Do You Still Talk to Grandma?

Do You Still Talk to Grandma?

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Moving Beyond Heroes and Villains

I have complicated feelings about the faith tradition I grew up in. This faith was the home I lived in and through which I understood the world for most of my life, but now I find that most of the work I do involves fighting systems, ideas, and practices that are entangled with or arose from evangelical Christianity. I hit my adolescence in the nineties. It was a wild time when you could exist in a world within a world: You could live completely in the evangelical bubble. You could attend a Christian school, go to church, be a part of a youth group, join a Christian sports league, watch Christian movies, wear Christian clothing, listen to Christian music, shop at Christian bookstores, and—yeah, it definitely sounds like a cult. But that is the world I grew up in, and in that world there were a lot of ideas about how life worked. Some were helpful; many were not.

I can still feel the deep pit in my stomach when I remember sitting in a youth room with a handful of other teenage girls while a man in his early twenties lectured us about the importance of virginity. That is the world I grew up in. Despite my discomfort, I lived much of my life in service to evangelicalism and to the world evangelicals created to sustain it. I attended an evangelical university and graduate school, and then I worked at a different evangelical university before becoming a pastor at an evangelical megachurch. I found a home and security in this world within a world, and I gave that home everything I had even though it was a home that was not safe for me, or secure. There were rules that we all had to follow to stay inside that home—
rules I did not fit in, a fact that eventually resulted in an experience of painful spiritual loss. I gave my life to something only to be rejected by it once I became more of myself. My faith tradition, or rather the people who were using that tradition to gain power in the world, handed me trauma and heartache and years of confusion. For a while I just accepted that I could no longer be a part of this faith community and its way of understanding the world, and in some ways that was true: I did not fit in the evangelical world in the way it was being presented, in the way I had previously understood it. But was that the end?

I spent a lot of time wondering if there was still a way for me to keep my faith, to let go of the things that no longer served me but to cling even more tightly to the things that did. Was there any good in Christianity? Could the good still be valid amid all the bad? How could I separate the two?

I quickly found myself navigating competing realities. I found that I could not completely sort parts of my faith heritage into one box or another, good or bad. The deeper I dug, the more I found moments and experiences that represented more than one truth. For example, I realized that I am still in financial debt to an evangelical university that I wouldn’t set foot in today, but this same university is also a place that produced some of the deepest and truest friendships that I have in this world. I remember standing at my wedding and looking around at the closest people in my life standing beside me and realizing that all but one of them came from that university. We all hated the place, but that place we all hated brought us together. Growing up in the church and having so many leadership opportunities and chances to speak and preach was an experience like no other, and as a person who now earns a living by speaking, I can see clearly that the thousands of hours that I got to practice in this community made me the speaker that I am today. And beyond practical skills, the church and my faith gave me a sense of comfort and security in the world. Believing that there was a God who was for me and loved me is an incredibly helpful framework—and yet that the same God was somehow obsessed with my virginity was weird. What was I to do with these competing realities? Could more than one thing be true at the same time? Could I stand against the patriarchy, white supremacy, and general nonsense of evangelicalism but also find wisdom and goodness in the Christian tradition? Can I grieve my time at an evangelical university that gave me equal parts trauma and financial debt while also deeply cherishing the friendships that I made there? I made it my mission to try to have both, to hold both, to keep my faith, and to fight against the power it held.

A few years after I began this journey, I had the extraordinary privilege to spend a weekend with a man named Richard Rohr. Rohr is a Franciscan priest who holds many of the really progressive, cutting-edge ideas about faith that a lot of us have now, but he came to them about thirty years ago. Like me and many others, Rohr had gripes with the powerful empire of evangelical Christianity, but he had something I didn’t have: information. Rohr had expert knowledge of the wider (and older) Christian tradition and all of the faithful people in that tradition who have discovered its wildly progressive and universal ancient wisdom. He had explored all of the places I wanted to go, and he left a map for all of the people who might want to follow the same path. Well, I was one of those people, and Rohr became a guide for me. I got to hang out with him for two days—I was in spiritual nerd heaven.

There was a group of twenty of us, all people who had big questions about faith, spirituality, and what it means to be human, and who also had started faith lives in evangelicalism but had since left. We all had our own reasons why we were on this journey of religious deconstruction, desperately following along and picking up the breadcrumbs Father Rohr had left for us to find. Some of us left evangelicalism because of our own identity, some because of beliefs, others because of the corruption or collapse of a church. But one thing was very clear: We had all experienced loss. When we spoke that weekend and asked questions, several of us spoke with anger, sarcasm, and general disrespect for evangelicalism. We spoke in a tone that suggested that we believed we were better than them—those antiquated evangelicals. They were dumb and wrong, and we were the ones who crammed into this room with this man because we were the ones who were going to do it better—be better—because we were the ones who were better. I just knew Rohr felt the same.

Richard Rohr knew that all of the people who hurt us, who forced us out of their houses and into this room, were bad and wrong—right? We were only about one day into our time with him when he shut down that idea in me.

Someone asked a question, the kind of question that’s a self-congratulatory comment in disguise, like “Why do you think it is that evangelicals are so interested in hoarding power for themselves and seemingly uninterested in the actual tradition and history of Christianity? Wouldn’t it be more advantageous and truer to the tradition if they adopted a more universal lens and approach to ministry?” We all nodded our heads when it was asked, familiar with this opportunity to talk about how wrong the other team was. We waited for our new leader to lead the way, but he didn’t. (Isn’t it so interesting how we always seem to be looking for a new external authority? How did I go from “all of those pastors are wrong” to “I only listen to Richard Rohr now”? Or I’ve heard friends say things like “I’m done with church,” but then Brené Brown is very obviously their pastor.)

Rohr paused and then told us all of the issues he saw with the evangelical church, and all of our heads were furiously nodding as he spoke about greed and power and unwarranted exclusivity and so on. Then he said, “I’d like to also take a moment and tell you a few things they have taught me.”

I was like, What? No, you’re the cool, progressive guy; you don’t get to say something good about the thing we all hate. I was confused and also maybe a little mad. Why do you get to acknowledge anything good?

I sat with what he said, the critique and the praise, and I wondered if the critique was enough to cancel out the praise or vice versa. But why? Why couldn’t I hold both at the same time? This man had found a way out of the binary and hard lines that I felt trapped in, and I desperately wanted that.

Most of us have been seduced into binary thinking—not just evangelicals or Christians generally. It is everywhere you look. In our storytelling, there are good people and bad people. In our history, we have people on the right side and wrong side. In our art, we have light and dark, and as far as the eye can see, we are pushing ourselves and the world around us into binary thinking. We are always trying to make a world where there are heroes and villains, good and evil, right and wrong, and where we can be the heroes, where we can be good and right. People love categories and boxes and clean lines. We like it when the world is easy to understand. We want to know if a relationship is healthy or toxic. We want to know if someone is straight or gay, male or female. We want to know if our friends or family or partners are feeling happy or sad. We want to know if our careers are a success or a failure.