We Must Be Our Others’ Keepers

I am an “other.”

When I was young, you wouldn’t have known it. I blended into what was considered acceptable and better – a white skin, obedient, Christian girl. But, around age seven, I began to grasp that the secret I was living with would eventually undo the image of what many people around me considered acceptable, better, and Christian.

Being true to who I was born to be would mean confessing that truth, and when I did, I would no longer be Regina to them. I would become an outcast, an “other” that was destined, in their belief system, to burn in hell forever. As a gay person growing up in a Christian church, I was aware early in life how much some people fear and despise difference.

Imagine being a child, forced to sit on a hard pew or in Sunday school class, having to listen to how you are going to hell. There, with Satan, you will suffer eternity roasting on the Devil’s fiery spit.

Eternity is forever. Forever is hard to imagine.

To make it easier for children to visualize burning in hell endlessly, a Sunday school teacher told my class to imagine a turtle. It picks up one grain of sand in its beak on the Atlantic Ocean side of the United States, then slowly walks all the way across the country and puts the grain of sand down on the beach at the Pacific Ocean. The turtle then picks up a grain of sand from the west coast and turns around to walk all the way back to the east coast. One grain is deposited and another picked up. Over and over, the turtle schleps one grain of sand back and forth, for eternity.

I have often thought of this and asked myself: Why is fear and hatred ever promoted in the very name of Jesus Christ: Christianity?

Wouldn’t a compassionate Jesus ask, “If we don’t listen to the stories of the outcasts, or care about how our beliefs made them outcasts in the first place, isn’t this living in a consequence-free ivory tower of self-righteousness?”

A few years ago, I was visiting my parents and went with them to Sunday service. A Bible teacher lectured the class about how gays are worse than drug addicts. I mean no offense to anyone challenged with addiction; I am only saying I know well the commonness of religious prejudice. I have been spit on, verbally accosted, and physically threatened by those who use their dogmatic beliefs to defend, in the name of God, their egocentric and spiritually ignorant hatred of my being different.

Shouldn’t we acknowledge it’s not God’s love but human egocentric judgment that seeks to put someone like me “in their place” with arrogant and cruel wisecracks such as “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Or “Love the sinner but hate the sin.” Or teaching generations of indoctrinated worshipers to believe being LGBTQIA+ is an intentional choice to sin against God.

A choice? What child would intentionally put themselves in the cross-hairs of religious and social hate? What adult, for that matter?

No, my sexuality is not a choice. And, no one seduced me into being gay. I just knew I was different around age five, but did not know why until later in life.

When I began to ask questions, I was lied to and told that a gay woman in church would have to have an operation to change from being gay. I did not want to have an operation, so for a long time I believed hell it would be, as there was no winning a spot in heaven for me.

Which caused me to wonder: How is a frightful, vengeful, judgmental God any different from Satan?

Yes, I am gay, and I now know that is okay with God—even though there are seven “clobber” verses in the Bible about same-sex relations. We need to consider, Biblical times were different from our own time. We have a duty to educate ourselves on ancient practices that were the basis for Bible verses still being used today to shape and defend way too many Christians’ judgmental view of homosexuality and fear of the “other.”

Fear of difference is deeply rooted in all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. (But I’m just here to examine the plank in my own faith’s eye.) This was exactly what Jesus was responding to when he challenged the crowds around him to love their neighbors as themselves, but in contemporary Christianity, this fear looks a lot more like viewing anyone or anything different as “the enemy”: Protestant vs. Catholic, White vs. Black and Brown, men vs. women, rich vs. poor, Republican vs. Democrat, Conservative vs. Liberal, heterosexual vs. LGBTQIA+, believer vs. non-believer.

The list of “versus” goes on and on. Why do we love our versus (and the verses we twist to support each versus) so much when there really is no such thing as “the other”?

Shouldn’t we be asking whether any attempt to rationalize dehumanizing or attempting to convert or change anyone, to fit some notion of “acceptable” to the God of our belief, would feel wrong to Jesus’ heart?

We owe it to ourselves and to Jesus to admit that Christianity as a whole has used fear, discrimination, genocide, slavery, colonialism, and misogyny as weapons to assert control and dominance. From the very beginning of human history, it seems we have all been an “other” to someone. But none of us should be an “other” to anyone.

I believe loving Jesus demands we talk openly and honestly about the hypocrisy, exclusion, and confusion that are thriving within the religion founded in his name. Jesus would remind us that wounding others in his name is wounding him. To stop hurting Jesus, we must accept that we will never create the world he envisioned for us if we continue to deny or excuse the world in which we live.

We can most definitely change the world in which we currently live by being our “others’” keepers.

We have empathy and compassion for all of our human sisters and brothers. We take responsibility for protecting their rights, as we want our rights protected. We give the hungry something to eat and the thirsty a drink. We make friends of strangers. We care for the sick and visit those in prison. We clothe those in need. We acknowledge and tackle systemic racism, white supremacy, and misogyny head-on with the goal of abolishing them. We join together by the tens of millions and say a HARD NO to authoritarians and want-to-be-kings. And we call out and separate ourselves from everyone within Christianity who is abusing their fellow human beings in Jesus’ name.

Because if we don’t align our hearts with the compassion, courage, and integrity of Jesus, to be our others’ keepers, I honestly believe Christ would want his name removed from “Christ”ianity.
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Excerpted from The Real Conversation Jesus Wants Us to Have: A Call to Bravery, Peace, and Love by Regina V. Cates ©2025 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission from the publisher.