Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A few flurries are possible. Low 31F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph..
Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A few flurries are possible. Low 31F. Winds WNW at 10 to 15 mph.
Updated: November 10, 2025 @ 6:40 pm
Christians should not force their religion on others as a way to shape an individual as it’s not an accurate representation of what Christianity is meant to be.
Christians should not force their religion on others as a way to shape an individual as it’s not an accurate representation of what Christianity is meant to be.
Growing up with Southern Baptist Christianity, I was always taught that to question authority was to question God. Discipline and corporal punishment were normalized in the church and in the household that I grew up in. Rather than honing a community of love and acceptance, the church and branch of religion I grew up in was home to fostering bigotry and hatred. Christianity as a whole is not a religion of hatred when interpreted in the way it was meant to be. As a gay woman, I have been slungshot into a world of questioning my self worth and my validity in my faith. This is what I have found.
I remember the first moment I overtly and publicly questioned my religion, it was in the ninth grade. I had only been in the public school system for two years at this point, and while I still viewed the world through Christian-colored glasses, something finally slipped through.
I was sitting in math class one day, across from an acquaintance; Timmy. I don’t remember how the conversation started but I remember we started talking about how hot Taylor Lautner was. I remember thinking how strange it was that it didn’t feel wrong to talk with a boy who found boys attractive. Later that week, Timmy came out to me as gay, I was apparently the first person he told. I was a Christian who was prepped and primed to be hateful toward any member of the LGBTQ community and yet he chose me. What was even more intriguing to me was that I didn’t care. I didn’t feel that “ick” you feel when you are confronted with sin, and that was the moment I began to question why queerness was inherently wrong through the worldview of the Christian faith.
As I left for college, I began to notice that my parents’ reach dwindled and with that, my own opinions began to surface. Because I was raised to believe that any independent thought had to be filtered through the church, my parents and the bible, I never stopped to question my own sexuality and place in the world. I am an independent thinker now, but for the longest time, Christianity held me in the submissive role I was prepped for. For the longest time, I didn’t know that there were branches of Christianity that supported love over submission.
With time and distance, I have come to realize that Southern Baptist Christianity has been used time and time again to control women, people of color, the LGBTQ community and so many other marginalized groups. Rather than allowing your religion to shape your personal worldview, oftentimes Christians will use it as a means to force that shaping onto people of other religions, ethnicities and sexualities.
This is not an accurate representation of what Christianity was meant to be. If you identify as a Christian, research the Bible and all its translations. Question the reality you have been primed to believe in and when your own beliefs are formed, stand firm in them. At the end of the day, you choose what you want to believe and you choose what you want to support. Never let someone take that power from you.
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