What Is a Christian Supposed to Look Like?

I go to church, get high, and talk dirty—and Jesus still loves me.

The other day, when I told my neighbor that I go to church every Sunday—he’d asked what I was up to that weekend—he blinked at me in surprise. “I never would have guessed that you’re religious,” he said, wide-eyed. When I asked what made him say that, he shrugged. “You just don’t seem like the type of person who would go to church.”

It’s not the first time someone has expressed shock at my church-going ways, and I suppose I can’t blame them. After all, I did write a story called “I’m at the Point in Middle Age When You Stop Eating Gluten and Start Eating Pussy.” (What? I mention my church in it!) I’ve also written about hooking up with men young enough to be my children, getting a lot of tattoos, and smoking weed. So I guess maybe I’m not most people’s idea of the poster child for Christianity.

But what, exactly, do people think a person who goes to church is supposed to look like? Is it really so strange that I attend two different churches, that I sing in the choir at one and sometimes preach at the other, and that Sunday is the highlight of my week? A colleague once told me that she thought I was a rarity among my demographic—namely, middle-aged white women who live in New York City and work in the media. She thought it wasn’t smart to advertise the fact that I’m a Christian. “People might think you’re some sort of anti-choice, religious-right nutjob,” she warned.

Anyone who is familiar with my work, and certainly anyone who knows me, knows this is not the case—and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. But was she right? Should I keep my religion under wraps, if I care about my career? And am I really such an anomaly? I thought of another middle-aged white woman in media who lives in the city and goes to church: my friend Emily Flake, a New Yorker cartoonist who also does stand-up and runs a humor-writing residency. I asked Emily if she’s open about her faith, whether people are ever taken aback by it, and if she has a withering one-liner for them if they are.

“I wear a cross, and if it comes up I will identify as an Episcopalian,” she told me. “But my relationship to my faith is a little shaky, if I’m being honest. I haven’t been to church in a minute.” She says that while people are sometimes surprised that she’s a Christian—“I’m fairly profane in my speech and work, so I think it’s a twist”—no one has ever given her a hard time about it. “The most I’ve gotten is, ‘Huh, weird!’”

Sadly, she didn’t have any witty comebacks I could co-opt, but it felt reassuring to confirm that there’s at least one other person out there like me—a cool urban writer lady who swears and makes dirty jokes—who’s also a Christian, even if she says she’s not “a full-throated, all-in, no doubts Christian.” But I still felt at a loss thinking about how to explain my faith to those who might misinterpret it, or who are made uncomfortable by it.

For a person who earns a living stringing words together, I often feel woefully inarticulate when challenged about my belief system. I tend to clam up, or cry, or both. To have such an important part of my life—the core of who I am and how I navigate the world—called into question or disparaged puts me into fight-or-flight mode.

When the subject of heaven came up in a conversation between friends who are not religious, one of them nodded at me and casually said, “You go to church, you believe in heaven,” not even pausing to allow me a response. I sat there, feeling uncomfortable. I knew she wasn’t being malicious; she was simply stating what, to her, was a given.

I don’t believe in heaven, though. At least, I don’t believe in the sort of heaven portrayed in cartoons, with St. Peter standing in robes at the pearly gates, refusing someone admission. When I was a little kid, sitting in church wearing itchy white tights and the half-slip my mom insisted I wear under my dress, kicking the pew in front of me and hoping we’d go to a restaurant for lunch, I believed in that heaven. I imagined bouncing on fluffy white clouds and eating as much cookie dough as I wanted without ever feeling sick to my stomach. Now that I’m grown up, the only heaven and hell I believe in are the ones we create for ourselves right here on earth. 

I don’t go to church because I’m worried about what will happen to me after I die. I go to church because it makes my life better now. Church is where I find community with others who are trying to figure out how to live in this broken world; people who are seeking to understand something, or to be understood, or both. Church is where my whole self, every sharp edge and sadness, every doubt and fear, is not only welcomed, but embraced. I’ve never felt as held, as loved, and as safe as I do with my church family. 

Church is where I found my voice again after my divorce left me feeling lost, alone, and undeserving of goodness. After bouncing around from church to church and never feeling quite at home or going consistently, I found my way to St. Lydia’s almost ten years ago. (A profile of the church in
The Atlantic that ran a few months later was titled “The Secret Christians of Brooklyn.”)

The first time I went, I brought my younger daughter with me. The pastor gave her a piece of chalk so she could draw pictures on the chalkboard during the service, and the man sitting next to me told me that he had a toddler at home—maybe so I wouldn’t feel like the only parent there. (The St. Lydia’s congregation skews young, and I was the oldest person there that night.) Right away, I felt welcome.

I hadn’t been going to St. Lydia’s long when someone asked if I’d like to try leading songs. I agreed to attend an afternoon songleading workshop, on the condition that I might not ever be brave enough to actually do it. Now, I sign up to lead songs at services all the time. I’ve grown far more confident over the decade I’ve been an active congregant, and singing has become one of the great joys of my life.

I would not be who I am without church. Every week, no matter what’s happened—if I’ve been hurt by someone or lashed out at someone else, if I’m feeling like a failure or bursting with joy—I can show up exactly as I am and feel God’s love for me, as expressed through the people there, who’ve shown up for the same reason. We are there to love each other, even if we’ve never met before. I know how cheesy that sounds, but it’s true.

My working title for this story was “More Religious Than Spiritual,” because I’ve heard so many people describe themselves as “more spiritual than religious.” I feel it’s important to speak up for religion, which is so central to my life, and which gets such a bad rap—perhaps deservedly so, for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to enumerate here. When I told that title to my friend Debbie, the community coordinator for St. Lydia’s, she laughed and said it’s exactly how she often describes herself.

“Beliefs and the supernatural have become less and less important to me the older I’ve gotten,” she told me. “The Christian church happens to be one part of my cultural inheritance, and in spite of how much damage it’s done, and how much havoc conservative political evangelicalism continues to wreak in the U.S., I’ve also seen what it can look like when it’s healthy and good. So I stick with it, and try to be a part of what makes it beautiful.”

That resonates with me. My stepfather was a pastor, and I grew up as a part-time preacher’s kid, being shuttled between my mom and dad’s houses a few times a year. Living with my stepdad was not easy, and when I’ve confided in friends about the abuse I endured growing up, they’ve often expressed surprise that I could still go to church after suffering such misery at the hands of a Christian minister. The thing is, church was the best part of being with my mom and stepdad.

Church was the place I felt safest, the place where I learned to love singing, and the place where I heard, every week, that I didn’t need to be afraid—that God was holding me in the palm of his hand. “Fear not, for I am with you,” the Bible says in Isaiah 41:10. I don’t know why it worked on me, but it did. I believed it then, and I still do today.

“To me, church should be about the practice of living life in community: breaking bread, working alongside neighbors, welcoming those who are seeking respite,” Debbie says. “It’s not about saying a certain creed, believing a particular thing, or feeling a particularly spiritual, worshipful way. It’s just the doing of life—together.” That’s exactly how I experience St. Lydia’s, and the other church I attend regularly, Bushwick Abbey.

At both churches, which are social-justice oriented and LGBTQIA+ affirming to the point where I jokingly reminded someone the other day that “straight people are welcome here too!,” many congregants come from church backgrounds where they were traumatized, shamed, and otherwise harmed. In spite of this, they are still seeking something that the church can offer; hope, perhaps, or love, or community, or all of those. But the damage inflicted upon people by organized religion, and the Christian church specifically, is real. I love church, but I don’t make light of its shortcomings.

I asked St. Lydia’s former pastor, Dr. Christian Scharen, who is now a professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, what he says to people who carry scars inflicted by the church. “I am a part of a tradition that has done tremendous harm,” he told me. “So I just own that. Much of that has come from deformed theology and abuse of scripture. I fight against that by trying to honor the core thing we learn via Jesus: That God is love, and if I do not love my neighbor, who I can see, then I cannot love God, who I cannot see.”

But what of those troublesome scriptures, like the ones members of the Westboro Baptist Church are fond of spouting? (I’m not linking to them, but you probably know what I mean: Scriptures that are used to condemn homosexuality and abortion, specifically.) Certain atheists I’ve known have tried to attack my faith by quoting these fucked up verses at me, as if they think I’ll suddenly drop my entire belief system in some sort of “gotcha” moment.  

Scharen says he looks at verses like these through the lens of what Jesus actually said and did. He tells me that some of the people who wrote the Bible probably “got what God wanted wrong,” and that if something in the Bible doesn’t align with Jesus’ core teaching to love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, he doesn’t give it much authority. “‘Slaves, obey your masters,’ it says at one point. But did Jesus say that? Nope.”

As for what Christians can do to try and make our voices heard in a world where our faith is so often distorted and weaponized in support of laws that strip away bodily autonomy and human rights, Scharen again points me toward Jesus. “Jesus, as the scripture shows, took the side of those on the margins, those who were poor, sick, rejected, and in need of healing body and soul. He tried to change systems that impacted the people on the margins, including public campaigns for justice, like when he turned over the tables of the money-changers in the temple.” He feels Christians have a responsibility to advocate for social change, which he strives to live out. “If Jesus was for justice, how can I follow him if I don’t do likewise in my era?” 

When I tell Scharen that people often don’t know what to make of me, with my penchant for swearing and smoking weed, writing openly about my sex life, and other not-so-stereotypically Christian habits (my recent obsession with accused CEO-assassin Luigi Mangione is just one of the things that, as writer and fellow church-goer Anne Lamott says, “would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish”), he reminds me that Jesus himself was something of a wild child.

“Jesus loved dinner parties, he loved life so much his critics called him a glutton and a drunkard, saying he ate and drank with sinners,” Scharen says. “Why? They needed his love and company, because the religious people said they were wrong, and kicked them out. Jesus was for them, especially. ‘I came so that you may have life, and have it abundantly,’ he said.”

One of the places I go to have life abundantly is Union Pool, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Reverend Vince Anderson (who is also the minister of music and community arts, and my choir director, at Bushwick Abbey) plays with his band, The Love Choir, every Monday night. It’s always a raucous good time, dancing to what he calls “dirty gospel” music with a crowd of people who may, or may not, feel that they’re attending a church service. Personally, I consider it church.

I asked Reverend Vince whether he thinks people who attend his shows are ever surprised to find out that he’s the real deal: a true believer who’s not just putting on a show (although he is doing that too—and it’s a very good show). He told me that when that happens, it always leads to “really good conversations about how I hold Christianity. And how I hold it is lightly, but seriously. I think people can relate to that.” He says, however, that he’s wary of describing himself as a Christian. “It seems very aspirational. I try to be a Christian. I try to follow the way of Jesus, but it’s very difficult. It’s hard.”

That said, he does identify as a Christian. “I make that known on stage because I think it’s important to see people of faith who are compassionate and human, and not some weird amalgamation of Christian nationalism and bullshit. But I’m a humanist first. We’re all human beings first, so I’d rather identify as a human being.”

And does he ever feel the need to justify or defend his faith, like I do? “I get tired of apologizing for my belief system,” he says. “And also, my belief system changes. I think that’s what people don’t realize. Faith for me is a constant, but the specifics of that faith change pretty regularly. Belief should just be a way of getting you to a place of love, and of faith. That’s all that is.”

“I view Christianity as one of the humanities,” Reverend Vince tells me. “Christianity is a way to view the world, just like any of the humanities are.”

I had never thought about it like that before, but when I’m writing a story or reading a poem, when I’m wandering through a museum looking at paintings, when I’m listening to music and dancing around my kitchen, those are all expressions of my faith—feeling joy, showing gratitude for my life, allowing God’s love to flow through me. That, to me, is prayer.

Tonight I’ll go to Christmas Eve service at Bushwick Abbey and sing with Reverend Vince. We are both trying to follow Jesus, with varying degrees of success. We are both Christians, whatever that means to us or to anyone else. I’ll sing his version of the Magnificat, the song of praise that Mary sings when she is pregnant with Jesus, as recounted in the gospel of Luke, chapter one, verse 46: “My soul magnifies the Light.” We will remember that the light shines in the darkness, and that the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5, in case you’re interested.) It’s something I hope all of us can remember, especially at this precarious moment in time, when the future feels particularly frightening and unknowable.

You don’t have to believe in Jesus to have faith, or even in God at all. But we’ve all got to have faith in something. Christianity is where my faith lies, and it’s precious to me, in spite of its flaws.

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