academaChristian.

Non-Christians can get away with saying some outrageous stuff. No lie. They can say stuff about Christians that, if the same were said to them, would result in shouts of bigotry and narrow-mindedness. It's the craziest thing.

I say this as two people. Firstly, as a person who has been the non-Christian getting away with verbal murder, and secondly, as a Christian invested in a community about which much negative is said.

I kick it with some people who have some things to say about faith, and law. It's true. On the extreme end, I know people who don't believe in birth control, and would gladly vote against gay rights, and believe the earth to be only 6000 years old. On what is considered the extreme end, almost everyone I've met through the church would affirm that non-believers will go to hell. These are people who believe in protecting sexual purity, and around whom I abstain from F-bombage.

Basically, I hang with the conservatives who make the liberals nervous. The people who my scientific papers refer to as "closed-minded literalists." The very group of people about whom I had made a snotty career of saying horrendous things. These are the they I had claimed were messing up the faith, stopping the love.

So, I get it. I've been there. Sometimes, I am there. At times, it is all I can do not to fire off a post, or a tweet, or a FB status about how some or other evangelist did something crazy dumb. I get it! But...

How did I think I ever had a right to blindly fire against these people? I kept asking myself that yesterday during this discussion with a fellow grad student. She was telling me about the closed-mindedness of the Christians she'd met down here, and their thoughtless literal beliefs. About how judgmental they'd been, and how she could just "feel" them judging her. And before I could recommend a good treatment for paranoia, I remembered who I'd been.

It was an odd moment of confusion. On the one hand, I want to push her. I want to ask, "Give me examples. Don't speak in generalities. I know those generalities, and I promise you I can go ten rounds, so give me examples. Tell me what people have actually done to you." I don't want to do this out of offense or hurt--I'm not offended or hurt, at least not in my heart--I want to do this out of truth. I want to get to the bottom of this supposed difference between us. I want logic. I want facts.

And yet, I also want to love her. Maybe loving her is pushing her to be intellectually thorough? To have to drop the fake rationality that I myself harbored for so long? To ask herself, why do I perceive judgmentalism where at least some of the time there is none? Why do I care if this girl thinks I'm going to spend an eternity separated from a God I don't believe in?

I stood there, wondering--when should I speak my mind? When should I very carefully, very smartly attempt to ask for evidence, and reason in defense of beliefs she assumes I share with her? When do I blow my "cover" as not only a Christian-sympathizer, but a Christian?

Interestingly, at the end of the conversation, I casually dropped something about "my church," and, at the risk of claiming the same types of "feelings" I'm so distrustful of in her comments, there was definitely a moment. I could see it register in her eyes that she had been talking very candidly, and very negatively, to a person who might in fact fall in the category of people she'd slammed. There were questions.

How will they be answered? When?