Christianity - Part 1

Quick warning at the beginning of this 2-part blog entry – I’m going to talk about my views on Christians and Christianity, which will bore many, interest a few and possibly alienate or offend a few more. Think about which category you might fall into and then decide whether to read any further!

As a child, I always attended Sunday School etc, but it wasn’t until I was reaching the end of first year at secondary school that Christianity made any impact on my life. There were two reasons for this. One was that I’d got into trouble at school and with the police for nicking coins out of a school bus driver’s pockets. That really made me think about whether that’s how I wanted my life to go. But it was another incident that made me really think about religion for the first time.

I used to live about 2 miles from the shores of Belfast Lough, and would regularly take myself off for a walk to a park on the shore. As far as I am concerned, the best ice cream shop in the world was (and I think, still is) there – Maud’s Ice Cream. The quickest way to get there was a walk through a wood and past a predominantly catholic area. I never thought anything of this. One day on my way back a number of older teenagers spotted me walking through the wood and decided to beat me up because I was ‘walking in their territory’. I was attacked because (they assumed – they never asked!) I wasn’t a catholic. It wasn’t a major attack – I just curled up in a ball until they went away, so avoided any injury above a bruise – but it did make me question why religion mattered.

For the rest of my teenage years, my whole social life was based around Christianity, both at school where I was involved with the Christian Union, and my home life, where everything I did was connected to church. I had plenty of friends and seemed popular, which are great things for a teenager to feel. I was struggling with my Christian beliefs and my being gay, though. I knew I was gay very early in my life – probably from about 8 or 9 years old. I used to pray that God would just make me straight like everyone else – even had a couple of girlfriends.

At 16, I got a part time job in Woolworths, which basically involved folding down cardboard boxes and brushing the stockroom floor – very boring, but gave me some pocket money. About a year after I started, I was talking there with another couple of lads, Eddie and Anthony, and somehow the topic turned to religion. I can’t remember the exact conversation, but somehow I ended up saying something like ‘at least he’s protestant’. This was a bad time to find out that Eddie was catholic. I stumbled an apology out and went to hide in the toilet – I have never been so ashamed in all my life. I suddenly realised that growing up in Northern Ireland had made me just as bigoted as everyone else around me – and I hated that idea.

It did make me resolve to never make that kind of judgment on a group of people again.