#NotAllChristians™

It’s me getting slapped by Heather Jackson circa 2006.

In my first teen journal post, there was a journal entry I included which read, “Why are there nicer non-Christian women than Christian women? Or at least it seems that way to me. If you ask me, something ain’t right.” And instead of expounding upon that, because I kind of felt like it spoke for itself, I added, “There are no notes.” In a way, it does speak for itself, as it was an observation and critique that I was making at the tender age of 15 years of old. And it was truly a question — I didn’t have the answer then. But after I posted that newsletter, I immediately started thinking about how it wasn’t as simple as it was written. And so, this is my contextual note on that journal entry. Buckle up.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I was raised in a very conservative, fundamentalist church of Christ. One of our more perverse views was that we were the only true Christians. If you weren’t a member of our particular sect, you weren’t really a Christian and you were going to hell. Keep in mind, we weren’t very big compared to other denominations and so truly “few there be that find it.” But the idea was that only we had the Truth™ and it had to be followed to the letter, or you were a fake Christian. So when I wrote about “Christian women” in my teenage journal, I was writing about a very niche group of women. And more specifically, teenage girls. I was writing about my teenage peers that were within our very closed-off group.

So what I was noticing was that teenage girls who did not meet a particular criteria to be called Christians were in fact good people. Nice people. And from my vantage point, nicer than our True Christian™ teenage girls. And that didn’t compute for me. I was raised in a bubble and taught that we were the good ones. The nice ones. The holy ones. The best ones. But if that was the case, why was I meeting nicer people outside of our little church? My bubble was bursting. I was slowly starting to realize things didn’t quite add up. As I noted with no answers at the time, “something ain’t right.”

The irony is that the non-Christians I referred to were actually Christians just of different flavors. Some Mormon, some Assembly of God, some Baptist, etc. I was slowly realizing that the people outside our little church were not all bad as I’d been led to believe. They weren’t lost people without a moral compass and incapable of human decency. And people within our little church were not all kind and generous.

Be good to each other,

Nat ✌️