i said i wouldn't blog for a few days. guess what? i lied.

Before I start: I think I say this kind of thing a lot, but it's still something I'm trying to put into words. I might have expressed a couple of things quite badly... but it's cool, I'm sure you'll tell me if I have. Oh, and this is far, far too long. Sorry.

******

I've decided that no, I don't want to be labelled after all. Part of me takes comfort in repeating the words to myself: I am Fiona Kennedy, I am a first year Drama and Theatre undergraduate at Royal Holloway, University of London. I am British, I am white, I am Christian, I eat meat, I am eighteen years old. I've had three blood tests in my life and the last two I've asked to be told my blood type and been informed that I don't need to know. Why not? I ask, why shouldn't I label myself further?

I never used to. I never wanted to call myself a Christian. I spent over a year going to church, chatting to Christians on forums and discussion boards and listening to worship music, wanting more than anything to get to know God without having to stick the "I am a Christian" sign on my forehead. Religion was for sheep, and I didn't want my search for God to be tainted by association to such a corrupt and backward thing. Also, I didn't want to have to follow the rules - being a Christian meant behaving like one and I wasn't gonna be a hypocrite myself...

For me, 'becoming' a Christian was the point in my life where I stopped giving a shit about the label and decided that it was an honour, rather than a taint, to have the word 'christ' as part of my identity. I still think that. The idea of Christ is sacrifice, humility, compassion, bravery, strength and love and love and love. It's when you put ian on the end of it that it starts to mean something else.

Sadly, it's always the negative connotations I'm more aware of. These days, people hear Christianity and they don't think charity, serving, integrity and passion, they don't think the things that I want them to think when I tell them what I am.

I want to justify myself. I'm not out to ally myself with Rome, with the pope, with the crusades, with gay-bashing and illegalised abortion and 'baptised capitalism' and hypocrisy. I don't want to shelter under the wings of an institution that's served itself and stuck a middle finger up at the humanity it's been sent to love. Nuhuh. I have never wanted that. I want more than anything to draw a distinction between me and them. I want to add a footnote to my label of Christian, I want a postscript that says but I'm not hot on the pope and I'm fine with contraception and some of my best friends are gay and I actually think that Noah's ark might have been a tad metaphorical and I think Bush is quite horrendous and I know the church has got a lot to answer for but...

But there is no postscript, right? The only footnote to calling yourself a Christian is the resultant conversation where you get to explain exactly what kind of Christian you are, and remove yourself from the less agreeable aspects of religion as you see it. Only, that explanatory conversation doesn't always come around, and, well, it's not as simple as kinds of Christian.

I've also been told that I'm a liberal. If 'liberal' means that my politics swing violently to the left and I happen to be a Christian, then, yeah, that's what I am. If by liberal you mean that I see Christ as a very nice man, the gospel as an inspirational story and the resurrection as a metaphor then no, definitely fucking not. If the fact that I believe in evangelism and speaking in tongues means that I'm charismatic and fundamentalist then yeah, fine. But if that means I'm into churches that are registered businesses, believe that George Bush is tantamount to the second coming and think pro-choice is a sign of the anti-Christ's imminent arrival then no, no, thank you.

Let's get this straight. Labels can be dangerous, they're misleading and they have a tendency to stop you from thinking. Labels can be wonderful and affirming and comforting but, yeah, when you whack them on your forehead too readily they can do nothing but divide this world into even smaller pockets of people.

Take it back to the blindingly obvious basics. What's the one thing that all these guys, the charismatics and the Catholics, the fundamentalists and baptists, the Churches of the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Conception and the Rootin' Tootin' Church for Y'all Who Done Hate the Devil, what's the one defining feature? Oh yeah, of course. That. The bit we overlook so easily, you know, the guy who died under the label 'King of the Jews'. Ever found a church with that on its billboard?

Put like that, it seems like the only thing associating me with these churches is our most fundamental belief. There's really no reason why I should be held accountable for them... Wouldn't it be lovely to separate myself from them? To create my own denomination, the South Eastern Church of the Theologically Bewildered so that everyone would know, upon introduction, that I wasn't Catholic, or Quaker, or New Right? My own little bubble, full of my faith, that no one might associate me with those who I disagree with.

The thing is that those are my brothers and sisters, my family.

We've divided and divided like amoeba, each new 'version', Christianity 5.0, believing itself better than the last, refined and revised, the sins of the last stripped off until we're left with nothing but what we believe is central. We've travelled in different directions, stripping off the politics, the pomp and circumstance, the ugly bits, the pretty bits, the disputed bits, the traditional bits and the modern bits and what we've got now is several hundred 'pure' Christianities, each one getting straight to their own point without thought for the other couple of billion followers of Christ doing the same thing.

Why are we so ashamed to be attached to one another? Why are we, the religion that follows the man who dined with prostitutes, treating each other like lepers? Everytime we divorce ourselves, every schism and split, every distancing from the sins of each other is denying Christ three times, like Peter swore he never would. We deny each other, we deny ourselves. Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me also...

The label I choose is the vaguest one, the most accurate one. I am a Christian, pure and simple. As in I ally myself with no denomination, and with every single one. I go to the church that suits me best and where my friends are, but the style of the service and the details of the theology don't define me. The religion I've chosen is one that asks for imperfect people, and as such its history is far from glowing. I won't even try to distance myself from it, I'm a part of it and its faults and follies are mine. But its sins aren't on my shoulders, or on any of ours - bearing the wrongs of the Christian faith was someone else's task and he did it well, he did it willingly.

In return he asked this - that we would love him, that we would stop blaming, and fighting and shirking and dividing and trying to absolve ourselves and just love each other. These other Christians, the ones that have killed and maimed in the name of Christ, those who have made religion big-business, who've beaten up gays and bombed abortion clinics, who've told teenagers in slums that condoms won't prevent the spread of aids... They are mine and I am theirs, we're bound to each other like my hands are attached to my wrists - one body, one blood, one label.