Beyond the Surface

I grew up in the Bible belt… I lived in North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida until the age of 23. I was raised until the age of 15 in a devoutly Christian home. I did the church thing ‘religiously’ for 15 years. I did Baptist, Presbaterian and Assembly of God. It never fit me.

I became a witch at 15 entirely on my own. I didn’t know any witches at the time so it wasn’t peer pressure. I discovered witchcraft in an educational encyclopedia in my school library - not by reading a book meant to teach about the ins and outs of witchcraft. I was scared of witchcraft because I was always taught that it was bad and evil. At the same time, it didn’t seem really all that bad… in fact, it made far more sense than Christianity. The rest is history.

I tried a youth group once when I was 17. During my senior year, I went to church a couple of times with a friend in my Creative Writing class. I was a witch then, not a Christian. I was concious though of needing to know that I wasn’t just running from Christianity. So I tried it. I still didn’t like it.

All of this to say that I totally GET what Christianity is. It just isn’t for me.

Many of the people who I hung out with regularly during high school and during various party phases have since, ‘found God’…. meaning the Christian flavor of God. As in Jesus, the holy spirit… and hairy thunderer in the sky. I congratulate them. As much as I looked for him in the Christian church, I never found him. He must have been hiding in one of the sunday school rooms with the lights off. I’m scared of the dark and would have avoided looking there entirely. ALthough one of my first sexual experiences was with a girl in a sunday school room with the lights off…. I truely digress.

I support their decisions. The coming diatribe is not meant to call out people who truely found a sense of divinity and spirituality through Christianity and truely changed their lives because they wanted to and felt lead to. True spirituality changes you. She changes everything she touches - whether her name is Jesus, Allah or Diana.

But what REALLY fucking irks me is when people I have known for YEARS (I KNOW what their personality is like and I KNOW what they like and what they don’t like and I have a fairly good idea of what their issues are) ‘find Jesus’ and then stop doing the things they enjoy JUST because the church tells them it is wrong. It’s one thing to change your life bit by bit because this thing no longer fits the way you believe or this other thing is no longer compatible with the lifestyle you want to have - it’s another thing to suddenly stop drinking and cursing because your church tells you it’s the wrong thing to do. You can be a Christian and stop drinking because you no longer feel that what it does to you is in line with what you think you should be. I’m totally down with that. I think it’s a load of SHIT to say though that the only reason you’re not doing it anymore is because the church would look down on it. That isn’t spirituality. That’s peer pressure.