Christian Family: Review of “Jesus Christ, a Scandalous God”

It has been years since he last set foot in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. “It has changed,” says Laurent Gay on the day of our meeting. Born in 1964 in the north of the capital, between Porte de la Chapelle and Porte d’Aubervilliers, in the 18th arrondissement, he also spent part of his troubled youth in the 19th. “My parents were not particularly bad people; they just didn’t show much affection back then. My father was rather strict, my mother was overprotective. But we didn’t talk much in the family,” he confides.

As an introverted child, everything and everyone frightened him. “I had a learning disorder; I was completely lost. I wasn’t a very happy boy. At school, I was the scapegoat for the older boys who were in my class. They raped me, and I said nothing. I was afraid to go to school until the day I started fighting back. That’s when I discovered a certain dark strength within me.” Soon after, he became one of the neighborhood “thugs.” “I felt like I existed with these boys, I who had had no friends until then,” he recalls.

Thus, through circumstances and his environment, he began to live a delinquent life: first joint at 12, first heroin shot two years later. As he explains, back then, drug addicts didn’t have the same image as today. “When we used heroin, we were ‘bad boys’; we felt above others. AIDS didn’t exist yet. Today, we clearly see what crack does—people are seen as bums.” At first, he took drugs to be like the others, but later it allowed him to escape his reality. A reality that darkened even more when his older brother left home. “We were six years apart. When he left at 18…