Side effects of going rogue…

I miss studying theology.

Evangelical nostalgia – the kind of longing for a specific way of living out the Christian lifestyle – has been hitting hard lately. I find that when I’m most stressed or anxious, this longing for the way things used to be increases drastically. Early on in my deconstruction process, I had often forced myself to stay within the confines of the theological paradigms of evangelicalism so that I didn’t have to deal with that sense of waywardness wrought by questioning everything. I didn’t want to feel adrift, which is what happens when the beliefs that shaped and guided your day-to-day start to unravel.

But knowing what I know now prevents me from going back.

What I’ve noticed this time around, though, is the nature of the nostalgia has shifted. This isn’t merely a desire for the sense of comfort and safety (both of which are conditional within evangelicalism), but rather for the sense of purpose I felt when I studied theology. As an evangelical, it felt like I was feeding my soul – not just reading the bible, either, but rather connecting certain verses and passages to specific beliefs. And when I got to seminary, it felt like I was learning new ways to better understand God – feminism, womanism, liberation theology, etc., were all couched in the framework of understanding the image of God and what practices we might adopt to honor God’s image.

The theology I’d study actually meant something beyond getting others to agree with me. In fact, it was the opposite. Studying theology helped me navigate the biblical text in such a way that challenged my thinking and/or my behavior, which then compelled me to challenge others. The deeper I’d dive into the text, the more of a “woke liberal” I’d become – and for no other reason than believing I was following what God was teaching me.

On the outside of evangelicalism, though, there isn’t always that shared sense of purpose, let alone having a similar upbringing. Many that I know now either had a healthy religious upbringing where beliefs were taught, but never forced, or had no identifiable religious influence at all. Talking about Jesus now often introduces an entirely new concept where I have to double-back and summarize bits of the bible just so whatever point I’m trying to make has a chance at being understood. In a lot of ways this can be a good thing – it allows a fresh perspective on long-held beliefs or ways of understanding, which can then further the deconstruction process.

And yet at the same time it was nice to have companions on a similar theological journey. It made me feel connected to something bigger than myself, which in turn kept me from retreating within myself and/or pushing everyone else away. With all that’s been going on for the last 9 months, I guess I’m just afraid that I’ll reach a point where I’ll choose to close myself off, where I’ll choose callousness over connection.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in these last 9 months it’s that Islam is not a religion for the individual. Every Muslim I’ve encountered is deeply enmeshed in a community – where everyone’s fed, everyone’s clothed, everyone’s housed. Everyone’s connected. I’m not saying I’m interested in converting to Islam (or reverting? I don’t know, I’m still learning); I don’t think I can convert to any religion anymore. But I do think that if at its core, evangelical Christianity hadn’t been so tied to capitalism and harmful ideologies, I wouldn’t be feeling the side effects of having gone rogue.

Any other former evangelicals feeling this? Or something like it?

May 12th, 22 years later…

Twenty-two years ago last Sunday, I was baptized at the Pacific Baptist Church at the south end of Lincoln City, Oregon. May 12th was Mother’s Day back then as it was this year, so the little church of roughly 15 total members was packed with nearly 50 people that day. Had I known there’d be a crowd, I might not have gone through with it.

But back then I was struggling. I know now that it was depression – deeply seated as if it were clinging to the marrow in my bones – but back then I genuinely didn’t see a way forward. I felt like my friends weren’t really my friends, my family was only tolerating my existence, and that there was nothing special about who I was. As an introvert, I cherish my alone time, but this was an unshakeable loneliness. And in the wake of a trip to Portland, Oregon for a Christian concert, I suddenly felt not only seen, but needed. I felt like I had a purpose, that I was meant for something more.

On the surface, getting baptized was simply the commemoration of the journey I had already started. I was reading the Bible, learning who Moses was, who the different Apostles were, and learning what God wanted for me. But deep down, I believed getting baptized was going to take away that lonely feeling. I thought that if I just got baptized, I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep anymore, and that everything would turn around.

On Sunday I spent a little while thinking about my time in seminary, and how all through each of my classes, I felt a similar sense of purpose. Seminary was supposed to be a steppingstone to a PhD program, which would then lead to a job as a professor. I had a few professors in my undergraduate days who taught with such passion and expertise that I hardly remember what they were saying, but I definitely remember wanting to be like them. I wanted the balance of giving lectures during the day, grading papers during the night. I’d daydream about having several books published on my particularly-niche area of interest, so niche that you probably wouldn’t know what it was, which of course would allow me to give countless mini lectures on the importance of… whatever my area of expertise might be.

Seminary fueled this desire even more, but it also brought forward a different set of challenges that I had never expected to face. You see, in my deconstruction process, seminary gave me all the skillsets I’d need to not only form my own opinion on a subject, but to do so with such conviction that no one could possibly persuade me otherwise. But I always thought I’d be still involved with some type of Christian community.

One of my favorite books from my life before seminary is called A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and in that book, Vanauken writes a poem that depicts a gap between faith and un-belief. Essentially, knowing what he learned about faith prevented him from turning back to the life he had before he started asking questions. For him, it was a leap toward faith. For me, the learning I had in seminary prevented me from returning to the simplicity of faith – the kind I was expected to accept for my life by virtually every evangelical I’d met.

Yet with every question I’d ask, there was a greater distance between the evangelicalism I had come to believe in and where I felt compelled to go. There wasn’t a shared reverence for the mystery of God anymore; my evangelical “friends” wanted to correct me, to reel me back into the acceptable form of faith. Their acceptable form of faith. And I couldn’t turn back with them.

The “gap” that I had first encountered way back as a young teenager was one that many teenagers experience. It wasn’t a gap between un-belief and faith, though I had been convinced that it was. Instead, it was between isolation and community. It was between believing I didn’t belong in this world because I was a mistake, and believing that regardless of how I was brought here, I was meant to be here. It would take years to deconstruct the manipulation that occurred in this 8th grade paradigm shift, but I think there’s still something fascinating about the whole experience. Because while it was a manipulation of my insecure emotions, it was also my own narrative construct that brought me through it.

When I came up out of the baptismal water, I immediately started to shiver. Though everyone assured me that they did their best to heat it up, it was hardly above room temperature. But the 50 or so people in the church cheered, and then prayed over me as I huddled myself into a giant towel. I don’t remember what anyone said in that prayer, but I remember thinking, This is it. I’m finally going to start feeling better.

It wasn’t magical like I had hoped it would be – like the switch from Peter Parker to Spider-Man, but on a smaller scale. In fact, there wasn’t really any physical sensation at all (beyond the shivering). Instead, I was now constantly reflecting on my role in life. I was constantly engaged with the question of meaning and whether or not I was living up to it.

Little did I know that this would be an existential awakening that arguably saved my life. Truthfully, it wasn’t God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, despite how many evangelicals told me it was. Rather, it was the act of embracing the existential struggle of finding my own meaning. It got mirky at the beginning because I had to borrow the rhetoric of evangelicalism to articulate things a little better and find my footing. But this journey has only ever been my own since getting baptized.

This is why I think it was so easy to walk away – because in actuality, I had always only ever been on my own journey. I followed the longing for purpose and meaning into the church, then followed the teachings of Jesus out. Then came seminary, August of 2014 (IYKYK), a Trump presidency, and a whole slue of things where evangelicalism kept showing its true colors (or rather, a lack thereof). What started as questions about meaning and purpose as a teen led to questions about inerrancy in college, which turned into questions about feminism while in seminary, then questions about liberation theology, then questions about critical race theory, and now here I am, two decades later, still engaged with the existential.

My podcast idea, “Existentially Speaking,” is intended to tap into that same questioning, that same sense of meaning-making. Twenty-two years ago, I had a limited imagination about what a meaningful life might look like, and only really presented with one possible answer. What I think about now is how I was led to believe that there even had to be an answer – that this sense of wonder I had about the world could never be satisfied with simply a deeper understanding of the biology of life. “This universe was created, thus there had to be a creator,” I was often told. But in my time away from evangelicalism, I’ve met countless people who have either believed in a different God or no god at all – and all of them treated people better than what evangelical culture tends to allow.

Deconstruction has only ever allowed me to see life in a healthier, clearer lens than what I had as an evangelical. Unlike what evangelicals might say about deconstruction, it isn’t a slippery slope into godlessness. Some who’ve deconstructed have remained within Christianity, some have found other religious practices more fulfilling, and some have embraced a limbo state of belief, which is where I find myself. For me, deconstruction has not been a single event, or a fixed process that I went through once and now I’m done. It isn’t past tense; it’s ongoing.

May 12th used to have a huge significance in my spiritual journey. It was a mile-marker for my faith, my commitment to Jesus. But that sense of “faith” was only ever self-serving. I didn’t learn better ways to process my emotions, like I have through deconstructing. I didn’t treat people better, I didn’t seek to learn someone else’s truth, I wasn’t comfortable with mystery, I had no sense of awe for the gentle things in life, I internalized a toxic masculinity, and I had a pathetic sense of love.

My 2002 self would have been horrified at who I’ve become, but deconstruction has helped me see that who I might have been had I tried to stay is far more horrifying to think about.

And maybe this clarity can help heal what that kid was going through.

Quick thoughts on Deconstruction…

The first time I encountered the concept of deconstruction was in my Intro to Literary Theory class during the summer of 2009. I forget what we were reading, but I remember the class discussion vividly. It was the first time I ever willingly spoke up during class, and that was only because… I was a devout evangelical.

Deconstruction, which is essentially the process of critically analyzing language of meaning (e.g. religion, philosophy, politics, etc.) in order to better understand its assumptions as well as its impact, invaded my evangelical brain as a demonic force. And if I hadn’t spoken up to highlight the obvious contradiction that you can’t say, “There is no meaning,” without assuming meaning to each of those words, I would have failed my church, my faith, and my God.

Or so I thought.

During May of last year, I went with a group of friends to float the river, and I was naively ill-equipped with what could generously be described as a pool floaty. For most of the trip, we were fine. We hit a couple shallow spots and scraped a few rocks, then got stuck once along the bank, but overall, it was an enjoyable ride. But eventually we came to a bend in the river that caused my floaty to capsize and I flipped backward into the river, and because our floaties were tied together closely, I was sort of trapped under the water.

The actual time elapsed with me under the water was probably no more than 20 or 30 seconds. Surprisingly, I never panicked while submerged, but my legs had cramped so severely that I couldn’t kick anymore. Thankfully, one friend found me, pulled me up, and in no time at all, I had my floaty around my waist. Not even 10 minutes later, we were pulling ashore where I could start to warm up. Every muscle in my body was exhausted and in pain. And as I sat within the little sunshine left to the day, I reflected back on the several articles I had read the week before about the dangers of floating or swimming in rivers in the PNW during May, when the river water is cold with freshly melted snow. I was mere moments away from becoming a statistic.

Near death experiences have the tendency to cause people to have existential crises – moments where we either question the way we’ve been living or realize that way of living hasn’t been enjoyable or meaningful in any way. These experiences are a visceral lesson in deconstruction. That Literary Theory class left me just as jarred as when I had emerged from the river, and I started to question what I believed to be true.

It started with inerrancy, a doctrine that states the Bible is literally perfect because God breathed it into existence. My own specific church did not value inerrancy as an essential doctrine and not long after this became public, our church had to close its doors. But once I started critically engaging the text, inerrancy fell apart like a sandcastle at high tide. And while I could have just kept rebuilding it, there was no motivation to do so, because at that point I had already discovered that its importance was fictional. Its foundation was sand.

Leaving evangelicalism altogether still took some time, even after our church shut down. I was still convinced that we were onto something good where we focused on actually loving our neighbors as ourselves and building a viable church alternative to anything evangelical. But convincing yourself that you aren’t evangelical while operating only amongst evangelicals within evangelical culture might be possible, but no one’s going to think you’re doing anything different. Of course, the most logical thing I could do was go to seminary.

I write all this for several reasons, but mostly to keep the term “deconstruction” where it belongs: in a positive light. Recently I watched a TikTok where someone in their evangelical fervor was “declaring war on the deconstruction movement and its founder,” whoever that is. The person who stitched the video highlighted that instead of addressing the valid reasons people are leaving the church, this “war” is being declared on the people who left and the means by which they did so.

But this “war” assumes that everyone who deconstructs from evangelicalism is now an atheist or agnostic, that we’ve conspired with the Devil by renouncing our faith. The reality is that there is no singular outcome for those of us who deconstruct. Some turn to atheism or agnosticism, yes, but many choose to remain within the Christian faith, just not evangelicalism. And some find other faith expressions to be more meaningful for them, based upon how they’ve deconstructed from their evangelical upbringing.

Deconstruction is not a movement; it’s a method of critically engaging what we believe to be true. It allows us to see our realities with more clarity where we’re less reliant on theological or political presuppositions (these can still exist, though, in a white supremacist society). And it enables us to decide for ourselves what we value in life and what kind of communities we want to be a part of. It breaks things down so we can build something better.

That Literary Theory class wound up becoming one of my favorite classes I’d ever taken. It changed the way I read, wrote, and engaged the world around me. For me, deconstruction is not something that’s going to end. It informs the way I do everyday things – eating, sleeping, drinking, working, voting, living. Because once you acknowledge that we make our own meaning, you only have the time and energy to do just that. We don’t have to accept the premise that there’s only one intended purpose for our lives – or that there’s a purpose at all. Deconstructing allows us to knock, to ask, to seek… even if we never find.

And I think that’s what makes it worthwhile. It’s an ever-expanding horizon, compelling me to keep going.

 

A belated Father’s Day reflection… sort of…

As I’ve mentioned several times before, leaving Starbucks was not fun. The company made it a simpler decision by continually cutting my hours while demanding greater performance, but leaving that specific group of coworkers was tough. In the final week, especially the last couple of days, I struggled to keep it together, to not cry over every little moment – the last time I’d see my favorite regulars, the last time I’d make drinks, or the last time I’d take orders for the drive-thru (I often described this role as a sort of radio-DJ type of experience because customers only interact with your voice – it was one of my favorite spots to work). Focusing on each of those fianl moments would have made leaving impossible.

What I realized, though, was that this is a common problem for me whenever it’s clear that a career change is in order (or at least a job change; honestly it’s starting to look like changing jobs is my career). Something about the job becomes unsustainable, but there’s always something else that tries to compel me to stay. For a long time, I had assumed that this compulsion was something I inherited from my Grandpa (who raised me). He always urged caution when I was considering a change that would effect my finances – going off to college, dropping from two jobs down to one, going off to seminary. Were he still here, it would have been impossible to convince him that going from one job to no job was the right move.

I mean, I hear his voice whenever I’m considering buying the name-brand item instead of the store-brand item, so it’d be a safe assumption that my hesitancy to depart this time around was a result of his influence.

But I think it’s only partially true in this case.

When I was an evangelical, I was led to believe that having an absent father was the absolute worst thing that could have happened to me. It was drilled into me that becasue I didn’t have a dad, I would struggle to maintain healthy (read “Godly”) relationships – especially my relationship with God. More than a few pastors often leveraged my fatherlessness to convince me I needed God. This became my core identity as an evangelical; I was fatherless before, but now I was a son of God.

All of this to say that I believed the biggest challenge I faced was the “abandonment issues”; the type of heightened insecurity I’d experience when people “left” my life. As the narrative was often told to me, I’d be more upset everytime someone moved away or I’d be completely closed off and callous to people leaving. It would only ever be some variation of one of these two options – all because my father was never around.

What none of these pastors (of course, all men) ever realized or ever allowed me to realize was that I did actually have a father, we just called him “Grandpa” (always with a capital ‘G,’ by the way). So every talking point about fatherlessness that they had thrown at me was meaningless because it didn’t apply to me.
In order to abandon someone, not only do you have to show up in the first place, but you have to show up often enough to garner a person’s trust. If you only show up once or twice, you’re just an acquaintance. But if you show up consistently enough, reliably enough, and then depart? That is abandoning someone. That’s how you betray their trust.

And that’s how I felt about leaving the coworkers I had at Starbucks; I felt like I had betrayed people I cared about deeply. People who had relied on me or looked up to me in some way. I left when they needed me.

Again, this is the manifestation of insecurities that developed over the last 35 years – insecurities that originated by a specific ideology manipulating my life experience to internalize the narrative that I’m broken, and in need of yet another absent Father to come fix me. My departure from Starbucks mimicked in many ways my exodus out of evangelicalism – I was repeatedly lied to about how valuable I was, the leveraging of my past experiences for the monetary profits of someone else, and never being allowed to express myself as I wish to. In both worlds, I was expected to conform to someone else’s version of me.

Leaving, then, wasn’t just a result of excessive burnout. It was, in miniature form, an act of liberation.

Being away from Starbucks has actually been relieving in critical ways, even if the financial anxiety has often been overwhelming. I finally have energy to write, read, and draw. I have a clearer sense of what I value most out of life and I honestly find no better way to honor those friendships I made at Starbucks.

I’ve been working on many things in this past month and while they’re each taking longer than I had originally hoped, I am actually quite excited about them. One thing in particular is a podcast I’m calling “Existentially Speaking,” and it’ll be a space to deconstruct my time as an evangelical – both rejecting the horrible things and redefining the wonderful things. More on that later.

For now, though, I’m just focused on breathing deeply and loving well.

Thanks for reading.

An Easter Reflection (From the Outside)

It’s weird to think that today used to mean a lot for me. About a decade ago, I’d grab my ESV Study Bible, a small notebook, and wear my Sunday best, which back then usually meant my cleanest clothes. If I was really feeling it, I’d hit up two services – either two morning services or one morning and then the college group in the evening. After service, I’d try to join up with some church friends for lunch or just head home to read from the Bible some more, journal, or write a blog (usually a combination of all three). Easter was once a full-day event.

It made sense at the time, I guess, but it’s hard for me to imagine trying to maintain that level of social interaction now – now when I’m thoroughly exhausted even halfway through a work shift that doesn’t involve as much social energy as church would. Even today, though we had our lobby closed, I was wiped from not even an hour and a half of talking to customers coming through our drive-thru – many of whom were on their way to an Easter service of some kind.

So many things are much clearer to me being on the outside of that world than when I was in the thick of it, but what’s clear to me today is how much of a spectacle Easter Sunday was. Part of that comes with the territory of having a religious holiday, sure, but for the evangelical world, it was less about commemorating the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus and more about being seen in front of others commemorating the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. And though bigger church services are what I have in mind here, smaller churches often followed the same model – the worship team plays a few extra songs, pastor gives a slightly longer sermon, and everyone’s (ideally) wearing their expensive attire. People raise their hands during each worship song, give the “Amen!” and “Mmmhmm!” at various points throughout the sermon, and then enthusiastically shake someone’s hand on the way out of the sanctuary.

It felt like a pep ralley for Jesus.

Actually, it felt more like a high school prom dance where everyone shows off how much of their parents’ money they spent on a tuxedo or a dress. But in this case, everyone was trying to one-up each other for their visible devotion to Jesus – raising their hands higher, singing louder, clapping harder, the whole bit. It makes me wonder now, a decade later, if it was ever actually about Jesus? Did I really believe that today was about the resurrection, or was I just trying to be accepted amongst my peers? Was it ever about following the teachings and examples of Jesus or was it really about my own insecurities?

There are evangelical voices that continue to dismiss the many perspectives of those who’ve deconstructed or outright left the church as having not really believed. And for a long time I thought they were wrong about this; that we did actually believe, but the expression of said belief was not what these evangelicals wanted. But it seems they were partially right; in these situations, I didn’t believe in the subversive Jesus who hung out with sex-workers and taught everyone to have all things in common with each other. At least not yet. I believed in the social-status Jesus – the one who demanded belief statements, cishetero-patriarchal obedience, and devotion to the almighty dollar (“prospering for God’s glory,” as it was once told to me). Easter was like the Super Bowl of our pious performance.

Toward the end of my evangelical stint, I did actually start to listen to the subversive Jesus – or at least I tried to. That’s what caused me to leave. You can only get so far when you start saying that gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people are all made in the image and likeness of God, and that Black lives actually matter (not just the unborn ones, as is often the retort). But Easter Sunday was still an enigma; how do I make sense of a day that’s intended to commemorate the triumph of a deity through the violent death of said deity’s supposed Son? Having seen so much violence in recent days, months, and years, how can I sit here and believe that such a death was intended? That God needed to kill Their Son in order to save humanity… from Their wrath?

My only conclusion is that it wasn’t intended even if it might have been anticipated. Perhaps the prophets, the truth-tellers, of old knew that such a rigid stance against oppression and rampant exploitation would come at a cost. Maybe they knew that no one could resist the greed and lust for power of those at the top of social hierarchies without surrendering everything. But I have a hard time believing that the God who inspired liberation movements around the world would ever intend for the death of Their own self in human form – and that instead the resurrection was a way of showing oppressors would never have the final word.

Easter, then, seems closer to its pagan origins – a time of rebirth and renewal. Instead of gathering with others to flex our peity, perhaps we’re supposed to gather together to care for each other’s needs – both the material and immaterial (mental, emotional, spiritual)?

I know of many Twitter mutuals and friends from seminary whose spiritual practices embody this style of community – and not just for Easter, but for their everyday lives. Honestly, I envy them a little. I miss the days of having a community wherein sharing our understanding of Jesus’ teachings was a regular occurrence. For me, there’s still too much baggage – too much negative energy around the bible, church, and even the concept of Christian spirituality to feel comfortable in most Christian settings.

But reflecting on this framing of Easter – as a liberative event rather than a time of spiritual competition – is helping. My not-quite-agnostic-but-also-not-quite-believing self needs a lot of time and space to process all of what I had gone through before and during my evangelical days (and a little after, too). At the very least, though, I can acknowledge that it feels less hostile, less laborious, and a little more… hopeful(?) than it did before. Some part of me can actually see the broken pieces coming back together, even if I can’t quite see the whole of the puzzle.

And I think that’s enough for now.

Feel free to share your experience of being on the outside – especially on a day like today – below. Part of filling the void of leaving former communities means constructing new ones and I think this can be a space for that, even if it might wind up being temporary for all of us.

Thanks for reading.

Back to Blogging: My hopes for this space in 2021…

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. I’m not really writing in any other place besides my creative work for my MFA program and occasionally for my journal, but I honestly miss this. I miss processing things in a semi-public forum where I wouldn’t necessarily feel judged for saying or asking the wrong thing. Evangelicalism is definitely to blame for that feeling.

But even beyond what evangelicalism’s influence was, I still found ways to write in a blogging space and have conversations that I was less likely to have in person (especially in church settings). And now with the pandemic severely limiting in-person interactions, it seems that this would have been the primary place where I’d seek to have discussions – really of any kind. But things were stressful for me even before the pandemic began and as 2020 came to a close, my fiancé and I went through some of the worst situations we’ve ever been through.

I do *not* want to write about 2020, though. If my last post is any indication, there was quite a bit that happened that I’ll eventually want to process, but right now I think I’d be inclined to re-live it. And I don’t have the energy for that.

But maybe it is time to take stock of what I want to blog about in 2021 and how I’m utilizing this space. Maybe it’s time to put in the work toward the non-MFA creative things I want to do (like drawing a comic series as part of a Patreon or start a YouTube channel talking about post-evangelical life). And maybe it’s time I take my writing more seriously and submit something to be published for once.

What I know from my own tendencies is that I get excited about an idea, maybe pursue it for a few days or weeks, then wind up sputtering out. I don’t want to do that anymore, and I think one thing that could help change that is if I commit, as I’m sure I’ve talked about elsewhere, to the process of creating things rather than the demand of having something polished. This would allow me to write or draw with a little less pressure, and allow me to be more open to discussions and feedback from other creators.

What I have in mind for this space, though, is aimed toward deconstructing what evangelicalism taught me as well as philosophizing about what to do with the good things leftover. One way that I’d like to try this is to resurrect a series I was a part of during my early seminary days called “Wednesdays with Wright.” It comes from a biblio-blog that was really formative for me in my journey out of evangelicalism and through seminary called Near Emmaus. This specific series engaged with the work of N.T. Wright, a prominent and influential scholar on the works of Paul specifically, and the Christian Testament[1] more broadly.

What I hope to do, though, is less about engaging Wright’s work specifically and more about utilizing his work as a means of processing what evangelicalism taught me.[2] It’ll be a way through which I can re-engage with the biblical texts as someone who is no longer committed to a specific religious agenda, but still has a seminary degree that’s mostly collecting dust. But it’ll also be a space to help others process what they – maybe even you? – experienced.

There are other ideas for this blog space floating around in my mind, but none of them are really all that clear yet. I have a few posts about politics and sports in the works, but those will likely be one-off posts and at random. What I intend for this Wright series (still undecided on a series title), though, is to post something every Sunday. Sometimes it might be some fully-synthesized thoughts or sometimes just a passage with a few notes. I’m leaving it open-ended for now.

I certainly aim to write also about my MFA experience in a similar way that I used to about seminary (those posts were for a blog that I wound up deleting, but I had the idea a while ago to bring them back and comment on them with updated perspectives – we’ll see). Again, some of what I’ve experienced is tied up with what my fiancé experienced as she is also in the program. Those things will take some time to unpack and wade through, but there have been many constructive things that I hope to write about.

But as I’m still forming a plan for this blog and this year, I’m curious to know what you are interested in reading from me? I know some readers arrive here from Twitter, some from Facebook, and even fewer from subscribing to this blog, but I want this to be a space for discussions, too. Much of what other social media platforms include is, at the very least, noisy – comment wars and Twitter ratios. I want a break and to break from that. So what would you like to read or discuss here?

Stay safe, wear a mask (it goes over your nose), sanitize everything you buy, and thank you for reading.

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[1] I prefer to refer to the “New Testament” as the Christian Testament and the “Old Testament” as the Hebrew Bible because this places the emphasis on the specific claims each religion is making with their respective sacred texts. This also de-centers Christianity so that Judaism can stand on its own as a viable religion not subject to Christianity’s exclusive narrative. And no, the Hebrew Bible is not the same exact thing as the Old Testament. The HB is the Jewish text; the OT is the Christian interpretation of the Jewish text. Not calling it the OT again allows for Judaism to be understood apart from Christianity’s influence.

[2] N.T. Wright is certainly *not* an evangelical, but he is popular among evangelicals.

Starve the Witchery

There is something about the Fall that always leaves me feeling nostalgic – for my college days, for old football games, and for certain people I once considered friends. I know I’m never getting my college days back, and despite the pandemic, football is sort of back – so there’s no real loss there. But the former friends is a little tougher. These aren’t people I simply lost touch with, either; they were once close friends that I specifically severed the connection due to one type of toxic trait or another. Sometimes it was repeated disrespect (even after “correcting” the problem), other times it was repeatedly violating boundaries, and there was even one time it was outright theft that they never ‘fessed up to. But this nostalgic feeling for these people isn’t the same type of nostalgia I have for being twenty years old and clueless; it’s because these people had such control over me that I feel wrong for cutting those ties.

When it’s someone who ghosted me, or maybe I ghosted them, or maybe we went our separate ways at one point in life and never made space for each other in our lives, I feel a longing for the memories we had. But when it’s someone I’ve had to remove from my life, there is still that longing for the memories I made with them – the image of them I had in my head – but there is also the doubt that I’m even doing the right thing. I go through round after round of gaslighting myself – Did I really understand what they were saying in that racist rant? Did they really violate a boundary I set or maybe I could’ve been clearer? Shouldn’t I really give them the benefit of the doubt? – and wind up feeling like I should reach out to them to see if there is something that I can say to save the friendship. Maybe if I apologize, I won’t have to block them?

In these moments, I always replay the events that led me to the decision to cut them out. In one case, it was a decades-long pattern of them taking advantage of our friendship for their benefit. In another situation, the supposed friend was projecting their insecurities into nearly every social media post I would make, and when I addressed this with them, they doubled down. And yet in another case, it was a roommate who neglected their responsibilities (even after dozens of reminders) to the point where it was detrimental to my health (I developed a sinus infection and missed two weeks of work). Some exploited me financially, others extracted emotional labor, and still others manipulated physical labor out of me. The apologies were always self-serving and full of empty platitudes about the changes they needed to make – never specific patterns of behavior they needed to outright change. It’s recounting all of these details that gives me confirmation that I am doing the right thing, but it also clues me into why it’s crucial that I don’t reach out to them: they will go right back to the extraction.

The best way to tell if someone is abusive is to see how they respond when you set a boundary or cut them off. In a more recent situation, I literally told the person I wasn’t going to talk about someone else without that third person present – the repeated pattern of behavior for the five months leading up to that moment. They doubled down in their efforts, leveraging their own emotional state as justification for getting me to talk about that other person. But I didn’t give them what they wanted, and they stormed off like a toddler with a temper tantrum. Weeks later, things grew to a boiling point with them, and I blocked their number and all their social media accounts. I didn’t bother telling them why because, honestly, they didn’t deserve explanation – especially after I had spent months trying to get them to change. But even if I hadn’t already tried any of that, they were still taking advantage of our friendship. I had to cut ties to protect myself (and in this case, someone else as well).

Part of my struggle is that I was part of an ideology that enabled this type of abusive behavior. In evangelicalism, the emphasis in personal relationships is always forgiveness, rarely ever identifying the harm done by one person to another. This cultivates an environment that winds up having no accountability – no system in place to cause those who do harm to look inward, to critically evaluate the impact of their actions. Instead, evangelicalism gives abusers a way out – make it about intent, offer up some non-apology apology and move on. In this context, abusers can end up with many, many victims. And what all of the people I have specifically cut out of my life have in common is that they were all evangelicals at one point in time. But my struggle isn’t this common background; it’s the emphasis on always needing to forgive, to keep the peace. Keeping the peace almost always allows the abuse to continue.

I’m not keeping the peace anymore.

For my MFA program, I’m reading a book by Leslie Marmon Silko called Ceremony – it’s a pretty iconic piece of literature even for non-English majors. One thing I noticed about Tayo, the main character, at the end is that he allows his friend Harley to be tortured and killed because if he had stepped in, he would have given in to the Witchery, the real force behind settler colonialism and white supremacy (two of the most devastating systems of abuse on this continent), everything it wanted. It wanted him to kill the men torturing his friend. For a while, Tayo fights this urge hard, but eventually walks away. Not giving in meant starving the Witchery and finding a healing path for himself.

One moral to this post is: starve the Witchery by severing those ties with your abusers.

Can’t Walk Away…

I’m reading the bible again.

When I first graduated from seminary four years ago, I was still practicing my Hebrew and Greek, and excited for my next degree program at Brite Divinity. Unfortunately, not long after graduating, I was forced to defer my enrollment for a year because I was not able to raise the funds to move to Texas. And of course the fall of 2016 came and with it the election of Donald Trump. Along with many others across the country, I watched the election results in horror, knowing white nationalists were cheering. I felt like I was living a scene out of V for Vendetta.

I was terrified.

Several days after the election, however, I read some of the breakdowns of the election – which demographic most supported Hillary Clinton, which didn’t, etc. When I saw that 81% of white evangelicals supported a blatant white supremacist, I wasn’t really terrified as much as I was pissed. In a blog posted to my Medium profile, I condemned the 81% and essentially swore off evangelicalism for good. There was absolutely no returning to a belief system that allowed for this to happen.

Not long after the election, I was once again forced to make a touch decision, only this time it would be a final one. Since I was only allowed to defer a year and because I still couldn’t raise the funds I needed to move to Texas, I had to decline my enrollment and give up on pursuing a PhD. Most of me was deeply saddened I had to make that choice, but part of me was relieved that I wouldn’t have to operate within Christian circles for a while. I needed to grieve.

I wasn’t just grieving the lost opportunity of furthering my education. I was grieving the loss of my former worldview.

Not attending any evangelical church was a decision I made based on the fact that I didn’t fit in. But I did not expect (though I probably should have) the outright betrayal of values when it came to the 2016 election. All throughout my evangelical experience, I was raised to believe that violence against women was wrong, that racism was wrong, and that bullying was wrong. And not only did these white evangelicals – with whom I have prayed, fasted, and broken bread – vote for Donald Trump, they supported him so whole-heartedly that they convinced themselves that God had ordained him to lead the country. I did not have anything nice or respectful to say to these people.

I still don’t.

But what happened in that grieving period was that I gave up reading the bible. It had been one of my longest practices as a Christian and one of the primary reasons why I chose to pursue a seminary degree in the first place. I wanted to be an influential voice in theological discussions and development. I thought that I would be able to expose the cognitive dissonance of many believers while proposing a viable form of faith for them to follow – that one could be a devout follower of Jesus’s Way and still ask critical questions. And seminary had me believing that this might be possible. But white evangelicalism is an extension of white supremacy, enabling and sustaining worldly powers for the personal gain of a few.

It wasn’t until late last year that I finally decided I’d try to read the bible again not only because I had an advanced degree in biblical studies, but also because there has always been something about the bible that I can’t get away from. Though my beliefs have changed dramatically from when I first started reading (I mean, my beliefs are now articulated by me instead of regurgitated from someone else), I never stopped being interested in what the bible contains. For while it has been a tool of oppression and trauma, it has also been a tool of liberation and healing.

This is the major difference between how I used to read the bible and how I read it now. Back then, it was a matter of defending certain “foundational” doctrines so as to protect the integrity of evangelicalism. But now it’s about exposing the hypocrisy underlying those doctrines and subverting the oppressive power structures those doctrines support. And it’s even beyond that; it’s about seeing how, whether in the Hebrew Bible or in the Christian testament, systems of oppression are contrary to the Creator’s ways. I don’t have to be Jewish or Christian to appreciate the liberating aspects of either religious text. And I don’t have to be evangelical to recognize its perpetuation of systems of oppression – racism, sexism, cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, etc.

After all I’ve been through within the last four years, I can never go back to evangelicalism. I’m not even sure if I can go back to Christianity. But I know that I can’t simply walk away from the biblical text. I may have encountered the text in a destructive environment, but that wasn’t the text’s fault. It was the fault of the interpreters; the ones saying, “This is what it means and if you disagree with me, you disagree with God and condemn yourself to hell.” But these interpreters have never realized that every day in oppression is its own hell, and we know we did nothing to deserve this. So if we’re already in hell at no fault of our own, then we know their view of the biblical text is wrong – that they’re lying. And for something that can wield so much power, it is critical that its interpretations are liberated from the oppressor’s grasp.

Which I suppose is where I now find myself – re-interpreting the text I’ve known for years in light of how it liberates, not only how it oppresses. This also means unlearning the evangelical lens – the lens that asks, “What does this verse mean to me?” And instead asking, “What does this verse in this passage in this place in the text ask of me? Who am I supposed to help with this?” This is often the more difficult thing to do, but I think that’s the point. Subverting systems of oppression is never easy.

I just know it would have been harder had I stayed.

If you left evangelicalism, do you still read the bible? If so, how’s that going for you? If not, are things clearer or mirkier? And if you’re not white, how does it feel to be out of that world? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Closing the Distance…

Going into this MFA program, I was nervous about a number of things. For one, it’s been three years since I’ve been in school, so I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to handle the academic rhythm. But one of the biggest things I was nervous about was the particular style of this program. You see, unlike my seminary experience, this program involves extensive amounts of creativity. I hadn’t allowed myself to be creative in a long time – possibly 7 or 8 years at least. There was a tiny bit of creativity with writing my research papers, but not really. Those essays had to cater to an innumerable amount of rules and format regulations that were often subject to change. And the content was produced by the quality of research I’d conduct. So those weren’t creative pieces; they were, in some respects, simply passing along information I’d uncovered in dusty old books at the George Fox library.

There just didn’t seem to be a lot of crossover between my seminary days and the MFA days that lie ahead. But in the effort of writing a whole new 18-page essay, I had spent the entire weekend before the due date of the 17th doing all sorts of digging through old journals and essays. My topic was a particular aspect about myself, which is both easier and harder to write about, but I needed more details. Some of the moments I wrote about have been forever seared into my brain, but some of them are a blur – happening so fast that I only remember snippets of sentences. And on the second day of digging through stuff I had long buried – both in my closet and in my mind – I had realized that I was still doing the academic rigor I did in seminary.

The difference now is that I’m researching myself.

Again, this is both easier and harder. The easy moments practically pour out of my mind and onto the page as I recount every relevant detail or emotion I felt as the events took place. Like a Bare Naked Ladies song or LOTR quote, these memories slip out almost subconsciously. The only work I really have to do is make sure they’re craftily pieced together.

But the difficult moments are another beast altogether. Sometimes it isn’t about the lack of details remembered; it’s that you remember them all. Like when my step-dad threatened my mom with violence and my older brother and I had to hide under our beds in our shared room, occasionally getting up to check through the cracked door if he had actually done anything yet. Or the day my grandpa came back from the hospital without my grandma, telling me she’d never come home, and how I’d played street hockey by myself every day for a week because I didn’t know how to be at home without my grandma. Even though the details aren’t fuzzy, the pain is still there. And when you’re digging through forgotten journal entries, you don’t really know how difficult it will be to write about it all.

Yet after this project, I’m nervous for a different reason. Researching myself – specifically the moments where I began and continued to process my racial identity (both Indigenous and not, both white and not) – involves, in some ways, exposing many of my deeply-guarded truths. These are things I once vowed never to share with anyone. But as the days go on, these are the things that keep me up at night if I don’t begin to walk through them again. These are things I buried deep within myself with the naïve justification that they were merely the adversities that framed the person I was becoming. Yet that naïveté was mixed with a hopelessly evangelical lens of the world, which only hardened the soil under which these memories were buried.

One of the side effects of evangelicalism is to make you feel completely detached from the world – that nothing in this world has any long-term impact over your life. Because whatever happens in your life is God-ordained – be it neglect, abuse, or what have you. Your eternity is guaranteed in heaven, they say, if you only believe in (their version of) Jesus. Part of unlearning evangelicalism involves recognizing that we are not detached from this earth – that in fact we are no more separated from this world than water is separated from the ocean. And with this revelation comes a sense of awareness – of both self and others. Writing as an evangelical was writing as someone who was unseen – these words I wrote weren’t my words, they were God-breathed because God had inspired me to write them. This is the logic I lived by. But it was a logic that allowed people – often including myself – to never see the real me.

In his book, We Were Eight Years In Power: A Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his increasing notoriety after publishing his essay “The Case For Reparations”:

The adolescent in me loved the attention and admiration. The senior citizen in me loved the financial security that came from the fame, since it meant the payoff of old debts and the possibility of a respectable retirement. But the part of me that I most identified as “me,” the part that felt the truest, was mortified. I had come to love the invisibility of writing – the safe distance between my face and the work. The distance was closing. (161, emphasis mine)

Though the reason is different, I feel the distance closing. And this is what makes me nervous. Through my evangelical days and even through most of seminary, I had shared in that same invisibility of writing. I could write endlessly about biblical passages that I thought best expressed God’s love for humanity. I could wax poetically about how Jesus undoes so much damage, and how we’re all being healed if we follow him (whatever that means). But I couldn’t talk about certain memories not just because they were buried, but because I didn’t know how to handle them. I didn’t know how to write about them.

And now I’m compelled to tell the stories I never should have buried. Maybe someone reads them and relates to them, maybe they don’t. Nevertheless, I have to write about them.

I have to close that distance.

Remembering Rachel Held Evans…

When I was in college, I had started asking questions about biblical inerrancy. What I didn’t anticipate, though, was the immediate rush by my then-fellow evangelicals to curb my questions.

“Don’t mess with the essentials,” I was told.

“That’s a slippery slope…”

I didn’t need clarification as to what “slippery slope” meant; its connotations were clear. But it still didn’t make sense. How could I lose faith in Jesus by acknowledging the imperfections and human-ness of the biblical text? In other contexts, we can learn about ancient civilizations and the origins of some modern-day belief systems based off of reliable artifacts. Why should I view the bible any differently?

“Because it’s God-breathed,” I was told.

There was no winning with these evangelicals. It was either that I accept their words about the bible and keep some semblance of peace in my life, or pursue these questions and risk rejection from nearly every evangelical group I was associated with.

And yet I was taught to resist peer pressure.

For a while I found a way to skirt the middle and mumble something about not really knowing the truth and that I’m following Jesus no matter what. But in my own reading and amongst a small handful of friends, I’d still pursue these questions. And though her words came a few years after my struggle with inerrancy, Rachel Held Evans’ blog “They Were Right (And Wrong) About the Slippery Slope” came as a cool breeze on a hot summer day.

I didn’t have to hide.

I didn’t have to pretend.

I could finally be honest.

I could finally be carefree.

You see, at that time, I was deeply committed to following the Jesus of the bible. He taught in ways that challenged the establishment and then did things to back up his teaching. He exposed not the sinners, but the hypocrites of his day – calling for authenticity in a culture where public perception was currency. I got into a lot of theological debates with my fellow evangelicals, but only because I believed that the Jesus they followed was made to match their comfort zones. The Jesus I saw was pulling me out of mine.

“But when I decided I wanted to follow Jesus as myself, with both my head and heart intact, the slippery slope was the only place I could find him, the only place I could engage my faith honestly.”

Rachel’s words described my experience exactly.

And although I’ve taken a break with theology (and really with christianity in general) within the last few years, I will never forget her influence, even with that one little blog post, on my spiritual journey. Her passing, as plenty of people have expressed on social media, is a huge loss. Honestly, some part of me just doesn’t believe that she’s actually gone.

But she is.

I’m not sure if they’re worth much these days, but my prayers are with her family – especially her kids. But my prayers are also with anyone who’s grieving her loss. Because Rachel did more than just challenge staple beliefs within the evangelical world; she created a community of people with similar questions, doubts, and experiences as her. My Twitter timeline is full of people with stories about their experiences with Rachel or her work (or both).

We exvangelicals don’t have too many heroes to guide us and Rachel was one of them. So today just sucks. It really, really sucks.

If RHE had an impact on you in some capacity (for me it was a couple blog posts and her book Searching For Sunday), feel free to share your story. I’d love to read it.
Thanks.

#RIPRachelHeldEvans #BecauseofRHE