It’s frustrating being told you’re going to hell. It’s impossible to have a relationship based on mutual respect if one party is utterly convinced that the other is morally inferior. I’ve been down that road on several occasions. The specter of hell has ended several close personal relationships. Been there, done that, got the ticket stub to prove it.
I've had friends and family who have converted to a fundamentalist Christian ideology. Part of the reason why it's so hard to get mad at them is because you realize that they genuinely believe the brimstone they're raining down on you. They really are concerned for your soul, according to their own deeply held beliefs.
Changing their hostility into acceptance would require me to change their beliefs, and since I vigorously believe that no one should insist that another person change their beliefs, I had no choice but to let the belief that I’m doomed stand. On the other hand, I also retain my right to believe what I wish to believe.
This leads us to the classical Pagan/Christian division. Although we are accepting of them, they are incapable, by their own beliefs, of returning the favor. There is no room in a fundamentalist ideology for tolerance or acceptance of differing worldviews. A Christian often feels obligated to convert their loved ones, out of a passionate insistance that refuses to value any spiritual path other than their own.
Although rather agnostic and only nominally Christian when I was a child, by the time I had discovered Wicca as a teenager, my godmother had become a fundamentalist Christian. One day, after learning of my beliefs, she sent me a postcard insisting that I was going to burn in hell unless I turned my soul over to Jesus. Her sudden and unexpected attack was a surprise, because we had always been loving and close.
I came to my own defense, and tried to point out the loving, ethical path of service that I was following. It was the first of many times I have had to try to convince a Christian that I wasn’t evil, deceived by Satan, or doomed for hell. Sadly, once I realized the impossibility of the impasse, I had to release my Godmother from her vows of spiritual guardianship, which ultimately severed my relationship with her.
It happened again with my best friend. We had been best friends since we were 8 years old, and considered each other sisters. We were inseparable through all of our growing-up years, and saw each other through some of our darkest moments. When she married, I was her Maid of Honor. We shared everything with one another.
However, following the death of her father and the birth of her first child, she turned to a local church in her neighborhood. Never being very religious before, she suddenly became ardently fundamentalist. By then, I had already been openly practicing Shamanic Wicca for several years, and had begun fulfilling my Calling through teaching and mentoring. Upon learning of her conversion, I expressed encouragement to her for finding something equally meaningful in her own life.
However, she quickly became anguished about the state of my soul. She couldn't stand it that I was, by her new beliefs, destined for hell. She loved me so much that she became ill at the thought that someone as good as me was going to be burning in eternal flames. She desperately wanted to save me for my own sake. She simply couldn’t accept that my spiritual choices were an acceptable alternative to her new beliefs.
We loved each other so much that we spent two years trying to reconcile our religious differences. The bottom line: although I could easily accept her religious choices, she could not accept mine. She simply could not concede that who I was, revealed as my deepest held beliefs, was worthy of respect. Friendships cannot be sustained without that fundamental bedrock of respect, and with great reluctance, I had to end our friendship of 18 years.
Even more recently, another friend and I had a parting of the ways due to this same conflict. We became friends in adulthood, when I was already firmly committed to my current spirituality, had been active in my ministry for several years. When we met, I was already a "well-seasoned witch". She was a spiritual dilettante, changing religious affiliations every few years or so, searching for a meaningful relationship with Deity. When she met me, she became intrigued by Pagan philosophy, and dove into study.
A few years later, she met her future husband, who was a fundamentalist Baptist. She became pregnant while they were dating. He insisted on her genuine conversion as a term of marriage, and she agreed. She gave away all her books and tools, and threw herself into her new religion with all of the zealousness of a true convert. She had to prove to her new husband that her conversion was genuine, so she became even more rigid in her rejection of all-things-pagan than might have otherwise happened.
And I was one of those pagan things. I tried to remain neutral on the subject of her conversion, and avoided any mention of the Pagan part of my life. I tried to maintain the friendship, but when I caught her trying to convert my children with bible tracts, I finally had to say something. The conversion attempts stopped, but it revealed how wide the rift in our friendship had become. Finally, I accidently received an email she intended to send to her church group which revealed her belief that Pagans are a bad influence and our evil needs to be countered. Now, although she only lives a mile away, I haven't seen her in over a year, and I don't sustain much hope for a future relationship based on mutual trust and respect.
Many Christians are capable of loving kindness, mutual respect, and tolerance for other cultures and beliefs. However, in my experience, fundamentalist Christians are generally incapable of granting others the courtesy to believe differently than they do. Their beliefs preclude any other worldview than their own. Anyone who does not believe exactly as they do is deceived by the devil. There is no other interpretation possible for them. This is truly sad, for it isolates them within the world community, and cuts them off from a rich variety of viewpoints and experiences.
Not that they'd think so. So be it.
~Flame RavenHawk
November 22, 2003