Skip to Content
Search Icon
Issue 03 – Christ the King 2020

Apologia

Moonshine Vodka

One-line description.

image

Moonshine Vodka

As a young Iraqi immigrant keen on assimilating, I decided to turn away from my parents’ traditional Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Orthodox faiths. This went hand-in-hand with the rejection of my heritage and my parents’ attempt to maintain it through an Iraqi subculture forming in the Los Angeles area at that time. Like many first-generation immigrant children I had to live a double life: the Iraqi Luma at home and the American Luma at the public school I attended.

At first I sought to have no Christian faith at all, though I faked one for the sake of my parents. After high school, through a series of events I began attending an evangelical non-denominational church. At that church I was taught to reject tradition and “traditional” churches — especially the Roman Catholic Church, which the pastor mocked from the pulpit at every opportunity. I was taught that the Catholic Church teaches a false Gospel, that Catholics were heretics, and the Church evil. I was taught that Catholics were not real Christians, and so I learned to despise them. I was taught the same thing that the evangelical missionaries we met in Greece taught my father: tradition was not real Christianity and Catholics were not true Christians. The only way to be a true Christian is to be born again, and the way to do that is to “accept Jesus into your heart.” The credo was “Dear Jesus, I ask you to come into my heart, I accept you as my Lord and Savior,” or some variation of this. I am not dismissing the idea behind this — that it is through a vibrant friendship with Jesus Christ that our hearts are increasingly converted, that through Him we grow in holiness. What I oppose is the idea that salvation can be individual, outside the community of the faithful in the Church.


You must or subscribe to read the rest of the article.

About the author

Luma Simms