Boy Erased

Throughout childhood I was a member of a Free Will Baptist church deep in the mountains of central West Virginia. The congregation was small and the dogma fundamental. Church membership was made up mostly of family members and close friends. It was rare that folks outside that small circle of people attended.

During my teen years a young, married couple -- who were not family -- started to attend on a regular basis. They were interesting, and seemed pretty hip to most of us kids. Soon, they began taking an active role in the church, and were especially eager to work with the youth. There was one problem: this congregation frowned upon women wearing pants in the church. 

And the young lady wore pants for every service.

After several months of waiting for her to catch on and conform, church leaders finally decided to talk to her about wearing a dress. The outcome? The couple never came back.

I couldn't help but think of this experience as I watched Boy Erased, which is based on the real-life experience of Garrard Conley. Conley is the Christian everyone thinks a Christian should be -- thoughtful, genuine, interested, curious, dedicated to God and to his faith -- and he's a true believer. His pastor father is proud of him, and his preacher's wife-mother thinks he hangs the moon.

Until the whole gay thing becomes public.

Even in the midst of distress and chaos, Jarrod (Gerrard's character in the flick) wants to do what he and his family think is the right thing -- learn to be straight. God can't love people who are living in sin, his father says, and people attracted to the same sex are living in sin.

So dutifully and with genuine intentions, Jarrod tries to change himself.

Instead, he discovers himself.  And in that process he recognizes the legalistic dogma so obvious and pronounced in many churches is, simply, made and maintained by people. We humans put our spin on The Word of God and fit it to how we see the world. The result is often a very narrow lifestyle of distrust and disharmony.

At one point in the movie Jarrod's father says that all of the answers to life can be found in the Christian Bible. That's true, of course, if we already know what we hope to find when we crack open the book to find it.