Why I (Still) Believe in God

A colleague asked me, a queer man from the South who grew up being told my sexuality was a sin, how I could still consider myself Christian. Here's my answer. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( ['How Can You Still Be a Christian?' He Asked. It's...Complicated.]( How Can You Still Be a Christian?' He Asked. It's...Complicated. A guy at work recently asked why I’m Christian. It’s not something I am particularly vocal about, but it’s also not something I’m not vocal about, you know? In some ways, I think of it as doing improv or supporting the Patriots: If you talk about it in public, get ready for eyes to roll. But I’d been trained for moments like this. It’s been years since I’ve considered myself evangelical, but the indoctrination is hard to shake. The party line is that the only way to the afterlife is through Jesus, and the only way to Jesus? Well, it could be through me. I could practically hear the youth pastors from my past speak in unison, “How blessed to be in this moment, provided through the grace of God, where this young man has queried you about your faith.” As we stood there, chatting over a cubicle wall and sipping on expensive promotional liquor in CVS plastic cups, my colleague said, in what amounted to nothing short of an invitation to put evangelicalism in action, “I just don’t understand how someone could believe in that.” Former me would have mounted a spirited reply, but I’m not former me. I understand why you’d ask the question. How can someone believe in that? For my every East Tennessee impulse to defend my faith, I have what is now an equally strong New York impulse to talk on past these moments. But the side of me that is Christian—the word I use most easily to describe myself—stumbled over my words, trying to find one specific anecdote that would make that question make sense. 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[Read the Full Story]( [This Hat Was My Obsession]( This Hat Was My Obsession Not long ago, I stumbled upon a photo of a fresh-faced Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern attending a toxic-waste benefit at MGM in Culver City. Sounds very chic. It was September 1986, and perched atop MacLachlan’s head was a blue-and-white cap with a large, colorful—but indiscernible—patch on the front. It got me wondering, What is that hat? When it comes to caps, I like them as random as possible. No brand names. No sports teams. I’ll take something stranger, thank you. What started as an idle curiosity about MacLachlan’s hat quickly became an obsession. After securing a hi-res image to work from, I futzed for hours in Photoshop until the word PALOMAR emerged from the pixels. Bingo. Palomar Mountain Spring Water, I learned, was founded in 1984 at the start of the bottled-water craze in California. It was based near San Diego, not far from the Palomar Observatory—it’s right there in the logo—that tops the actual Palomar Mountain. I immediately jumped on eBay and bought the one you see here for $90. After all that sleuthing, it took only about three minutes to find it. Perhaps it was being stuck in the Covid era that made the exercise seem like an escape. Or maybe it was because, having spent several hours squinting at my laptop to ID it, I wasn’t letting it get away. [Read the Full Story]( [The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer]( The Unbearable Costs of Becoming a Writer My parents didn’t understand my job. At least, not in its entirety. If asked, they might tell people that their daughter was a writer. They were both avid readers who read my first book and many of my stories; once, when I visited them, I found a newspaper article I’d written stuck to their refrigerator door. On visits, they would occasionally see me working—that is, staring at my computer screen, typing a bit, and staring some more, wrestling with a draft for hours or days. They might be interested in what I was writing, but sometimes it was difficult for them to see it as Work, and they would often mistake it for volunteer labor, a hobby, like the hundreds of stories they knew I’d written growing up. The editorial process, my entire career in publishing, seemed nebulous to them, mostly invisible labor—until I sent them something I’d written that had been published, something they could see and hold and read for themselves. There were stretches when I made so little money writing or editing that I couldn’t blame my parents for assuming they were hobbies. They used to wonder how I could spend weeks revising work I had already done, months on an idea or project that might never sell. It was hard for me to explain these decisions, explain why I made them even when I could not necessarily afford to. I knew that they wouldn’t have taken such risks. I had grown up watching my parents do what needed to be done, which often meant improvising. My father worked in restaurants for most of my childhood, and my mother did administrative office work. When layoffs came or businesses closed, they found other ways to make ends meet: he stocked shelves at a snack-food company and did yard work for the family for whom my grandmother kept house; she took temp-agency assignments and worked in my middle-school cafeteria. Until a series of medical emergencies hit, they were mostly able to make ends meet. [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019