Jesus is a Dirty Commie

I am a communist transgirl. So far I’ve said nothing remarkable; anecdotally speaking I can say that the majority of young transwomen are either communists or anarchists. What makes me unusual is that I am also a Christian.

I’m embarrassed to say the word. “Christian” has been tarred by the child abuse scandals of the Catholic church, the flatulent bleating of mega-church mega-pastors with their mega-mansions, and the legions of bible-thumpers threatening hell to all those who do not ascribe to their narrow interpretation of God’s purpose on Earth. In most of my social circles online and in person, Christianity is almost universally considered to be a force of repression and reaction.

I find these interpretations of Christianity as abhorrent as my militantly godless friends do. Perhaps more so, because they are sacrilegious perversions of something that I love; the Apostolic Church. The Christian Church before Emperors, quacks, and prudes (Looking at you, Constantine, Augustine, and Paul) shaped it into an arm of a repressive state. The Apostolic Church of the first and second centuries was defined by a communalist worldview; Acts 4:32 proclaims “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” (New International Version)

This was the early church; a radical group of communitarians who rejected both the authoritarian nature of the Roman Empire and the society of slaves and masters which defined it. Inspired by the example of Jesus, early Christians went forth across the Mediterranean and formed communities that lived according to his counsel in Matthew 25:40 “”And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!‘” (New International Version)

At the beginning of this year I was an atheist. I became convinced that religion’s sole purpose was to be a tool of the ruling class, a justification for subjugation of women to men, slave to master, one race to another. If it wasn’t Karl Marx’s “opiate of the masses” it was the call to slaughter the unbeliever or heretic. No good could come of it, I robustly proclaimed, and the evidence for God’s existence was trivial. Reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion lent a smug logic to it all; religious and spiritual people were simply deluded or hypocritical.

On November 11th, not quite two months after I moved to Tucson, I went to Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It was recommended to me by a dear friend (and former Episcopal priest), and though I remained hostile to the idea of faith I had been longing for community, so I decided to give it a shot.

November 11th of 2018. One hundred years to the day since the last shot rang out over the Western Front. I enter the sanctuary, and I take a place in the pews, listening to the choir rehearse. A feeling steals over me, a sensation I haven’t felt since I was young; peace. True peace. I kneel, and for the first time in years I pray with some genuine intent. And as I gaze upon the stained glass window above the altar, a depiction of Christ, tears start to run down my face.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life. I have been a toxic person, I have been a problem drinker, I’ve stolen, I’ve lied, I’ve deceived. Where possible I have offered my sincere apologies, knowing that I owe them to those I’ve hurt, but I am not owed forgiveness for my trespasses. When I gaze upon the figure of Christ, I feel called to step forward into the future. I feel renewed. My mistakes remain in my past, and doubtless I have yet to atone for many of them. But I cannot go back into the past and undo what I have done wrong; I can only strive to go forward in the spirit of Christ.

I want to reclaim Christ from the theocrats and prosperity theologians. I want to reclaim Him from Jeff Sessions and Mike Pence. I want to discard the Old Testament, the idea of God as a jealous and wrathful man in the sky. I don’t know that I believe in God, but I believe in Christ the Man, who preached revolution and resistance, who broke bread and drank wine with his friends the night before he died. Christ who suffered a brutal and painful death as an act of love for all of humanity.

The Internationale, the anthem of Communism, begins with the call “Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye wretched of the Earth!” I believe fervently that we must do away with billionaires and millionaires, we must smash the hierarchies of class, race, and gender. We must do this for the sake of all humanity, and for the Earth upon which we live. I feel called to this task by virtue of Marxism, yes, but also by the spirit of Christ. Christ who overturned the tables of the moneylenders, Christ who broke bread with sex workers and tax collectors, Christ who said “love thy neighbour as thyself.” Christ who taught me as a child to be compassionate, and Christ who now, at the age of twenty-four, calls me to love and serve humanity and the world in the broadest and most compassionate way.

So I go forward, a living contradiction.