The Church of Czestochowa and Schoolhouse Rock

America, Christianity, and the story of my cousin causing a big scene

Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash

My neighbor is very Catholic. Three Crucifixes on the living room wall Catholic. One of the first things she brought up when she met me and my fiancee was the church she attends with her husband. We adore them. They are incredibly kind, and I enjoy our chats from across our fence when their dog goes to do its business and I’m sitting outside working or reading. We talk about lawn care, neighborhood Halloween parties, the job market. They’re the best neighbors we could ask for, really.

This year, these neighbors, partially in response to other neighbors, planted two Harris-Walz signs in their front yard. Katelyn and I weren’t surprised, but relieved nonetheless to see it. Within a few days of the election, I sat on my patio drinking coffee when my neighbor walked out to the wrought-iron fence that separated us.

“Can you believe it?” she asked. I couldn’t. A lot of people couldn’t, and for some time, I wondered if it was our fault. If it was my fault, for example, for only following liberal accounts and for refusing to watch Fox News. Most of my friends are queer. Was I just ignorant? Was there something I was missing?

But as I talked to my neighbor, I saw the pain she felt from not being in an echo chamber. Her face was sunken as she questioned her religious community and her beliefs. People in her church had been very excited for the incoming administration, and it baffled her. “This isn’t what Christians believe in,” she said. “I find myself looking around and asking, ‘Am I even a Christian? Do I even believe in God?’”

My coffee mug was on the verge of shattering in my hands.

I fear for the questions she’s asking herself because I know them too well.

What Is Christianity If It’s Not “Loving Thy Neighbor?”

I was raised just shy of “as Catholic as they come.” My First Communion photo was proudly displayed in the living room with my brother and sister’s First Communion photos. We went to church every Sunday. My mom was a CCD teacher and I volunteered at Bible Camp. My sister was an alter girl.

What sticks out in my memories are not the services themselves (except for the time we accidentally went to the Polish one at Our Lady of Czestochowa, the “fancy” church. Our Lady of Mount Carmel was the not fancy church, as it did not have a live nativity at Christmas nor the preserved heart of a Polish prime minister. Don’t ask me why!). The drives home from church were boring, but I guess understanding morality is boring. My parents would ask us about the homily, about the readings, and about what they meant.

Here’s what I remember from those chats.

To me, Catholicism meant giving to the poor. The old widow who gave all of her income to the poor was more celebrated by Jesus than the rich man who gave a small portion of his earnings.

To me, Catholicism meant giving so much to the poor that you weren’t rich. The ol’ “it’s harder for a camel to move through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven” thing. Being Catholic, I also didn’t realize that was an actual Bible verse.

To me, Catholicism meant that every person was Jesus. Every person was deserving of charity. Fill in the blanks for me…there’s a story about a rugged looking stranger that shows up at someone’s house? And he’s denied entry but in the end he’s Jesus so bully on the people who didn’t give him shelter? Current Christians and Catholics should know that story better than I do. I believe it has something to do with Isaiah 58 but I’m not sure.

Back when I was a little Catholic, in middle school, I completed an exercise in school where I wrote about my future. I remember pledging to donate 10% of my income to AIDS research and also, maybe in that exercise but maybe these were just my general feelings at the time, vowing to stay chaste before marriage. Parents, cover your eyes, but I’m 0 for 2 on that one.

I wish I could pay my bills and have 10% left for charity. I do donate to charity, but I feel absolutely gross sharing the details of how I donate to charity because the whole point is not to brag about it. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one that I look for opportunities to share a meal with people asking for money and feel the pangs of “Catholic guilt” squeeze my heart when I see a GoFundMe and consider moving onto another website. We’re all much closer to homelessness than we’d like to admit. We’re much closer to being homeless than to being a billionaire, even if we’ve been in rooms with billionaires. We are the old widow in the story. And if we are interested in being a good person as laid out by Christian and Catholic leaders, we should be caring more about the rugged looking stranger asking us to share our food, our shelter, our empathy.

I say “we” because although I have walked away from the most logistical bits of Christianity and Catholicism—attendance at mass, going through the sacraments, proselytizing—I can’t point to any other source of my moral code and values. My parents are Christians. My uncle, who took us around to give leftover Thanksgiving food to the unhoused, grew up in the church. The only other source I can point to when it comes to my political beliefs is that one song in Schoolhouse Rock: “The Great American Melting Pot.” (Sorry for getting it stuck in your head. It’s stuck in mine.) Can I proclaim that I belong to the church of Schoolhouse Rock? I was Mary in the CCD Christmas play one year, and I was Interplanet Janet a few years later. (Not to brag…)

I’m extremely thankful for the people in my life who helped me form these values. Even though I don’t claim to be a follower of Jesus, I do try to be what I thought the church’s idea of a “good person” is. So I find myself asking Christians who voted for Mr. Grab Them By the Pus*y…do you realize how far you’ve strayed?

What Does Christianity Mean to MAGA?

My cousin is a smart kid. Okay, he’s not a kid anymore—he’s a freshman in college, far far away from Austin. I doubt he’s going to church, because the whole family has stopped attending church because of him.

As the story goes, my cousin’s family attended a service at the Westlake (read: wealthy) church. When the service was over and they walked to their cars, they saw an unhoused person asking for money. All the congregants walked right past the person. This is the same cousin whose dad took us around to give leftover Thanksgiving food to the unhoused, so I understand his confusion, and why his confusion quickly turned to anger. “Hypocrites!” he started yelling. (I don’t remember the exact quote.) “Hypocrites!” He made a scene. He upset people. They don’t go there anymore.

I don’t know why fewer people are going to church, but I can guess that seeing this hypocrisy has a lot to do with it. Will my neighbor do the same? I’m not sure.

When I see folks in America making accusations of immigrants causing a huge crime wave or of trans folks assaulting young people, I want to yell the same thing that my cousin yelled. MAGA is falsely accusing both groups of causing America’s social, economic, political, and cultural problems. Oh wait, that was the strategy of a different political party did in Germany. My bad.

And these false accusations don’t make sense. Name a trans person or a drag queen accused of assaulting a child, and I can give you 20, heck, 50 people in various positions of authority who are not immigrants or queer people but faced similar accusations. In Boston, Katelyn and I talked to an Uber driver. He talked about the city, saying, “Yeah, crime has been down significantly and the city’s been cleaner than ever, but…” His voice lowered to a whisper: “There’s a lot of illegal immigration here.” So immigration can coexist along with a safe, clean city? And how does he know who’s a citizen of this country anyway? Whose papers is he checking? How do any of us (white folks, I’m mainly talking to you) know a person’s immigration status when passing them in your neighborhood or at the grocery store?

There are white, Christian, straight people who commit crimes every day. Why are they still welcomed with open arms but immigrants and queer people are facing discrimination and demonization? Are your neighbors—despite how they look or the language they speak or how their clothes match their genitals, which isn’t your business anyway—not Jesus, or worthy of our love and charity, too?

I get angry at the political situation for the same reason my cousin got angry outside the church and for the same reason my neighbor is having a crisis of faith. MAGA is teaching the opposite of what I thought Christianity and Catholicism and Jesus was, yet they claim their faith louder and prouder than anyone else. And, in the face of a church leader who calls them out on their bullsh*t, this is the response we get?

Hypocrites!

Hypocrites!

I leave you with this video, because this is a true person of faith to me.