27 years after Anita Hill, Evangelicalism finally broke me

(This post was built from a Twitter thread I posted yesterday….)

So I’m going to share something personal I’ve referenced before but haven’t directly explained. This is not me speaking as a professor, and I want to make that clear for my students because our class space is so filled with different ideas and disagreements and that should remain safe for all of us.

I need to tell you why my heart is breaking about yesterday’s Brett Kavanaugh hearing.

Some of you have heard me mention before how I grew up. Conservative white Evangelical churches. I was that kid. At church 3–4 days or nights a week, youth group, Sunday school, summer camp, missions trips, etc. I know this world so well because it was my world.

My parents both work in ministry as well. This is arguably as much in my social DNA as anything. What I’m trying to say is I GET this culture in ways that are hard to describe to someone on the outside. You can read about it, but the experience is something else.

For example, when Kavanaugh went on TV and claimed the virgin defense, y’all that was a dogwhistle to Evangelicals. It was the purity culture no-sex-before-marriage message (my whole youth group took the pledge at a Christian rock concert in the late ’80s; it was a thing). I know people outside Evangelicalism who mercilessly mocked him for this disclosure, but that wasn’t a message for them. It was there to attest to his bona fides. He was in the club. You want another? The Bible speaks of the virtue of Christian persecution, and scholars have observed that this in fact has become a way Christians pass the test of whether they are faithful. Paranoid feelings of being constantly persecuted are endemic to this culture. It’s how they can use religious liberty to not bake a cake for a gay couple as a pivot for using the same argument to take away the right of that couple to even choose marriage for themselves. When you’re always under attack, irony doesn’t exist. Only persecution as proof of salvation. And so of course Kavanaugh went full angry victim. It was a signal to Evangelicals. He is in the faith, just like you. And for those who doubted him, he also vaguely referenced mistakes of his youth to activate the grace-and-forgiveness sentiment. He is forgiven those unstated trespasses of long ago. Evangelicals love a good redemption story, just love it. What people outside the circle call disqualifying, to those inside Evangelicalism it is a +1 on his resume.

It became pretty clear this week that this entire strategy was around the Christian base. I could see it through and through. They were talking to people I grew up with. And I knew it was gonna play.

Despite how I grew up, sometime in my junior year of high school, I began to change. I began to reject a lot of what I’d grown up in. Not overnight, but observations and doubts about my upbringing began to pile up. And I’ve thought about this many times this week. The thing that set this all in motion was the Anita Hill hearings back in 1991.

There was the indelible media imagery that a lot of us remember, but I was on the inside. I was at the churches, hearing people mock her and disbelieve her. I heard ministers do it. I heard family members do it.

I wish I could tell you now that I took a crazy strong stand, but I didn’t. I was a coward. My whole life was hung on this culture, and it was built around conformity. To ask me to step out, basically you might as well have asked me to sever a limb. They were inhered. Although I didn’t cognitively know this at the time, I understood at a deep, unspoken level the danger in not conforming. I had no language for how to disagree because the language wasn’t taught. Culturally, Evangelicals are wired around respect for biblical, parental and church authority, and anything that went outside those bounds put you on the outside. This is not a world of grey, but rather black and white. It wasn’t until I read James Coleman’s sociology work and Max Weber in grad school as a 30-year-old that I realized this. Disagreeing wasn’t just disagreeing in the world I grew up in. It was death in that culture. The early New Testament history term is “ostraca,” referenced for a process for how communities disowned heretics using shards of clay. Weirdly, I learned about this idea in a college theology class. But it took me a while to realize I was ostraca.

My evolution and separation was slow. I (probably stupidly) attended a conservative Evangelical college. It was … an education. I discovered journalism and a channel for being different. I raised some hell in my time on the paper. I found a voice for thinking differently, or for taking my ideas and exploring them in a more structured way. Journalism also gave me an avenue to ask dissenting questions. There is no Q&A after a church sermon. Being an annoying reporter who can dissect statements, find contradictions, and seek the truth had a type of power that I’d never experienced before. I loved it.

But this was a LONG evolution. I graduated college in 1997. I was a radical progressive in that world of the Christian college I attended, but once I started work as a professional, I had no language for the people I encountered and no idea how to navigate socially. Because the people I met, worked with, and listened to when working on stories sure as hell weren’t in the pews I grew up in (at least openly).

I like to call my work in newspapers my real education. I hung out with and worked side by side with people of different faiths and races. I met and got to know gay folks. They were normal people. I know this sounds bizarre, but it blew my mind. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is the language Evangelicals used to describe the artificial process of separating people from who they are, and it’s completely useless in the real world. You can’t strip people of humanity by describing them as the sum of characteristics and actions, and if that’s wild, it really breaks down when you start to realize that calling things sin is often more a function of power than theological basis.

Through all this? I was still a sucky ally. I made a lot of mistakes pre/during/post college and said things I’m ashamed about now. I learned and changed, but there was still so much that hadn’t been challenged among all the lessons I’d absorbed the first 20 years of my life. I was clueless, and didn’t even know what I was clueless about. So I wasn’t raised in how to be an ally, let alone a good one. We aren’t talking about refining so much as reinvention, and it’s work that continues to this day. My friends, they have been so patient with me over the years. It literally has been like learning a whole new language. I didn’t know what love one another really meant because I hadn’t been forced to love someone who wasn’t like me.

And before you feel cheered by this thread, I want to reiterate that I’m still not a great ally. I know that word is a good signal to people who need supporters, and while I like to think of myself as such I don’t feel worthy of the term ally. I feel like my time at Lehigh has changed me a lot for the better, but I have made my share of missteps even in recent years. I have work to do.

Anyhow, after the ’16 election, things got tense. Facebook sucks, folks. I was linked to a lot of old friends and family who tolerated me being different and only referenced me in passive aggressive ways, but it became untenable. I cut a lot of ties because I had to. Because it was the same old shit. Mocking people of color who were scared. Owning the libs type stuff. Conservative Evangelical culture has a toxic air to it. Bravado masculinity replaces the call to love one another. No listening, just yelling. My relationship with church has been complicated post college as well. I’ve left more than a few places because people felt permission to tell me how awful I am because I work in journalism. More often than not, they see a caricature and not me.

To me faith is the pursuit of truth. It has always been compatible with journalism. I’ve never had to reconcile it, but I’ve sure had to defend it. Most often to Christians who smugly deride me as a liberal (btw, I don’t consider myself a liberal). I won’t get too much into family, but it’s a disaster for me too post 2016. Crying as a write that, but there’s not a lot to be done or said there.

ANYHOW, here’s the point. I watched what happened yesterday and I was back to high school me again. I watched the stories about Liberty busing up students to support Brett Kavanaugh. One student said it didn’t matter if he was guilty because he’d overturn Roe.

Nothing has changed. Still the same culture war, win-at-all costs stuff even when it comes at the cost of turning their back on everything they said they believed in. Party and policy wins over people. They are simultaneously fighting to end abortion and also health care for the kids people will be forced to have. It’s insanity.

I realize this sounds like the usual political rant, but for me it’s personal. This thing I was raised in, this structure that at least was built on what I thought was solid, deeply held belief, was the first thing to go when it got hard. I had to break free from that structure at cost to myself, but to find out later that it never existed can make you dizzy.

With this week’s hearings, it all came back. The same mistakes, the same people. Same words, but I heard the voices of the people I grew up with instead of those speaking on the TV. Some I knew who laughed at Dr. Hill back then are doing the same things now. I realized how different I was, and how little has changed among the people I knew.

But you know what really is breaking my heart today? It’s the silent ones among the people I knew. They’re still there, lurking in my feed, saying nothing. They’re not attacking Dr. Ford, but they sure aren’t standing for anything either. And you need to understand, these folks will stand for anything they perceive to be injustice. Protest and dissent are hardwired into the Evangelical brain, but folks couldn’t be bothered this week I suppose. Life is going on for them. Protesters are screaming into the wind and they’re getting nothing back from the family values people.

I realized last night as I was talking with my wife at the dinner table that I’ve learned to cope with the harsh words and sexist thinking I grew up in, but I’ve never been able to cope with their silence.

I want to yell, but they stopped listening to me a while ago. I became a “liberal journalist” and lost all expectation of being heard. The thing I keep saying is I can’t change these folks. I know them better than a lot of you. It was my world, but it’s not anymore. Instead they need to fight like hell on the inside to change the toxic culture that has led to this. We didn’t get this political moment overnight. It was slowly built by the religious right. I was part of it for a while, until I couldn’t anymore.

And it is a problem of toxic Evangelical culture. Individuals point out to me they aren’t like that, and their church isn’t. Fine. But culture is made up of the collection of churches and individuals in a larger system, and what you produce collectively is your culture even if you don’t create it yourself. You’re either making it, giving tacit approval via silence, or fighting it. I tried all three of these things, in order. And then I had to leave.

And folks, this has broken me. I’m lost for how to raise moral kids in this world at times. Church isn’t safe for me and I worry about it being safe for my kids. Read that again, because that should not be the case. I don’t know how to change these folks that I love but are damaging me in awful ways. I’ve described it publicly as being untethered, and now I’m telling you why.

Please don’t give up hope on these people in these churches. I haven’t. But I have realized I can’t do this for them. But to those of you out there hurting, I am so sorry you are going through this. I’m sorry that the Church has left you out in the cold. And I’m sorry I was part of it for too long. I’m sorry that even as I grew and changed, I had trouble finding my voice for a long time.

I want to believe that faith still matters even if I’m shaken with doubt. The classroom is a safe place for me because it’s about the exploration of truth. I love my students. All of them. We take this journey together even if it leads us down different paths. I have the privilege of having outlets to work this out. Writing has been that. Teaching absolutely is that. Some of my students have heard a lot of this because I trust the safety of the classroom and it comes out as we apply ideas to life.

The pain and suffering of the survivors who feel ignored by this week’s circus in DC is real and greater than anything I feel. But if I could personalize it a bit, I feel safer in newsrooms and the classroom (which are kind of being threatened a lot these days!) than in the churches I grew up in. If I feel that way, imagine how those marginalized by this culture feel. Imagine how women in the #MeToo movement feel when they watch their abuse dismissed as a political stunt rather than an open wound.

That’s the tragedy that is breaking my heart today; the news is hard enough, the response is worse, but the silence is worst of all.