Religious experiences come in many forms. I grew up in the Bible Belt of the South about half a mile up the road from the home of Billy Graham in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was an evangelical fundamentalist who accepted the Bible as the literal world of God.
That Bible, I was taught, said that segregation was the will of God. It said that women were inferior to men and must be quiet in church and could never have authority over men. It said that it was oaky for me to call other religions “pagan” and to suggest that their adherents were going to hell. This was particularly true for the Jews who, I was told, had been responsible for the death of Jesus.
I was also taught that the Bible condemned homosexuality as either a sickness that needed to be cured or a moral depravity that needed to be overcome.
The formative religious experience of my life was confronting each of these prejudices and overcoming them. In the process I was able to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism, so that I could explore it with an open mind and an open heart.
It has been out of that long-time growing religious experience that my whole career has been created.
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