Advice on relationship deal breaker
Hello, I'm using a throwaway account due to identifying information on my regular account.
I was raised going to church every Sunday but as I got older I rejected the idea of a God after being exposed to other ideas. This statement isn't to mock, it's just background. On top of that, my views lean to the liberal side. For the topic of this post, I'm an LGBT ally.
I met my boyfriend almost a year ago and it was apparent from the start that his views were polar opposite from mine. He was raised in a conservative Christian household but moved away from that as an adult. We agreed that while we have different beliefs, we were willing to work through it and not let them affect our relationship.
About two months into our relationship, he got back in touch with his faith and wanted me to find God. He told me that God doesn't expect anyone to change because He made no mistake in creating us. He had so many fascinating ideas about God and spirituality that I had never heard before so I entertained the idea of finding God with the stipulation that I'm weary of organized religion and the Bible. Again, no offense meant, just providing background. He was on board.
As soon as I started believing, he got his dad involved to share the joy. Then everything changed and he turned into one of those Bible thumping people you'd see spewing hate on Facebook comments. As I read the Book of John, I realized that Jesus was a voice for the voiceless and oppressed. He helped the poor, the sick, the outcasts, and rebuked the wealthy and the corrupt religious leaders. I liked this Jesus guy. He seemed like he stood for the same ideals that I did.
When I shared this with my boyfriend, he accused me of twisting God's word to fit my liberal agenda. Whenever I came to him with new ideas, he refused to hear it because apparently his way and the way he was raised is the only way to serve God. Eventually I started falling off, stopped reading the Bible, and stopped praying because I felt like my boyfriend was trying to turn me into everything I that turned me away from God to begin with.
Over the next few weeks, I noticed that he became obsessed with us living in sin. When I wanted to have sex, he was convicted. But when he did he didn't seem to have any convictions. I called him throughout the day to check on him at work and he was be extremely negative about what everyone did to piss him off and all the ways he was having a bad day. He also seemed to stop praying but was hung up on my faith. It was just a lot of little things that made me feel like he wasn't being very God-like. I can't put my finger on it though.
The final straw was when he told me two days ago that he asked his dad to send him scripture about homosexuality so he could show me that it's wrong and so he could start teaching my four year old daughter that it's wrong. She's my child, not his. I said no. There's no conceivable future in which I could see myself ever teaching my daughter about the "evils of homosexuality".
He refuses to accept anything different from what he thinks and refuses to hear me out. He keeps going back to what the Bible says but he won't accept that simply seeing words on a page is not enough to change my mind. He thinks homosexuals can be saved by God and that it's our duty to save them. This is becoming really extreme for me and I don't know where to go from here.
Please give me some advice on how to handle this situation.
Posted Jul 21, 2017, 9:47 PM UTC