Memories: Carman and God's Army

I have been off the radar for the past couple of days (and will continue to be for a bit more) due to the end of the academic quarter.  I have been finalizing papers and preparing for an exam that I am most certainly not looking forward to.

Whenever I need a distraction from studying I browse the Internet looking for things that I find nostalgic.  As I was working on a paper for my Evangelical Religion, Culture, and Media in the United States class, I started thinking about the very first Christian concert I went to.  I was around 8 or 9 years old and my mom and I went to the Selland Arena in Fresno, California on a bus with our church to see....CARMAN!  I was the happiest little boy ever!  I remember standing there with my hands raised and eyes fixed upwards towards heaven during the entire concert.

As I look back now, Carman was a very interesting person.  My favorite song was "God's Got An Army."  It's strange how there is so much reference to violence and fighting (even if it is figurative) in contemporary Christian music, even though Christ teaches us to turn the other cheek.

Childhood Brainwashing?

Over the past couple of months I've been doing as much as I can to raise opposition to Proposition 8 in California.  That has included volunteering at the phone bank for "No On 8" and just reaching out to friends and family to spread the word.  But for every bulletin I post on Myspace about Prop 8, I am met with resistance...by a thirteen-year-old.

My thirteen-year-old cousin has really enjoyed challenging me on my beliefs, interpretations, and opinions on politics.  However, he shares information with me that I've heard before, because I used to be in the same place he was at his age.  But he disregards that and chooses to put down my marriage and call me a sinner.  This is the last message I received from him...

VINCE AT LEAST 75% OF PASTORS AND CHURCHES THINK GAY MARRIAGE IS WRONG AND IT IS. GUESS WHAT I JUST TURNED SOME ONE WHO WAS GAY INTO A STRAIGHT MAN HE WAS MY NEIGHBOR, I TOOK HIM TO CHURCH AND HE FEELS WRONG THAT HES GAY SO I CHANGED HIM AND I SHOWED HIM THE PAPER I MADE THAT I SENT TO YOU. I'M PRAYING FOR YOU AND HIM. I THINK GOD IS USING ME TO CHANGE GAYS. I ALREADY CHANGED ONE AND I CAN CHANGE 2 MORE.

I was left speechless.  There are so many things wrong with this message.  Where does a thirteen-year-old get the idea that God has chosen them to "change the gays?"  Not to mention that he thinks he's been successful in converting at least one person and has the power to change more.  I politely responded that I tried reparative therapies and they don't work and that using guilt to push someone back into the closet is not the same thing as converting them to heterosexuality.  But what are church leaders teaching young people today?

It is not okay for a junior high student to believe that God has given him superpowers to make people straight--it's not okay for anyone to believe that.  Granted, when I was that age, I believed that homosexuality was wrong and I would voice that, but I never thought I could change gay people; but I also never thought it was fixable, I just thought they were out of luck and were destined for hell.

It is disturbing that there are church leaders that would be very proud of this young man's efforts.  Churches are using dangerous indoctrinating messages to turn children into mini-reparative therapists.  That is a scary abuse of religion.

Response to TheCall

As I was walking about the campus of San Diego State University, I saw loads of posters that caught my attention.  They were for TheCall California.  I was intrigued so I went home to check out their website.  

Personally, I'm intimidated a bit by crusades and such, all goes back to my first encounter with Promise Keeper conventions.  But my goodness, this is a crusade to "save the homosexuals" on a very large scale.  I am sure that many organizations will be responding to this very large event in the area.  I am in the process of networking to see if we can get a group of people that are willing to stand in vigil lines outside of the stadium.

I am not opposed to prayer, but what is being prayed for is something completely unnecessary.  This event demonstrates an abuse of religion and spiritual violence.  As a follower of Jesus Christ and his ministry, it's time to turn some tables in the temple.

This event is lead by Lou Engle, you may remember him from the movie Jesus Camp.  Engle is describing this a battle between "light and dark." He says that 

This is a time to resist mightily the spirit of peaceful coexistence and apathetic resignation in the face of this prevailing darkness.

It is messages like this, that suggest that LGBTQ individuals are less than normal.  These messages suggest that we are the root of all evil.  These messages are dangerous to the LGBTQ community.  Words lead to action.  By calling this a spiritual war between good and bad and designating the gay and lesbian community as "bad," Engle is sanctioning and condoning violence against the Queer community.  

Somehow I'll Make a Man Out of You

How many of you have heard that song from the Disney movie Mulan, "I'll Make a Man Out of You?" I feel like that song represents an interesting part of my ex-gay experience. I've been visiting San Diego State University for the past two weeks (my husband is a student here) and they've been having Greek Week, which is a time for students to find out about the fraternities and sororities on campus and then perhaps rush for them. There was one fraternity that really caught my eye, Alpha Gamma Omega, SDSU's only Christ-centered fraternity. So I decided to check out some of the things they do. They do: Worship Night, Wakeboarding, Beach Football, Broomball, and then "Bigger or Better" (I'm not sure what that means exactly).

Their activities they have planned really got me thinking about gender roles and how they could possibly be trying to re-assert their masculinity by these activities. I was taught through my reparative therapy counseling sessions that men engage in these activities not to necessarily "butch" ourselves up, but because sports are a natural way for guys to connect with another.

Because I was told that my father did an inadequate job raising me to be a "man of God," I was assigned to male mentor in the church.

For us guys in the program they partner us up with straight male mentors, particularly men who are a little older, overweight, and balding. Well, the therapeutic theory behind this is that they believe that these guys will serve as less of temptation for us. But I have a little confession to make. I find those guys kinda hot. --Chad, Doin' Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House

My male mentor's job was to pretty much be the good Christian example that my father wasn't. We went out to play catch at the lake, we went to go see action flicks at the cinema, and like every good Christian "dad" he took me to a Promise Keepers convention where I was supposed to learn how to become a "man of integrity." From my mentor I was supposed to receive constant reaffirmation for the good things I did that were representative of an authentic "man of God."

However, through my attempts to "reconnect with my masculinity" I ironically began to feel like less of a man through the activities that I was doing. I felt like masculinity was being defined for me. I always knew that I was a feminine guy. I had heard that since I was a small boy and I had learned to accept it. But my male mentor didn't know how to respond to that. He had 2 sons that were older than me and I'm sure he was just doing what he done with his sons when he raised them. Eventually he had starting feeling like he was doing something wrong as a leader, but then changed his mind to the belief that there was just more that was wrong with me.

So as these fraternity brothers play their beach football and tackle one another with no shirts on, I wonder if they do so because they too believe that sports are just the natural way for men to connect with one another.

I attended "Jesus Camp"

"Jesus Camp" is an intensely great movie to watch. This isn't going to be a movie review, because I couldn't share half of what I felt watching and thought while watching the movie. But I will share a little information about the movie--with a little help from Wikipedia.

Jesus Camp is a 2006 documentary directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing about a Pentecostal summer camp for children who spend their summers learning and practicing their "prophetic gifts" and being taught that they can "take back American for Christ." According to the distributor, it "doesn't come with any prepackaged point of view" and tries to be "an honest and impartial depiction of one faction of the evangelical Christian community."

I've watched "Jesus Camp" many times! I sort of just can't get enough of it. Because every time I watch it I walk away with something new. Last night, as I was watching I caught myself saying the "Pledge to the Christian Flag" and the "Pledge to the Bible" with the children, Vince told me that I do that every time I watch it--I was unaware of this. But it made me remember what it was like for me to be a part of a pentecostal setting.

Although my mother's side of the family is really Catholic (and I am an active Catholic) my father's family is very much into the Assemblies of God (AG) faith. Throughout my childhood I was very involved in the AG church. Which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing. I was a committed member of our church's Royal Rangers outpost--which is like an AG version of Boy Scouts, I was in this Bible Quiz Challenge team, I was in choir (which is where I learned how to sing like no other), and I was on the drama team.

At a young age, I was taught that there were two types of people: those who loved Jesus and those who didn't. Those who didn't would go straight to hell and those who loved Jesus should actively show it. I did.

There is one scene in the beginning of the movie that brings me to tears. It is when the children's minister is preaching and then all the children begin to speak in tongues and "fall in the Spirit." I am brought to tears because it reminds me of a time when I was 10 years old. We had this amazing speaker at our church who worked primarily with youth. He did a 4 consecutive day series of just offering God's word and letting the Spirit pour out. Every night was filled with teenagers and children speaking in tongues and falling in the Spirit. On the third night, I spoke in tongues for my first time and "fell in the Spirit." It was an amazing feeling as I laid there on the ground with words coming out of my mouth that I couldn't understand. I think back now and I think that at age 10 I didn't know what was going on--not to say that the experience wasn't genuine and real, but I'm sure I didn't understand why I was speaking in tongues or why I was "falling in the Spirit."

The next night a young woman was exorcised at the altar. It was the first exorcism I had ever scene. I was horrified at age 10 at what I saw. It was like nothing I had seen before. Little did I know that 8 years later I would be getting an exorcism...at the same church, by the same pastor.