Yes, people can and do change when you argue with them; I am living-proof

Photo of me standing outside of the gay club counter-protesting the Bible Thumpers

One of my least favorite phrases is, “There's no point in arguing with people; they never change their mind anyway,” and its close cousin, “protesting doesn’t really change anything.” I’ve heard these words countless times over my life. I’ve come to believe that folks say it to justify away having to do the work, but I'm here to tell you that these sentiments are untrue.

I’m proof.

What I do agree with is that change is rarely spontaneous. Yes, you might not ever see that change yourself. Most folks living “left of center” claim that we believe in science but then ignore the fact that emotional evolution, like all forms of evolution, is often a slow process. That means that sometimes you win the debate but never know it. At times, you might have planted a seed of questioning in someone’s heart that doesn’t fully mature until years later.

I’m reminded of the story of Eustace Scrubb from the Chronicles of Narnia. He is a nasty little brat of a person who is cruel and vindictive. His shenanigans ultimately turn him into a dragon, as one is wont to do in fantasy novels. When Eustace finally realizes the errors of his ways, he attempts to remove the scales himself. It is difficult and painful. This story is allegorical to another nasty little brat of a person: Paul. He had also devoted his life to cruel shenanigans before being blinded by Jesus. Eventually, Paul was healed by the very people he had been causing harm to, and scales fell from his eyes until he could see again.

These are fables, stories written to help us understand the power of choosing goodness over hatred. However, I have seen such moments firsthand. Sadly, without the dragons or Jesus cameos.

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On the weekends, a group of Bible College students would go out to protest the local bars. The congregation I pastored would often counter-demonstrate with signs of love and humor. One Thursday night, two of these students walked past our table and threw a Bible tract at us. I yelled that they should have a beer, and they yelled back that I was going to Hell. Little did we know, this was the beginning of a bizarre friendship.

Every Thursday night, our new friends Sam and John* would walk by, hand us some tracts, and we would start conversing. Slowly, they began to sit with us and talk. This went on for months, and the encounters started to last longer and longer. We were actually, truly becoming friends. We stopped debating politics and religion, instead having authentic conversations about movies, books, and girls. But there was a ticking time bomb in front of us that would test the reality of this friendship; we were approaching the dividing point: Memorial Day Weekend.

For decades, Memorial Day weekend had become a time of fun and revelry for the LGBTQ+ community in our small Florida town. Thousands of people would come to the beaches to enjoy the nightlife, and, as a result, hundreds of street preachers would descend upon us to tell them they were all going to Hell. Our congregation would come out on this weekend to stand in between the queer community and the Bible Thumpers. Our goal was to act as a fence between the two groups, preventing the hatred from making its way into the ears of those who just needed the love of Jesus, not hellfire and brimstone.

Here is an example of the types of signs we would carry on Memorial Day Weekend

As I arrived, with a bundle of signs under my arm, one of the older street preachers stopped me, “You believe all that stuff you say about helping homeless folks?”

“I do,” I responded.

“So you believe the Bible says you are supposed to give to the one that asks of you?”

Again, I responded that I did, and so he hit me back with, “Then give me all the money you’ve got in your pocket.” What this man couldn’t have known was that I had just pulled the last cash I had in the world out of the ATM to go grocery shopping after the protest was over. I could feel my wife pleading with me out of the corner of my eye not to do it. But I knew I had to. I handed him the cash, exactly $100 bucks, and he smiled and laughed.

“It says to give your shirt as well, you know.” He grinned. I was wearing my priestly clerical collar. I pulled out the white tab, removed my shirt, and handed it to him. Indignently, I said, “You want my pants as well?” He nodded with an increasingly evil grin. The next thing I knew, I was standing in my underwear, surrounded by a few dozen street preachers.

This is how I’m going to die, I thought to myself.

Then, someone picked up a rock.

Out of nowhere, I heard someone scream to stop, “FUCK YOU!” I looked up, and it was Sam. He threw his Bible to the ground and said something like, “What is wrong with y’all! You told me we were the persecuted ones! And you are about to stone this guy! For what?”

Slowly, the crowd disbursed. Someone came over and handed me my clothes; they had to purchase them from the old street preacher. I got dressed and began to look for my friend. See, he lived in a trailer owned by someone at the church, he worked for someone at the church, and went to school at the church. His whole life was wrapped up in this thing, and it all went away in an instant of human decency.

He ended up getting a job at one of the very bars we used to protest out in front of. He started his own business, and we remain in touch to this day. Sometimes, we have to try on some radical love to see some big change. I will admit, this wasn’t the result I was expecting. Half the time, it was just entertaining to debate with him. But I am so glad he handed me that Bible tract that day. I think it saved us both... just not in the way he expected.

When I used to tell the story of my friend Sam leaving, I would place myself as the hero of that narrative: I was the good type of Christian, Sam and his friends were the mean kind, thus because of my act of bravery and selflessness, I helped convert him to the more Mister Rogers style of following Jesus. What I did not realize at the time is that I, too, still had a lot of work to do and that, sadly, the line between Sam and me was not nearly as thin as I thought it was. During his exodus from his Independent Baptist roots, I was still a priest. Though I presented myself as an alternative to the cruel type of Christianity, I wasn’t all that different. Yes, our congregation stood in opposition to the vitriol of the Bible Thumpers. Still, the Orthodox Church as a whole had a theology very similar to our Baptist counterparts when it came to LGBTQ+ issues. I wasn’t offering an alternative as much as saying, “Would you like to get punched in the face while someone is screaming at you or using your correct pronouns?” Well, either way, you are getting punched in the face. Essentially, our argument was, “Don’t scream at people on the streets; guilt them in the confessional as God intended.”

I would argue that for many, the latter hurts more because it comes as a shock.

I was tolerant.

I would tolerate you.

Not accept you.

Not love you as you are, just where you are.

But I was still praying for you to stop being you.

I was the problem.

Little did I know then that my own day of reconning was coming. Soon, I would realize that I was not the hero of the Sam story. I was about to discover the dangers of sitting on the fence.

---

The evening before my ordination to the priesthood was full of anticipation and anxiety, the feeling one attributes to butterflies in your stomach before a first kiss. Yet, even more similar to the eve of a wedding. Those same feelings of cold feet began to itch at my toes, and I felt like I wanted to run like the wind or maybe Julia Roberts. The somberness of the vocation I was about to undertake weighed heavily on my mind and soul. This was probably the greatest source of my doubt because I am not a somber person. I am rough around the edges, marred by trauma, and with a tongue that moves faster than my mind.

Am I someone Jesus would call to this ministry? Am I worthy of this?

I was ordained a priest in the Western Rite of the Russian Orthodox Church

That morning, my eyes welled with tears as the bishop placed the oil on my hands, anointing them for the sacredness of the Eucharist. The blessing of a priest’s body during the ordination service is not that dissimilar from the ritual of last rites. From a theological perspective, this makes perfect sense. The action of becoming a priest is, in function and purpose, the laying down of one's life, joining our sacrifice of certain earthly pleasures with the ultimate death to self-found in Jesus. As I repeated the vows, I meant them with every fiber of my being. No part of me doubted my commitment to the cause or the cross I would carry. Finally, I stood arm to arm-with the bishop and celebrated the Divine Liturgy (the mass) for the very first time. 

For nearly a decade, I stood behind the altar and lifted the bread and wine. I heard confessions, celebrated weddings, and presided over countless funerals. In the course of a day, I could see every part of the human experience. I might begin my morning baptizing a child, the afternoon watching as a couple make a lifelong commitment to one another. Then, later that evening, standing at the deathbed of another couple as one of them finally reached “until death do us part.” 

I loved my simple life as a small-town parish priest.

The beauty and majesty of the liturgical church were mesmerizing to me. As the son of a Southern Baptist minister and a Pentecostal mother, this was my great rebellion. I had abandoned the one true faith of Luther’s Reformation for the Whore of Babylon, trading in contemporary Christian music for chants, smoke machines for incense, and track lighting for beeswax candles. The ancientness of the Orthodox faith helped me feel connected to Jesus in a way nothing else had. These songs and smells felt like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, placing me into another world entirely where the blind could see and the deaf could hear, and the dead would rise again in glory.

For most of my time in ministry, I felt like an outsider, an outlier of the Church, who just didn’t quite fully belong. I was constantly in trouble for letting colorful language fly during my sermons or making too many pop-culture references. I was a cussing, smoking, drinking priest in motorcycle boots hanging out at punk shows in seedy dive bars. 

When the Bible-thumping street preachers would come out and protest our local gay bar, I would stand outside in protest of their bigotry while holding signs from the humorous “I’m With Stupid” to the more direct and gentle “You Are Loved” or “Free Hugs.” Many other clergy were afraid that I was getting too close to “the world” and that I would compromise myself by associating with such people. I continued to protest the protestors in front of the gay clubs and abortion clinics, placing myself at odds with many of my brother priests. 

The problem is that I was straddling the fence so hard that I had splinters in my sack. 

I was trying to counter the hateful way that folks were saying things and not the root ideologies that were motivating that hate. I disagreed with how my fellow Christians responded to those entering the abortion clinic. So, instead of holding signs with hateful messages, mine said things like, “I will adopt your child.” However, the core of my motivation was not dissimilar to the actions of those I was attempting to counter. At the end of the day, I still believed that abortion was wrong and that people living an “alternative lifestyle” should live an abstinent life. I disagreed with the vitriolic way the message was being shared much more than I cared about the theology backing it up.

Worst of all, because I was being kind instead of cruel, I piously believed that my actions were better than those of my siblings in faith. What I failed to see is that it didn’t matter if you invalidated someone with kindness or cruelty; it was the action of not seeing them, not hearing them, and not accepting them that caused the real pain, not just how the words were said. In many respects, my way was a more horrendous action. I preached love but not acceptance; I preached tolerance but not inclusion. Then, unsuspecting people would come to my parish believing that I loved them just as they were, but I fell short.

What I was unable to explain at that time, because I wasn’t being honest with even myself, is that the battle of religious ideology was really being fought in my own heart. I could not reconcile the faith I had been taught from birth and the feelings I had about my own identity. I was a married priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, and yet I knew, deep down, that I was queer and polyamorous. I was fighting my own demons by treating others with the kindness I wished to receive while still condemning the very same feelings.

I claimed to be fighting hypocrisy in the Church, but the truth was that I was also a hypocrite.

No, I was not slinging slurs of condemning people to hell or standing on the street corners with verses taken out of context splattered across them… but I was a liar. I was lying about my own identity, about my feelings, and my doubts. I would stand behind the pulpit and preach things as truth that I was uncertain of and questioned, yet espouse them as absolutes. In reality, I was far worse than the others I condemned because I took a “kiss with a fist is better than none” approach. I spoke with love, kindness, and compassion, but the end conclusion was the same; we were all children in the hands of an angry God.

There was a crack in my armor; I just didn’t know it yet.

Me wearing Eastern vestments while celebrating a divine liturgy with the Bishop during Lent

The year leading up to my leaving the priesthood was a time when I was experiencing some of the most profound doubt, all while appearing to many as more fundamentalists than I ever had. If you were looking toward me from the outside, no part of me appeared to be questioning my faith. I was a stalwart defender of it. I had lost friends over my sudden extremism and Biblical literalism. To those who loved me, it seemed I had become a sold-out Russophile, but inside, I was grasping for any straws I could to prevent myself from falling over the ledge into apostasy.

I remained silent as the church condemned Pussy Riot and as pictures began to surface of the violence being enacted on the LGBTQ+ community in Russia. 

One of my least favorite phrases is, “There's no point in arguing with people; they never change their mind anyway,” and its close cousin, “protesting doesn’t really change anything.” I’ve heard these words countless times over my life. I’ve come to believe that folks say it to justify away having to do the work, but I'm here to tell you that these sentiments are untrue.

On February 21st, 2012, a group of women entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. They were wearing bright balaclavas to cover their faces, and they began playing a song called The Punk Prayer, exposing the relationship between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

They were arrested. 

It is hard to imagine a time when this wasn’t international news, but it wasn’t. Most people were unaware of the protest and subsequent arrests. But as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, it became news instantly in my circle. 

I received a memo from my immediate superior that we should condemn the protest from the pulpit. Initially, I argued. It seemed odd to me to speak out against people protesting. It did not make sense to my Western sensibilities. The right of people to peacefully assemble was so engrained into my consciousness that the outrage didn’t make sense. My superior countered back about how the protest took place on private property and that I wasn’t thinking logically. 

I complied with the demand to speak out. I was, after all, a servant of the Church, and it was my duty to submit to those in authority over me, which is precisely what I did.

It is easy for people to forget who I was in light of who I have become. But it can not be stressed enough that I was ultimately compliant with the demands of the Church. I said the things I was told to say. However, I soon could not stop paying attention to this court case, which was slowly becoming an international conversation. 

Three members of the art collective Pussy Riot were arrested: Nadya Tolokonnikova, Maria "Masha" Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich. Each week, new information would come out about not only their treatment but the atrocities they wished to expose. 

I continued to serve as a priest.

It can not be stressed enough that my silence was complicity and that silence + death.

The war continued to rage within my soul.

Then tragedy struck in the way that it only knows how: in threes. Within the course of a few months, I lost two of my closest friends, one to suicide, and another was murdered. I presided over both of their funerals. Neither of them were practicing Christians. According to the faith structure I was adhering to, their souls were in mortal danger. Then, our parish was hit by a flood, and the parsonage where my family lived was destroyed. I was tired, full of doubt, and afraid. Every inch of the town I had called home was now filled with sadness and memories I wished to forget. I could feel my faith slipping away from me, and I was scared.

I requested a transfer to a new parish, and the bishop approved it. I took a position as an associate priest at a small church in South Carolina. Little did I know, that this would be my final undoing.

One day, my wife and I took a tour of a plantation museum run by a Black lead non-profit designed to expose the reality of the cruelty of slavery in the Antebellum South. As we took the tour of the cabins where human beings were enslaved by their white Christian oppressors, I stepped into one of the buildings that doubled as a church for those who were enslaved on the plantation. On the wall was a written sermon that had been preached there using the Bible to condone slavery. Riddled throughout the sermon were verses that supported slavery. Yet, in 2013, you’d be hard-pressed to find many congregations that would say they supported it now. Instead, as history has been whitewashed, Christianity had now attempted to pretend as if it was some beacon of light that fought against this injustice when, in reality, it had been one of the tools that helped support the slave trade and justified this violence with the scriptures.

I stood there staring at this sermon and was stuck with a sobering thought, “One day, it could be one of my sermons on a wall like this.” Would it be the homily I preached condemning Pussy Riot? Would it be a transcript of a conversion I once had with a young deacon who confided in me that he was gay, and I told him that he should remain celibate if he wished to be a priest? Was I any different than these pastors who used the scriptures as a weapon to justify hatred and cruelty toward someone else? 

On June 26th, 2013, the Supreme Court repealed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and paved the way for marriage equality to become the law of the land. Instantly, chatter began amongst the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, calling for violence towards the queer community. Some suggested that LGBTQ+ people should kill themselves, while others prayed for a “Russification of America” so that it would become more aligned with the extremist views of Russia. I watched in horror, knowing that my continued silence would support these words.

I had finally reached my red line.

That afternoon, I typed up a brief letter of resignation and posted it online. As I read this letter a decade later, it failed in so many capacities. Yet. I’m sharing it with you because it shows growth. We don’t always have the right words or know the proper terms; for example, notice I say polygamy instead of polyamory, or I use the term transgendered instead of trans. Even my letter's cadence is so different from how I write now. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but I was doing the best I could to begin taking the steps to undo all the damage my church had done, and that I had done.

Here is the letter, dated June 26th, 2013:

“For nearly a decade I have served as a pastor, priest and friend to those in need. But my failure today is measured not in what I have done but what I have failed to do. I have remained silent on the issue of marriage equality, and by doing so have failed many people whom I considered to be friends, family, and also those who are suffering throughout the world due to intolerance and bigotry.

I have remained silent out of fear, fear of isolation from my faith, of losing the love and support of my family, and so I have allowed myself to be motivated by that fear. However, the scriptures tell us that 'true love casts out all fear.’

Silently in my heart I have held feelings in opposition to my faith on issues of marriage. I thought that if I remained silent and prayerful then I would eventually come in line with my faith. I have not. 

The truth is that marriage ‘between one man, one woman’ is not in the scriptures. There are ever evolving forms of marriage in the scriptures, and seldom was it simply between a singular man and woman. 

This fear has held me back, but I can not sit idly by and watch young children kill themselves over the shame of loving someone. It is my religion, or at least the way it is interpreted, that is promoting the shame that is leading to these suicides, to the bullying, and to the assaults.

In my silence I have allowed these actions to take place. When those within the LGBT community have asked me to speak out, I have remained silent, and I am ashamed of myself.

Our hearts are capable of more love than our ancient religions can comprehend, because they are crystalized in a time we have evolved past, and I have allowed myself, and my family, not to progress. 

It is for this reason that today I forsake everything that I have known, my religion and my stability, and I choose love. I realize in doing this there will be many who are disappointed in me and angry with me, some will even hate me, but that is a risk I am willing to take because I can no longer live with myself.

To the LGBTQ community, I beg your forgiveness, for my silence and inaction. To my friends who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, questioning, and to the often forgotten, polygamous community, thank you for remaining my friend in spite of it taking me so long to come forward. The time has come for me to join my voice with those who are moving forward.

This leaves me with more questions than answers, I will have to start over completely, begin a new career, and a new life.

Your prayers, positive energy, support, and love is needed now so very deeply.

Nathan Monk”

In the aftermath of denouncing the priesthood, I was censured by the church and had my facilities removed. The seminary I attended was closed, the bishop who ordained me disposed, and the ordination of hundreds of priests was placed on hold until the hierarchy could figure out how an apostate like me was allowed into the ranks of the clergy. My family had to flee in the middle of the night from our home, packing only the essentials for fear of retaliation. I received near-daily threats of violence against myself and my family. I received a call in the middle of the night telling me to kill myself. 

My wife was pregnant with our third child, and we shoved everything we could into our minivan and left our whole life behind.

Every part of my life began to crumble around me. I had lost every friend and every colleague, and I was living in exile. I spent the entire day after I denounced the priesthood, calling everyone I knew, apologizing for my silence, for my inaction up to this point. I determined to make the rest of my life an act of contrition.

The rockiness and instability turned me into a shell of the person I once was. I became angry, paranoid, and bitter. This version of myself ultimately torpedoed my marriage, and I found myself truly alone with the man I had become. I did not like him very much, and I don’t blame anyone else for not liking him, either.

Then I went to therapy. I got help. 

I got better.

It was not easy; it was painful. I had to go deep into my past and face the trauma I had chosen to forget. I had to learn to forgive myself even if others never would. I found a reason to wake up in the morning again. I came out of the closet and started to live life to its fullest.

On the left: me with Nadya and Eva Elfie and on the right me with Masha Alyokhina, Diana Burkot, Olga Broisova and Alina Petrova at Riot Days

I have felt a great debt to the members of Pussy Riot for helping me see the light. But not just them; they were the final straw, but there were many other heroes along the journey who helped me. Like when Jeff and I lay awake one night after youth group, and he asked me if I liked boys. Jeff liked boys. I sometimes did like boys. I didn’t tell Jeff that when he asked me. I was still glad he asked, though. There were also my friends Booth and Big Gay Bob. They used to come out to our food distribution. Both of them were members of the LGBTQ+ community. They knew my theology wasn’t exactly in alignment with theirs, but they loved me anyway, in spite of myself. I had countless folks argue with me on the internet, including my best friend’s father-in-law. In many ways, if you read that debate I looked the most conservative I ever did, but not because this man was losing, but because I was just yelling the loudest because I knew I was.

I left the institutional church because I was argued with. I have a lot of friends who have left for the same reason. For most of them, it wasn’t an overnight moment but a slow progress of deconstructing their faith down to the foundation. It is painful and difficult and often comes with losing friends and family along the way. It’s ripping the scales from your arms and eyes because Jesus said, “Nathan, why are you persecuting me?” For years, I might have said, “But Jesus, when did I persecute you?”

“Whenever you said you couldn’t do a wedding, or bake a cake, or told someone they must do penance for looking at gay porn. Whatever you said to my siblings, you did to me.”

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Shortly after I left the priesthood, I went to a karaoke bar. A man approached me as I sat there alone at a little round table. At first, I didn’t recognize him; it was John. It took him a little bit longer than Sam, but he ultimately left the Baptist Church as well. He looked at me and said, “I guess we can get that beer now.” We hung out for a couple of hours; we even sang a karaoke song together while finally enjoying that drink. We apologized for how we had treated each other over the years. Just like I apologized to the members of Pussy Riot, to my queer friends, and so many others. Because I changed.

Eventually, I came out as queer. I realized that I was wrong on so many levels, not just about the world at large but also myself. I had fallen short. I am forever thankful for those who argued with me and told me I needed to change. For the ones who protested to the random person who posted photos of bloodied gay kids on the streets of Moscow just fighting for their right to be themselves. I don’t even know the name of the person who shared those, who led me to Pussy Riot, who led me on a wild adventure of self-discovery. But all of them played a part in the journey of leading me to my most authentic self thus far.

I changed.

The word sin, when translated literally, means to miss the mark. It is an archery term for when you are aiming at the bullseye but fall short of it. In this sense, I have sinned against all of my siblings with my time of silence and complicity. 

There is a beautiful prayer in the Episcopal Church that is a confession of sins that reads:

Most merciful God,
I confess that I have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what I have done,
and by what I have left undone.
I have not loved you with my whole heart;
I have not loved my neighbors as myself.
I are truly sorry and I humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on me and forgive me;
that I may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name.

Amen.

For my failures, for my silence in the past, for taking too long to get here, for not loving myself, for not loving you, for now seeing the Divine in each of you, my siblings, I beg your mercy and forgiveness.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.