Coming Out Part 2: Paradigm Shift

This is the second in a series of posts about my coming out story. See the first here. The names of individuals in these posts are changed to keep identities safe.

I was in the midst of a paradigm shift.

The underlying theme of my spiritual life has always been my sexuality. It’s hard to ignore. Coming to faith in an Evangelical Baptist church, sex was constantly a topic in youth group (along with drinking). The approach was something like this:

Never have sex. Wait till you’re married. Never drink. Wait till you’re 21.

Which basically meant the guys’ accountability group was dominated by confessions of masturbation, porn, temptation, and that make out session that got a little too heated at last weekend’s party (though, granted, these were the edgy topics; sometimes we never got past “lusting with the eyes”).

For me, that meant that the constant thing on my mind was:

God, if they only knew.

To say the least, personal purity and peity was the central theme of my theological development (my church’s theology, like most Evangelical churches, had strong pietistic influences). In fact, you could say that purity, salvation, and conservative politics were the only themes of my theological development. So, when I got to college, well, my Baptist training went into full effect: I rejected the party scene completely. No drinking. No sex. In retrospect, I must have seemed pretty boring to my dormmates.

As I started to piece together my position on my own burgeoning sense of sexuality freshman year, I too realized that my theology was not nearly robust enough to deal with the demands being placed upon it in Theology 10001 (a required course for all Notre Dame undergrads). Oddly enough, “it says it in the Bible” in support of Protestant belief is not sufficient to counter thousands of years of Catholic theological Tradition. Moreover, I began to realize that the Bible doesn’t actually say anything all that clearly. “Don’t drink, don’t have sex, don’t get abortions, don’t let gays marry” didn’t actually constitute a theological system either; so, under pressure from a loving Theology professor who “danced for Jesus” in class, I began to look for a faith I could sink my intellectual teeth into.

At the same time, I became increasingly convinced that my sexuality needed to be treated and removed.  Looking back, my resolution to remove my sexuality had a reciprocal relationship with my theology: not only was my theology shaped by that resolution, the theology I developed fed and strengthened it in return.

I turned to Calvin’s writings and slowly became more and more Reformed in my thinking. My reason for doing so,: Calvin’s strong sense of the human depravity; that we are utterly immoral, in need of a perfect savior.

You see, I hated my sexuality. To me, it just made me different. It made me something vile, something wrong, something detestable. By extension, I hated myself. To me, I was more broken than everyone else. I saw myself as a leper, an outcast, someone unworthy of any affection, of any attention, of any friendship. I seethed with hatred toward myself and my body and my ‘condition’.

It followed that I wanted to rid myself of my sexuality.

In the Reformed view, we’re all vile, wrong, and detestable until we’re made clean by God. The utter depravity of man is a major part of Calvin’s theological understanding: we’re helpless to help ourselves out of our misery and need God’s grace to intervene on our behalf. In fact, it’s so major for the Reformed understanding of Christianity that I was encouraged regularly by Reformed preachers, both at my church and by podcast, to understand myself as depraved in order to better understand God’s grace and God’s exaltedness.

I loved it.

I didn’t want a theology that demanded that I love myself, that said God takes me as I am and loves me despite my sin. No. I wanted a theology that said I was despicable, as I knew I was, and that God would make me clean, and I would have no choice in the matter because I couldn’t do it myself.

Using that hatred, I unleashed volley after volley of psychological attacks on my sexual preference: Vile. Wrong. Destestable. Lustful. Arrogant. Bastard. Unworthy. This thing, this thing, it makes you unclean. But God, God makes you clean.

Fast forward four years to Chicago.

My homophobia was being ripped to shreds in my friendship with my out gay friend. There was nothing to hate about him. He wasn’t a Christian, I thought, but he was just a person: broken like the rest of us. And just because he was gay didn’t make him more so than anyone else. My constructs and stereotypes began to fall apart and I began to fall for him.

I feel literally torn. I find myself in a place I know all too well – caught between the call of Christ and my attraction to other men. There’s this guy who makes me nervous, nervous like I felt on my first few dates with my ex. I find myself stuck: who am I? If God is healing me, why these feelings? Am I to feel guilty? Sorrowful? Excited?

Everyday, I feel like I have to deny who I am to follow God.

But that’s what He’s asked of me.

O God, you ask too much.

Speaking with my pastor after coming out, he gave a good frame for it: the facts of my experience weren’t lining up with the worldview that I had come to develop.

The only solution, it seemed, was to abandon the worldview.

I prayed. Hard. But slowly, slowly, it seemed as if this was exactly where God was leading me: to embrace my sexuality and, well, then only God would know what would happen. Celibacy? Relationships? A life of singleness? A life with a husband and family?

I figured it was probably celibacy.

So, I identified as gay, out loud, for the first time December 12, 2010.

It was like breathing free air after years in a prison cell.

Read the next post in this series here.