Today, for the first time in several years, I went to church.
I went for the funeral of a dear friend, who was a staunch believer and one of the best human beings I ever knew.
While I no longer believe in the religious concept of a soul - the ghost in the machine that continues after the body is gone - I do think that "soul" is as good a word as any to serve as shorthand for the part of you that's really you. It can serve as a single syllable to encompass the core parts of the brain that make our personalities, our values, our most important decisions.
And by that definition: This Christian saved my soul.
And she saved it from other Christians.
I was raised in the sort of conservative Evangelical church that preached many sermons about the "evils" of abortion and being gay but none at ALL about the evils of systems that are designed to keep the majority of people poor and desperate. A form of Christianity very focused on sin, and punishment, and the blood price that had to be paid in order to keep us from being sent to the everlasting flame for our filth and corruption.
And I went to a conservative Evangelical college - the same college that produced Russell Vought of Project 2025 infamy, during the same years he attended.
After graduation, I'd started to have just enough sense to begin having questions about Evangelical Christianity, but not yet enough sense to leave behind the patterns of thought and behavior it had ingrained in me.
My wife and I had found liturgical churches to be comforting during difficult times, and started attending a local Episcopalian church. We liked it enough to decide we wanted to become members and receive confirmation, and part of that process was going through catechumenate. Our teacher was Tamara.
Having been raised Evangelical, my first question was "What do Episcopalians believe?" And Tamara laughed a bit and said that, while the short answer was "The Nicene Creed", the slightly longer answer was that Jesus seemed to think that what his followers BELIEVE wasn't nearly as important as what they DO, and any critique of a tree should be based on its fruit.
Over time, as I saw that we had members in the church who were openly gay and felt no need to "repent" for that, I asked Tamara how the church reconciled that with the biblical passages that said it was a sin.
Now she could have made any of a dozen counterarguments, any one of them accurate. She could have talked about the cultural and linguistic context of those verses, the deliberate mistranslations of certain Greek words in English bibles, the fact that the same word calling homosexuality an abomination was used for eating shrimp... But she didn't make a counterargument. Instead, she asked a question:
"What do you think sin is?"
She let me sit with that a moment, then said "When I read the Bible, everything spoken of as a sin is something that HARMS someone. Everything spoken of as righteousness is about LOVE.
I invite you to consider: Who is harmed if two consenting adults choose to love each other?
And maybe we aren't called to be focused on who or what is sinful. Maybe we're called to focus on what is LOVING, and DO THAT."
And that was the moment that Tamara West saved my soul.
In that moment, the scales fell from my eyes and I could see clearly for the first time. I saw that all the "Love the sinner, hate the sin" talk I'd grown up hearing was bullshit. I realized that, if I was going to follow a god who claimed to be the incarnation of Love, then I needed to err on the side of love rather than hate. And I realized that any god worth following would not condemn love.
I often reflect on the fact that, at the time I met Tamara, I stood on the razor's edge between going back to Evangelicalism and becoming the kind of person who would somehow convince myself that the moral thing to do was to vote three times for a known traitor and rapist... or becoming the person I am now. And I will always, always be grateful to Tamara for giving me a shove towards the correct side of that razor-thin line.
Over the quarter century that followed, my beliefs continued to evolve, and eventually began to diverge from Tamara's in that I no longer could believe in a god that loved us.
But I didn't have to BELIEVE in a love that burned like an all-consuming fire, a love relentless in its determination to do as much good as possible to as many people as possible, a love fierce in its holy wrath against any who would harm her children, a love that embraced all people but especially the most vulnerable as her children.
I could see it in Tamara packing food and hygiene supplies for houseless people every week.
I could hear it in her voice as she spoke of our responsibility to each other as humans.
I could feel it in her hugs.
I could taste and smell it in the meals she made for whoever happened by and was hungry.
You don't have to BELIEVE in things that are real.
You can KNOW them.
And Tamara's love for her fellow humans was one of the most real things I have ever encountered.
That, my friends, is all the religion any of us will ever need.
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