My New Year’s Resolution: To Call Myself Christian in Public

After years of “playing it cool” with my unbelieving friends, I can tell you: It only gets weirder to talk about faith the longer you wait.

Last January, I made an unusual resolution. On New Year’s Day, like many people, I peel the plastic off a new planner and imagine its pages filled with earnest but unlikely ambitions, from reading the Bible cover to cover to praying the Examen every night. But last year, instead of changing a daily practice, I set out to change a pattern: I would begin to speak openly about my Christian faith. Doing so would require revealing my relationship with Jesus to many people outside of my church community for the first time.

I’m a resident of the “None Zone,” a title the Pacific Northwest was given nearly two decades ago thanks to a high percentage of residents that claim no affiliation with any religion. In a 2017 Gallup poll of Washington state, 47% of American adults identified as not religious compared to 33% of the general population. Seattle, in particular, is one of many progressive American cities where the cultural narrative says Christians are an anomaly at best or anti-intellectual and backward at worst.

When I made my New Year’s resolution, I had been living in Seattle for 15 years. I knew how to walk the line. If I met a non-Christian, I’d carefully consider when to reveal that I attend church. More likely than not, I wouldn’t mention it at all. When I was in grad school during that time, a friend was flummoxed to discover my Christian faith through a blog post I’d written, since I’d only talked about my Jewish family. When I did mention my faith, I would do all I could to let people know that I’m a Christian but not that kind of Christian—one that fits an urbanite’s “straw man” stereotype of evangelicals. I wanted to be the sort of believer you could invite to your party.

Over time, the strategy of withholding my relationship with Jesus began to backfire, and I started to wither inside. It takes time and energy to present different sides of yourself to different people; no one can be their own PR manager forever. I was swimming in murky and lukewarm waters in both my online and real lives, and I’d become disingenuous and detached. The vibrancy of my faith was suffering, too.

After decades of “playing it cool” in hopes that I’d pass an imaginary litmus test from my many agnostic and spiritual-but-not-religious friends, let me tell you: It only gets weirder to talk about faith the longer you wait. Read More