What do you do when the faith you’ve embraced for most of your life no longer fits the person you’ve become? When the teachings that once gave you comfort start to feel like chains? This isn’t a tidy deconstruction story—it’s messy, layered, and deeply personal. From my complicated relationship with Christianity to my identity as a Cherokee citizen and bisexual man, this post is about reclaiming truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. If you’re looking for platitudes or easy answers, you won’t find them here. But if you’ve ever felt like an outsider in the pews, you might find something familiar.
Apologies to Bertrand Russell
For most of my life, the answer to the question, “Are you a Christian?” had a pretty straightforward answer. Except for a period of about two years in the late ’80s/early ’90s, the answer was yes. Between my divorce in 1987 and sometime in 1991, God and I were on something of a break. He failed to fix some situations entirely of my own making, and I resented Him for it. As one does.
In 1991, my wife and I started attending a Southern Baptist church—the last one I had belonged to before my divorce from my first wife—and we were off to the races. I was heavily involved in church and served as a worship leader just about anywhere I attended.
In 2001, I began a two-year process that led me into the Catholic Church, along with my wife, who converted with me. That’s a story for another post, but from 2003 on, I’ve been officially Catholic. According to Church teaching, I still am—although I’ve completely walked away from it.
Once a Catholic, Always a Catholic (sorta)
There’s not really a way to become an ex-Catholic in the eyes of the Church, other than excommunication. And not only is that a total bummer—it’s a lot of work. You have to be heretical enough and influential enough to get noticed by someone high up in the Church who actually cares, and then resist efforts to resolve the issue. Even then, some very deserving people and groups have failed to secure excommunication for themselves—at times, despite their best efforts.
One cannot self-excommunicate. You used to be able to write to the parish that baptized you and be removed from the baptismal rolls, but that avenue was abolished in 2009. You can still write a letter to your parish (the one you were baptized in) stating you are no longer Catholic, but they’ll either ignore it completely, or make a note in your permanent baptismal record that you no longer wish to have a baptismal record. See? Tricky.
I have to settle for being one of millions of lapsed Catholics. At any time, I can go to Confession, basically say, “I’m sorry I was an asshole, God,” and get on His good side again. As flippant as that sounds, it’s also tempting to me. I love the Sacrament of Confession–not the part where you have to say things about yourself you don’t want to say to anybody–but the dynamic of confiding in the priest, who is literally the representation of Christ to you in that moment, and leaving forgiven.
I fell in love with the Sacraments and the liturgy, the “smells and bells,” and the saints. I still love those things. I still think of St. Francis of Assissi and St. Maximillian Kolbe (who volunteered to starve to death in place of another prisoner at Auschwitz, and was eventually injected with a lethal dose of poison, which he defiantly raised his arm to accept, too weak from hunger and dehydration to do anything else) as two of the coolest people who ever lived. An Ursuline Franiscan sister, who passed away earlier this year after a lifetime of humble, radical service, is one of the most important people in my life. I still love all the things about the Church that drew me in 24 years ago,
If there is a God, I’m not worried about what He thinks of me—and if there’s not, it doesn’t keep me up at night (although lots of other things do).
I’ve been to Mass a few times—for a funeral or to accompany someone else—and when I do, I say the words, I do the things, and I refrain from communion. And I still love the liturgy.
Why I Left
I’ll tackle some of the big answers to the “why” question in future posts. In the meantime, I’ll let Anne Rice speak for me. She rejoined the Catholic faith of her youth and, for a period of time, was very active—she even wrote about Jesus instead of vampires. This is what she posted when she left the Church in 2010, after ten years of struggling with the hypocrisies and inconsistencies she encountered:
“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”
As a Catholic, I was always an outsider. I get it.
Rice later expanded on that, saying she refused to be anti-gay and anti-birth control. In an NPR interview, she said:
“I believed for a long time that the differences, the quarrels among Christians didn’t matter a lot for the individual—that you live your life and stay out of it. But then I began to realize that it wasn’t an easy thing to do.”
Still Not a Christian
I remain committed to what Jesus stood for and talked about: integrity, radical empathy, kindness, and accepting people where they are, for who they are. His teachings dovetail with Cherokee elder teachings about compassion and community. To look at the current state of the Evangelical church (as well as the priorities of conservative Catholics, who are driving much of what’s been happening), you’d think He stood for fascism, racism, and radical cruelty to people you want to “otherize.”
I’ve agreed with some things the Church taught (all that stuff about love), and partially agreed with others. I don’t particularly like abortion, but I don’t think my personal opinion should drive policy. I’ve never thought it should be criminalized, because of the terrible things that happen to women trying to obtain them—as well as the unintended (or maybe not?) consequences of women being denied life-saving care. That includes a D&C of a fetus that is clearly dead, because doctors and hospitals are under criminal threat of prosecution, even when trying to save a woman’s life.
To the extent that I ever implied I supported the specter of what’s happened since Roe v. Wade was overturned, I sincerely repent. I’ve never been comfortable with some Christians’ obsession with seeing babies be born, coupled with their utter lack of concern about whether that baby is safe, fed, educated, and given the hope of any kind of positive future.
A few days ago, someone posted to Instagram that “Pro-Life” Christians are actually pro-birth, because they don’t care about the child’s life after that—and that’s true of most. Not all, but the vast majority are indignant about abortion and couldn’t give two shits about social programs that would feed, educate, and care for them.
The insanity of MAGA has just followed that line of thinking to its logical conclusion: rip children away from their parents, orphan them or send them to die somewhere (if they happen to be brown), and that’s fine. Let children in Gaza and in Africa starve to death (and they have, in horrific numbers, since Trump took power), and that’s no problem. As long as it doesn’t affect them or someone who looks like them, it’s not only tolerated—it’s celebrated.
Far-right activist and Trump acolyte Laura Loomer posted to social media,
“Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”
There are 65 million hispanics in the United States, not 65 million undocumented people. That’s the number of hispanics overall–citizens, people here legally, and undocumented Imigrants. Let that sink in for a second. An influential far-right activist–a white MAGA cultist, not coincidentally–said it would be groovy to kill every hispanic man, woman, and child in the country, ha ha ha. Cue the laugh track.
How many of the white people who eat this shit up–who’ve taken gleeful pictures in front of an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign, or who wear gators-dressed-as-ICE merch sold by our government, are pro-life? Here’s a hint: the answer is “all of them.”
Reclaiming My Identity
I look white, but I’m not white—which I’ve never been ashamed of or silent about. My maternal grandfather was Afro-Caribbean (with ancestral roots in West Africa, thanks to the slave trade), and people on my father’s side survived the Trail of Tears and other attempts by the U.S. government to eradicate them. Hence, my citizenship in the Cherokee Nation.
Jim Crow laws and the One Drop Rule were fully in force when I was born in 1963, and racism pretty much destroyed my mother. She was mentally ill, and physically and emotionally abusive to my brother and me. Her self-hatred–and rage toward us–grew out of the hate directed at her. So this isn’t an abstraction to me. If my parents had gone back to her hometown of Santa Fe or his of Oklahoma City, my mother, my brother, and I would all have been treated the same. So they moved to Seattle, where my mother passed–not for white, but for something other than Black. If people asked, “What are you?”, she wouldn’t answer. If they thought she had origins in India or Mexico, she let them. She never talked about it, other than to say, “You should be proud of your heritage, but don’t tell anyone about it.” When I did, I understood why she’d said it, and her response was always the same: “I told you so.”
Indian Schools and the Catholic Church
As I’ve educated myself on what happened to the Cherokee people and every other Indigenous group in North America, I’ve learned that some of the religious orders I admired most—Jesuits, Franciscans, Ursulines—were heavily involved in the atrocities perpetrated at Indian schools. Children were ripped from their families, forced to cut their hair (a dehumanizing act of violence to a Native with long hair), speak English at all times, and abandon their culture and spiritual practices. Children were beaten and starved if they didn’t comply. The schools would “Kill the Indian to save the man”—a perverse twist on the already perverse notion of loving the sinner and hating the sin. The Church has acknowleged this, but barely, and any engagement with Native communities is minimal.
Then there were the things they didn’t talk about—the molestation, rape, and deaths of children (including the babies children carried after being assaulted)—to Natives here in America, to First Nations people in Canada, and to orphans in Ireland. I’ve also spent the past 20 years witnessing the fallout of the sexual abuse of children by at least 6,000 priests–and the cynical and self-serving response by The Vatican and the American bishops. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, and Christianity is well represented in the Cherokee Nation—but for me, I can embrace being Cherokee or embrace being Catholic. I can’t do both.
Coming Out to Myself
There’s another aspect to me that complicates my relationship to the Church, and that I fully realized only recently: I’m bisexual. I’ll post about that at some point, but the quick version is that I came to this realization in my 20s when my first marriage was falling apart. I started thinking about what I wanted my life to look like going forward, and I realized I had an attraction to men. I felt I couldn’t deal with that on top of everything else going on in my life at the time—I labeled it as unimportant and filed it away so well that I all but forgot about it. That memory was always there, but on the few occasions I thought about it, I chalked it up to the stress and desperation I felt then, and continued to ignore it. I never told anyone.
A couple of months ago, that knowledge hit me out of the blue, forcefully and in an instant—which apparently isn’t that uncommon for people my age. The knowledge came first, along with the memory of having suppressed this almost 40 years ago—very much as a shock—and when I started adjusting to what this meant, the feelings followed, in much the same way. After a break due to a cardiac crisis and having a pacemaker implanted, I came back around and let this old/new part of me integrate with the rest.
Over time I’ve seen that other signs existed, moments hidden in plain sight and tucked away. For whatever reason, the gatekeeper in my subconscious decided it was time to let the sun shine onto those dark, all-but-forgotten memories.
My amazing wife loved me through it all, and it’s led to some really deep conversations about our lives and our marriage. Our relationship and communication are much better than before I came out to her. For me, there was no question of leaving or experimenting sexually. I’m old enough—and, I hope, wise enough—to know that blowing up something good in search of something else wouldn’t make me happy, and the damage and pain it would cause my family made it never even worth considering.
Being bisexual means having the capacity to be attracted, romantically and/or sexually, to people of the same gender and other genders. That’s about what I feel, and I can’t change that. However, what I do and who I love–that’s all me. “Forsaking all others” means exactly that, and nothing about my commitment to her has changed. I love my wife and I’m attracted to her, just as I have been for almost 40 years. We are still together, and we are still monogamous. For me, knowing—and refusing to hide or be ashamed of it—is enough.
I couldn’t have this knowledge make itself known to me and then just stay in the closet. I was in one kind of prison keeping this from myself for almost 40 years, and hiding it to make my life easier would just be a different kind. Given everything that’s happening to the LGBTQ+ community—especially seeing transgender people being erased the same way that the same kind of people tried to eradicate Natives—it wasn’t an option from a moral standpoint, either.
In a sane world, this would just be one fact among many about me, but we don’t live in that kind of world. I saw an Instagram video yesterday of a trans woman being screamed at, insulted, and cursed out by a Karen just for existing. She literally did nothing and hadn’t engaged with this person at all. At one point she bizarrely screamed, “I’m outing you!”, as though she wasn’t aware that other people could tell she was trans. How unhappy to you have to be to try to ruin the day–or the life–of a complete stranger who isn’t doing anything to hurt you? White MAGA cultists are not only doing things like this in public–they’re proud of it.
The repeated and outrageous lies the MAGA movement has told about trans people makes this kind of public violence–and much, much worse–acceptable. You might not like the idea of Trans people existing, but “Love your neighbor” doesn’t come with exceptions. Trans people–trans women, especially–are at a much higher risk of dying through suicide or violence. Villifying them–Donald Trump Jr. recently called the trans community “domestic terrorists,” which is nonsense, but dangerous nonsense–and it makes either of those horrific outcomes a lot more likely.
If you call yourself a Christian and support Trump, let me ask you: do you remember who Jesus hung out with—who His favorite people were? They were prostitutes and tax collectors (considered betrayers of their own people, shaking down fellow Jews for money over and above what they owed and pocketing the difference), unclean people like lepers and the woman with a bleeding disorder.
His chosen people were outcasts and misfits—not religious leaders, politicians, or collaborators with Rome. In telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, he chose someone despised by his hearers as the hero of the story. It would literally be like an undocumented person coming across someone in a MAGA hat who was badly injured, rescuing them at their own peril, and paying their medical bills.
If you’re a Trump supporter and you think you’re following Jesus—that ain’t Jesus.
If this post resonates—or challenges you—I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment below, share it with someone who needs to read it, or just sit with it for a while. And if you’ve ever wrestled with faith, identity, or belonging, you’re not alone. More stories to come.
