Don’t push your beliefs on me

September 23, 2025

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

I was coming out of a Morro Bay market the other morning, toting a sack of items, feeling pretty bedraggled but mellow from a good round of tennis rallying, when a tall man around 50 just exiting his work van, sized me up, drew closer and said, “Jesus loves you.” He said it with a kind of smug smirk, and I had no retort, as I am usually taken aback by this statement.

This has happened to me often in my supposed adulthood. I am not and have never been a religious person, but have always refrained from ever trying to impose my lack of religious beliefs on anybody. Why? One of the first things my father taught me was to “respect other people’s religion, no matter what it is.”

It is my opinion that deeply religious people make their religion the very center of their lives, and that they are proud and protective of their religion, sensitive to its criticism, and so devout they feel they need to pass it on to whomever they feel needs their savior, including their society, their country.

But leave me alone. I’m having a difficult enough time dealing with being old and losing friends and therefore close to the end myself, and wishing to gouge out a few more constructive years of doing what I’ve always taken joy in—pursuing my passions to the extreme and yes, sometimes sinning without hurting anybody.

But when somebody sizes me up and feels impelled to tell me Jesus loves me, I usually just move on and say nothing.

In a case around 18 years ago, I published a monthly paper called “The Rogue Voice” with journalist Stacey Warde. We were controversial.

Certain people of deep religious faith, including clergymen, swept Rogue Voice issues off our racks and burned them. We went on local radio with Dave Congalton to defend our voices.

On an ensuing issue we put a picture of one of our racks on the back cover with the words “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” One man patrolled Morro Bay and Cayucos, entering businesses and trying to brow-beat owners out of advertising with us.

He did not succeed. But I ran into him all the time, a huge strapping man of intimidating demeanor who lived in our same neighborhood, and he always took pleasure in reminding me that “Jesus loved me,” much in the attitude of this recent man at the market.

After a while, my only retort was, “I know he does, but he must despise you.” He took it in stride. He was so serene in his salvation from a stormy past. He was having fun needling and agitating a non-believer. He presented no physical threat although he was younger than me and the size of an NFL lineman.

I feel, looking back, that he felt, because my paper had writers putting out articles of religious cynicism, and another man describing life in state prison, that I was an anti-Christ, but still forgiven by Jesus who loved me, and my reaction to that should be “shame, humiliation, guilt, fear, and, in a sense, being put in my lowly place.”

I feel the constant reminding me that “Jesus loves me” by this person was a source of belittling and bullying while hiding safely behind the shield of Jesus, or Christianity, which is unassailable in our society.

I’m sure this person had absolutely no hope that I could ever be shamed into accepting Jesus and be saved and resurrected. He didn’t hate me because Jesus wouldn’t allow that. Not the real Jesus, anyway. I feel the real Jesus would like me, because I am compassionate and merciful and honest with myself and others.

At least I think I am. But there is a growing sense among many of us in this country that Jesus has been hijacked by a lot of folks and used in a manner of bullying us non-believers and all others of different persuasions into submission and insisting our country is best served by its religious order if we are all to survive as a nation; if we are to live in peace, happiness, fulfillment, etc.

Some people call it Christian Nationalism. It could also be called White Christian Nationalism.

Well, I think we’ve done well enough over the past 250 years to keep it as it’s been, with the separation between church and state. We are not a theocracy.

And, to my detractors, peace.