Kevwe
Picture location: Her room
In my conversation with Kevwe, we discussed her journey with Christianity and what pushed her away from the Christian faith she was taught. She discusses what aspects of her personal identity she felt did not align with Christian standards, and the God and spirituality she is building outside of the church from a liberatory standpoint. The following quotes were selected from this conversation.
"It was just not good for my mental health to keep on going to Christianity -- and I pushed through. I was like you know what? At some point I was like I'm just gonna take from the Bible what I can. I'm gonna worship God the way I worship God. I'm going to acknowledge the fact that a lot of these ideas I have about God is also connected to to the things that are coming out of a human's mouth."
"Treating [sex] as something that I should be ashamed of, or ashamed of myself as a sexual being and thinking that God is watching me while having sex with people... was not something I could really reconcile. This and me just having a lot of desires of the flesh. And you know, it just did not seem to align with my Christianity in that aspect, but it seemed like I had to throw that away to be Christian.
“And I tried to. But in trying to throw that aspect of myself away, I ended up just internalizing a lot of shame. And it just ended up hindering me in how I connect with my body physically and how I connect with other people physically... why is it that God hates me for having sexual feelings when God was the one who gave me a libido in the first place? God's the one who gave me a clitoris, so like, if they didn't want me to be getting freaky then maybe they shouldn't have done that. I don't know. That's really on them."
"A lot of church leaders say "oh, don't listen to things of the world, they'll corrupt you, only listen to Christians." And then for them, godly things = gospel, which are explicitly deemed as godly or things where they exclusively honor God, but I would push back on that and say you can see godliness in other things that are not in the so called "godly" music. Even till now, this is where I connect to my spirituality, even if not connected to Christianity. I would listen to music back when I was like a full-fledged Christian, and I would feel very connected to God, more connected than I could ever -- than I feel when I listen to people preach to me in sermons."
"...'til very recently I realized that the way I was experiencing religion (as I knew it) was hindering the way I connected with my mother, as she is dead, and the way I connected to members of my family who have died before me... The way that Christianity as I was taught would have it, is that when people die, people either move on to heaven or to hell. And they don't have any business with you in this life anymore. And so there was that really huge disconnect between me and my mother in that sense."
"The reason why my family's even Christian is because of violence. The reason why that we have to feel like we have to give up parts of our culture, it's all really connected. Because colonialism says you have to give up who you are in order to be a Christian. And this is the same thing, when you come to like, sexual orientation, or sexuality or sexual-ness in general. Or when it comes to like your grief in your cultural ways of feeling connected to your loved ones who are dead, and creating that barrier between the living and the dead. And all of that is connected to these colonial ideals of giving up: you have to give up so much of yourself to become this person that God loves."
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