It's been a subtle thing, a slow shift. My support for the full spiritual leadership of women remains what it always was, as does my inclination to include queer folk in the life of the church without bias or reservation. I'm completely convicted that our response to the rising tide of climate change will require significant human adaptation, and that faith is a part of that. I'm not fundamentalist, not by the longest of shots. None of that has changed.
And yet I feel like a fish out of water.
It's more a question of mutating language and culture, I think. The church has changed. I haven't. I just don't frame the world in the same way. I don't think about gender or race or justice in the same way. I don't articulate my faith in the same way. I am and have always been more liberal/anarcholibertarian than left-progressive. I prefer action to discussion. Heck, I prefer root canals to discussion. At least root canals have a clear goal and outcome.
When I sit through meetings, or read through policy statements, I feel like a stranger in a strange land. I understand the language, sure. But I so often feel like a conservative, where before I'd never have considered myself even faintly in that camp. Well, I feel conservative until I listen to the fever-dream falseness peddled by the far right, and then I'm aware of the awkwardly liminal space I inhabit.
The question, though, is whether or not this is a bad thing.
It doesn't have to be. Why must our engagement with those who view the world differently axiomatically be defined in terms of hostility?
When spending time in a different land, among a different people, why wouldn't you appreciate what you can about them? Like, for the good hearted and faithful progs with whom I am acquainted, their openness to the new things God is doing, their welcome of the stranger, their earnest kindness to those on the margins, their commitment to undoing injustices.
Or, for the good hearted conservatives with whom I am acquainted, their honoring of the witness of those who have come before, their ability to be contented with what is, their holding on to the good, their caution about fixing that which ain't broke.
Like Aesop's Bat, I don't fully inhabit either side in the culture war. But unlike Aesop's Bat, I'm not willing to pretend I'm allied with whichever side is ascendant. Or loudest. Or most aggressive.
My primary allegiances lie elsewhere, after all.
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