Let's help evangelical Christians break free of the shame that drives them

I recognize the selfsame pain, internalized shame and disavowed doubt accompanying the enduring evangelical Christian support of Donald Trump because these feelings are the unholy trinity of my own inherited religious tradition. Whereby I was “saved” by a God totally uninterested in anything but my ability to worship him —or else. Evangelical support of Trump isn’t an aberration, it is an incarnation of the God we were always taught to believe would save us from hell even if he had to put us through it to get to heaven.

So, in an election year, taking place during a global pandemic, it’s time to cut to the chase. We don’t end the pain of this presidency (and our democracy) by spilling more ink on the “abhorrent,” “toxic” or “confusing” support of Trump by evangelical Christians. It is what it is. 

Nor do we get there by providing impressively vitriolic takedowns of his faulty philosophical, political or theological arguments for enduring power. They are what they are. 

Instead, we get there by bravely entering into and helping to exorcize the pain of deeply complex religious men and women who have internalized a trickle-down snowball of shame and self-doubt emanating from a God who long predates the self-styled dollar store incarnation currently squatting in the Oval Office.

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Listen to the teenagers: Things are not right

The pandemic has apocalyptically uncovered the raw nerve of the collective pain we regularly live with as Americans. And it has violently revealed the ways in which citizens in this country are expected to internalize and subsequently take responsibility for the toxic stress of our societal abandonment. In America, even our pain itself has been privatized.

What we do with and for our kids is often the clearest explication of what we actually believe about the world.

Lately, in my industry at least, this looks like teachers (or the ones privileged enough to still choose) weighing whether or not to leave the profession or expose themselves or vulnerable loved ones to an early grave in order to provide a poorly funded public service to families and children they love. It looks like parents (or the ones privileged enough to still choose) weighing their abilities to provide virtual home school opportunities for their children while also working, or exposing their children, teachers, themselves, family members and the community at large to COVID-19. Additionally, the bifurcation of our choices about staying home or going back to school fail to account for the underlying reality awaiting our students were they all to return to an academic environment my friend Jim refers to as “Chernobyl-light.”

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The revolution will be standardized

Like a Baldwin-esque fire, I want this apocalypse to burn away or reveal the truth of what runs the world. Because the forces of “law and order” don’t just protect the perpetuance of an often amorphous and publicly disavowed “racism,” but at a far more insidious level, they undergird the interests of an insatiable greed that predates our efforts at Instagramming the revolution.

This greed enslaved black and brown bodies for centuries as a way of propping up the economy of a fledgling nation and violently pilfered the lands of our country’s indigenous peoples to form its republic. This greed has dismantled nation-states across the globe to protect “our” way of life, or keep “us” safe. It cages immigrant children at the border and incarcerates whole generations of Black men in for-profit prisons. It pits marginalized communities against one another in a race for “representation.”

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Self-care as political resistance - or how (not) to sacrifice humans to 'save' the economy

When our national religion mandates that thousands of people patriotically perish in order to resurrect our nation’s unalienable right to Shrimpfests and Taco Tuesdays or aimlessly spending $35 dollars at T.J. Maxx or Nordstrom Rack, we are engaging in an ancient and detestable barbarism parading as devotion, faithfulness and bravery. It isn’t brave to sacrifice other people who aren’t like you to reopen the economy, just like it isn’t brave to consign other people who aren’t like you to the fires of hell, or a snaking bread line, or a crumbling school or a war zone pretending to be a neighborhood in which you would never venture

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Leaving the corners of our fields unharvested for the sake of the most vulnerable.

Aside from pillaging our retirement accounts, lower respiratory tracts and sense of time (how long have I been wearing these sweatpants?), COVID-19 has had the audacity to lay yet one more thing bare — namely, our rather profound inability (even now) to envision a world in which our American faith has anything at all to do with what happens to people who aren’t like us, both as we die and most especially while we are still alive.

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Why progressive Christians need to talk more about sin.

What if sin, more than sinners, is our problem? And, what if the cure for the problem of sin isn’t for us to talk less about sin as a theological concept while continuing to take more individual responsibility for its reign on earth, but instead to talk more about how sin is what currently passes for domestic and foreign policy, while we begin to struggle against it together with every fiber we have left?

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