If there is a God, he set me up for failure in the Christian world when he deemed it suitable that I be gay. Struggling with my sexuality in the church resulted in many well-intentioned people saying awful things to me. Now, I’ve left Christian belief behind and I’m a proud member of The Satanic Temple. Unsurprisingly, the comments haven’t stopped. I get called deceived, evil, damned, and much more on a regular basis.
Continue reading “When People Tell You You’re Deceived, Damned, or Sinful”Month: August 2019
What Satanists Wish Other People Understood About Satanism
Few religious groups are as misunderstood as Satanists. While I’ve done a great deal of explaining and pontificating about my own Satanism, I haven’t featured many other Satanic voices on this blog. I thought I would reach out to a few prominent Satanists and ask them what they wish non-Satanists understood about their religion. I found their answers enlightening and lovely.
Continue reading “What Satanists Wish Other People Understood About Satanism”#Metoo and Confronting Evangelical Abuse
In this episode of Sacred Tension, environmental scientist Melissa Wilson returns to the show to tell us a harrowing story of abuse at a small Christian college in Appalachia. Instead of assuming this incident is an anomaly, or a tempest in a teacup, it is best to see it as a microcosm of the abuse and crisis sweeping all of evangelical Christian culture.
Continue reading “#Metoo and Confronting Evangelical Abuse”I Am Now An Outsider to the Christian LGBT Community I Helped Build, And That Hurts
Several days ago, an ugly battle over the resurrection of Christ exploded on theological twitter. It started when two prominent theologians started tweeting about a non-literal perspective of the resurrection, and the conversation quickly devolved into a morass of ugliness and bitterness. The details of the debate are immaterial to this post, so I won’t get into them. What stands out to me, though, is that many of the people defending the literal view of the resurrection were my fellow LGBT progressives. As I read through these tweets, and absorbed a toxic dose of twitter radiation, I had a painful realization, and I suddenly understood why my departure from credal Christian faith has hurt so much. I realized that, over the course of years, I slowly became an outsider to the very LGBT communities I helped build.
Terrible Things Evangelicals Say About Mental Illness
I recently moved to a new house, and as is often the case when big life changes arrive, my mental health collapsed. It doesn’t matter that it’s a good change – my deep reptile brain doesn’t understand the difference between positive and negative change, it just feels the disruption and responds with panic.
Continue reading “Terrible Things Evangelicals Say About Mental Illness”




