I am lowkey worried that this might be a point of contention.
We are aligned on almost everything. On the rest of it. The big stuff and most of the small stuff. It is one of the things I love about being with him.
But.
He is religious. He knows the Bible. He reads it. He takes it seriously in a way I do not anymore, or in a way I am not sure if I do, or in a way that I once did and have since unlearned and am not sure what I have replaced it with.
He won't even come on the podcast.
He says he is afraid of saying the wrong thing. He does not want to be the person on the recording who got it wrong. He fears blasphemy. Not as a punchline — as an actual thing. As something to take care around.
I joke about blasphemy.
I do it on the show. I do it in our group chats. I do it sometimes in front of him. He doesn't laugh.
His God is Old Testament.
I don't mean only Old Testament — he reads the whole Bible — but the God he reaches for, in the moments when he is talking about who God is, is the God of fear. The God who sees. The God you do not cross. The God whose name you do not say lightly.
My God is New Testament.
The God of love. The God you can talk to like a person. The God who absorbed the worst of it on the cross so you could stop being afraid of him.
I do not know if these are the same God or two different Gods we are each calling God.
I also do not believe my God sends everyone who has not believed in him to hell.
This is a huge one in Christianity. I know it is. I know the verses on both sides. I know the weight that view carries in our communities. I know what people will say.
I just don't believe it. I cannot make it line up with the God I think I know. If God is love, the math doesn't work for me. If God is the one chasing every person down with kindness, I cannot also believe he is going to ship most of them off to eternal fire because they didn't sign the right paperwork in time.
I know my boyfriend would not put it that way.
I know the moment I do put it that way, I sound flippant. Glib. Like I am not taking the question seriously.
That is part of why I do not bring it up.
Funny thing is, he does not even go to church most Sundays.
His religion is internal. It is conviction. It is what he believes. It is not a building he walks into every week. By that measure, I am the one who has been to church more recently. I am the one who sat in the pew last month, unsettled.
So it is not about practice. It is about what we believe is at stake.
For him, more is at stake. The verses are heavier. The lines are sharper. The wrong answer matters more.
For me, the lines are softer. The questions are open. I am still figuring out which parts I keep and which parts I do not.
Most of the time none of this comes up. We are watching a show. We are making dinner. We are arguing about who put the laundry in the dryer wrong. We are aligned. We are fine.
It only becomes a thing when we talk about it.
So we mostly do not.
I am writing this on the internet. I am about to put this on a blog that anyone with the link can read. I am going to let strangers — and God knows who else — read about my boyfriend and the religion gap between us, before he and I have actually sat down and worked through it.
I do not know what to make of that.
I know it is easier to write to strangers than to look across a table at the person I love and say I think your God might be different from my God and I do not know what to do with that. I know the strangers are easier because they are not him. They are not the person who is supposed to also have this with me, whatever this is.
I am not sure what writing it down here is doing for me. I am not sure if it is a way of avoiding the conversation, or a way of practicing for it, or a way of admitting it out loud first because saying it out loud first feels too big.
That's it. No fancy ending.