I grew up in Boulder, Colorado where I learned from the Dooby Brothers that Jesus was my friend.  Because I was born again on Valentine’s Day, I saw Christ as not just a friend, but a lover.

Then I went to college where I attended Navigators, an evangelical organization that originated in the U.S. Navy and was based in Colorado Springs.  They preached a different Christ in Colorado Springs than in Boulder.  I was told Jesus didn’t experience sexual arousal when a woman kissed his feet.  I thought about the pornography my brother kept hidden in his bedroom, and wondered if something was wrong with Jesus.  Like my brother’s G.I. Joe doll, G.I. Jesus was muscular, fully equipped for combat, with only a plastic bump where his “trinity” should have been.

I watched my lover being castrated before my very eyes. 

I experienced judgmental behavior from my Navigators leaders and went through a couple of painful breakups with Christian boyfriends. I told God the next man I dated was not going to be a Christian.  My next boyfriend was Jewish, a relationship that further reinforced my concept of Christ as a lover, even a bridegroom.

While my vision of Christ matured into fully-realized manhood, many American concepts of Christ seemed stuck in preadolescent boyhood, all versions of G.I. Jesus.  There’s Mark Driscoll’s Steroid Jesus, Mel Gibson’s Celluloid Sadism Jesus, George W. Bush’s Android Jesus who could be sent to war with no collateral damage.

G.I. Jesus was a toy that boys played with, not a man with real feelings and a heart that could be broken.  His malleable joints could be contorted into all kinds of positions, manipulated to march roughshod over the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, even the Gospel.

Whether or not our Founding Fathers envisioned Christian government, they couldn’t have foreseen the plastic action figure who ran our government the past eight years.