Part 1 of 2

I was born into an Evangelical Christian household and got “saved” at age twelve. From that point, I studied my ass off – always within the bible, biblically based works, or Strong’s Concordance – to learn more about this amazing thing I’d recently discovered. In short, I obsessed.

I always had questions, though – like how Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matt. 5:17, KJV) meant that the old testament law was invalidated. Really? ‘I came not to destroy but that means you no longer have to do X, Y, and Z’? It never made sense to me.

One of the BIG things I got from all religious exposure, in my neck of the woods at least, was Purity Culture™. At age twelve, I made the purity pledge; I had a purity ring and I would forgo large parts of normal adolescent sexual development for the next thirteen to sixteen years.

I was also raised to be a biblical literalist and believed it so much that I was genuinely a little surprised when fellow believers looked sideways at me for things. After all, if Creation in Genesis was to be literal, then shouldn’t Leviticus be literal? Shouldn’t Paul’s Letters be taken literally? The first weird thing I did was cover my hair in church (1 Cor. 11:5, 6). Of course, this got tangled up in Purity Culture™ and turned into covering my hair all the time because I was "married to God until He brought me my husband."

I became a Messianic Jew at age eighteen through my own studies. My mother was supportive since her best friend for longer than I’ve been alive was a Messianic Jew so she didn’t see any conflicts between that and her religion. The REST of my family and friends, however, were pretty damn quick to bring up the dangers of legalism – which I just saw as the natural fulfillment of the original commands. It seems to me that what I did "wrong" was to follow their teachings through to their logical ends. I read the whole bible, let it speak for itself, and took every applicable command (and some non-applicable ones) seriously. I cooked and cleaned and organized - as per my "role as a woman" in the congregations I attended. I began following biblical dietary law which, for me, mainly meant no pork or shellfish - and that wasn't too big of a sacrifice for something as important to me as religion.

It’s important to now note that, when I was eighteen, I finally realized my same-sex attractions weren’t a developmental stage but an integral part of who I was. I was distraught at the time and asked my mother to send me for conversion therapy. In her wisdom, she said no. However, in her folly, she told me all the wrong things for the rest of it. I tuned her out when she told me it was just a phase because what I was telling her was that I had finally figured out it wasn’t just a phase and I felt unheard so I stopped listening. Apparently, what she went on to tell me was about how she used to ID as bisexual and now rejects that part of her sexuality in favor of her religion. Maybe I heard more of that than I realize or maybe that’s the only course of action left for bi- and pansexuals in that situation but, for the next ten years, I would pretend to be straight.

I guess I was about twenty-five when I met my ex-fiancé. It was a shitty relationship but I'd been taught that my utmost goal in life was to be a wife and mother; I was so desperate for a husband that I could have been written by Jane Austen. In the end, I saw he wasn't going to be a good husband so I broke up with him. My life's plans were dashed against the rocks. I was now in my late twenties, unmarried and without children and that was the great unspoken sin in my society. Literally – it was preached from the pulpit and expressed in the super Christian society that we had the command from God to marry and procreate and that a woman’s primary ministry was to her family.

I was devastated. I stopped attending the myriad of church services I’d been going to, I dropped out of the youth mentoring program I was a part of, and I sought comfort in alcohol for a couple of years. Well, apparently, you’re not supposed to drink a liter of Jack Daniels every night so, eventually, my doctor informed me that my liver told me that I had to stop. I’d previously had tremendous success with the twelve-step program of spirituality designed for food addiction so I sought the sister program for alcoholism. On June 17, 2015, I got sober.

On the upside, though, my alcoholism and recovery led me to a more secular, yet still spiritual world where traditional sins, like fornication, were more tolerated because the primary focus was on not drinking or doing drugs. Like, as long as you don't drink or do drugs and try not to be too much of an asshole, you're doing pretty good. It was a good middle ground to get me out of fundamentalism.