The Bible as Fandom

“Have you lost interest in things that used to interest you in the past month?”

For my day job, I sell insurance for a major American company to Medicare beneficiaries over the telephone. At the end of every enrollment, I have a questionnaire with several health-related questions, including this one. Experiencing a sudden loss of interest can indicate deeper mental health issues that need to be addressed.

Every time I read it, I find myself thinking about my own interests. My life used to revolve around theology and especially academic study of the Bible. Some time in the last decade, I lost that interest. Here’s how I am finding it again.

Surprising Life Twists I Never Saw Coming

In 2013, I de-converted from conservative Evangelical faith. I could not reconcile my exegesis of the Bible with issues of justice for LGBTQ+ people. But the actual moment of my departure was when I realized just how much my theological paradigm compelled me to be constantly “othering” people. I had been categorizing the entire world in terms of “saved” and “unsaved,” and then treating people accordingly.

That paved the way for me to explore my own gender issues. In 2015, I transitioned from living as a man to living as a woman in society. I have never been someone who makes changes gradually. I went from presenting 100% male to 100% female in a single day. I had all my legal documentation changed in the space of two months. I didn’t mess around.

I tried desperately to hang on to the faith that had once been so important to me. But the more I interacted with my community that had been so deeply hurt by conservative faith, the more I found myself pushed toward secularism. After all, it’s hard to cling to a system that empowers a small minority of privileged people by marginalizing a great deal of others.

For a few years, I tried to find my place with liberal Christianity. I was on track to enter ministry with Metropolitan Community Churches. MCC was founded in the late ’60s by a gay Pentecostal pastor after he was kicked out of his church. It seemed like a good fit for me as a queer refugee from the church. I reenrolled in seminary to continue pursuing my Master of Divinity degree.

I love MCC deeply. But I found myself still endlessly striving to make sense of faith. I had spent two decades constructing an intellectual edifice for Evangelical theology. I simply could not find resources robust enough to remodel my faith to make sense. I couldn’t separate the parts I loved about my Evangelical heritage from the toxic parts. I could no longer connect with the vitality and life-giving energy from faith that had once sustained me. And of course, the outrageous costs of seminary classes didn’t exactly help.

Involuntary Loss of Faith

I somehow stumbled onto atheist YouTube. To my dismay, I found their arguments more and more compelling. I concluded that much of my conversative faith had been built on faulty epistemology. In other words, I discovered that many of my beliefs about God were not well-founded. The cost of continuing to believe was that I would feel I was lying to myself. The price tag was too high.

At long last, I yielded my faith.

Immediately, I stopped feeling joy at my vast theological library. Only pain and loss. My bookshelves shouted as me constantly that the faith I once loved had been forcefully ripped away from me . In an act of mourning, I boxed up my Jesus and the Victory of God, my Word biblical commentaries, all ten volumes of my Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, and hundreds of others. And finally I found peace.

But what would take its place? Once Covid hit, I found community again in tabletop roleplaying games. We met online once a week to tell stories about fantasy worlds together. In place of a vast theological library, I began to accumulate volumes about imaginary places that my friends and I could imagine inhabiting. My Sunday night group thwarted the great dragon Tiamat from taking over the known world. My Tuesday night group traveled to the first layer of hell to rescue a fallen city that had been claimed by devils.

It was a new mythology, this time unburdened by the demand to be true. It provided the community I desperately needed.

So okay, I confess, I am a nerd. I enjoy pursuing fandoms. I know on the map where the planet Hoth is in the Star Wars galaxy. I collected a couple dozen Wonder Woman graphic novel after the first movie made me fall in love with the character. I accumulated nearly every volume WotC has published about the Forgotten Realms from fifth edition D&D.

So Here’s a Question

What if I come back to the Bible with that same sense of wonder? What if I strip away my expectation that the Bible can only be relevant if it provides a metaphysical map of reality? What if instead, I just come back to the text and appreciate it for what it is? What if I nurture my love for the narrative world it creates? Or in other words, if I approach the Bible simply as fandom?

Suddenly, the whole project is fun again. I can appreciate Paul simply for his brilliance as a thinker. I can follow the academic arguments about the historical Jesus without needing to predetermine the answer. And my years studying Greek and Hebrew have to be at least as valuable as if I had studied Klingon, right? Lets face it, there’s something fascinating about anyone who has learned a made-up language.

Thus begins my reentry to biblical studies. I have started unboxing the books that have been patiently waiting to be loved again. I need to find shelving for them all in my current office. Yesterday, I upgraded my Logos Bible software to version 10 . The new version has a cool feature that lets me catalog my print books, making them searchable. And my upgrade package finally gives me access to the BDAG Greek lexicon without having to schlep around a giant print volume.

So it seemed like a good time to fire up this old blog again. Glad to have you along for the journey. Leave a comment about your own journey.