I didn’t exactly hide the reputation of Reed College from my parents when I was doing college applications, per se. I just emphasized certain aspects of its reputation more than others. To be fair, Reed didn’t make it easy on me. The day that I called my parents to tell them that I had made my decision, the news broke that a Reed student had died of a heroin overdose. I knew that my parents had a lot of confidence in me to make good decisions, but I also knew better than to emphasize its eternal presence on the “Students Ignore God On A Regular Basis” list or its toleration of experimentation to my conservative Christian parents. Imagine my surprise, then, when my mother told me that all of her friends had already heard of Reed College through Christian writer Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality.
In theory, this should have been the perfect book for me. I grew up in the church, but unlike myriad other gays that grew up in the church, I don’t hate it, and I don’t hate Christians. I like most Christian people, and still consider the people in the church that I grew up in part of my family, even though I think very differently than I do now. It’s one of life’s little ironies that all of the Christian education that I went through as a child worked. I carry the Bible in my heart exactly like they wanted; I can no more divorce it from my psyche than change the color of my eyes. I am comfortable with that, my problems with Christianity rarely lay in the Bible. I left the church because once I left for school I was confronted with people that made lifestyle choices and thought in ways that the church had always said would lead to immorality, and found that I could not condemn them. Once I realized that I was learning more about universal love and acceptance in a dead secular academic environment than in church, I had to leave.
hammer & jack 