  I was coming out of the restroom upstairs, that is the one I used because I was embarrassed to use the one downstairs, there were always too many people in that hallway.

So I’m coming out of the restroom, and in that tiny little darkened hallway, with everyone else downstairs, my friend’s older boyfriend stood.  In the middle of the hallway.  Not letting me get by.  I went left, I went right, I looked up and crossed my arms, more defiant that concerned.  And then he kissed me – kissed me hard, grabbed me, pushed me up against the wall.  And I yelped – yes, yelped, it was all I could get to come out at the time, and at the sound he let me go.  No clothing removed, no smacking around, just the kiss, the groping, and then I was released.  He looked at me.  I looked at him.  In that moment we said many things with our eyes, but we were speaking a different language.  He was saying “Don’t tell, don’t tell, don’t tell” and I was saying “I’m telling, I’m telling, I’m telling.”

I did not go to an adult.  I thought, I need to tell her.  She needs to know who this is, that he is not who she thinks he is.  And she will thank me for letting her know before he did something to someone else, or to her, before he did something else inappropriate – or worse. In the mind of a 13 year old who goes to church every Sunday, there is always an “or worse”.

I went to another friend first, one of the 5.  Oh, how she exclaimed.  She was all shocked and angry and concerned for me and all upset and devastated for our friend, and she stayed by my side for the rest of the day and was all tears and hugs and “Are you sure you’re okay”s.  And after VBS was finished for the day, she called over the rest of the 5, and they said “We’ll tell her together.  We’ll be there with you.  We’ll do it together.”  And so we did.  We all sat down together, I said her name and I said her boyfriend’s name and I said “He kissed me.  And pushed me, and touched me.  And I hate to be the one to tell you this but I know that you need to know that it happened.”  And I was all tears and sniffles and waiting for her to hug me and for all of us to leave and go to someone’s house to swim or watch a movie or something, but she did not hug me, nor did she shed one single tear, but instead looked at me right in the face and said in the coldest tone of voice I have heard to date: “You. Are. Lying.”  And then she walked out.

I told the boyfriend that I’d told her, and that she hadn’t believed me, that he had to tell the truth.  First he was very angry, angry in a scary way, and then he laughed.  Just burst out laughing on the phone.  Then he said “She didn’t believe you?  Well then why should I tell her anything?”  And that was that.

This is how fast it happened.  This is how fast I was ousted.  One day, I was in a group of 5 best friends.  The next day, I had 4 friends that wouldn’t talk to me.  The day before the rest of them had gone home together, but not me. I wasn’t invited.  See, the girl with the boyfriend, she was the only one old enough to drive, and the others were riding with her.

Well.  After a couple of weeks of being discarded by the girls, people started to notice.  First, the youth pastor, who said that teenaged girls are fickle and that they’d “come around” if I just “prayed for them” and “forgave them, even if you have to do it over and over again every day, just keep forgiving them.”  And so I did.  I did pray.  I prayed, and I cried, and, shy as I was, I got down on my knees in front of the whole church to ask God to give me my friends back. I did this every Sunday.  Because at 13, I was not allowed to do things with many people from school. My parents wanted me to do things with “church people” because that was “a better crowd”.  So basically, these girls were all I had.  They were all I had, and no matter how badly they hurt me, I wanted them back.

After this had gone on for a couple more weeks, I’d still made no progress in getting my friends back.  I’d even asked them to forgive me, as if that made any sense in the world.  It was then that a boy in the youth group told me that I was being “tested” by God, and that it would all be over soon. Once again learned in the ways of God, I prayed some more.  I prayed “Please God, just stop testing me. I can’t take any more of it.” I could go on and on about the damage that these girls did to me.  I could talk about hypocrisy. I could tell story after story about what these girls did to me (made fun of me, to my face – at a church Christmas dinner!!) but that could go on forever and after all, I was only being “tested”, right?  Except that this particular “test” lasted for two years.

Read it again. For two years.

For two years there was a Fab Four in the youth group of New Life Assembly in North Shore.  For two years I was the remaining 5th girl.  For two years 4 girls, each of whom I’d called my “best friend”, ignored me, berated me, made me feel worthless.  For two years my parents made me get up every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night and go to church to worship God in the company of those who despised me.  And if you think that’s why I left the church, you’re wrong.

After two years, at a “revival” in Pensacola, Florida, the girl who’d had the boyfriend who’d had his way with my mouth, crotch, and left breast that fateful afternoon turned around in the middle of a church service crying, and hugged me.  The other 3 girls looked on in confusion – and then, I believe, in relief.  Oh, good, their eyes seemed to say.  It’s finally over.  I know it was many years ago but I’m telling you right now I can still see their eyes, looking on as I stood held in an embrace that confounded me so much I couldn’t react. In the midst of her sobbing she said something that truly shocked me, she asked “Can you forgive me?”  And I told her the honest truth, I said “I forgave you two years ago”, and we both cried and cried and cried.

I could say that everything was better from that moment on, but then I’d be lying.  After that embrace, things did get a little better, but the 5 of us were still on rocky ground.  One came around quicker than the other, thus injuring her relationship with the others in an effort to rekindle her friendship with me, and so on.  Other than the preceding events, our lives began to resemble probably what most teenagers lives are like.

The older I got, the less my parents pushed me to go to church, and the more infrequent my visits became.   When my family left Houston I stopped going at all.  I spent time with people who may or may not have attended church, but who treated me much better than the people from my church ever did.  And on Sunday mornings, I slept in.  I slept in, living by myself in my family’s house that was not-yet-sold, and I learned how satisfying it is to wake up early on a Sunday morning and just have a cup of coffee or two outside, sitting by the pool, not thinking about what to wear to church but instead enjoying the rare moments of peace that God had given me.

The years following my departure were filled with news of scandal.  Oh this one is saying this, that one is claiming that, this one is a lesbian, oh and those two are lesbians too, this one had an abortion, this one went crazy, this one got divorced, and on, and on, and on… remember this is news about a church.  Right?  Right.

I did go back to the church, a few times.  The other youth group members, all of us adults then, might have said hello.  They’d see me, hesitate, walk over slowly, and with that thin, tight-lipped smile they’d say “Oh HI.  How ARE you?  What have YOU been up to?” And then they’d stare right past me with that half-smile, half-grimace on their face as I gave some cursory answer and then everyone would give a little uncomfortable wave or nod and we’d all go our separate ways, and I knew, I knew every time I tried to go back… I knew I wasn’t welcome there anymore, that I never would be again.  And though I may have been older and wiser than when I left, I still couldn’t figure out why.

When I moved here to southeast Texas, my parents were immediately breathing down my neck about joining their church.  And I thought about it, I really did.  I thought, well of course it will be different here.  I’m older now, it won’t be like the youth group at New Life.  Plus this is Silsbee, Texas.  Small town, nice people, right?  But then I met one of the ladies from the church, and I heard her incessantly bad-mouth the other people in the church, and I watched her make my friend cry over and over by telling her that everything in her life was wrong, and that God was disappointed in her, oh yes He was, she knew because she has the “Spirit of Discernment” bestowed upon her, a heavenly gift that God gave her for just exaclty this purpose.  That same woman accused my parents of being bad friends and – get this – bad Christians, because my parents got a set of pots and pans for a family who very much needed them and had helped my dad frame out a door after hurricane Rita, and hadn’t gotten she and her husband a gift at all after they’d helped my dad with the new front porch railing.  This woman who has plenty of money and doesn’t want for anything actually said that my parents were bad Christians.  Because they gave pots and pans to a needy family.  And I said No, nope sorry, not for me.

Once, right after Marvin Zindler died, my friend Melissa and I were talking about how long he’d been on the news in Houston and I said “It seems like people in Beaumont don’t really know what it means to have someone like Marvin Zindler, there isn’t anyone in the news here that’s been around for that long” and the same woman came up to me and leaned into my face and spat out her words as she said “Why don’t you just go back where you came from if it’s so much better there.”  And I said, Well.  I’m certainly glad I don’t attend church with this woman.

I liked the associate pastor.  He talked to me once, I mean talked to me like I was a real person, not a recruit.  And I appreciated that and I always meant to write him a letter of thanks but I never did.

So, that’s how I left the church.  More or less.  And after leaving, after deciding that all these individual religions, with their different interpretations and different rules and different criticisms of all the other religions, just wasn’t for me, well, then I decided I was agnostic. Yes, I understand the term fellowship.  But was there a specification that this fellowship was required to have present stained-glass windows, funny smelling carpet, and straight-backed pews? I have beliefs, but they are not spoon-fed to me by a man in a pulpit.  I am accountable, but not to the gossip and prying eyes of a congregation.  I have values, I have morals.  But no one has to tell me what they are.  I can read.  I can interpret.  And you know what?  I can see God in the trees, in the breeze, in a dog that just missed being hit by a big truck, in that orange-pink light of sunset, in the way the grass tickles my toes, in the nurses at Baptist Hospital who made sure I wasn’t nervous about my surgery, in my boss who lets me take off work for dog-related emergencies, in how really totally wonderful a cold piece of Key Lime pie tastes, in the laughter of my friends, in the warm little paws of my dog Buster, in the way it takes an extra day for a credit card payment to clear when I’ve overdrawn my checking account and I narrowly miss a whopper of a fee.  And I feel so lucky to be agnostic, to be able to say it and know that whether or not YOU know the definition of it, I do.  I feel so fortunate that I don’t have to go out and buy new clothes and wake up early and fix my hair and put on makeup to go to church, where the same God who saw me wake up, yawn, and scratch my butt is waiting.  And I’m glad that no one can tell me that I have to be inside a church to find Him.