Kim Davis’s God Is Not My God

Kim Davis’s God Is Not My God

I don’t call myself a Christian anymore. I still believe in God, and I still pray, but the word troubles me—suggesting there’s common ground between myself and our country’s proudest zealots.

(Art4TheGlryOfGod by Sharon / Flickr)

One summer, when I was about seventeen, I got a tattoo of a cross on my right foot.

It’s chipped in the middle. I scratched it—hard—when it was still binding with my skin, my foot propped on the soap cubby next to my parents’ bathtub.

Religion was never thrust on me as a kid in rural Illinois, but I grew up with a personal brand of faith engineered by C.S. Lewis, whose books I devoured, and Joan of Arc, whose life I recounted in full medieval garb for a middle-school history project. I believed in God, I prayed, and I proudly called myself a Christian. I don’t remember the motivation behind the tattoo, but I do remember enduring a wistful adolescence marked by existential uncertainty. I remember wasting hours in that bathtub, ears submerged in tepid water. I remember needing something to hold on to.

I don’t call myself a Christian anymore. I still believe in God, and I still pray, but the word troubles me. Committing to that label would mean conceding there’s common ground between myself and our country’s proudest zealots. Like “ironic” and “literally,” the word “Christian” has been so thoroughly bastardized from what I grew up thinking it meant that I can no longer say that I am one, without implying that I’m also a fear-mongering, reason-abandoning, gay-bashing bigot.

Sure, the Bible is rife with passages that seem, to some, to validate those stances. I’ve spent much of my life surrounded by people who claim it does. But as society advances, so should its churches. Instead, the hypocrisy of those who claim to live by the teachings of Christ—loving your neighbor, judging no one, unburdening your fellow man and woman—but who do the exact opposite has reached crisis levels.

There’s Ammon Bundy, the Mormon who led an armed militia to take control of an Oregon wildlife sanctuary in February, because he “was asked to do this by the Lord.” There’s Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of the Christian Liberty University, who urged students at the school’s December convocation to carry concealed weapons so they could “end those Muslims before they walked in.” There’s Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, an evangelical Christian and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, who has vowed, repeatedly, to defund President Obama’s efforts to help poor nations combat climate change. There are the thirty-plus U.S. governors, all of whom identify as Christian, who tried to prevent Syrian refugees from entering their states.

These self-appointed crusaders of the Christian faith have forced me to reevaluate my beliefs. But none have obliterated the connection I have with mainstream religion as solidly as last year’s favorite hot button and Halloween costume, Kim Davis.

Davis, as you are no doubt aware, is the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed last fall for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses under “God’s authority.” These days, she refuses to slip into obscurity. Or rather, we refuse to let her. She’s been name-dropped on the campaign trail. She’s been nominated for Time magazine’s “person of the year.” She was invited, by Republican congressman Jim Jordan, to Obama’s last State of the Union address—where she told interviewers that the president’s agenda has “mashed down, literally” people of the Christian faith. Most troubling, perhaps, was the Kentucky Senate’s vote for a bill that would create two marriage licenses—one for straight couples, and one for gay couples. The House, controlled by Democrats, refused to go along.

As it happens, Davis attends Solid Rock, a Pentecostal Apostolic Christian church in Morehead, Kentucky. Apostolic Christians, or “ACs,” as I’m used to calling them, dominate the corner of the country where I was raised. I’m not a member, but many of my relatives on my father’s side are. Davis and I come from similar worlds, but have very different interpretations of it.

There are two AC churches in my tiny hometown of Fairbury, Illinois (population: 4,000), both unaffiliated with Davis’s church (neither are Pentecostal) but operating on similar principles. Like Davis, the Apostolics I grew up with dress modestly—women in floor-length dresses and skirts, men in starched slacks and short hair. And, like Davis, they believe in the infallibility of the Bible, and the vindictive, scary God at the center of it, above all else.

The influence Apostolic Christianity has on my hometown is a dark undercurrent that pulses through the entire community. I went to a public school, but we watched The Ten Commandments, the 1956 blockbuster about Moses, in a sixth-grade science lesson. In a school assembly, an abstinence teacher tore up a paper heart and explained that everyone you have sex with similarly “takes a piece of your heart.” And when many of the young women I grew up with decided to join the church as adults—trading their denim jeans for the requisite denim skirts—their contact with non-members waned and then disappeared. The rest of us are like The Leftovers, occasionally bumping into the departed at the grocery store.

My grandma is the most devout AC I’ve ever met—she doesn’t own a pair of pants, a television set, or a deck of cards because her church “elders,” an all-male group of decision makers, have deemed them “anti-God.” Nearly every decision she’s ever made, from where to vacation to whose funeral to attend, has been influenced by the church, and the outcome is almost always, “stay home and read the Bible.”

For two summers in a row, during a stretch of time when I was too young to be left alone, but too old for daycare, I spent every weekday at her house. With no TV, computer, or neighbors my age to play with, there wasn’t much to do but sprawl out on her couch and work my way through the entire Baby-sitters Club series. Most days, she would sit in the rocking chair next to me, thumbing a ribbon through her dimpled, black Bible. I was a curious kid, so I would sometimes break the silence with elementary philosophy. What is heaven? Who is God? Why are you always reading the Bible? Her responses came with an asterisk: “This is what I believe,” she would say. Or, “This is what my church believes.” Never, “This is what is true.” It was a position of power, and she could have easily molded my beliefs into a replica of her own. She could have told me the Bible was law, and I would go to hell if I didn’t scrupulously adhere to its rules. She could have told me never to wear makeup, or pants, or short hair, as someone had once told her. But she didn’t.

What my grandma did teach me was that you can be a devout, ultra-traditional member of a religion without being a dogmatist. I grew up with an armored sense of religious autonomy and never felt pigeonholed by mainstream Christianity’s interpretation of Truth. I have her to thank for that.

My beliefs are ever-evolving, but I can say this with certainty: my God is not Kim Davis’s God. My God is with me when inspiration hits after two days of staring at a blank piece of paper on my computer screen. Or when I’m having a long, loud conversation with a group of friends, hours after we should have gone to bed. My God is at weddings, and at funerals, and when I’m walking my dog.

My God doesn’t need to be feared. My God doesn’t need to be worshipped. My God doesn’t ask me to sacrifice my love for humankind on behalf of a book. If that makes Kim Davis a better Christian than me, so be it. I’m not attached to the word anyway.


Kristen Bahler is an independent journalist living in Brooklyn, New York. She writes about the intersection of business and human rights.


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