I was a evangelical Christian for 35 years – until my transgressive big sister gave me the courage to break free | Josie McSkimming
My sister Dorothy Porter was a bohemian, gay poet; I was a respectable church handmaiden. But she cracked the door open for me to start seeing the world differently
I spent most of my adult life as an evangelical Christian, learning to accept a whole-body compliance to a regimented way of living and submission to the Bible as God-breathed and infallible. For me, this became a rigid and tortured way to live, the opposite to the freedom it initially promised.
I followed in the footsteps of my big sister, the trailblazing poet Dorothy Porter, and attended a church camp when I was 10. But unlike Dorothy (or Dod as I called her) who fell in love with a sequence of beautiful and beatific female Christian leaders at the camp, I charted my own path and invited Jesus into my life and was born again. Dod was horrified, but I think quietly set about trying to deconvert me from that time. It took 35 years.
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