If I have spelled this wrong in the title, at least know upfront how on brand that is for the story I’m about to share with you!

I’ll state something really nice first: my view of God is that he is so big and beautiful that if someone I don’t know wanted to hear if God loves them, I’d have to throw John 3:16 at them as ultimate proof that God accepts you regardless of when you come to Him or how or even what that means!

Conservative theology often misses that tolerating a viewpoint other than yours isn’t enough. The viewpoint that because I don’t actively fight against you I am not harmful is not accurate. Often the very reason systemic prejudice or discrimination exists is due to not accepting that complacency on human rights is the same as accepting their denial.

I am Christian. But I was taught that God works in ways I won’t understand. That never prevented me from creating friendships and celebrating people’s successes, no matter their biblical view.

If God works in ways we don’t understand, isn’t it then our job to accept that it’s better to celebrate other people’s joys over their sorrows being ignored all the same?

Earlier in my young adulthood journey, I met a guy named Scott and he ended up being the most abusive person in the world. He was a raging alcoholic and violent and used a lot of my compassion (especially towards stories that hurt others but maybe I didn’t understand) and allowance of God to be God beyond my comprehension as this main point for why I deserved his consistent violence. He would say that my lack of obedience to tradition made me not only a bad Christian, but also one who deserved to be beat for having a heart of compassion.

He would site two main issues underneath these and they would later get distorted as ammunition against me by church leaders, who would try to ask him for an explanation and not track how manipulative he was being.

First. He would say my sexual assault was my fault and my trauma from it deserved to be met with anger and frustration because it made me unworthy of being loved.

In college I experienced a guy take me on a date, harm me, follow me home/to my dorm, and call me apologizing about how I didn’t deserve it. It was super weird and I often don’t know how to properly explain why I didn’t report him.

The answer has never been clearer: I had blamed myself for how this now made me “unclean” or “impure,” as my virginity – often cited as a gift reserved for a spouse to share taking away with you (more on how my view of sexual relations has changed in a minute) – had been stripped from me without my consent.

For a long time, I was so ashamed.

I cried in my dorm for weeks, couldn’t sleep very well, kind of passed my classes that semester, and eventually was told my reaction was severe enough that I should go inpatient. I did and basically had my mom fight to help me leave in under a week, as being taken away from what I knew was way more distressing than my actual feelings.

When I was finally able to open up about all of this to a therapist, I discovered that a lot of shame was in that my main way of coping may have solved the emotional strife but created a new shame by proxy.

Coping with having a moment of promised extreme pleasure and connection taken from me left me to wrestle with how to resolve that. I turned to hooking up with strangers and seeing if it was me who didn’t deserve love or if being with someone who used sex solely as pleasure was beyond my limits. A lot of partners later, I stopped and concluded that I did enjoy intimacy but had regained enough power back to not need to prove it to myself that way anymore.

Although it solved the emotions and the brokenness over being powerless, it became an issue.

Most guys are decent enough to respect that who I was before I met them is a long enough story to warrant hearing out before judging my behavior against their experiences. Scott heard I wasn’t offended by people having premarital sex. He didn’t consider that holding someone accountable against his morals for how she overcame trauma is incredibly mean and bad. He would use all this as a reason to choke, beat, and rape me all while getting blind drunk because he hated my past and present.

This would be complained about as me liking the queer community and supporting them.

I have been a very big queer rights supporter ever since the queer community took me in and showed me that how I coped with my pain was not enough to devalue me, and never would be.

They preached the message of my God.

The message that you are allowed to make mistakes and still expect love that you are always deserving of is one that was aligned with my view of God. To be in God’s image is to accept how powerfully big God truly can be.

Scott would use my compassion toward the “least of them” in the Bible as ammunition that I was preaching a false gospel. People who knew me only as Scott’s girlfriend/fiancée never would ask why I said I was “queer” and instead would go with his word that it was me not being a good Christian.

I like how the queer community supported me (and continues to still) and wanted to get to know how I could help them.

That meant identifying with them.

Jesus would talk to the poor and sick and needy and the lepers and see what he could do for them; how God could be more present to them. I don’t always know what he then did to enact change. I do know that hearing someone’s story is ultimately more powerful than an ability to help. But it means hearing someone’s story without placing your values or ideas into them.

A God who doesn’t respect my past sounds impractical. So why are so many Christians claiming to act in the image of God but then judge people for things they don’t have lived experience of going through?

Jesus, to me, would be the person today who is going out there and making the unknown stories heard and valued by people previously ignoring them. He might be like a politician or a teacher or a writer or a documentarian, all of whom strive to make the world better in a different way.

To not see God in me is to deny yourself the right to claim you can judge my relationship with Christ or how obedient I am being to Him.

God is big enough that I trust someone in Christ is making choices they find to honor God. If I don’t like what they’re doing but see that it’s harmless, I’m more than happy to leave it alone because I trust that God is big enough to solve even the small things I can’t. If someone has a different interpretation of a valance issue that is more about who deserves the gospel, I can understand that it’s not necessarily up to me to help them see that limiting the gospel and it’s redemption to the world is to say you have limited God. It’s not an issue of religion at that point. It’s an issue of common people deciding that God is defined by their human limits, and even the historical ones.

For a church to have accepted that Scott was using my love for others as a weapon is for them to say that they would have sided with the Pharisees.

For us to be true martyrs of the faith, it means going up against big systems of oppression that are more likely to play us than change. I unfortunately (our luckily if you follow my choices) am bold enough and privileged enough to stand up every time and fight for change!

I may make a rant/blog at some point about why Biblically based counseling isn’t helpful for most people, but I think I at least laid the foundation to explain how my ex used religion as a way to aggressively fight my love for God. I don’t like that he was claiming to know my faith better than me.

I don’t like that he got people to agree.

Second. He would often state that as someone in addictions ministry, holding all stories as valuable was only going to lead them down bad theology.

I could attack this claim in so many ways.

Firstly, it’s a ministry. That means that we accept people at every faith stage. It also is likely that those people who walk in are really scared.

Secondly, they are admitting that they have an addictions problem, in some fashion, by showing up and being willing to listen. To shame them further for their addiction would be so removed from the heart of Jesus I don’t even know where to begin that stance.

But there’s another bigger point.

He was an alcoholic (and might still be) and he was super abusive during and after and all around in his interactions with me. I was so passionate about not devaluing others’ stories that one pastor assumed I was condoning the abuse rather than so caught up in it I didn’t even notice.

The irony of fighting for addictions to change while suffering at the helm of an addict is apparent.

But also I can’t control that he was abusive and also an addict. We don’t control who we find or who finds us and manages to get into enough of a broken spot to control us. He didn’t like that I was willing to accept my past and then made myself into someone pretty fucking cool.

You either get to grow from your hardships or become bitter. Growth may just mean accepting it wasn’t your fault and never could have been. It may be something way more extreme.

Conclusion.

What was the reason for this post?

I went to a school that often spouted that they were a professional counseling program. They very much were actually a Bible college that offered counseling skills coursework that qualified the students to then train professionally. It wasn’t a professional counseling program.

They said “Christian Counseling”.

This apparently means that you can get a glorified MDiv that leads to potential LPC licensure in most of the US. But that’s not counseling. I have explained very clearly above how the viewpoints of my harmful churches prolonged my abuse and disallowed me the chance to escape.

The school ascribes to those viewpoints.

You have to take theology sequences where you are forced to hold your tongue when asked about the injustices of the world. If you play their game without their permission then they fail you for having a worldview where God isn’t bound to a human definition of Him.

I may have built myself a ditch in taking the theology course from the department head of the theology program. But also it was perfect!

I immediately learned that the expectation of the average student was to blindly accept the school’s limited view of God’s authority.

There was this discussion about common criticisms and our takes on them. I pulled up and posted to a discussion board a biblical publisher’s critique explaining that Sodom and Gammorah more recently has been understood as a call out against bad hospitality and the behaviors toward the angels. I expressed that ignoring this critique is furthering the division in the church.

Needless to say, the professor did not accept that view and then proceeded to grade me much harsher and lower on all my theological papers.

I’m not so mad that he did that as I am from knowing that the school supported that. They would tell me that all I needed to do was get a 4.0 in the next two semesters. I had a solid 2.5 (about) from a bad theology sequence mixed in with counseling classes I did well in.

For them to hold their ground that I would be fine and able to get a 4.0 after seeing that I couldn’t pretend for a whole class not to stir the pot and potentially anger a professor into trying to fail me out? It’s irresponsible. It’s dumb and not cool.

I’m bold and brash and say my mind.

I’m a proud Italian Jewish queer af Christian who loves God enough to make herself look bad in standing up for others. It’s what it means to me to act in the image of God.

And if I’m being honest?

I think Jesus would much rather me bring in a ragtag team of misfits into heaven who can at least love his creations over me bringing in a bunch of stuffy Pharisee sympathizers who think the laws and Bible are too big for God to ever change our understanding of.

My Jesus does things and loves people that I can’t.

I actually am proud of that.

XOXO,

Dorothy B