I know a lot of people like that, thanks to my time on the internet. No, they're not Christians, but they're still people. God still loves them and sent Jesus to die for them, and they can reject him all the way up to the point that they die, after which they face judgement. But God still loves them and wants them to know Him, and I am the messenger of that news - perhaps the only Christian in their circles, for many have been burned by the church, by religious families, by social and religious condemnation. I'm open about my faith, but not proselytising, I hope. And I hope to give them a different view of Christians to the one they were brought up with - people who said 'I can't love you because you're not as God wants you to be'. Because my view is that God says to me, "I love you, even though you're not what I want you be - yet." And he has committed to remake me to be spiritually more like him (although I resist the process a lot). But I'm not who God wants me to be - not yet. And we - He and I - are working on it, still, after forty years.
The thing is that most of my Australian Christian friends don't have the connections I do. My spiritual mentor does - her daughters are just out of school and in the arts, and are struggling with their faith and how the church has tended to approach queer peoples in the past. I'm grateful to have that; we read the bible and do a small study, and pray with each other. And I can voice my doubts to her without fearing automatic condemnation, or the standard Australian Evangelical line.
See, here's the thing: I remember a Christian friend who wouldn't donate to a group because they supported an organisation that promoted marriage equality. Would they defend gay people being targeted by bigots? I wish I could say yes, but I don't know.
I've been asked "No, where do you really come from?" many many times. And when they don't get the answer they want, people tend to keep asking until they get the admission that my family came from overseas (as compared to, say, being Australian Indigenous). The only time I remember friends stepping in were two women who'd known me for ten years at that point, and they laughed and encouraged me when I kept on obfuscating. "Sydney. Australia. Australian. Australian." One of them said, "Actually, Selina's more Australian than I am: both her parents are Australian, my dad's still British." I've never forgotten that defence and I never will. Incidentally, neither profess faith in Christ.
Would my white Christian friends intervene on my behalf if someone insulted me? Yes. Probably.
Would my white Christian friends intervene for someone else like me if someone insulted them? Maybe. I think so.
Would my white Christian friends intervene when someone generally made a blanketing comment about people like me? I don't know.
I think that's the part that's most isolating: I DON'T KNOW.
If I were in the US, I'd be an at-risk person. Low-risk, as a 'safe minority' but still at-risk of generic bigotry, rather like that New York Times editor who was told "Go back home to China" although he was born in America. That's the possibility that I'd be facing over there - insignificant compared with having a headscarf torn from me and my car stolen, or having people threaten me physically because I'm not white - but there, and while I trust that my American friends might defend me, would they do the same for someone else, someone they didn't know? Would they speak up to stop stereotyping? I don't know that, I can't trust that.
And that terrifies me.
I'm not even American. I don't have to identify with American Evangelicals, but I look at them and I wonder about Australian Evangelicals: if someone promised us No Gay Marriage, would we also flock to a banner that was held by someone who said and did terrible things, and encouraged bigots, and wouldn't defend everyone - only those who agreed with him? Is that what we've already done with the Australian Liberal Party and Nauru and the Marriage Plebiscite?
I listen to the fears my non-Christian, at-risk American friends, and I hear the silence from my Christian-identifying, voted-for-Trump American friends when they're asked to condemn the violence against individuals of colour, sexuality, and religion - or else I wade through screeds about 'unity' and 'liberals who can't accept the results' - and wonder if this is what it is to love my neighbour.
It's not wrong to love my neighbour as myself, is it? To love those who might hate me, and to be a blessing to those who might curse me, to do good to those who might do evil to me, and to pray for those who might happily see me dead? No. No, it's not. It's right to defend people regardless of their policy or politics, whether they're sinners like non-Christians or sinners like Christians.
But I'm tired, and I'm scared - for my friends-who-aren't-socially-or-evangelically-accepetable and a little for myself - and I really feel like I'm out on the edge, alone, without support from either my Australian Christian friends or my American Christian friends, both of whose silence condemns me for my 'social justice crusade'.
I'm not - I have Christ with me, giving me strength. "Inasmuch as you did for the least of those, you did for me," said Jesus.
And yet that's more intellectually known than spiritually felt at this point in time.
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