Religious guilt. More and more I'm reading news articles and seeing stories about how people's lives have been flipped on their head due to self imposed quasi-religious morality. It's really starting to become a wide spread tragedy.
Ten minutes ago I read an article about a woman who was a virgin until her honeymoon but because she had worked so hard at not "being bad" and having sex or sexual thoughts that for the next two years she hated having sex with her husband. Something that she should have found incredible enjoyment in was agonizing and full of guilt and shame.
Let me be clear: I am not making any sort of judgement call on virginity or the lack thereof. I am hardly qualified to pass judgement on such things. This woman's story is just a single example of how Americanized Extreme Evangelicalism and "religiousness" is really screwing up people's lives.
Personally I have spent my whole life trying to "be good." I've done the right things, said "yes ma'am", and minded the speed limit. It hasn't been until recently however that I've realized how much weight I've carried around. My religious, moral or social obligations have made me absolutely miserable. I've strived to do "what's good" and yet instead of climbing Jacob's ladder I've buried myself in self righteous guilt and obligation.
This isn't about Christianity itself, this is about the mountain of guilt Christians and other hyper religious people bury themselves and the people around them under. Enough is enough. It's not sufficent to say "it's not a religion, it's a relationship" or some other "shoot Christians say" catch phrase. That isn't the point. The point is that until we, as people, as #firstworldproblem Americans, and as a collective group (insert your church here) stop holding everyone else to our self imposed righteousness. Notice I said self imposed - not divinely ordained or democratically enacted.
Casting Crowns is a contemporary-Christian band and in one of their songs they say "Are we just shiny plastic people, under shiny plastic steeples, with walls to hide our weakness, and smiles to hide our shame? Well if the invitations open, to everyone that has been broken, maybe then we'll close the curtain on this stained glass masquerade." The problem is that we pretend to do that all the time. Gospel tracs on the Roman's road have turned into Papyrus font laden stories of "finding Jesus." We've replaced forgiveness of a scarlet letter with a tattoo covered worship leader, and we've exchanged our suit clad sidewalk prophets with graphic-t's and rectangular wire-frame glasses.
We don't allow people to be real with their lives today, we only let them confess yesterday. If their today doesn't meet our expectations we have a litany of programs, books, and seminars to help them conform by tomorrow. It has to stop. We need to stop fixing each other, and fixing ourselves, and trying for all manner of moral elitism; and we need to just breathe.
The world would be a drastically better place if we just left well enough alone. What if we allowed people to love each other because they genuinely care about each other, not because they are that month's community service project? What if we went to church, or "fellowship group" because we liked the people there and wanted to be with them, not because we liked (or thought we were expected to like) the people there and didn't want them to think less of us for not showing up?
What if we let people show their spots realizing that some spots never change, and many are never supposed to? What if we stopped declaring whatever made us the most comfortable and conformed as "absolute truth" and started to just listen to the truth of people's hearts and lives? What if we put down our venom to keep Santa out of christmas, evolution out of science class, and gay people out of government/church/ect? What would happen if we saw ourselves for who we really were, and then could take the people around us at face value?
I don't know about you but it sounds pretty good to me. I think we would find that the world, our faith, and our families were much more like we wanted them to be in the first place.