Sometimes, Books Make Me Cry

...but usually in a good way. I'm reading Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready!, which is a pretty entertaining, in-depth, and remarkably unbiased look at Christian pop culture. The author approaches it from an "outsider's perspective", although I often find myself rolling my eyes or snickering at some of the kookier people he interviews. But then I just read this:

I nodded, and Jon went on. "Some things we just have to struggle with, you know? Look at gay marriage. I know what the Bible says, but I have gay friends who adopted a child, and now this little girl that nobody else wanted has a loving..." He shrugged.

That's what made me cry. When you start taking a long, hard look at the conservative, evangelical brand of Christianity, it's easy to get bogged down in the hate speech that seems front and center to modern American Christianity (Pat Robertson, I'm looking at you). And, truth be told, gay rights were a major influence on me turning away from religion. The more I thought about it, the more I thought about the gay people I knew, the more I realized that to say they were sinning just by loving who they loved made no sense, that to be a moral person, I actually had to reject many of the beliefs I'd been taught made up Christian 'morality'.

Things like the simple little quote above actually give me an eensy bit of hope for humanity. That one Christian can look at people he knows and respects, and realize that maybe the Bible doesn't always apply tells me that maybe there's more common ground out there than I thought.

Plus, I'm glad that a little girl nobody else wanted has a loving family.