Coming Out of the Religion Closet

COMING OUT OF THE RELIGION CLOSET

Rev. Kit Ketcham

Since I retired and have had time to think about more than the next deadline I faced as a minister, and since my religious journey over time has been a concern to my family members, and since I have come to see how deeply embedded in me is my Christian upbringing, I have done some important thinking about my religious life and how the changes in me have come about.  Let me set the scene a bit.

From birth through high school, ages 0-17, I was pretty much your Baptist preacher’s kid and youth.  My baptism at age 6 was meaningful to me and as I grew up, I was pretty sure I wanted to have a career serving God as I understood God at the time.

My college years at Linfield were revelatory, as I met other Christians from a diversity of backgrounds.  I loved my two required religion classes:  Life of Jesus and Basic Christian Thought.  Both gave me understandings of Jesus’ teachings and of the history of Christianity that I had not come across in Sunday School.

The summer after graduation, 1963, I served as a staff member at the American Baptist Assembly grounds in Green Lake, WI, where I encountered Christian preachers and leaders with an even broader understanding of Christianity and a Christian’s mission in the world.  Intellectual scholars like Harvey Cox and Howard Moody were among them, preaching ideas that I had not ever heard from the preachers of my youth, powerful speakers whose message was inspiring and focused on social justice and civil rights.

When I returned to Goldendale, where my family now lived, I got a job in the local WA Dept of Public Assistance, serving Old Age and Family recipients of welfare.  It was my first real glimpse of poverty.

It was hard living in Goldendale under my parents’ roof and being the preacher’s daughter again, but I had no real choice.  Being back in my father’s church and trying to respect his beliefs while hanging onto my own expanded consciousness and knowledge of a bigger Christian message than the one of supernatural events and discomfort with such issues as evolution.

But that winter I learned of a class being taught at the First Baptist church of Yakima and I braved Satus Pass at the snowiest time of year, several weeks in a row to attend the class for about 6 weeks, wanting to be among fellow seekers for something beyond conservative Christian belief.

At the very last class, I met a young man who was a minister with the American Baptists working with juvenile offenders in outdoors settings, but he also knew about job opportunities in Christian Centers across the nation.  He was charming and helpful (and cute) and helped me contact the director of the Christian Center program.  I applied and was offered a job in Denver and started in the fall of 1965.

At the Denver Christian Center, located in the inner city area of Denver, I taught a small preschool class, had after-school programs for elementary and junior high school kids, and a monthly teen canteen at night.  I was thrilled to be active in this way, working with inner city kids and their families.

The director of the DCC was the Rev. George Turner, who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr in Selma, just a couple of months before I arrived in Denver.  My co-worker Lydia Ortiz and I became fast friends.  We socialized after work, helped with the tiny Baptist congregation that met in the DCC building on Sundays, and visited families in the housing projects together.

Around Thanksgiving of that first year at the DCC, I went home to Goldendale for a visit and was invited by my dad to speak at church on Sunday.  I was eager to tell them what I was doing, how the Center worked, who we served, and at the end, I opened it up for questions.  The last question, just before the closing hymn, came from a man at the back of the sanctuary, who raised his hand and asked “how many souls have you saved for Christ?”

I was stunned.  Humanitarian aid, not evangelism, was the mission of the DCC and I tried to explain, but I don’t think I convinced him, and as I left the building that day, I said to myself, “I don’t think I’m that kind of Christian anymore, if I ever have been.”  And that question became the theme of my life for years after that day.

During the year and a half I worked there, before it became a United Way agency, Lydia and I decided to attend a Young Democrats meeting in a restaurant in downtown Denver, and it was there I met the man I came to love and marry in late 1966, a year later.

The Christian Center experiences and my marriage to Larry, who was a Unitarian, were transformative.  Moving to Denver and marrying a man from a very different faith were giant steps away from family ties and loyalties, which was very painful for my whole family and also for me.  

Moving to Denver also provided me with a much larger world than I had known before and an introduction to urban Baptist and Unitarian churches.  During my time at the DCC, I had joined the nearby Calvary Baptist church, which later disappointed me greatly by moving from the inner city to the suburbs. That seemed like a desertion of the innercity community and I was deeply bothered by their move.

The Baptists were the founders of the DCC but those Denver congregations didn’t seem very interested in helping out with our programming.  It was the Unitarian ladies’ auxiliary that provided cookies and lemonade and extra hands for my preschool kids, and this discrepancy was not lost on me:  the Unitarians were interested in social justice work; the local Baptists were not.

This was the era of the Vietnam War when churches were leery of taking political stands, no matter how justified, and Larry and I joined protesters in downtown Denver to shout slogans and oppose the war.  Again, the Unitarians were visible.  The mainline churches were not.

Another experience convinced me.  Larry and I had a chance to go through the first iteration of the Colorado Outward Bound school for teachers, another transformative experience, for sure!

As part of that six weeks course, we spent a weekend on the streets of Denver and on Sunday morning, I decided to attend church in my grubby disheveled attire.  I went to Denver’s First Baptist church, wondering what the reception would be, but I might as well have been invisible.  No eye contact, no friendly greeting, nothing.  One more disappointment from the Baptists.

So Larry and I began attending UU churches in Denver and after our son was born in 1972, we joined Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden, CO, and began to learn more about UUism.

The chief attraction for me about UUism has always been the involvement in social justice work, something that had gone missing in mainline Christianity.  I missed the stories and songs of my Christian upbringing, but I relished the intellectual content of the UU sermons I heard.  I liked the lack of emphasis on supernatural events which seemed to be the core of much of the theology of mainline churches. 
 I liked the emphasis on reason in religious thought and the acceptance of scientific evidence, particularly for the theory of evolution.

Hopping now from the 70’s to the 80’s and on into the 90’s---Larry and I were just occasional attendees of UU services until Mike was old enough to attend Sunday School and then we joined JUC.  But our marriage was bumpy at best and in 1980 we divorced.

I ended up being the one who got “custody” of the church, at least at that time, and I became much more active, singing in the choir, attending singles events, working with the social justice projects underway in this activist church.

In 1992, I was a member of the Committee on Ministry, a group which examined the various ministries of this 500 member congregation and evaluates their effectiveness, as an aid to the senior minister.  And that year, as a member of the committee, I helped to lead the Homecoming Service, which was always the 2^nd Sunday of September.

Asked to give a brief homily in the service (presumably because as a Junior high teacher and counselor who did cafeteria duty with a bullhorn, I was accustomed to speaking to herds of cats and getting them to listen to me!) I got up in the pulpit that morning, spoke about the past year, the challenges and the joys, got a few laughs, saw a few tears, and sat down again in the choir.

Our minister went to the pulpit and, into the mic and in front of all those people, he said “Kit, you missed your calling---you ought to be a minister.”

It was like a lightning bolt.  My life changed at that moment. 

Four years of seminary, plus a summer of chaplaincy internship in a trauma hospital and a yearlong internship in a Colorado UU congregation flew by and in the spring of 1999, I graduated with a Master’s of Divinity and was ordained by JUC and my internship congregation, the UU Fellowship of Boulder CO.

I wanted to relocate to the PNW where I’d grown up and applied for a fulltime position at a newly formed congregation in Portland, Wy’east UU Congregation, which was a spinoff from the large downtown Unitarian church.

At a luncheon with the board of the congregation, I was grilled on my background, how I would serve the congregation, what I would like to do as their minister, when a woman on the committee, after listening to my answer to a question, turned to me and said with glee, “I knew it, you’re a believer!”

Now, she had told me earlier that she was an affirmed atheist, so I inferred (accurately, as it turned out) that she meant I held to religious beliefs that she had discarded and was judging me, perhaps jokingly, as being on a different team, somehow.

We managed to get past that assumption on her part, but I made a personal vow that my mission as a UU minister would be to try to bridge that gap between progressive Christianity and rational humanistic but also pluralistic UUism.

It was hard.  In every congregation I have served, including PUUF, I have struggled to make the point, over and over again, that we are descendants of progressive Christianity.  Christians are not the enemy and we have nothing to be ashamed of in our long and mostly honorable history---except, perhaps, for the subtle dislike, rarely openly discussed but existing as an underground prejudice in congregational life, prejudice toward the Christian religion and its language of reverence.

To be fair, many UUs were wounded by a harsh fundamentalist theology as children and were looking for a safer religious home.  I can’t deny that and certainly understand a need to deal with that pain.  But it may need to be faced directly, instead of avoided.

My own Christian upbringing was gentle and loving and uncomplicated.  Nobody treated me badly or accused me of being a terrible sinner because I was female.  My parents had conservative beliefs and I heard many a sermon about heaven and hell, and the dangers of worldliness, like movies and dancing and card-playing.

But when I found Unitarian Universalism, which was so appealing with its courage to speak out on social issues and to get our hands dirty doing the actual work of changing the world, I just added our seven UU principles to my own understandings of Christianity, which boiled down to the teachings of Jesus and the simple statement of the prophet Micah in the Hebrew scriptures.

You may remember that Jesus, when asked for his take on the greatest commandment simply said, “You must love God with all your heart and soul and your neighbor as yourself”.  And Micah’s teaching was also simple: “What does God require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly in life.”

Both these teachings are simple; they reflect what we UUs know about the human world and how to be most effective in it.  Most of us no longer have a childlike concept of God; our studies in science and human history have taught us that whatever “God” is, it is not a being, not male or female, not even definable.  We each have our own concept of the power beyond human power, which many call God.

Like most UU congregations, PUUF has a strong and valuable strain of humanism as one of our theological sources.  It is a product of the Enlightenment of the 18^th century and the growing influence, over the centuries, of science in daily life and in our understandings.

But we can easily let the attractions of humanism sidetrack us from the beauty of a religious faith that appreciates its diverse roots and celebrates them all. And we can easily let some of the symbols and words of conservative Christianity sidetrack us from the wisdom of its prophets like Jesus and Micah.

And because some strands of the traditional Christianity we may have rejected in the past have become even more conservative, more punitive, more disconnected from scientific reality, we have allowed a scorn for Christianity generally to creep into our consciousness and create an atmosphere that can be unwelcoming to folks who walk through our doors, folk who use and love the ancient words of reverence.

I feel compelled to speak about this today because of my own journey from conservative Christianity to a religious faith that combines the teachings of Jesus and other ancient prophets with a 21^st century faith that is unafraid to challenge the oppression in the world. 

 I am a Christian Unitarian Universalist, just as some of you probably are.  Others of you are Humanist Unitarian Universalists, others Buddhist UUs or Jewish UUs.  In our faith tradition, we have Pagan UUs, Muslim UUs and birthright UUs, who are folks who were born into UUism and never left.  We are a faith of great diversity and widely varied backgrounds.

Starting next week, we will be meeting in a Presbyterian sanctuary, perhaps schmoozing with devout Christians at coffee hour and other social events.  We will doubtless join them in some of their social justice efforts.  We may listen to Pastor Bill Van Nostran preach on occasion.  We will become friends with progressive Christians and we will need to be aware of the subtle uneasiness that lies beneath the surface of our time together.

Progressive Christianity is a different breed of cat than fundamentalist Christianity.  It is a pretty close relative of ours, and the differences of the past which separated us need to be set aside in favor of the many commonalities we share, in terms of social justice work and a peaceful world.

We must not refuse to address this issue.  To be true to our seven principles and our six sources (which you can find in the first few pages of our hymnal), we must work toward understanding and accepting the fact that Christians are not dumb, not ignorant for loving the ancient stories, the language of reverence, and for feeling the presence of God in our daily lives.

As one of our spiritual ancestors, Francis David in the 16^th century, reminds us, “We need not think alike to love alike.”  I also kinda groove on Hard Rock star Alice Cooper’s statement: 

 “There’s nothing in Christianity that says I can’t be a rock star.  People have a very warped view of Christianity.  They think it’s all very precise and we never do wrong and we’re praying all day and we’re right-wing.  It has nothing to do with that.”

In closing, a little more meme wisdom: 

“In this congregation, it’s okay to be an atheist, it’s okay to be Christian, it’s okay to be Jewish, it’s okay to be pagan, it’s okay to be x, y, or z…

It’s not okay to shame other people for their beliefs, either publicly or behind their backs.”

For more perspective on UU theology and Christianity, I invite you to check out the latest UU World magazine, which you should have gotten in your mailbox this past week, for views on the teachings of Jesus and also of various activist movements that we as UUs embrace and support, created  by Christian leaders and supported by UU theology and our leadership.

Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer.

BENEDICTION:  Our worship service has ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place.  Let us go in peace, remembering that our religious faith is multi-faceted and attracts a wide diversity of religious views.  Our values are our commonality, by which we covenant to accept each other with respect and encouragement to spiritual growth and healing. May we not be afraid to hear different languages of faith and may we bless the richness of our community in all its beauty.  Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.