Oh, stop!

I grew up in Evangelical Christianity, which I can say with all my heart is a disgusting, evil religion.

I don’t have it wrong, and the press don’t have it wrong. We have it right, and you’re trying to make excuses.

The largest group of Christians in the United States, Evangelical Christians, practice a faith that centers around the idea that almost all human beings ever born are going to hell, and only an elite group of believers who does exactly the right things with respect to belief in Jesus Christ are going to be spared that eternal agony.

You can say that’s about love if you want, but I’m going to say right now it’s evil and horrifying. It’s a fucked up belief system that inevitably results in fucked up judgmentalism and severe mistreatment of community members who won’t get with the program. Because I wouldn’t get with the program as a teenager and young adult, I was treated like shit by mainstream Christians who muttered words about love while they actively hated on me and hurt me.

That’s why I hate most Christians fiercely. Because when they talk about love, they are almost always lying.

I grow up afraid to go to bed at night. The Evangelical Christian God who condemns almost all of his creation to eternal flames terrified me.

I wasn’t terrified because I had my ideas about the religion wrong, but because I had them right. I wasn’t a stupid child. I believed what I was taught in my mainstream Evangelical church, which is not some fundamentalist exception. I’m talking about your everyday Baptist Church on the corner. I’m talking about the kind of church most Christians in the United States attend, according to Pew and PRRI.

You can try to switch it up and call that horror show love if you want. But it’s not, no matter how many nice loving words Christians mutter as they think about how everybody but them is going to hell.

I hate Christianity in general, with a few small exceptions, because I have it right. And I hate it even more because lying Christians like you try to cover up the truth and tell me I’m wrong.

I’m not wrong, you are. What you call love is hate, and fewer and fewer of us are confused about that. Get back to me when you figure out what love really means. I don’t suppose you will, because I know know very few Christians who ever have.

In the meantime rest assured that Americans are fleeing the pews because we have you figured out. And when you tell us we’re wrong, we flee all the faster, because we are not stupid.