Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 6:
Bible Bar! Fights Appetite!

Christmas season in America, 2002.

And it was a fairly innocuous trip to a local business district, an innocent errand to find a CD I knew my best friend would like for Christmas.  And somehow I let this mission lead me to a Christian bookstore.

Which is always a mistake for me.

Being a gay man, I can never say that I fit in with Christian culture in America.  But honestly, it's just not me anyway.  I find The Prayer of Jabez so offensive that when I see copies of it stacked higher than I am tall, I feel ill.  When I see the things everyone in America uses and enjoys every single day slapped with a "Christian" label, I want to throw up.  Do we really need Christian candy?  What, in the end, does it do for our witness to have Testamints sitting on our coffee tables?

It wasn't always like this.  I used to be quite at home in this environment. Back in my Intervarsity days in college, which I remember fondly, I could stroll into these kinds of places with little thought as to what it all meant.  I was never the type to read Chicken Soup books or repetitively recite an obscure biblical prayer, but the culture seemed to nurture me, and I wrapped it around myself as much as I was comfortable.

Then I went to Ireland.

In Ireland, for the most part, the Church is dying.  The people I met who were around my age - I was 20 at the time - seemed to have little use for faith or tradition and were simply uninterested in trying to reconcile the disappointment with the church that most of them were experiencing.

The people who do actively practice their faith are often small groups of people who meet in their homes and who face ridicule when they try to tell others about what they believe.  In Ireland, U2 is the closest thing to "Christian" music that there is.  My friend John Mark Mullan put it best: "Only in America are there Bible verses on posters of kittens."

So when I returned from Europe, I tried going into this same Christian bookstore and found myself hyperventilating.  To walk in the door and see a giant display about "Bible Man," and books on Christian finance, Christian dieting, and Christian dating was a little too much to handle.  Especially when I could find none of the spiritual classics - one small boxed set of C.S. Lewis was all - and not one single book on ministry to the poor or the disenfranchised, I was suddenly experiencing a great deal of disillusionment.

So why I let myself be lured back into this place this past Christmas, I'm not sure.  But somehow, between the door and the music section, I detoured into the book shelves just to see if anything of quality was available.  Sure, they had Manning and a little more Lewis, but then…

…it struck me like a bolt of lightning.  Bottles of nutritional supplements with Bible verses explaining why Scripture tells believers - apparently - to take these capsules full of olive oil twice daily with water and/or food.  Paintings of biblical figures and promises that God will bless your life if you pop these Christian vitamins.

I would've walked by, except for the one thing I couldn't ignore.  All I know is, I saw this one small display on the shelf and immediately was on the floor half laughing, half crying, half wanting to begin turning over tables like Jesus in the Temple.

That passed, and I stood to verify that I wasn't crazy.  The display read: "Bible Bar! Helps control appetite!"  A picture of Jesus looked up at me from the Christian Power Bar, His humble eyes imploring me to drop those few extra holiday pounds.  He had, after all, shed His blood for me.  It was the least I could do.

People had stopped to look at the not-so-subdued hysterics I had entered into on the floor and were now staring at my shocked and disappointed face as I stared at Bible Bar.  Would one of them come to ask me if I'd accepted Jesus?  Would I, in my rage, take the boxes of Bible Bar and begin flinging them into unsuspecting patrons' faces in a desperate attempt to show them the horrible error in all of this?

If I love Jesus, I have to control my appetite.

I remembered how, in my spiritual immaturity, I used to wonder: if I had enough faith, would I need to eat?  If I had enough faith, would I be okay if not one of my needs was ever met?  If I had enough faith, could I move mountains?

With Bible Bar, I can move the mountains that are my love handles.

Are we taught in Scripture that slavery to our appetites is a bad thing?  Absolutely.  Are we taught that having them in the first place is wrong?  Absolutely not.  We are given our desires and needs by God, and we are given faith to believe that God will meet them.

With Bible Bar, I can supersize the Gospel.

While I do believe that, to some degree, things like Christian books and music and culture can serve us and meet us in very important ways, what makes me so angry about things like this - about that whole culture in general - is that it tends to trivialize the entire message of the Gospel.  When my Savior is depicted on the wrapper of a Power Bar, His death at Golgotha - his ugly, sickening, awful death for all of us - is played down so we can strive to be more like what we're told we're supposed to.  Jesus died so that I can be thin. Jesus died so I can indulge that part of me that really does believe no one will love me unless I'm 10 pounds lighter.

So as I walked away from Bible Bar, I decided not to be too angry. After all, I have my own issues as a gay man with Christian culture in America, and at some level I use my anger over things like Bible Bar to justify all the other anger I hold deep inside.

So I prayed, "Lord, would You come in and begin turning over tables here?"  Somehow, I thought, maybe He would. But I won't. I haven't the authority.  So I try to understand, just as I want to be understood. I mourn that the Gospel has become, according to USA Today, a 3 billion dollar industry, and pray for God to make it new and vital in my own life so that I won't be tempted to run to things like Bible Bar - or the underlying message it preaches - for some sense of spiritual (or worldly) success.  My Gospel isn't supersized; it's barely there at all sometimes.  But I won't find the meaning in the cross by becoming a consumer.  I can't say I'm believing what I find in Scripture if I let this culture tell me that I don't love Jesus if I put on a few pounds.  (For more on that, read any book on Christian dating.)  I refuse to be uncritical of something because it wears the name "Christian," because when I deconstruct it, I see a wolf in sheep's clothing.  I see the culture that's already got me so messed up on my own body image and self-esteem just wearing the finery of the thing in my life I hold most dear.

I pray that the lies will be shattered, revealed for what they truly are.  I pray that the makers of Bible Bar, in an act of divine grace, will find themselves bankrupt and begging for mercy at the feet of that which they've used.

I pray that the lies in my own life will be unclothed and exposed, and that I will have the courage to feed them to the Spirit's fire and find myself more free than I ever knew I could be.

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