By Ryan Self
I grew up in one of the most conservative areas of the country, West Texas. My sophomore year of high school, my hometown of Lubbock was ranked the second most conservative city in the nation. Coming in third was Abilene, Texas, where I went to a Christian college.
In the 19 years I lived in Lubbock, I only knew one out gay person — we’ll call him Derek. He was a classmate in the year below me in junior high school.
Derek didn’t hide that he was gay; and people didn’t hide their distaste for him. He was bullied. Kids taunted him, said all kinds of degrading things behind his back without being overly concerned if he could hear them. One day, I remember seeing him crying on the bus. It was the first period of his first day at a new school and he was already in tears.
To say that those around me, including myself, were callous toward Derek is an understatement. I wish I could say that I was sympathetic to him — I was not. I joined in on the jokes and never thought twice about the harm we were doing to another human being. After all, he was a gay person.
One Wednesday evening, he showed up to our church youth group. I was shocked. How could anyone let a gay person into a church?
Even two decades later, I am still ashamed of what I did next. We were asked to name a person we admired and list a few things we liked about that person. For my hero, I said what I admired most about him was that he was straight.
Immediately, the youth minister told me to sit down and tried to defuse the situation. I got a call from him and another friend that night to talk about what happened. I honestly was not thinking too much about how what I said would be offensive; I was trying to be funny. Only later did I realize how hurtful what I said had been. But a part of me was deeply confused. Were we not supposed to treat gay people with contempt?
The way I and others treated Derek back in junior high was wrong. I was young, I was dumb, and I was repeating messages my community had given to me during my formative years. But my lack of understanding didn’t mean I didn’t have a responsibility to apologize, to own up to what I said. The following day, I apologized to Derek at school.
Thankfully, Derek did come back to our church. I would never have forgiven myself as an adult if something I said led another person to feel so alienated that they chose to never come to our church again.
Deep down, a part of me knew I had more in common with Derek than I ever wanted to admit. I was in junior high. I was going through puberty. My male friends were beginning to talk about girls, how they noticed girls, how they were interested in them. And deep down, I knew: The way my male friends were talking about how they felt about girls was the way I felt about guys.
That was 13 Ryans ago
Speaker and author Rob Bell talks about viewing ourselves as distinct versions over time. So when you refer to something you thought or did in the past, you might say, “That was 13 Robs ago,” or in my case, “That was 5, 10 or 15 Ryans ago.”
This way of thinking about ourselves and others enables us to have grace for our previous versions. It also allows us to acknowledge that people may have changed in the past and may continue to change in the future.
The version of me that held so much internalized homophobia that I joined in the mockery of a gay person… that was 13 Ryans ago. The version of me that finally owned up to being gay, but still had so much shame he could barely talk about it… you might say that was nine Ryans ago. The version of me that got to a place where I no longer saw any tension between my faith and my sexuality… that was four Ryans ago.
As Bell reminds us, it’s not that you are discarding those previous versions of yourself; you’re owning all the earlier yous. You’re not denying that you did that, said that, believed that, lost that or harmed that; but that version of you then is not the version of you now.
The fact that our current beliefs and attitudes are likely not the same as ones we held 5, 10, 15 years ago should give us hope that others have the capacity to reconsider their views, too.
One thing we desperately need more of today is grace. We do not have grace for each other, especially those who hold different views — sometimes, tragically, because we don’t have grace for ourselves. We are embarrassed of the things we believed in the past, and rather than make peace with our previous versions, we double down on ensuring we’re “the good ones.” We’re running away from our previous behavior instead of learning from it.
Convenient Amnesia
Britt Baron, a black lesbian pastor who grew up in a traditional evangelical environment, talks about this type of amnesia. In her book, “Do You Still Talk to Grandma?”, she discusses the phenomenon where we conveniently forget times we also displayed troubling behavior and grew from that:
It’s what happens when we disconnect from our personal growth histories and allow ourselves to forget our own pasts. It infects people who overlook the many times they have made mistakes and how long it took to overcome their ignorance and do better. It is what tempts a person to join a self-righteous internet mob and judge other people as if it is their job.
This convenient amnesia is pervasive and extremely counterproductive. Something is deeply insidious about trying to crucify people for views you once held.
A few months ago, The New York Times ran a feature on how a conservative evangelical pastor changed his views on same-sex marriage after his gay son came out to him. It’s a deeply vulnerable story about how the father came to not only embrace his son, but also how he gave up a prominent preaching job at great cost and started a new church that could be fully affirming of LGBT people.
I found this story incredibly moving. The New York Times comments section did not. Here is a representative comment with 700+ recommendations:
Another important point is that conservatives seem to lack compassion for others until they have a first hand personal experience with others, and then they suddenly ‘see the light’ and that simply illustrates their instinctive sense of selfishness and inherent lack of charity, altruism and humanity.
The son came out to his father in 2013 (around the same time I came out to my conservative parents, who responded wonderfully). Only the year before, President Obama announced he had “evolved” on the issue of same-sex marriage. At the time, 53% of Americans supported same-sex marriage. A few years before, in 2008, Obama and Hillary both opposed it, along with a majority of blue-state California voters who voted in favor of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.
A lot of people across the political spectrum opposed same-sex marriage. And a lot of those same people are now pretending as if they were always “On the Right Side of History,” when, statistically speaking, they too likely went through an evolution.
Distance but not denial
The beauty of viewing yourself as different versions over time is that it creates “distance but not denial,” as Bell puts it.
If you view yourself as static, you likely have a harder time admitting you are capable of holding views in the past you would condemn now. You are in denial. Viewing yourself this way cuts you off from the humility required to not only sympathize but empathize with another person’s perspective.
Because a lot of people, especially when it comes to topics like support for same-sex marriage, are living in denial that they ever were (or could ever be) opposed to it.
Under the right circumstances, we are all likely capable of bigotry and mistreatment of others. But we are also capable of learning and growing, coming to new understandings, and making amends for past behavior.
I’ve seen this firsthand in my own hometown.
Many of the friends I grew up with, teenagers who used to make homophobic jokes, are now adults leading the effort to create space for gay people in their churches. I will see people from my old youth group at conferences for LGBT Christians and allies. Classmates and teachers back in Lubbock I was once terrified of being out to now post often on social media about their support for gay people.
While previous versions of these people might have, like me, been hostile to gay people, they are now leading the cause for broader support of same-sex marriage.
And yes, plenty of people back home still oppose same-sex marriage. I still love those people in my life and they love me. I even recognize they have some good-faith reasons to not support same-sex marriage.
But maybe a future version of them will change their mind, like I did — like millions of Americans did.
When Derek was being bullied at my middle school, only about 40% of Americans supported same-sex marriage. That number is now around 70%, and same-sex marriage is the law of the land.
This is not to say everything is rosy. I’ve written elsewhere about ways the Christian college I attended in West Texas seems to be backsliding. Too many gay people across the country are still being disowned by their families and friends. I’ve heard their stories — they’re gut-wrenching. But I also know America — including my hometown — looks very different for people like Derek and myself than it did when we were in middle school.
I recently went back to Lubbock for the holidays and got coffee with an old friend from junior high who had moved back to Lubbock. We hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade and had both changed plenty over the years. She had grown up in the same faith tradition I had and was back at her old church — but now, that childhood church affirmed LGBT people and counted many as members.
She asked me what it was like to grow up gay in Lubbock. We talked about Derek. I shared that it hadn’t always been easy, especially watching how Derek was treated. But as we reflected on our hometown, we agreed: so much has changed.
And so much will change again.
Ryan Self is a communications professional who writes about books and the interesting conversations they start on his Substack, “Ryan’s Boring Book Club.” There you can find book reviews, commentary and the occasional interview.
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