Confessions of an Ugly Little Judge

Getting to Love the Hard Way

I didn’t start out evangelical. My folks were from the “Easter and Christmas Eve” branch of Christianity, and in between my folks worked out their salvation on Sundays dressed in bikinis—the better to work in our Phoenix, Arizona yard. My faith choices boiled down to that twice-a-year Methodist church or Grandma’s Southern Baptist weekly scream-athon.

Even at age ten I was a spiritual seeker, having spent the summer before going to Mormon church in Salt Lake City while a patient in a Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children. While the rest of the fam spent weekends out by the pool, I went to church with my grandma from Kentucky. The sanctuary was spare—brown indoor/outdoor carpet, gray folding chairs facing a podium. The only thing on the wall was a giant cross.

Instructed to read my King James Bible, I struggled to make sense of what they told me was not only God’s Word, but God’s words. Jesus was going to judge me, so I’d best practice judging everyone else.

I sat up straight on those chairs—both to atone for attending a Mormon Church (as if I’d had a say in it) and in abject fear of the pastor. His sermons were more shrieked than spoken and I felt sorry for his Bible, which took a beating as he pounded it against the podium. I’d never heard about fire and brimstone. But at Grandma’s church, the fire might as well have been real—it was hot in there.

You might say I was scared into judgment by the SBC.

Grandma, being from Appalachia, was convinced of the Bible’s inerrant truth with a capital T. She’d never learned to drive, so my grandfather carried her, as she’d say, to services while he waited outside in their ancient, hand painted green car. Every day, she rose early to read her Bible. When I’d ask her what a passage meant, she’d reply, “It means just what it says.” I took that as gospel, even as I couldn’t understand why God punished doubters and liked one twin better than the other.

To me, God’s words seemed pretty grouchy. By age twelve, I thought God hated me for breaking too many rules. All the “thou shalt nots” sounded eerily like my adoptive dad’s voice. By the time I was a grown-up, the worst damage was the way biblical inerrancy had molded me into an ugly little judge.

Believing that a Bible translated umpteen times over millennia is the literal, exact dictation from God’s lips can do that to you. If you’re so right, then all those poor heathen must be so wrong. But did my KJV really mean just what it said? While I was busy defending the Book of Genesis as historical and saying Mormons weren’t real Christians and were therefore doomed, a piece of me wondered how a God of Love could be as clique-ish as the popular kids at school.

As a crippled kid, I knew I’d never make it into the in crowd, so I tended to root for underdogs. I hated being an ugly judge, knowing how it felt to be picked last for the team. Reject was my middle name. But for years, I struggled—I needed to belong.

So I see why evangelicals today might be reluctant to walk into the arms of critical thinking and reason. To study not God’s words but God’s Word is much harder. It’s messy and scary and most importantly, hardly ever spells out what to do and how to live, not to mention that it may well get you excommunicated from the only church family you’ve ever known.

At the height of my judgy evangelical period, my even more evangelical sister and I argued about whether or not Chinese babies who’d never heard the gospel were going to hell. Sis had no snappy answer. She started to cry. 

Somehow her tears broke the spell. I started to think for myself.

These days, I don’t mind standing with the crips or the unconverted. The ugly little judge was a failure and a phony, as if to say, I’m special and you’re not. Now, I look for wisdom instead of answers. The only parts of the bible that make any sense to me are about hope and mercy and love.

It’s possible to both read and revere scripture without being literal or close-minded. It’s possible to find loving faith communities that don’t rely on narrow interpretations, that don’t forbid doubts and questions, that emphasize love over dominance and mercy over vengeance.

Stick your head out of the silo and you’ll see us, waving frantically from the choppy waters of this life, bound for the shores where Jesus sits, loving even ugly little judges like me.