interview by Mike Madrid
I became a Christian when I was ten. I no longer believe in God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, heaven or hell. But I think that Christ’s formula for living is a good thing.
My family is from Texas. My mom and dad were both born in the same West Texas town. When my brother was five, they moved out west. He’s five years older than me. Fortunately for me, knowing what I know now, they left a very closed minded, semi-racist…dare I say “white trash” family tree and existence, and became the liberal west coast folks of the family. In my mind, growing up in San Francisco afforded me great freedom of thought and zero racist tendencies.
My parents took me to the Church of Christ. That’s what they grew up in. In the Church of Christ, it’s all hard pews and no spirit. Very puritanical. It’s hardcore. Not comfortable. Not fun, when you’re a kid, especially. No musical instruments. It’s all a cappella. Even though we were in a very rigid, puritanical sort of church, it did help me with my singing skills.
When I was around six, my dad got transferred to the Sacramento area. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but we started going to a Pentecostal church, a part of the Assemblies of God. Cushy theater seating for a thousand, air conditioning, sound system. Comfort, luxury and a rock band with drums. People dancing in the spirit, speaking in tongues. My parents, fully engaged, stepped into their new spirituality. And I joined them. At ten I accepted Christ in my heart. And it was not a familial duty. It wasn’t peer pressure or any kind of encouragement from my parents to do so. I was just awash in the spirit.
My parents—their faith was very active. They had gotten involved with the youth ministry at the church.. It made them younger, because they found a new expression of their faith. All the kids called my mom “Auntie”. Everyone wanted to hug her and be around her. My dad’s more on the quiet side, but he taught Sunday school and led Bible studies. He would be the substitute preacher now and then. In the mid-70’s, my dad became an ordained minister, and eventually ended up having this little home church in Montara.
We moved back to the Bay Area and I started 4th grade. Went to junior high and first year of high school in San Bruno. Those years were a bit of a struggle. I was maligned and picked on and abused. And then we moved to Daly City. When I moved to [a new school], I had a clean slate. None of my history. So, for the first time in my life, there was the opportunity to become popular. I had signed up for drama class, and there was an audition for Twelfth Night. I’d never been in an actual play before. Did some sketches in junior high. I auditioned and got cast. We ended up winning “Best Play in California” for that production. My first play. So I was a big shot, right away.
I was very serious about my faith while I was studying acting [in high school] and figuring it all out. And by that point, I needed my own church experience. I didn’t want to be part of my dad’s little tiny home church. I needed a youth group. I moved to a different church in San Francisco, on my own. That was where I really blossomed. I was writing Christian plays. I was in a choir that would tour California every summer. The music director would put together songs and I would write a play to go in between. Eventually my parents started going to the church I was at once that little home church shrunk down to nothing.
When I entered my sophomore year at my new high school, I was a true believer. But over time, my friends started asking me, “Hey man, you wanna smoke this joint? You wanna get drunk?” And that was fun. I enjoyed that. I was fitting in. That goes back to popularity. I was hanging out with the stoners, and the jocks, the “drama fags” and the black kids. I was having a blast, but I was conflicted. I was wrestling between being true to my faith, and being a sinner who was cool and popular. And eventually being a sinner won out. [Laughs]
Every summer my church would do these choir tours. So every summer I would get seriously recommitted to Christ during the tours, and say, “I’m going to be a warrior for God in my high school when I go back.” My senior year, like my sophomore and junior years, I started school really fired up. Enough so that I had shared my faith with some of my closest friends. And word got out to somebody. One of the cheerleaders that I had a crush on confronted me at the top of the steps of the high school. “I hear you’re a Jesus freak.” And in that moment of stark confrontation from this beautiful young blonde girl, I said, “No. You must be mistaken.” I denied my Lord. [Laughs] And that’s when I decided being liked was more important.
I stopped going to church. I stopped going to school basically. I was smoking weed every day. Drinking and acting the fool. When I look back at that time in the late 70’s, I see our society was at the cusp of the degradation of American public schools. I was able to get away with all of that behavior without any penalty. I had enough credits and it didn’t matter. It was sad. So that was a deep time for me. I acted crazy, I was an entertainer. I drank and smoked and snorted with the best of them. So that was my senior year. Class clown. Even my graduation pictures I’m all coked out. My eyes are all bugged out. My friends who knew me before that final year said, “Wow, dude. You’ve really changed.” I took it to the next level. My parents were nonjudgmental to a fault. When I was doing all that crazy behavior, they weren’t scolding me, admonishing me. They still let me drive after I crashed the car. They were cool about it, and were examples of really loving Christian parents. They knew that I knew the answers, and I would find the way.
So the summer after graduation, the youth choir at my Church that I had been a part of for the last three years had done their tour. I didn’t go on that tour. They invited me to come to see their show. So I went there, all hard. And I put up a strong defense. But eventually, I felt God’s hand reach down and grab a hold of me. That was “the moment” where I made my most serious commitment to serving God, and stepped away from my sinful season. Really seriously started serving Christ and leaving the childish ways behind. In retrospect, it was still a struggle. There were things in my life that I didn’t feel able to completely overcome. And I carried around a lot of guilt and anxiety about trying so hard to be a good Christian and serve God the way he would want me to.
My brother came out right around this time in my life. As a believer, I felt homosexuality was a sin. But we all sin. So I wrote him a letter saying, “Hey, you’re my brother and I love you. I don’t condemn you.” So that was another aspect of my faith that I wrestled with. A lot of Christians have a tendency to castigate gays and look at the gay community as a sector of sinners that needs to be saved. I thought, “People are people, and sin is sin.” I would look at these kinds of Christians and think, “You lie and you cheat and you steal and you have affairs. So what’s the difference? Why is [homosexuality] set apart as ‘the thing’ that we have to get on megaphones and yell at people to, ‘Get right with God’?” I had a problem with that. I though our job was to lead by example. Lead by love and openness. Those issues were there when I was very committed to my faith. So, I was trying to work it out. It helped that my brother was gay.
I got married when I was twenty. A few years in, [the marriage] started to go sour. It was a really horrifying experience. In a nutshell, my wife pretended to have an affair with the pastor of our church in order to destroy me psychologically. Her goal was to play on my insecurities. Create an environment where I would lose control enough that our relationship would break apart and she’d be free of me. And I know that this happened because she admitted it to me at the end of the relationship. As this was destroying me, I was calling out to God, “Why do you want this of me?” And I realized at that point [that] God wanted to crush me in order to get me to submit to him completely.
As I was becoming more and more despairing, desperate and suicidal, nobody from my church, except for one man, would reach out and help me. Some of the elders didn’t want to talk to me. And I became very aggressive. I would go to the prayer room and tell them how I was feeling and would get the brush off. I started calling people out. I’d ask, “Why won’t you help me?” I couldn’t hold in my anguish. Nobody wanted to go down the honesty route with me. And I think that was the moment when my church, organized religion, and the Body of Christ became invalid.
I worked with a Christian theater company at this time and started going to some different churches.. I met this married woman. I was still a Christian at the time. She was a Christian, too. We had an affair. As this was evolving, my mom died. In ’89. It was those two events that shook the foundations of my life.
A girl who went to my church was at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and was in her first year as a company member there. And that’s how I ended up getting into that school, in the grad program. She gave me a stellar recommendation based on a skit I did at church. I was the oldest guy in my class. Everybody was in their early twenties. I was already thirty, had already been married, had a full time job. And divorced. So I already had a lot of life experience to immediately use in my craft.
In acting school, we were doing an exercise. We had to lay on the floor and imagine yourself in the theater of your dreams. You’re on the stage and somebody’s going to come in the door. And immediately my mom came barging in. [Laughs] And she sat down and said, “You know, I’m not real happy with how you’re living your life. But I’m so proud of you, of who you are.” To get that validation from her in a spiritual sense was completely overwhelming. I had to lay on the floor for about ten minutes. I couldn’t speak. Everyone asked, “Are you OK?” I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t move.
I had a further epiphany of myself standing on a plateau, and looking for the fence line. And there was none. It was just a plateau. And I realized at that moment that my mom had been God incarnate while she was alive. She was the living God in my life. Everything had to be filtered through her, and how she would react to it. If there was any judgment from my dad, it would just be a look of disappointment. [My mom] would be the one to be hurt. And that was gone from my life. I began to shut the door on my relationship with God.
While I was in acting school, I had a meeting with my dad. I told him what was up. “Dad, I smoke, I drink, I have sex, I don’t read the Bible or pray anymore. Basically, this is who I am.” [Laughs] And without hesitation or any sign of disappointment, he said “Alright then.” Never, since that day, has he ever judged me or said, “You need to get right with God.”
To go into a career like acting, where it’s always evolving, you’re always going from job to job. Time just becomes this fog. I didn’t have career goals. I was just going from show to show to show. Who’s going to hire me next? Fortunately I had success immediately, which was amazing. I was able to quit my day job and never look back. Everybody knew who I was. I was a full time actor for ten years in the Bay Area.
Every time I thought about it, I said, “I don’t want to live in LA. That’s not me.” But here it is. It’s me now. And I’m here as an actor. Been here six years. I’ve been relatively successful in terms of whatever success is measured by in Hollywood. But it’s a more difficult road than my stage career. I am fulfilled at times and in complete despair at times. It’s a real struggle to stay focused.
You know when people are passive-aggressive? I’m “aggressive-passive”. I learned this in junior high school. I didn’t have a tough brother, nor a tough dad to stand up for me. I learned to be a smartass to protect myself. I’m so not a guy who fights. But I put on a strong front. And L.A., being the fucking shithole that it is, is full of people who are ugly and aggressive, and it’s hard for me to not match them with my own aggression. I try to deflect with aggression. I also deal with that in relationships. I don’t like confrontation, but I can’t abide backbiting. If somebody does something to hurt me, I’m going to call them on it. Often, to my detriment. Many of my friends have stopped being my friend because I play the hard line. That’s another aspect to our society that’s corroded—people aren’t able to deal with reality or take responsibility for their behavior.
Along the way, I learned that I needed to embrace my darkness. That was how I came to grips with myself. My nature. I finally took off part of that weight of condemnation that I carried around all those years as a believer in Jesus. I accepted myself by seeing myself in a yin and yang form. Yeah, I’m a deep, dark motherfucker. I’ve got some shit in me. And it’s scary and ugly, but I have to embrace it. I can’t judge that. I have to say, “Let the light balance it.” Because the light’s always going to win. It’s always going to light up the dark. You just hope you get the balance right.
A while back you joined a Facebook group called “The Christian Left”.
I was jumping for joy that I’d found Christians who were standing up for liberal views. That somebody labeled themselves as “the Christian Left”. Because I thought, “My God! Where are the Christians that are Christians? That are ‘Christ-like’?” That believe in Jesus and his example. Helping the poor and the sick and the needy. Who stand with gays and women that are having abortions. Standing with them, holding their hands. Loving them. That’s it. No judgment. Jesus didn’t judge.
I’ve never been a very competitive person. I enjoy luxury and comfort—the less essential things that we all strive for. But I am a tender-heated person. When I look at the state of the poor and the middle class as opposed to the rich, I don’t want to be counted among the elite. And that is a testament to my parents’ brand of Christianity. Their ability to not judge and not be didactic in terms of saying one thing and doing another. Unfortunately my dad is starting to be corroded by Fox News, which has been really devastating to me. He throws out a couple of things now and again, and I think, “Wow, dude. I always thought you were the best Christian I knew. And yet you’re as easily swayed by the lies and propaganda as are so many others Christians.”
I tend to be really hard on my Christian brethren. Politics have all been skewed by the Christian Right [and] the Moral Majority. All they wanna talk about is abortion and gay marriage. Legislating their morality. If I was a writer, I would write a screenplay about Jesus, here. Now. How he would deal with the American Church, as it is. Because it’s so unbelievable. I can’t abide it. I just finally decided, “Yeah, I don’t believe. I can’t believe.”
For years, I would not disavow or put any disclaimers on my experience as a Christian. I accepted it as a reality that was in my life. But it wasn’t until about a month ago that I admitted to myself that I have become an atheist. To actually say it out loud. Residually, I approach life in certain ways because of my former beliefs. I haven’t been able to completely reimagine my new life as an atheist. But I look at things more simply now. Kindness is just kindness. We appreciate love. And if we can give that back, we’re making a difference. Now. You make a mark or you don’t. You make an ugly thing or you don’t. There’s so much hideous ugliness, you really notice when something beautiful is happening. But beauty hasn’t won out. Obviously this is not about specific Christians. It’s about our society and our culture. How we are degrading ourselves and our planet and becoming base, and inhuman. It’s an ugly world I’m seeing.
You think that abortion is the issue that Christians should be shooting other humans over? Doctors? No. I think they should put a bullet in motherfucking pedophile priests! Those bitches are from Satan. They are Sa-ta-nic. They are evil incarnate. If God forgives them and loves them enough to let them do that, then I can’t believe. That his word will supercede the destruction of a priest’s hand down a child’s pants, in the guise of his “path” to Jesus. Jesus was reaching into that boy’s pants if you look at it in terms of that boy’s appreciation of who that priest is in his life. I even heard one priest say of Father Geoghan [Geoghan was the Boston priest found guilty of child abuse in 2002], “The man is an angel and this is so wrong what happened to him. He was a beautiful man of God.” And this was his brother in Christ who is affording him all this. That doesn’t make any sense to me.
I do accept that there is a void inside me. There was a certain church-related spiritual “high”. The spirit engagement of prayer and speaking in tongues. Or even being touched by God’s word. That communal “high” is really the only thing I haven’t replaced. But I was losing that feeling way back in the early 80’s anyway, when I was going through my divorce. I was losing that when my brothers and sisters weren’t there for me, when I needed them to be. My present wife has definitely filled a big part of that void. She’s an amazing gift. An amazing angel. If there is a God, he sent her to me to be my personal Jesus. She is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
I worry about my wife a lot because she means so much to me. I’m afraid she’ll get run over, hit by a bus. [Laughs] I always say simple little things like “walk home safely”. I worry about her. But really, I’m fearful of death. I lost my mom a long time ago, and my dad’s getting older. I’m worried about losing him. Especially since we’re not as close as…well, we were never close. Seems we’re never going to be close. So I worry about that. But I don’t have the need to pray. I don’t ever pray. I’m careful to tell people, “I’m thinking of you. I’m not praying for you… ” [Laughs]