Church

"I felt like...churches came to the table with a them and us mentality, them being liberal non-Christians in the world and us being Christians. I felt...that there was this underlying hostility for homosexuals and Democrats and , well, hippie types. I cannot tell you how much I did not want liberal or gay people to be my enemies. I liked them. I cared about them, and they cared about me. ... It isn't that the Christians I had been with had bad community; they didn't, I just liked the community of the hippies because it was more forgiving, more, i don't know, healthy.
The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in a word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up....
I began to understand that my pastors and leaders were wrong, that the liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reason Christians were Christians, because they believed their philosophies were right, good, and beneficial to the world. I had been raised to believe there were monsters under the bed, but i had peeked, in a moment of bravery, and found a wonderful world, a good world, better, in fact, than the one i had known.
The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community but it was conditional love....Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And i hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my sould told me it was wrong....I wanted to love everybody....Hatred seemed to me the product of ignorance....I was tired of the Christian leaders using biblical principles to protect their power, to draw a line in the sand seperating the good army from the bad one. The truth is i had met the enemy in the woods and discovered they were not the enemy. I wondered whether any human being could be an enemy of God....
People are priceless.... All economic metaphor.
And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless....With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did....
If a person senses that you do not like them, that you do not approve of their existence, then your religion and your political ideas will all seem wrong to them. If they sense that you like them, then they are open to what you have to say....
The Bible says that if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and your heart does not love them, that you are like a person standing there smashig two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you. I think that is very beautiful and true."

from Blue like Jazz