In this Next Chapter of my life I think it’s important to start by making my confession.

I like confession.

When I was a kid my friends and I used to sit under the maple tree in the front yard of our house on Calumet Avenue and help the Catholic kids make up sins to bring to confession. We figured it was just too boring to go into the booth and tell the priest you hit your brother, or talked back to your mother, or snuck a peak inside your dad’s Playboy magazine. Think of the poor priest, listening all day long to this bland drivel. It has to be like, as Bishop Fulton Sheen once described it, getting stoned to death with popcorn.

So we made up sins for the Catholics among us. Doozies. Real doozies. Some of the kids who took our sin creations into the confessional at Holy Rosary Church were never seen or heard from again.

Confession shakes things up!

And confession is good for the soul.

So here is my confession:

I’ve lost my faith.

Not my faith in God, mind you. Or my faith in Jesus.

No, the faith I’ve lost is my faith in the religion that disguises itself as Christianity these days.

I have come to observe that it is a faith that, at it’s heart, hates. It hates the world. It hates truth. It hates nature. It hates science. And most especially, it hates people.

“God loves you, but…” is usually it’s opening line. Then come all the reasons the God who loves you can’t accept you and why you will spend eternity in hell…

Because, A: under the influence of a talking snake, Adam and Eve ate a piece of fruit. God told them they could eat anything else in the grocery store – even that unhealthy stuff in the cereal aisle – but not that fruit. I imagine it was a little like telling someone not to think about chocolate. “Don’t” is almost always accompanied by the urge to “do.” So they did. They ate the forbidden fruit. And ever since that fateful bite, every human being has been infected by their disobedience. This is called “original sin.” It is passed down from generation to generation by people having sex and making babies. I know. This sounds kind of crazy in our day when we have a better understanding of genetics and all. But hey, St. Augustine and the others who came up with the idea almost two millennia ago were a lot smarter than me. And if they say God doesn’t love you anymore because your mom and dad did the dirty, who am I to argue?

Then, B: there’s the fact that, once you were old enough to know what you were doing, you volunteered yourself into the life of sin. You lied. Cheated. Disobeyed your parents. Thought dirty thoughts. The list goes on and on and “your mileage may vary.” But the bottom line is always the same: “God loves you, but you have sinned and fallen short.” All this B stuff proves that all that A stuff is true and you do all these dastardly deeds because you are sinful to your very core.

In the algebra of the Christianity I no longer believe in, A + B = God loves you but cannot accept you. So go to hell – go directly to hell – do not pass go – do not collect $200.

Many of us – maybe even most of us – grew up exposed to some variation of this theology. It streams through the pulpits of our churches, our Bible study classes, and the general consciousness of religious culture. The growing influence of Protestant fundamentalism is indoctrinating even the younger generations into the religion of self-hate. It draws many into its guilt-ridden web, and drives others away from the church – and worse – from God.

Like one young woman is said to have told her friend who’d invited her to church: “Why would I want to go someplace that will make me feel worse about myself than I already do?”

Any religion that starts with “You are loved, but…” is dangerous. It is in the but of this religion that evil finds fertile ground in which to plant seeds of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, intolerance, and all other manner of hate.

As I said earlier, I have come to observe that this new Christianity is a faith that, at it’s heart, hates. It hates the world. It hates truth. It hates nature. It hates science. And most especially, it hates people.

But while it is disturbing that this religion forms around a hatred of people – both our own selves and others – the real problem runs even deeper.

It seems to me that it is a religion that – at its very core – actually hates God.

More on that next time…