In some ways, the ubiquity of mom-and-wine kitsch reflects the pervasive nature of alcohol in many people’s day-to-day lives. Most craft stores sell a version of It’s Wine O’Clock Somewhere wall hangings, and Etsy abounds with Mommy’s Juice tumblers, wink-and-nod opaque sippy cups for adults. A recent article from the Columbia University Public School of Health confirmed that rates of binge drinking and Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is increasing most rapidly in reproductive-aged women, aided by a culture that normalizes alcohol use and downplays its abuse by suggesting that a glass of wine (or three) is needed to survive the daily stressors of motherhood.

A new wave of books published in the last few years provides one powerful antidote to the changing (and troubling) drinking habits of some women. Dubbed “Quit Lit” by The Washington Post in early 2023, these often-confessional books provide a warning to readers by showing how swiftly alcohol dependence can consume a person’s life, complicating relationships, altering physical and emotional health, and increasing stress and anxiety. Penned primarily by women, Quit Lit reflects the disturbing trends about women who drink, and an increasing awareness that the bottle is not the hoped-for antidote it often promises to be.

Erin Jean Warde’s Sober Spirituality: The Joy of a Mindful Relationship with Alcohol provides an important addition to the Quit Lit genre, though her target audience is not only women, and not only those who drink to excess. Part memoir, part meditation, Warde situates alcohol use within the context of Christian faith, as she reflects on her own transformative decision to become sober following years of alcohol dependency. For Warde, sobriety “allows me to love deeply, to receive a joy that will never leave or forsake me. Sobriety allows me to gather myself up and place my soul on the altar.” Sober Spirituality is an invitation to readers to find the love and joy Warde discovered by changing her relationship to alcohol and, in a way, becoming born again.

The author writes with an authority of knowing sobriety and spirituality well. An Episcopal priest and spiritual director, Warde spent a number of years in thrall of alcohol. She also did not quit cold turkey—Warde writes that few people do—but instead through stops and starts, sobriety finally “stuck.” She likens her new-found sobriety to a kind of awakening that her hungover self, with its halting morning-after self-loathing, could not have imagined. Warde sees sobriety as resurrection into “a joyful life,” requiring a kind of death first: of old habits, comfortable patterns, even relationships that have been founded and fueled through drinking. 

Sober Spirituality wisely explores the biblical basis for sober living, challenging the oft-times facile argument that the Bible condones alcohol use, given the preponderance of references to wine throughout scripture. It’s important to affirm that Jesus drank wine, Warde writes, but also that the wine in the ancient Near East was different than what is available now, and that Jesus’ relationship to the alcohol was not toxic or debilitating. Warde reminds readers that other biblical passages (like Proverbs 23) show the dangers of drunkenness, alcohol’s promises of a good time giving way to bad decisions, darkness, and shame.

Despite the glib nature of mom-and-wine culture, and indeed of drinking culture more broadly, shame remains a pervasive part of alcohol use and abuse. Substance dependence can often be a silent struggle, Warde says, as it is for many who are seeking sobriety. Throwaway comments on social media that either glorify drinking or vilify those who drink too much present a “double whammy” for those striving for sobriety, who are reminded that alcohol makes any event more fun, and also that those who over-indulge are drunkards and addicts who cause harm to others.

A resounding strength in Sober Spirituality is Warde’s unwillingness to contribute to the shame that is often part of conversations around alcohol misuse. Given her own experience, she recognizes that the journey toward sobriety is not linear: it might not have a specific start date; it might not have a particular pathway; more than anything else, it requires a mindful relationship with alcohol and with others. Warde uses the idea of “long obedience in the same direction,” noting that “Sobriety is, for many of us, a progression, an unfolding, an intuitive process of embodiment, and the inkling that a more joyful life is possible.” 

In writing about her sobriety, Warde uses the language of liberation, of “returning us to what we were made for—joy, yes, but also a more compassionate heart.” Understanding this liberation means that Warde had to recognize her own white privilege, and the ways alcohol numbed her from wholly witnessing the racial injustice around her, or from seeing the full humanity of others in their grief and their joy. Sobriety also helped Warde acknowledge how white privilege shows up in drinking culture: the substance abuse of white women can be seen as a lark, worthy of wine sippy cups; Black people who struggle with substance addictions are more readily portrayed in the media as “lazy, devious, and violent sociopath(s),” and their abuse of substances more likely to be criminalized. 

It is Warde’s thoughtful consideration of addiction’s high costs that makes Sober Spirituality an important read even for those not personally challenged by alcohol’s allure. She carefully plots the ways a $250 billion/year alcohol industry repeatedly deceives us into believing its products provide health benefits, despite all contravening evidence. More pervasively, the alcohol industry lies to us, telling us that drinking is a necessary addition to the good life, a message children also receive in terms of marketing, movies and TV shows, and the model of the adults in their lives. Liberation from alcohol includes being freed from the industry’s deceptions, though Warde manifests considerable compassion for those who work in the industry. “Systems deserve criticism, and people deserve compassion,” she writes, a point that deserves broad application for justice-minded Christians.  

This kind of empathy appears everywhere in Warde’s book: empathy for those who work as bartenders and alcohol sales, empathy for those struggling with substance abuse, and empathy for those who have vowed to quit, but for whom a sustained sobriety is still a struggle. Warde’s own challenges with AUD shape the ways she guides others, and it’s also clear that Warde’s liberation from alcohol addiction has allowed her to more fully see the Imago Dei in others and in herself. Sober Spirituality is an invitation for others to join Warde in her journey, a new kind of Quit Lit that recognizes how long obedience in the same direction offers so much more than the empty promises of wine o’clock and mommy juice.

“I had no idea this stuff existed,” one faculty peer—a teacher in the religion department—told me. “This doesn’t reflect my experience of evangelicalism at all.”

“This perfectly described my upbringing,” a young woman messaged me later, one of many students, mostly female, who described to me the devastating ways purity culture had trammeled their sense of self and their sexual identities. These women’s experiences in church were colored by a miasma of messages reminding them that their sexual purity before marriage was sacrosanct, the female body a sacred possession to be shared only with some future husband. As girls, they learned to be accountable for their own sexual purity, and were also tasked with protecting their male peers, who might stumble into sexual sin at the very sight of a bare shoulder or pair of yoga pants. 

I thought about these young women—indeed, all the students I teach at an evangelical university—while reading Emily Joy Allison’s excellent new book, #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing. I thought about my colleague’s response: that he had no idea this culture existed, even though his students and faculty peers were clearly swimming in it. And I thought about the article I’d just read by David French at The Dispatch; he details the abuse of at least 57 boys at Kanakuk Kamps, a well-known Christian summer camp in Missouri, where a sexual predator had easy access to kids for years, his abuse covered up by camp executives and a bevy of nondisclosure agreements. 

 A through line connects the sexual assault these boys endured and my students’ upbringing in purity culture, and that through line is evangelicalism’s inordinate focus on sexuality as the defining trait in people’s lives; the ways that focus is experienced differently by men and women, cis-gendered and queer; and how the ideology of purity culture provides perfect conditions for the kind of predation that affected the lives of countless children at Kanakuk Kamps and elsewhere.   

READ: Identifying Spiritual Abuse

In #ChurchToo, Allison draws a clear connection between evangelicalism’s significant focus on purity culture and the preponderance of sexual assaults that have occurred in churches and youth groups and summer camps. Her book is a stunning reminder that too many abuses occur in what are to be safe Christian spaces, and she provides a compelling argument that purity culture itself grooms young people, making them more susceptible to assault. 

At the center of her argument is the claim that when the ideology of purity culture seeps deep into Christians’ minds and bodies, they become perfect victims for assault. Purity culture is its own kind of grooming, and can be a precursor to assault, as people hear time and again that any sex outside of cis-gendered, heterosexual and monogamous relationships is the gravest of sins, the paramount transgression against God that will potentially lead to their destruction.

Given this overwhelming messaging, which likewise conveys that victims are complicit in perpetuating this grave sin, assault becomes a source of shame to be hidden. Thus young people are less likely to report their assault to leaders, and leaders are less likely to discipline abusers; concurrently, leaders are more likely to provide cover for abusers in their midst, under the aegis of grace and forgiveness. The Houston Chronicle’s 2019 expose of the Southern Baptist Convention’s willingness to shield 700 church leaders accused of abuse is but one of many examples Allison provides. The SBC’s abysmal handling of the sexual assault cases fundamentally reflects a pattern in church and parachurch organizations to stand with the accused, rather than the accuser. 

Allison premises her conclusive reporting on her own experience. As a teen, she was groomed by a youth pastor whose actions faced no serious ramifications within her church. In 2017, on the heels of the #MeToo movement, Allison courageously told her story through social media, using the hashtag #ChurchToo. Countless women and men responded with their own #ChurchToo experiences, a groundswell of response that showed Allison—and the world—how endemic sexual assault within Christian organizations is, and how rarely assaults are adjudicated, either within the church or without. 

The Kanakuk Kamps case, which David and Nancy French brought to light this March, is an excellent example of the inordinate efforts some Christian leaders take to shield abusers. The perpetrator, Pete Newman, was arrested in 2010, and charged with seven counts of sexual assault. Prosecutors identified 57 victims, but assume there are hundreds more. Newman began working at the camp in 1995, and over the next 15 years, groomed and abused boys, allegedly sodomizing some victims, masturbating with them, and “performing and receiving oral sex,” according to The Dispatch article.

The Frenches report that by 1999, the camp had received calls from concerned parents, though Newman not only continued to be employed by the camp, but became one of its “rising stars,” featured in camp promotional material. When he was finally arrested, leaders expressed shock that he had behaved so treacherously, even though they were well aware of his actions—and had plied victims’ families with money, free Kanakuk gear, Playstations and tuition to summer camps, in exchange for silence. The muzzled victims created a sense that all was right and well within the camp, and Newman continued having access to children until his arrest in 2009. 

Allison’s book is a call for reckoning: for the leaders involved at Kanakuk Kamps, for churches and families where victims are silenced, and for an evangelical culture that has elevated sexual purity above all else, a goal to which we are all to aspire. Such an ideology denudes people of their inherent worth apart from their sexuality, creating a culture that is especially damaging to those who lack power, who are sexual and gender minorities, or who have shame heaped on their heads, simply because abusers chose to victimize them sexually. 

#ChurchToo is a hard but important read. Allison’s work should compel Christians to contemplate the destruction wrought by purity culture, in our churches and homes and summer camps and institutions: in other words, every place where people thought they were safe, until the church leaders in their lives failed them, all in the name of purity.

#ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing (Broadleaf Press, 2021) can be found here. 

Back in March, when the Covid pandemic was beginning to unfurl in the United States and the news about its destruction felt so dismaying, I found comfort walking my dog through our town’s pioneer cemetery each day. Such an act might seem macabre, save that the gravestones there gave me hope in humanity’s resilience, the cemetery a reminder that people have been living and dying in my hometown for more than 150 years. 

In this practice of cemetery walking, I share infinity with Christiana Peterson, author of the fabulous new book, Awakened by Death: Life-Giving Messages from the Mystics. Like Peterson, I see the space devoted to death as also symbolic of life: in cemeteries, we are confronted with the beauty of being alive, and the mystery that comes with death. It’s a mystery our culture often refuses to face, Peterson argues; and while her book was written almost entirely before the Covid pandemic, this contemplation of death—our cultural refusal to face death, the transformative power that accompanies those who do—is prescient, Peterson’s voice prophetically calling us to “awaken to death” as a way to live more profoundly. 

Now more than ever, we need this voice, because we are surrounded by death. And yet, too many persist in denying the deadly virus. Since my cemetery walks in early spring, more than 300,000 fellow Americans have died of Covid. In some states, the death rate is numbing; in South Dakota, for instance, one in 800 residents have lost their lives to the coronavirus. For black and brown people, the rates of death from Covid are disproportionately higher than for white people, who benefit from structures that preserve health, including having easier access to life-saving health care. 

What has astounded me most about the 2020 pandemic is this denial, a willingness to sacrifice elderly and vulnerable populations to death, presumably so that others—luckily younger and healthier and with access to health care—can freely live. Conversations about mask mandates and social distancing turn on this presumption that some deaths are less significant than others; churches who persist with in-person meetings convey that their religious liberty is more important than protecting their vulnerable congregants, who are welcome to worship alone and at home until the pandemic has ended.  

READ: Oh God, Where Are You Now?

I am astounded, but I have also been enraged: at those who deny Covid’s deadliness, yes, but also at those who have politicized this pandemic, transforming even the simple sacrifice of wearing a mask into a statement about one’s freedom and one’s unwillingness “to live in fear.” What seems like fearlessness to others feels like recklessness to me; what seems like expressions of liberty to others feels like selfishness. Most days, I see this while scrolling through social media, angry at the folks who question Covid’s reality, including people in my home community who rail against a governor for instituting mask mandates and lockdowns to deal with skyrocketing Covid numbers.

Perhaps instead of rage, though, I need perspective and empathy, and Peterson’s book offers me this, in spades. What I appreciate most about Awakened by Death is Peterson’s ability to put our relationship with death into historical contexts that starkly reveal our current cultural discomfort with death. Early mystics encountered God in a time when death surrounded them, the Black Death being only one of many ways those in the Middle Ages might meet their end. Peterson explores the art and literature from that era, as well as the words of Christian mystics who grappled with death directly, seeing this grappling as a way to draw closer to God, rather than avoiding the mystery of death altogether.

Awakened by Death also traces the shifting responses to death that have occurred in America over the last few centuries. Even architectural design once acknowledged the presence of wakes, where families would care for and honor a dead body in a home; over time, this sacred and familial ritual has been abrogated by far more austere funeral homes, where bodies can be embalmed and prepared with make-up to look still alive but sleeping. 

Too often, our collective fear of death means we marginalize those who are suffering and on the precipice of dying. Aging bodies are reviled because they signal a kind of entropy; we are a culture obsessed with youth, Peterson writes, as a way “to numb ourselves against the mystery of our eventual decay.” We are conditioned to long for the certainty that death can be held at bay, rather than facing the uncertainty that life offers us, our end an enigma knowable only to God. 

As I read Peterson’s deeply reported exploration of death, I was challenged to interrogate my own angry response to the pandemic, my lack of compassion for anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and all those who persist in behaviors that have prolonged this pandemic, putting my loved ones at risk. Those who deny Covid’s deadly reality, or who insist that the vulnerable stay home so that everyone else can live, reflect an unwillingness to contend with sickness and death; an inability to look at and name human suffering; perhaps even an insistence that one’s own body will not succumb to the disease, despite all countervailing evidence suggesting we don’t fully know how Covid attacks people, or who will be stricken. This perspective suggests that even wearing a mask might be too much a symbol of our finitude, a reminder that we are all frail, all vulnerable. Denying the mask is not so much a response borne of freedom, but of fear. 

Peterson’s Awakened to Death compels me to consider my own uncomfortable relationship with death; more significant to the moment, her words challenge me to transform my rage to empathy for those who claim they will not live in fear of Covid and death. I must wonder: are they paradoxically so afraid of illness and death they cannot—will not—accept that Covid has the power to kill them? What might happen if they accepted the reality of death, and do everything possible—even curtailing their personal liberty for a time—to make sure that others might live?  

My aging canine has taken her own turn toward death, and we no longer take walks to the cemetery together. Yet Peterson’s Awakened to Death has given me hope in the same way springtime walks had, affording me insight into the resilience of humans throughout history and reminding me that our understanding of death—as our understanding of life—is itself transient.  

In her epilogue, composed in spring 2020, Peterson writes that “the prophets and mystics of our church are needed more than ever, offering a theology that cares for the body, for our neighbors, for the earth, words that give truth, but also offer the strong flames of hope in such a frightening time.” Peterson’s book itself offers this prophetic voice, convicting me that in being awake to death, we can more certainly save others’ lives, as well as our own. 

Those sons we imagined into being over 18 years ago are now in high school, set to graduate next month. With a pandemic raging, Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown rightly cancelled the remaining weeks of this school year, putting an end to my sons’ high school education, and all the planned activities leading up to commencement: no prom, no senior skip day, no awards ceremonies, no goodbyes to teachers or peers. Perhaps no graduation ceremony itself, a possibility we are just now trying to accept.

The class of 2020 was born into a country disfigured by terrorism, and now will be launched into the world during a global pandemic. This year’s graduates have lived through other national tragedies in their first eighteen years, their lives intertwined with moments of collective grief. As parents, we’ve navigated these tragedies with them, often flying blind and without guidelines for successfully carrying our children through events that have gutted us as well.

I remember watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with a toddler on my lap, crying into his sweaty neck about the horrors unfolding at the Superdome. I picked up my boys from fifth grade hours after Sandy Hook, wondering how I should tell them what happened at another elementary school, thousands of miles away. The Aurora theater shooting occurred while my sons were at summer camp, and I decided not to tell them what happened. When the Parkland shooting occurred, my kids were in high school, and I fought every impulse to immediately retrieve them from their campus upon seeing the news. And underneath all this unspeakable grief, children dying in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, their mothers sending kids to school not knowing if they would return home safely: this I didn’t speak to my boys about much at all.

Now my sons and their peers are caught in a pandemic, keeping them inside, bored and isolated from friends, unable to celebrate graduation, an extraordinary achievement in their young lives. It’s hard to know how to carry the grief of this loss, especially when we have personally been spared from the horrors so many others face. After all, Hurricane Katrina and Sandy Hook and Syria’s war occurred thousands of miles from us, the threat of a natural disaster or school shooting or drone warfare only a barely-perceptible thrum to our day-to-day activities. And while those tragedies also showed fractures in our world—places where power and privilege led to the dehumanization and destruction of others—they seemed like events beyond control, things I couldn’t make right, no matter how much I tried.

Even now, watching the news with unhealthy obsession, I feel like my family is living in another reality: one where the decisive action of our governor, the lack of urban density, and communities willing to isolate has saved us from the cataclysmic destruction New York, Detroit, and New Orleans are facing. Combined with my family’s access to health care, our status as members of the white upper middle class, and the continuation of our jobs, this pandemic feels so much less threatening than it must for others without similar privilege.

How then can I mourn for what our family has lost, including the end of my sons’ high school education and the lost opportunity to celebrate important milestones? When so many others are suffering unimaginable pain, is it right to still feel grief about what my kids will not experience? How do we teach kids to hold their grief and disappointment in tension with the understanding that their sacrifices now are saving the lives of many others?

READ: The Best I Can Do: A Lament for Lost Control

That is the question with which many parents who have similar privileges must certainly grapple. While I don’t believe in tragedy as a ready means of teaching us important lessons, it’s clear that my kids—and many other 2020 graduates—are learning now that their consideration of others’ needs matter more than their own desires; and that, in a world broken by inequity, they are called to help the most vulnerable among us, even when that means giving up something they’ve long anticipated.

As a person of faith, I soundly reject the theology that asserts God is using this pandemic or other tragedies to transform us. Nor do I believe that God created this virus to punish us for our sins, sending a pandemic similar to the catastrophic rain that purportedly slayed humanity in Noah’s time. The Creator I worship is not a god of vengeance or spite, so small-minded that immense suffering would be caused just so we humans might fall to the floor and worship him (sic).

Yet this Holy Week and Easter, I was more fully aware of the God I do worship: someone who upended the structures of privilege and power by teaching us that we are called to love and self-sacrifice; and whose death and resurrection is a compelling reminder that goodness and light will always, always, prevail over darkness, whether that darkness be a tyrannical government set on killing a Messiah, or an insidious virus that has slayed multitudes.

Such a redemptive message seems especially prescient this year, when we are compelled to sacrifice ourselves—our livelihoods, our routines, our church celebrations—so that the most vulnerable among us have a better chance of living. This pandemic has laid bare fractures in our society that have been sublimated, starkly showing us how systemic evils like racism, a lack of accessible health care, wealth inequity, and ableism affect all our communities. The Covid-19 pandemic should compel us to wake up, to alleviate the suffering that exists all around us in this worst of times and in the best to come. And so, while dissidents grumble about wanting to jumpstart the economy and get back to all those activities that once constituted “normal life,” we should focus on this idea of sacrificial love, finding hope in the billions of people worldwide who have sacrificed for their neighbors and for strangers, the most holy manifestation possible of Jesus’ redemptive love.

Of course I wish my sons would be able to celebrate graduation next month. I wish they could have attended prom, ditched school with friends on senior skip day, danced at the all-night grad party I helped plan. A million times over, I wish we were still in that alternative world where governmental maleficence hadn’t allowed the virus to unfurl itself through our communities, laying bare the many fault lines in our health care system and our social structures. But this is the world my boys now live in, and they will be launched into adulthood more aware of injustice and of their own significant privilege—a privilege that has buffered them from some of the horrors other young people have faced.

Right after 9/11, I naively believed that bringing more children into the world might provide hope and light to a broken planet. Turns out, my sons—and others in their graduating class—are indeed providing hope, but not in the way I then imagined. As I celebrate the class of 2020, I feel hopeful that the world will not be that same, but that it will be redeemed by these young people, who will recognize exactly how their world is broken, and who are, through their own loving sacrifices right now, beginning to make things right.

This was not the first time I’d been mistaken for a male while running, nor would it be the last. Perhaps for that reason, I’ve followed the athletic career of South African Caster Semenya closely, including last week’s court ruling demanding that Semenya take medication to tamp down her body’s naturally-produced testosterone, or cease competing as a woman altogether. Even though Semenya is wicked fast — she holds the world record in the 800 meters — I’ve felt some affinity for Semenya, knowing only a modicum of the vast shame she must experience as her body and her sex are interrogated over and over again on an international stage.

And it’s this interrogation, by sports governing bodies, by journalists, by her competitors, that reflects our collective inability to let people be exactly who God created them to be. It’s also this plea for “fairness” by those with power and privilege that reveals the vast difference between being fair and being right, between demanding a narrow definition of femaleness, and recognizing how culturally limited our understanding of femininity really is.

When Semenya won gold in the 800 meters at the 2009 World Championships, questions started to emerge about whether she’d come by her victory honestly. That year, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) compelled Semenya to take a number of humiliating sex verification tests to prove she was a woman. In the years that followed, scrutiny about Semenya’s sex continued to follow her, even as she silently racked up more wins, including a 2016 Olympic gold medal. In 2018, the IAAF announced that female athletes who had a hyperandrogenous diagnosis, including Semenya, needed to take medication to lower the naturally-occurring testosterone levels that characterized the disorder. Although Semenya challenged this ruling, it was upheld on May 1, meaning Semenya will not be allowed to compete in women’s races unless and until she alters her physical make-up with medication.

By doing so, the ruling said, the playing field will be more fair to other competitors. But by doing so, Semenya would no longer be the person God had uniquely created her to be.

And let’s face it: athletes who compete at their sports’ highest levels are uniquely created. This is something we often celebrate when we cheer for our favorite sports heroes, expressing awe for their almost super-human capacity to excel. Think of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, whose incredible 6’7’’ wingspan, size 14 feet, and huge hands equipped him to win 23 Olympic gold medals. Or sprinter Usain Bolt, a dominant international force for over a decade, whose 6’5” height meant he took far fewer strides in a race than his competitors. Or Barry Bonds, whose visual acuity made it possible for him to see a 90-mile per hour baseball clearly enough to smack it out of a ball park. (Though, in his case, steroids seemed to help, too.)

Sports federations never asked Phelps to shorten his arms a few inches to make swimming competitions more fair, nor Bolt his legs; Major League Baseball never demanded that Bonds wear sight-altering googles. Such a suggestion seems almost laughable: If an athlete’s superior performance is fueled by natural means, rather than through banned substances, why put limitations on that physical greatness, leveling the playing field so that more competitors have a shot at victory?

Why then make the case that Semenya needs to alter her body to compete?

The answer to this question is written right there, in her body, and in the ways she also embodies difference: as a Black woman, as a lesbian, as a person who does not fit our expectations for what someone who identifies female should look like, nor how they should navigate the world. Her performance on such a public stage challenges our assumptions about what it means to be a strong, fast female athlete, and rather than celebrate her amazing uniqueness, she has been asked to change, to align more closely with what we’ve decided — by cultural fiat alone — is acceptable for how women should act, and think, and look, and even how they should run.

Put more bluntly, those with power and privilege are once again demanding that a Black woman modify her body for the comfort of others — in this case not only Semenya’s competitors, decrying “unfair” races (see here for an example), but also anyone who finds it justifiable to comment on Semenya’s appearance and skill as a runner. The IAAF ruling fundamentally codifies the belief that Black women’s bodies can be too much, just as they are, and that — as throughout history — Black women need to accommodate those around them, diminish who they are, if they are to be acceptable, and thus accepted, in the spaces they enter. In Semenya’s case, this diminishment is not just symbolic, but literal as well.

It might seem like international sports competitions have little relevance for justice-minded Christians, and we may believe there is not much we can do to support an athletic superstar like Semenya. But her case should serve to remind us of the many ways those who are privileged continue to establish expectations for others, demanding that they conform rather than acknowledging that there is beauty in difference.

But justice does not look like leveling a playing field — in the name of fairness — by making some people conform. Justice requires that we give people the freedom to be exactly who God created them to be. Justice means advocating for those who lack the freedom to flourish, not only in international athletics, but also in our churches, our workplaces, our communities.

Justice is proclaiming that our notions of masculinity and femininity are themselves problematic, a social construct that has little to do with what people look like, or how they run through the world.

Back in 2009, when Semenya won her first World Championship, she said that interrogations about her sex did not bother her: “I see it all as a joke, it doesn’t upset me. God made me the way I am and I accept myself.” After a decade of scrutiny, I hope she feels the same way, though I also know how challenging expectations can be, how they can wear you down, make you feel unworthy.

Given the attention this most recent judgment has garnered, and the support from countless fans, I also hope Semenya will continue to resist the IAAF demands that she alter who she fundamentally is, or run in men’s competitions, even though she is a woman: A woman who God formed to run fast and strong. A woman who is fearfully, wonderfully made in God’s own remarkable image. A woman who deserves to be celebrated, just as she is.

This week, I was called a baby killer again, this time on social media, when a stranger accused me of having no soul and murdering babies. I had suggested that abortion discussions are rarely nuanced, including the current outrage directed at a failed Virginia law regarding abortion later in pregnancy. Asserting that women in a situation covered by the law are most often devastated by the loss of a much wanted child, and questioning what decision I might make, turned me immediately into a proponent of infanticide.

Apparently, there is no room for nuance in a debate pitting presumed baby killers against woman haters. And also, no room to understand the humanity of women involved in heart-breaking choices about their own lives — and the lives of their children (born and unborn) as well. Still, when I read Kassi Underwood’s 2017 memoir, May Cause Love: An Unexpected Journey of Enlightenment After Abortion, I felt sure discussions about abortion might begin to shift, from unproductive arguments based on black-and-white ideology to something far more complex.

In May Cause Love, Underwood narrates her unfolding spiritual journey following an abortion at age 19. The memoir unflinchingly chronicles Underwood’s lonely attempts to discern what she should do with her pregnancy; the painful abortion itself, also lonely; and the months and years that stretched out after the procedure, when isolation, shame, and sadness became Underwood’s constant companions.

Beautifully written, May Cause Love offers no dogmatic statements about what people should believe about abortion, but instead uses Underwood’s experience to explore questions about where God stands in the midst of pain — and how women’s stories about abortion have been co-opted for political purposes, creating a cycle of shame and misunderstanding and despair that does little to address why women have abortions. Underwood’s memoir is a sacred and grace-filled tale of how loneliness can be redeemed by loving communities who support women, no matter the choices they make.

Turns out, having a nuanced narrative about abortion can be problematic, in and of itself. Narratives that don’t meet our baby killer or woman hater polarity are unwelcomed by a journalism industry too aware that division and moral outrage sells.

In spring 2017, Underwood’s memoir was published by HarperOne, a subsidiary of Harper Collins, one of the top publishing houses in the U.S., suggesting that complicated spiritual memoirs about abortion might be ready to go mainstream. Underwood’s narrative approach seemed unapologetically undogmatic, her story personal and compelling and a reminder that real-life women, experiencing life-ending abortions, can grapple with complicated feelings about their abortions — feelings that cannot easily fit within the usual pro-choice or pro-life paradigm our public discourse offers us.

In the months following the publication of May Cause Love, a handful of journalists pitched reviews of the memoir to Christian publications and to feminist ones. Although the book was reviewed in a few online publications, these pitches were predominantly ignored, the nuances of the memoir seeming unwelcomed by conservative and progressive places alike. Sometimes, journalists working on reviews for Underwood’s memoir were ghosted in the editorial process, as if the very topic Underwood was covering — women’s complex experiences with abortion — was taboo, not ever to be mentioned in any context, professional or otherwise.

Such a response essentially proved the very point Underwood was hoping to make in telling her story: that unless women’s encounters with abortion fit the black-and-white narratives we’ve already heard countless times; we don’t want to hear them. An underlying theme in Underwood’s story is that when women are offered the chance to tell their stories, they are offered a chance to heal; and so until women can tell their stories, no progress will be made in the abortion debate. People will remain entrenched, their beliefs unchanged, and fundamentally, both women and children will continue to suffer.

READ: Why Abortion Should Not Be Politically Decisive for Christians

“The fight right now is extremely superficial and everybody’s trying to stay ‘on message’ and ‘on brand,’ which means nobody is saying anything new,” Underwood told me recently. “We’re trying to solve a mind-bogglingly complex issue with slogans and messaging, and it hasn’t worked after decades of trying. The impact is, millions of people who’ve had abortions feel isolated and misunderstood.”

“One in four women will have an abortion in her lifetime,” Underwood said. “We haven’t begun to untangle the web. The experience of abortion is wrapped up in layer upon layer of patriarchy, including patriarchy masquerading as feminism.”

Underwood had hoped May Cause Love could change the conversation. When the book was released, just months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, it was clear readers weren’t looking for nuance, but were seeking places to confirm their rage in a deeply polarized cultural climate. According to Underwood, “My book didn’t make enough noise, in part because I wasn’t taking a side in the debate. I was talking about attaining peace of mind and community in a time when moral outrage was on trend.”

Indeed, recent public discourse surrounding abortion suggests there has been an intensification of moral outrage, rather than any attempt to find common ground. January’s March for Life in Washington D.C., the remarks there by President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and the conflict between adolescents following the march and an Indigenous elder all fueled online discussions about what it truly means to affirm the sanctity of all life. In the same week, the signing of a Reproductive Health Act in New York state enraged some right-to-life advocates, who believed the law would encourage mothers to abort their children in the late stages of pregnancy.

These events have done little to open space for nuance and authentic conversation about abortion. Instead, adversaries on all sides of the debate fail to listen to those at the center of this controversy: women who have had abortions.

READ: Evangelical Women & Men Call for A Pause on Culture War

Even articles purporting to change the dynamics of the issue, suggesting a way forward, offer little by way of women’s lived experiences. See, for example, this recent article in the New York Times, in which a man suggests his pro-life identity matters in a “throwaway culture” where a pregnancy can be ended without a second thought, as if babies are just another disposable item. Yet the writer does not offer any woman’s perspective on what her abortion actually entailed, nor does it acknowledge the complicated decision-making process women report going through when faced with having an abortion.

Many of those who support reproductive rights have also promoted women’s abortion experiences as an unalloyed choice that has few emotional or medical drawbacks, and so have little space for a memoir like Underwood’s, which acknowledges the pain, physical and otherwise, that accompanied the choice she made. Amelia Bonow’s 2015 campaign #ShoutYourAbortion called on women to tell their stories about abortion as a way to normalize it, and the resulting website features women talking about abortion in wholly empowering terms. This winter, writer Lindy West and Emily Nokes collected these and other stories in the book Shout Your Abortion, with a mission of reducing the stigma that can come with abortion.  “Abortion is common,” West wrote in 2016. “Abortion is happening . . . Abortion is a thing you can say out loud.”

In some ways, Bonow and West are advocating an approach to storytelling that seemingly makes space for women’s varied experience about abortion. Underwood tells me that she would have been “over the moon” if Shout Your Abortion had been published in the aftermath of her abortion. “It’s high vibe, relevant, and feminist,” Underwood said, “but at the same time, I think I would have felt an eerie sense of aloneness alongside of my joy, because my story isn’t quite as clear and unmitigated as Lindy and Amelias’. And that was a big part of my feeling of isolation. I could talk about my abortion, but I couldn’t talk about the confusing mixture of emotions and war inside of me.”

May Cause Love addresses these tensions well and is an astounding memoir, because Underwood provides a voice rarely if ever heard in abortion discussions. As Underwood’s publishing journey itself reveals, though, such voices are unwelcomed by mainstream and Christian audiences alike, who are looking for their biases to be confirmed, rather than challenged.

And, of course, some anti-abortion activists might argue that women’s stories mean little when babies’ lives are at stake. But attempts to shame women into different choices — by yelling at them in front of abortion clinics, threatening or enacting violence, even posting graphic pictures on social media — fail to offer any way forward in this discussion, because those acts dehumanize and silence women, making them into public enemies worthy of scorn, baby killers rather than people often faced with untenable life choices.

READ: Not Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, but ‘Pro-Voice’

In May Cause Love, Underwood highlights a compassion-based organization called Exhale, which labels itself as “pro-voice,” by providing space and resources for women and men with abortion experiences to simply tell their stories, to be heard, and to process what has happened without shame or judgment.

Exhale believes that when the stigma of abortion is removed, allowing people to converse with friends and family about their experiences with abortion, they will feel less isolated as they wrestle with the decisions they must face, and they will also find a caring community who will love them, no matter what. This kind of support, Exhale believes, could change the shape of public discourse about abortion altogether.

Until women are free to talk about the choices they have to make, Underwood explains, we will not resolve the critical impasse that says people fall into one of two categories: either baby killers or woman haters.

“Elevate the voices of people who have abortions,” Underwood says, a point that resounds clearly in her memoir and in the work she’s done to make space for others to tell their stories, too. But those complex, nuanced narratives won’t be told so long as media companies refuse to promote them — and so long as consumers, activists, all of us who care about this issue, refuse to hear.