“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . ” – Jesus Christ

Never mind Jesus’ words. White American Christians know it’s just fine to hate, as long as you hate the right people.

Hate has brought more people to white American Christian churches in America than love has.

Hate spawned whole new white denominations: the Southern Baptist Church, formed to keep Black people enslaved.

More recently, the North American Lutheran Church, formed in 2010 to prevent LGBTQ people from being pastors or being married in the church.

Christians have fundraised on hatred, explicitly or implicitly, suggesting that we could “love and welcome all,” but Jesus, well, he definitely was a white American guy who liked flags and guns.

Now, eight more people are dead in Georgia.

The suspect, a 21-year-old White man named Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock, Ga., said the shootings weren’t racially motivated, even though six of his victims were Asian-American women, and white conservatives have spent the last year blaming AAPI people for the COVID-19 virus, calling it KungFlu or the China Virus, and leading to a documented rise in incidents of violence against Asian Americans, according to NPR.

Long said he suffered from sexual addiction, and according to the Cherokee (Ga.) Sheriff’s Office, he “blames the massage parlors for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex.”

At age 21, living in an unincorporated section of a Georgia County not far from one of America’s hubs of thriving Black culture, Atlanta, in a state where Democrats won two Senate runoffs in January, tilting the balance of power in the U.S. Senate away from Republicans, Long straddles the lines of two Americas. His America: male, conservative, white, Christian, and Southern — is losing.

The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote an extensive article about Long’s ties to the Southern Baptist Church, specifically an ultra traditionalist and conservative offshoot called Founders Ministries, which lists the church where Long was baptized as one of its member congregations. Pulliam Bailey interviewed Long’s former youth minister, Brett Cottrell, who said Long’s father was “considered an important lay leader in the church,” and the family attended morning and evening activities on Sundays, as well as meetings on Wednesday evenings and mission trips.

Were these the tools of Long’s radicalization? Building blocks and indoctrination of the hatred that would lead him to go on a killing spree?

Once we would have thought that these past church activities only added to the shock. How could it be that this good, “church boy,” would turn into a killer? We would call him a “lone wolf.” We’d wonder about mental illness, about family trouble. We’d tell Long’s story as an individual, rather than explore his place in a pantheon of angry, white, male, conservative, Christian mass shooters.

Maybe it’s something about the “culture.” A parenting issue. We don’t say that when the accused is White.

But the sheriff’s office said it wasn’t a hate crime. Cottrell said Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., had several non-white members. The pastors never preached about racism.

They didn’t have to. A message got through loud and clear that preached the supremacy of whiteness: who was good and worthy of forgiveness, a place in God’s Kingdom. Always KINGdom. Because God is a powerful white American man. Rich, too.

The Washington Post captured a video of the sermon preached by the Rev. Jerry Dockery at Crabapple Baptist this past Sunday. Dockery told his congregation the apocalypse was near. He suggested America had “45 presidents in our brief history.”

READ: Asian American Christian Collaborative Statement on the Atlanta Massacre & Ongoing Anti-Asian Hate

Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States, but many conservatives, including conservative White Evangelicals, deny that Biden was legitimately elected, a line of messaging promoted by former President Donald Trump.

The sermon talked about Christ waging war. About a dragon deceiver thrown into eternal torment.

The Revised Common Lectionary, a set of Bible readings used by the Roman Catholic Church and most American mainline denominations, had an assigned Gospel reading this past Sunday that included this line from Jesus, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him,” – John 3:17.

But that type of Jesus: inclusive, universal, loving, forgiving; was nowhere to be found at Crabapple First Baptist.

And so Long learned to hate.

He learned to hate the non-white Americans whom his denomination originally decreed should be kept in chains.

He learned to hate women, whom Southern Baptist doctrine deemed were under the “headship” of their husbands, and unfit to preach or lead men in Bible studies, or serve on leadership boards at church.

He learned to hate himself, when for whatever reason, his relationships didn’t conform to the pattern his church had taught him they should: a domineering man and a willing woman. He sought out that sexual satisfaction and dominance, not intimacy, at the hands of vulnerable Asian women, in massage parlors across Atlanta.

His brain was hopped up on hatred. His church told him he was dirty, impure. His church told him they were destroying the America his family of White men had built and dominated for generations. He chafed under COVID restrictions. He sought comfort in his faith. His faith told him Jesus was calling him to wage war, to take up weapons, to force women and non-white Americans to submit to him, or pay the price.

And of course he knew how to obtain and fire a gun. Because guns, more than love or forgiveness, are sacrosanct among too many White American Christians. We are like those in the crowd who shouted: Crucify Him! We prefer killing to life itself, even though we are approaching our High Holy Day, when we supposedly claim that Jesus’ greatest victory was the triumph of life over death.

Instead we glory in killing machines and slaughter ourselves in the process.

Where is that triumph today in America? O Death thy sting … it hurts. We are gathered at the tomb but we are denying our own death, so that we cannot be resurrected.

For white Christians, our so-called faith rings hollow.

Perhaps Long will not be prosecuted under a hate crime statute. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials say those cases are notoriously difficult to prove.

But I ask this of all those who claim the name of a Savior who commanded us to love: how much hate does it take to make a hate crime?

In Georgia. In America. We have blood on our hands.

This piece first appeared at ChurchAnew.org. 

The ending words of this poem, “The Hollow Men,” from T.S. Eliot, drifted into my consciousness early Sunday morning as I prepared to go to church and livestream a service from an empty sanctuary.

The poem records an empty synaptic space, a space where we’re paralyzed between stimulus and response, uncertain of how to react in a world-changing moment.

I’ve been reading about the lack of shared grief, of empathy, at a time when the novel coronavirus has taken nearly 100,000 American lives. You want to scream but nothing comes out. You drink your coffee, then your wine. You stare into the screen.

In case death had not come near enough—in case evil had not made its dark power visible enough—last week, about 20 blocks from my house, a black man named George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck until he collapsed. Millions watch him die via viral video.

Ferguson seems eons ago now, but it was only six years ago that Michael Brown was killed by Darren Wilson in a suburb of St. Louis, igniting the Black Lives Matter movement and sparking a national conversation about police violence. Sadly, the lives we lost always seemed to move to the back burner in a political battle about which America would prevail: black or white, wrapped in a flag or a t-shirt screaming: RESIST.

But is saving lives Democratic or Republican?

Then came the 2016 Presidential Election, and a year later, the kneeling protest of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick wanted to protest police violence, and he did it in a way that couldn’t be ignored, on national television watched by millions of Americans during the national anthem prior to NFL games. But the news cycle is so frenzied, and American propensity so high to distrust traditional news media and instead fall victim to conspiracy theories spouted by alternative websites and videos, that instead we made it about honoring the military.

Kaepernick’s protest had nothing to do with the military, nothing to do with being proud to be an American—because as a black man, his America was different than mine. His America was necessarily always flawed, because his America had enslaved his ancestors, lynched them, told them they couldn’t live in their neighborhood.

His America was an aspiration, a dream never fully realized, nascent in the words of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Sojourner Truth, or Malcolm X, or James Baldwin, or Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This America was strong enough to withstand the truth: that its justice had always been weakened by privilege and power. That skin color and ethnicity and religion and gender had always complicated so-called equal rights. That justice was never “for all,” and our nation was never “indivisible” but instead divided, always, imperfectly, with unequal rights.

American injustice has always been starkest for those with brown and black skin, the descendants of those who were brought here against their will and forced to wear shackles. In Northern states like mine, we’ve papered over our racism by preaching a social gospel, by pandering and tokenism, and by suggesting that economic justice is racial justice: by assuming every person with brown or black skin is impoverished and in need of our help, so that we can voice support for the African American Community and for equal rights, and scorn the Klan in the South, but refuse to integrate our schools or our neighborhoods. I live in the whitest and wealthiest corner of Minneapolis. It’s no accident, shrouded as we are in liberalism and progressive politics.

Does it matter what I say or what I think: 20 blocks away? Ensconced in my fenced backyard?

READ: Four Thoughts for White Christians

Does it matter that Justine Damond, a white woman, was killed here three summers ago by the police, this time by an officer who happened to have brown skin? Or that he alone was convicted?

Today I’m embarrassed, selfish in my reaction. Why my city? Why couldn’t that officer just move his knee? Why did he have to watch him die? Why?

As if removing his knee just seconds earlier, preventing a national outcry, would change anything. George Floyd was a man not a martyr, but perhaps he becomes one, an unassailable statistic for the cause of the sanctity of life. In all our arguing, our policies, our politics, it has come to this: a simple question about the preservation of life and the dehumanization of our fellow Americans.

What is a life worth?

For Americans of faith, particularly those of Christian faith, the answer to this question should be obvious. God prioritizes individual life above all else, resurrecting the life of a convicted criminal who was sentenced to death on a Cross. America was supposed to be a triumph of the rights of the individual. Our military prides itself on searching for any one soldier who is lost, because each individual life lost matters.

COVID and George Floyd, and Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Philando Castile and too many beyond them, shake our faith in the answer to this question. At the heart of our nation’s proud economy is a heartbreaking calculus. Black and brown lives are simply worth less than white ones. Poor lives are worse less than rich ones. Female lives are worth less than male ones, especially if that female is a mother.

I don’t want to look these truths in the eye. I’d rather just silently scream and drink my wine and wish that Officer Chauvin would have moved, before it was too late. But I guess white Americans, especially those of us in the North, are just waking up to the fact that it’s already too late. It’s been too late. It’s been too long.

The myth of our America is fading from view. This realization is sweeping across the country, and instead of trying to stop and go back—to a world that served our fellow Americans unfairly and unjustly and killed them and imprisoned them—it is time to go forward. To let go of the American myth that is suffocating and killing us, from COVID or depression or heart disease or suicide or police violence or overdose—and embrace the truth of an imperfect America that can only be rebuilt on the ashes, not the relics, of the past.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Today, may our whimper give way to action and compassion, for a new world and a new America.

Our furnace isn’t working — again — and now that Christmas has passed, it seems as though winter’s icy glare is settling in deeper, deadening life and slowing the rhythms of the world.

Of course we all could use a slowdown these days, a moment to hold our collective breath and perhaps consider thinking, or even praying, for a moment before we decide to hate and maim and kill each other again, or ourselves, with ever punishing work and January austerity diets.

I watched with you and with the world, as over the past week a man was killed in Iran by a weapon sent from America.

Did Qassem Soleimani deserve to die?

Probably.

Through his work with Iran’s Quds Force, an elite division of the Revolutionary Guard, and his strategizing with Iranian supported militias throughout the Middle East, Soleimani plotted violence, murder, and death.

READ: Red Letter Christians Lament the Escalating Violence with Iran

He was complicit in an Iranian regime that denies the rights of women and minorities, forcing its people to bear the weight of crushing economic sanctions, a brilliant and creative populace stifled under polluted air and rising temperatures, due to climate change and government apathy for its people.

As I get older, though, I become more convinced that maybe we all deserve to die.

We betray and oppress each other in myriad ways. The consequences are simply easier to bear when our actions cause the slow, unpublished deaths of people across the world, not by missile strikes but by Asia bearing the weight of America’s plastic trash, or black Americans facing the weight of a racist criminal justice system, or Americans living in poverty preyed upon by prescription drug manufacturers and opiate prescribers and sellers.

If we want to end evil by killing the evil ones, where do we start and where does it end? In the mirror?

My son currently attends first grade in the Minneapolis Public School District, one of the most racially unequal school districts in the country. White students tend to do well in the Minneapolis Public Schools, and white families, clustered in the South and Southwest corners of the city generally, tend to have lots of options for quality schools. Students of color, in contrast, have fewer options and often attend schools marked by inexperienced teachers, or unsafe routes to school around centers of gang violence. Test scores show the results of drastically different experiences for students.

As the daughter, daughter-in-law, and sister of public school teachers (my mom and brother work/worked primarily in schools that are in high-poverty areas and majority students of color), I’m a huge advocate for teachers and for public schools. I care a lot about racial justice.

But I have to look in the mirror, too. We chose our house in Minneapolis, because its community schools are the best in the district. They’re also overwhelmingly white. I don’t want to lose access to the schools we sacrificed for so that my son might attend.

What can we do?

The result of so much violence and selfishness in our world I find is often an overwhelming sense of anxiety followed by nihilism and/or depression. What can I do about a climate that’s warming so much as to melt polar ice and lead to devastating, deadly wildfires across Australia and California?

READ: Burning Down the House

What can I do about long-entrenched enmity between countries and governments, who own weapons of mass destruction employed at the push of a button? What can I do about economic inequality, about rural farmers and manufacturing workers being pushed out of the modern economy? What can I do about a broken health care system that abandons families struggling with addiction and mental health?

Many times it’s easier to diagnose the problems than to suggest a treatment plan.

Right now I can’t even get my furnace to work properly, I need to lose some weight, and I dropped my youngest off late at preschool this morning.

(You can add your own list of inefficiencies and imperfections here.)

When you add the weight of the world to the weight of your life, it feels unbearable. I hear a voice shouting in the distance: “Retreat! Retreat!”

And many of us have. We’ve retreated to our safe corners of the world and of the Internet, siloing ourselves off from voices that might challenge or disagree.

People finding themselves lost without a compass find it hard to be generous to others. When you shame them for their decisions made in a vacuum, the only result is more battening down of the hatches, more retreat, more closed doors.

In times like these, we must turn to those experienced in oppression and seeking justice in a world pitted against them. Listen to the voices of native people. Listen to the voices of African-American Christians, the heirs to Civil Rights movement and abolitionists. Listen to the voices of women, who have always picked up the pieces after war and death. Listen, too, to one another’s voices.

These conversations are painful. Peoples’ pain and desperation is on display, in a cold winter that seems interminable, as desperate migrants from around the world risk life and limb for a better life for their children, boarding risky inflatable rafts to sail to freedom, or at least to not-death.

We cannot comprehend one another’s lives or struggles, or diminish others’ struggles in the face of our own.

We cannot calculate the value of human life on a spreadsheet, whether that life is Iranian or American, young or old, black or white, man or woman.

The victims of violence are everywhere. The haunted eyes of Rohingya children, abandoned by a one-time advocate for peace in Myanmar. Schoolchildren in America with their hands over their heads, practicing active shooter drills. Churchgoers loading their guns before walking into the sanctuary. You and I, seeing one another on the street, and avoiding eye contact.

READ: ‘Good Guys’ Carrying Guns & a Savior Who Carried a Cross

I guess my prescription for all of us today, victims of a violent world, is to look up again into the eyes of another and see yourself in them, realizing that our freedom and salvation is bound up together.

I’m drawn again to these words from Jesus in Matthew 11: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

This modified article originally appeared at Angela Denker’s blog.

I brought with me my notepad and laptop bag, still wearing the dress I donned that morning in Raleigh, a night after a book presentation to a group of around 50 North Carolina Lutherans and people of faith. Two days in a row wearing a dress (and Spanx, I have to admit) was a lot for this self-professed casual dresser, so much so that the second day I put a red t-shirt on over my dress just to feel more comfortable.

Comfort can feel elusive in this age of political chaos, of rush-rush-rush, of shrinking airline seats and ever more restrictive guidelines for buying a home and paying off debt and achieving, in whatever sense it remains, the American Dream.

Here was mine, in that room in rural eastern North Carolina, after having preached a 5-minute all-call sermon surrounded by preachers and leaders who’d inspired me and Christians all over America and the world for years. My first book trip to the South, via airplane. Surreal to believe I was here among them, sharing my research, hoping it made some sort of dent in a world hungry for hope.

They didn’t applaud at the end of my sermon like they’d applauded for the more famous, angrier men who shouted for impeachment and anger and retribution against evangelicals who’d sold their souls for political power.

I didn’t mind. I’d ended, after all, with a prayer — and applauding after a prayer maybe seemed a bit too close to the triumphalist American Christians who challenged the humble and powerfully quiet gospel of a risen Savior who died to show how strong God is.

Preachers All-Call at the Red Letter Revival in Goldsboro, N.C.

I returned in the evening to the Goldsboro Revival in this little military town about an hour east of Raleigh, N.C. Despite my fatigue and road-weariness, I sat in the back pew to hear the words of a man I’d often considered a modern-day prophet, a man whose authenticity and commitment to Bible-centered justice never failed to inspire me, even in the moments when it scared me because of the commitment Jesus asks of those who are sent and called.

Goldsboro is the hometown of Rev. William Barber II, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church just down the road from the assembly, where we’d held our “preach-a-thon,” earlier that day. I’d seen Barber speak to crowds of thousands on TV, and read his articles on the internet. Once he tweeted an excerpt from my book Red State Christians, and for hours my phone blew up with retweets and mentions.

The man’s witness always packs a punch.

Still, here, in that back wooden pew at the Goldsboro Assembly, I was struck by the humility of it all. The crowd was decent, spread across pews in the massive worship space. The praise and worship was inspired, reviving the flagging faith of weary Christians who’d traveled here from across North Carolina and, in some cases, America.

Despite Barber’s and others’ massive followings, however, it wasn’t a packed house. As he spoke, Barber kept mentioning the “Greenleaf” people in the crowd, and I was reminded that so many of us so-called Christian leaders can be so many things, but at heart we are all sometimes vulnerable parish pastors, caring most about those from our own community, those who know us best.

Near the end of his talk, leaning hungrily toward the crowd, Barber got close to the microphone.

He wanted to talk, he said, about Frederick Douglass, who is “doing great things lately.” (That’s a joke.)

No, Barber wanted to tell a story about the great African-American 19th century leader, a man who rose as a Black man in a time of slavery to be a renowned American intellectual and cultural leader.

Frederick Douglass, Barber said, was tired. Tiiiiiirrrrrreeeeedddddd.

Can you recognize the feeling?

Frederick Douglass was tired.

Not the kind of tired you get after a too-short night’s sleep. Not the kind of tired you get after a sweat-inducing workout in heat and humidity.

Not even the kind of tired you get after staying up all night comforting a crying newborn baby.

No, Frederick Douglass was spiritually tired, a kind of fatigue that overwhelms your body, mind, soul, and spirit. He’d heard about the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, a decision that declared himself, a Black man, as subhuman — as property.

Douglass realized that no matter what he’d accomplished, racism would always relegate him to a lower status in America. He’d never be a full American in the eyes of the government.

Douglass, Barber said, read the political news of the day and contemplated moving to England, where, he thought, he might be treated better and might finally be able to rest. Do you know that feeling? Have you thought of Canada wistfully?

Wracked by worry and frustration and sadness and this spiritual tiredness, Douglass, Barber said, was about to retire for the night when someone told him there was somebody at his door.

Sojourner Truth* was at the door. The indomitable abolitionist and slave-freer and Underground Railroad captain, a rescuer and warrior and savior in the mold of so many strong Black women who have held up America and the best of her ideals in the midst of circumstances that felled many strong white and Black men.

Douglass let her in, and Sojourner Truth could see immediately the weariness and spiritual tiredness, even deadness, apparent in her friend.

THREE WORDS!

Barber shouted suddenly, wiping the sweat from his face in his auditorium in his hometown where he worried that the revival hadn’t been what they’d wanted it to be, where he shared his own angst over church members who had left, where friends had pleaded with him to “just not preach justice so much.”

If you could just not preach about ______ so much, everything would be better.

It’ll happen to you, Barber told us. “Because it happened to me.”

As he told the story of Douglass, Douglass’ tiredness became Barber’s tiredness, this man of tireless faith and inarguable commitment was revealed in all his own sensitive and vulnerable humanity, the nights spent up worrying about the gospel, the times he wished he’d never read the Red Letters of Jesus — their challenge insurmountable, their grace at times inaccessible in a world of quid pro quo.

THREE WORDS!

Barber roared, and we were standing there with American heroes Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, Truth holding up Douglass with her own tired arms.

She asked him one question, Barber said.

“Is God dead?”

Because if God is dead, maybe we can stop.

An intoxicating but terrible proposition.

“IS GOD DEAD?”

In worries about impeachment and fake news and lack of trust and government corruption and families torn apart by politics and Christian leaders who protect guns more than the poor, and hopelessness rising in the waters of the Arctic and flowing out the taps of Newark, spreading an invisible poison across the land where people tried to move away from each other, isolated, staying safe in our designated racial and cultural and political zones.

Barber, in his own tiredness and vulnerability — in his hometown that loved yet challenged him — summoned up the strength of a long-dead Frederick Douglass, a strength buoyed by his spiritual sister Sojourner Truth, who lifted him from depths.

“God is ALIVE!”

In his roar, in a sanctuary with imperfect acoustics and a loud fan running to block out the 95-degree North Carolina October heat, I heard the shouts of the women at the tomb 2,000 years ago. They’d been up all night, and they were tired. Tiiiiirrrrreeeeddddddd. Bone tired.

Tired like you, and tired like me.

Still, they came anyway to the tomb.

The angel met them. Held them up. So that they could hold each other and God up as they spread the message that would gird martyrs and redeem civilizations and force uncomfortable preachers and uncomfortably allied Christians out into the streets to speak for justice and abolition and Civil Rights and icebergs and migrants and poor people.

God is alive.

Mary whispered it to the other Mary, and together they went and told the rest. No, they couldn’t stop — even though often they wanted to — when lives were threatened and mortgages came due and jobs were taken away and invitations were rescinded.

They must press on.

GOD IS ALIVE!

These words, repeated and told again and again in story and later in song, reverberated all the way back to my wooden pew in the back of the church, where I sat stunned and tired.

Barber staggered off the stage. The gospel music lifted.

Moments later, I staggered to my rental car. I dragged my bags to the front desk at the local hotel, where Sojourner Truth called me by name and said she had an apple for me. Sustenance in the storm. It was enough. I would keep going, because they didn’t stop either. The tired ended when we were tired together, when witnesses to the holy surrounded me in my despair and fatigue.

GOD IS ALIVE!

I flew home the next afternoon, my head pounding with a migraine that hadn’t left since the night before. Still I said it to others, in words and in stories, so that in witnessing to it they’d say it back to me and I’d remember. God is alive.

No tired is stronger than that.

*This article has been updated to attribute Frederick Douglass’ interaction with Sojourner Truth, not Harriet Tubman, whom Rev. Barber quoted during the revival. 

It gets a little exhausting detailing the moral downfalls and power-hungry greed of so many prominent male evangelical leaders, and their allegiance to a man that has little to do with the gospel and much to do with money and power. I’m honestly worn out by the theme that plays out no matter what the story is (and usually they rely on a number of anonymous sources, like this one does). Liberals rejoice that another evangelical Trump-supporting leader is proven to be more immoral than advertised, and conservatives yawn: another story from a liberal news outlet written by a liberal author with no named sources.

But hidden within this story is a new truth that I think bears examining. A subplot of the article about Falwell, Jr., is the open disdain the unnamed high-ranking Liberty officials have for Falwell’s wife, Becki.

A little like Serena Joy of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Becki is portrayed as the mastermind and manipulator of power-hungry but dumb Falwell, Jr. It’s a literary trope often employed in American Christian conservative politics and churches — the ironic idea that behind a prominent male evangelical leader is a supposedly subservient wife who’s actually calling all the shots, even when those shots end up diminishing women’s rights and roles in general.

Quoting from the Politico article, a Liberty university official says, “You know, there’s a head of every family, but what turns the head? The neck. She’s the neck that turns the head wherever she wants it.”

This seemingly isolated comment is actually steeped in conservative Christian theology and culture. Many conservative Christians believe in an interpretation of 1 Corinthians 11, a long Pauline discourse that reads, in verse 3: “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of the wife, and God is the head of Christ.”

Complementarian conservative Christians use this verse to understand gender roles in a hierarchical sense, that men are above women as Christ is above men and God is above Christ. They use this gender-based hierarchy to justify denying women the opportunity to preach or teach men in their churches, and they lift up complementarian marriages, where men are supposed to be leaders of the family and have the last say on any family decisions.

Having studied this section of 1 Corinthians in its original Greek during my seminary training and hereafter, I find the complementarian interpretation to be overly simplistic and lacking in context. The rest of this section of the Bible goes on to list Paul’s rules for the Corinthian church about head coverings. Other writings from the time suggest that Paul was seeking to single out an overly loud and disruptive group of women in the Church at Corinth, whose ecstatic outpourings during community gatherings was distracting and disrupting the worship service.

Headship language — and the Greek understanding of head — is also more complex than a simple hierarchical chart. To be the head as Christ is the head is not to rule over, but to manage and lead thoughtfully. The Greeks actually believed that most decision-making power and leadership was based in the gut, not the head. Thus you love the Lord your God, Jesus says, with all your heart, soul, and mind. The soul, for Greeks and likely for the Apostle Paul, was based in the gut — not the head.

But that biblical interpretation and Greek exegesis has not been embraced in the wider American conservative Christian community, and certainly not at Liberty. Thus, Falwell, Jr., is still seen as the head in his marriage, which means he has ultimate power and control.

I have to wonder how that gender-based discrimination and tightly controlled gender role education has impacted Falwell, Jr., his wife Becki, and American conservative Christianity in general. This has much more to do with American Christians than it has to do with Trump, who probably never heard of complementarianism before ascending to the presidency, and perhaps not since.

For a Liberty University official to suggest that Becki is the “neck that turns the head,” reveals a suspicion among American conservative Christians of women’s place in leadership. A powerful woman can only exercise her power secretly in this culture, by attempting to “manipulate” her husband and “turn his head.”

This kind of reasoning is toxic for both men and women. For men, it absolves male Christian leaders who’ve been seduced by power and money away from the gospel of any responsibility for their apostasy. It suggests that Falwell, Jr., a man of great wealth and power, is simply a puppet of his wife’s desire for power and control.

For women, complementarian reasoning reinforces the idea that we must exist in a tightly controlled universe where our options for exercising leadership and power are few. For too long, conservative Christian women with leadership potential have been cast as overly aggressive wives, their only option for control or power being to enrich the riches of their family through enacting the greedy plans of their husbands. Other conservative Christian women with leadership potential become overly domineering homeschool moms or scheming women’s Bible study leaders.

Too often, conservative women like Becki Falwell, who achieve the ends of wealth and power for their family, end up hurting conservative women in general. What if a young Becki Falwell would have been encouraged instead to take her own leadership role in administration at Liberty? Could she have led the campus shrewdly and lifted up other female leaders, rather than exercising her power covertly through a husband who might amass family wealth but otherwise denigrate women and even humiliate Becki through marital infidelity?

The Jesus of the Bible suggests that women are much more than the neck. Women are the messengers and prophets of the resurrection, the first to declare that Jesus is risen. Women are the deacons who support and lead the early church. In the Hebrew Bible, women like Queen Esther save God’s people.

For conservative women to move out of the shadows and work with their conservative Christian husbands, the corrosive effects of complementarian theology must be dismissed and overcome in the churches and universities where men like Falwell, Jr., have perverted the gospel in favor of power, money, and control.

Perhaps that’s the most important lesson that so many are missing in the recent Politico article. But to see it, we have to move past the goal of humiliating Trump to understanding the psychology of his voters, especially conservative Christians.

I am the granddaughter of a German American Lutheran pastor who ministered on the Kansas-Missouri state line in the midst of the civil rights movement. On the other side of my family, I am the granddaughter of a German American Catholic deeply faithful woman who voted and advocated against abortion. I am the daughter-in-law of a Vietnam veteran and Lutheran school graduate from rural Missouri who put a Trump sign in his lawn and a MAGA hat in his garage. I am the niece of an aunt who sparred with her father, my grandfather, over the possibility of a Christian supporting Trump, an aunt who felt ostracized by her father because of her political and religious beliefs. I am the wife of a man who is the only one among his high school friends who voted for Hillary and who was mocked for doing so. I am the sister-in- law of an African American woman who protested with Black Lives Matter in Chicago. I am the sister-in-law of a half-Hispanic woman who lives in deep-red rural America and is conservative herself.

My family makes a patchwork of red and blue, Evangelical and mainline, urban, suburban, and rural. I resist the idea that we must continually make one another the other. In our own families, to do so means devastating separation and estrangement. It’s not worth it. It never is. Red State Christians are not the “other” any more than my own family members are not the “other.” Red State Christians are my family. They’re your family. They’re you. For me, this book is not about some other America that I had to excavate and uncover, like an archaeologist. Rather, for me, this book is about America itself and ultimately about uncovering myself, my family, and my faith.

When I look back at my travels across America, from Dallas megachurches to Appalachian small towns, I realize that I was overwhelmingly welcomed and accepted. Not by everyone. A conservative Catholic college in New Hampshire forbade me from visiting, and Rick Warren’s Orange County megachurch, Saddleback, told me explicitly not to conduct interviews. But the everyday people I spoke to across America in red counties welcomed me. […] In these moments, with these strangers and friends, I found that all across America, people were willing to engage in conversation. I heard stories of tragedy, stories of relentless faith in the face of terrifying adversity, and stories of individual people making resurrection and new life possible even in places where new life seemed awfully unlikely.

Sometimes I heard people say things that sounded intolerant or racist or mean. It usually happened when they were telling me about something they’d heard on TV or on the internet. And at the same time, I learned too that people’s general beliefs often didn’t apply in the particular. People who voted against gay marriage or gay rights often welcomed people who were gay into their own church communities or families. Even racism was hard to quantify. Liberals knew all the right words to say and theories to quote, but I noticed patterns of structural racism that white liberals benefited from all the time yet no one acknowledged. Meanwhile, the white conservatives I spoke with often had more diverse family and neighborhood experiences than the white liberals I spoke to. Which was worse, racism in general or racism in particular? I learned that the dividing lines we draw don’t mean so much in practical, everyday American life. Of course we find that out only when we cross the dividing lines.

In saying this, I refuse to whitewash the troubling incidents I witnessed and heard during the course of my research. Primarily among pastors and media figures, among wealthy and powerful people, I heard people use Christianity to justify American Christian Nationalism that would seek to harm the weak among us: refugees, the poor, women, people of color, the LGBTQ community. These manipulative pastors and Christian leaders wanted money, power, and control, and they saw Trump as a means to these ends.

Still, as I come to the end of this journey, what sticks with me are the stories of surprise. All across America, people are doing surprising things that don’t fit into our prescribed boxes that we use to categorize people. Evangelicals are not a monolith, not universally any one thing, and Red State Christians defy categorization. Eighty-one percent of white Evangelicals voted for Trump—some because they wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, some because they hated Hillary, and many because they felt like Trump was talking directly to them and speaking for them, whereas Democrats and others didn’t even seem interested in engaging with them in a conversation that wasn’t laced with pejorative or patronizing insults. In neglecting to have that conversation, many Americans miss out on the stories of the people I’ve introduced you to in this book. America is a big country, and the Holy Spirit is alive—not primarily in Washington or on TV screens, but in El Paso and Naples and Cole Camp and Altoona.

The voices that I believe will heal America’s wounded heart are the voices that can speak truth to power in places far from seats of power. I am encouraged by Wes, the half-Hispanic, half-Tongan youth pastor at one of Orange County’s largest churches, who bristles at those who assume he’s on the grounds crew but who relentlessly proclaims the difficulty of the gospel anyway, and thousands listen. Evangelicalism depends on an experience of the Holy Spirit and a dynamic display of God’s power. For many years, that power has been caged inside churches and power-hungry pastors, but what I found across America while talking to Christians in red counties is that American Evangelicalism is beginning to break out of its cage.

At the heart of it all is my own Red State Christian family and the ways it divides and comes together and surprises even me with its love and forgiveness.

A moment of grace that sticks with me happened during something I said I wouldn’t write about, my own family reunion for my father-in-law’s side in rural Missouri. When we got together again for the big reunion this past summer, in a red county in a red state surrounded by Red State Christians and Trump supporters, I figured I should just be a mom and take off my author and pastor hats. When it was almost time to eat, my two-year-old son had a potty accident, and I found myself in the bathroom in the basement of the Missouri Synod [Lutheran] church. [The Missouri Synod does not ordain female pastors.] Everyone would want someone to lead us in prayer, and one of our relatives had been an accomplished Missouri Synod pastor. I figured we were good to go. When I came out of the bathroom with my son, everyone had started eating. My husband came up to me with a puzzled look on his face. “Where were you?” he said. “Everyone was looking for you. They were waiting for you to pray for us.”

When I think back on my whole year researching Red State Christians, that story stands out. It reminds me that all Americans, Christian or not, conservative or not, have a remarkable gift for acceptance. If given the chance, we can accept one another, learn from each other, and build an entirely new country built on justice and freedom for all.

My Red State Christian story began with Trump, with his bombast and his uncanny ability to mollify moral concerns and unite an Evangelical Christian coalition of voters. Still, the place my story ends is far from Trump. It ends in places in America where people are forming unlikely alliances, surprising each other and surprising political pundits, to build a future that looks nothing like the Republicans or Democrats of the past.

Grace, for American Christians and for all of us, is a difficult thing. It means starting from a place where all of us have been wrong, and knowing that we all have something to learn from each other.

Excerpted from Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump by Angela Denker (Fortress Press, 2019). All rights reserved. Used with permission. FortressPress.com

In the midst of impending rain and thunder, I took my 3-year-old son to the park, anyway. Winter had been long this year, and we were desperate for the sun on our backs and the sight of other people who we didn’t know, revealed to one another underneath our down parkas and wooly hats.

I took my son to a park at the crossroads of America. Our city’s most affluent suburb, a park frequented by mothers in Polo dresses and nannies pushing $2,000 strollers, occasionally dads dropping by after work in ties and rolled up shirtsleeves, boat shoes on the weekends.

They were all white, like me.

But the park butted up too against an apartment complex, whose residents were predominately people of color and, sometimes, refugees. We coexisted here, in the park together, in the few months of the year when we go outside together, to a place that’s free for everyone to go and the social lines that divide Americans so often, don’t exist, for an hour or so.

Still, the dividing lines often kept us apart, anyway. The white preschool moms stuck together, as did the nannies. Next to the park, a large picnic shelter next to a lake often hosted parties and gatherings of large groups of people, many of whom were first or second-generation immigrants from Central and South Asia. Often I smelled the tantalizing barbecues and heard music, minor melodies unfamiliar to my ears, wafting down the hill from the lake and the picnic shelter to the park, where kids played, if not together then at least side by side, knocking into each other at the bottom of the plastic slide and taking turns on the zipline.

This week the park again was integrated, crossing racial and ethnic and socioeconomic lines, but again the adults kept to themselves, for the most part. The kids, though. The kids gave me hope.

Little girls in brightly colored dresses and glittery sandals stood around my son in line for the zipline, dashing and diving and jumping up and down.

“It’s my birthday party and my sister’s birthday party, too,” one of them told me, squinting and smiling into the sun.

“I’m 4,” her sister said.

“I’m 6 – I mean 7,” the original girl said. “I almost forgot!”

I helped the younger girl off the zipline and handed it to my son.

“I’m almost 4,” he told her.

On the other side of the park, older boys wearing baggy pants cut above the ankle and wide-cut jackets supervised a group of younger boys, one of whom was trying to take a phone from another. They broke up the fight and patrolled use of the phone. The younger boys were deferent, respectful.

A girl in a dress and a headscarf laughed delightedly as she played with the sand-mover, manipulating its metal arms and tossing sand into the air. My son walked over, and two little girls asked if I’d lift them up to hang on the spinning wheel with my son.

“Ahhhhhhh!” the three sighed together.

We went back to the zipline, and the sisters were still there, discussing glittery sandals with a little white girl and her dad.

The original girl looked up at me.

“We’re having a party,” she said. “And we’re all from the same country.”

“What country are you from?”

“Afghanistan.”

I realized, with a start, where I’d seen their outfits and the boys’ haircuts before, where I’d associated the unfamiliar strains of music. Often children wearing clothes like these stared up at me from pages of magazines or newspaper articles, about famine and violence, about lack of education and children begging with their mothers in the streets.

The child mortality rate, the number of children who will die before they reach age 5, out of 1,000 live births, in Afghanistan was estimated to be 110.6 in 2017, according to the CIA World Factbook. In America, it’s 6.5.

According to UNICEF, 62 percent of children under age 5 in Afghanistan will be taken to a health provider with suspected pneumonia. Forty-six percent will receive oral rehydration salts due to dehydration and digestion problems, often caused by unsafe water. Just 39 percent will receive the full measles vaccine. Twenty-nine percent of children ages 5-17 were engaged in child labor in Afghanistan, and 35 percent of women ages 20-24 were married by the time they turned 18. Just 2 percent of Afghan kids have children’s books at home. Forty percent will be left under inadequate supervision, due to parents and families living in poverty. Just 54 percent will complete their primary education.

Only 32 percent of Afghanistan’s population, according to UNICEF, has basic sanitation services, and just 12 percent have piped water.

Certainly Afghanistan, like everywhere in the world, has its wealthy people and its success stories. But the statistics above are grim for children like the ones I met at the park.

They looked much like the Afghan children I’d seen in the news, except their eyes were brighter somehow. They were safe. They had time to play. Their parents were available. They didn’t have to listen to bombs by night and live in uncertain housing situations, their lives at the mercy of political stress and religious extremism.

Here, they were free – not immune, of course, from racial and ethnic and religious and sexual discrimination – but shielded to a point from violence, disease, and early death. And given a sunny afternoon at the park even as the clouds, pregnant with rain, threatened to burst and unleash a torrent.

I realized something, playing with these girls and watching these boys and listening to the music and smelling the food cooking with the adults, in the picnic shelter nearby next to the lake.

The America where they live: where they’ve been welcomed as refugees and yes, supported by my tax dollars, is the America where I want to live. I cannot imagine my park only populated by one type of people, mostly white and occasionally African American or Asian American, well-off and isolated from the larger problems of the world. I long for the confluence that happens here at this park, where worlds collide and children play and American hope endures.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Last week, I went to New York City for a book signing. We ate dinner at a Laotian restaurant, in the shadow of a statue that reminded us that America is great only because all of us live here together. America is great because of the hope she offers for those of us wretched here and there, for those of us transformed by newfound freedom, for those of us homeless in body or spirit. America offers a chance for resurrection and new life on the shores of New York Harbor or the Rio Grande.

This is the America where I want to live. Not a pristine, scrubbed, rich utopia that charges admission at the door. No, the America where I want to live is the America where Afghan refugee kids shove rich white kids in line at the zipline, and brag about their birthdays, and grow up together at the neighborhood park.

It begins in December 2014, though truthfully it started several months earlier, in February 2014, sitting in a tiny pastor’s office in a tiny church outside Chicago.

Snow fell furiously outside, and I turned around to watch it drift, as I watched a gaggle of people walk past my door, at the end of the twice-daily 12-step meeting hosted in my tiny little Lutheran church.

Sometimes in 2014 I felt uncertain and isolated. I had only a few months ago become a pastor; somewhere inside I was still the journalist I had been before, with the soul of a writer longing to tell the truth. My congregation could not contain the breadth of my desire to communicate, so, at my husband’s urging, I started a blog.

On the advice of a former intern to a prominent Christian writer, who went to the same journalism school as me, I contacted a group called Red Letter Christians. They’d be among the first to publish my Christian writing and blogging, and they even invited me to a small gathering of activists, authors, and pastors on the east coast in 2014.

Wide-eyed and naive, I listened as these veterans of publishing and speaking circuits shared their wisdom and their woes. Introverted and missing my 18-month-old back home, having just weeks before suffered a miscarriage, I walked in to eat breakfast alone.

I didn’t really know anyone; I wasn’t in the “club,” so to speak, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be. So I put my head down, and stared into my coffee cup. Behind me I heard another person sidling up to the breakfast buffet. He walked slowly, haltingly, slightly bent over. I didn’t know then, but he’d dealt with bone-fusion arthritic disability much of his life. Like the Apostle Paul, he had a thorn in his flesh (2 Corinthians 12:7). Like the Apostle Paul, God’s power would be made perfect despite this weakness, which was not in truth weakness but strength (2 Corinthians 12:9).

I didn’t know any of this, then. I just saw a man I didn’t know; a man whose skin color was different than mine. I wondered if he was with our Christian group, but I didn’t ask. I just kept sitting, drinking my coffee, self-obsessed with my own inadequacies and social anxieties and love for my son, who was back in Chicago.

Later that day, we gathered to hear a special speaker. In the silence of a nondescript room in the basement, slowly, purposefully, my breakfast partner walked in. We had been alone in that breakfast room for several minutes, me and the prophet.

“national board of the NAACP”
“chair of its legislative political action committee”
“pastor”
“Duke graduate”
“President of his college at age 17”
“Architect of Moral Mondays”
“fighting voter suppression in North Carolina”

Years later, that list would include speaker at the 2016 Democratic National Convention (though he calls himself a biblicist and a conservative when it comes to scripture), author, arrestee, criminal, Poor Peoples’ Campaign leader, MacArthur Fellow.

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, spoke that day in 2014 as I would see him speak years later on national television, and again this week at the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis. He often started quietly, using charts, images, graphs, and even videos to enhance his message. He was tethered, absolutely, to the Bible passages that guided his walk, and, unique among speakers today, you rarely heard him talk about himself.

He used lists of facts and figures and historical data, pausing occasionally to breathe and to stay resolutely dedicated to his central message, that voter suppression, particularly across the American South and in conservative states, was undermining American democracy, and that this same voter suppression had its roots in the 1930s New Deal and racism borne in Reconstruction, all the way up through Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Trump’s politics of fear and resentment.

Barber showed how it all — how we all — are connected, and connected inherently both to sin and to God. He talked about the insidious ways powerful people take advantage of racial — and gender and sexual identity — discrimination to incite unfairness and entrench many, especially the poor, in systems of injustice. He said that when politicians campaigned on racial resentment, their words hurt African Americans but their laws mainly hurt poor whites. He challenged the church for providing cover for sin, for being too afraid or too complicit or too disorganized or too self-involved to speak out.

Listening, I felt not judged but incited to action. Occasionally he’d laugh, and you’d see behind the moral fervor and God-given prophecy into the man, who in 2016 would be harassed on a plane for his disability and likely his skin color, and later forced to leave. He handled it all with an unspeakable sort of dignity rarely seen anymore, and as I listened to him speak in 2014, I felt transported to another place, another space. I’d return to Chicago determined to involve my tiny, struggling, white church in racial reconciliation. We’d cross the segregation lines of Chicago to partner with a dynamic black Lutheran church on the Far South Side. We’d trade worship leadership and trade pulpits. We’d really know each other; we’d open our hearts to listen.

Miraculously, months later, this work began to happen. Barber’s words echoed in my heart. But I’d end up leaving Chicago in June 2015 to work in Orange County and give birth to my second son. My blogging ministry ground to a slow halt. I’d rejoin the Red Letter gathering in 2016, but it was not until moving to Minneapolis in 2017 when I would begin anew my ministry of words.

While I mothered and soaked up the sun and ministered in Southern California, Barber had been traveling the country as a man on a mission, sent straight from God. He continued his battle in North Carolina, winning victories as a restrictive voting law that predominately affected African-American voters was struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals on July 29, 2016, and people around the country vowed to join efforts against voter suppression.

Even as Barber spoke at the 2016 DNC, I noticed the ways he didn’t fit there. He gripped the lectern as he spoke, a speech not intensely political or even partisan but instead insistently biblical, a voice descended from another realm unpolluted by the trappings of lobbyists, partisanship, and fame.

He came almost from another era yet was grounded in the situation of 21st-century America, his eyes clearly open to American wounds, long unhealed, yet within him a reservoir of untapped hope, a deep pool of resilience founded in the words of the spirituals he knew by heart and would sing in the midst of a protest, his eyes lifted heavenward.

When I saw Barber again this year, 2019, in Minneapolis, months before publication of my book, Red State Christians, and mired in a quest for political and religious national understanding and resolution myself, I again felt deeply ashamed. I had sat for breakfast with this giant of a man, and I had said nothing. I had failed to discern the presence of a prophet in my midst because I made the mistake so many of us do, that my earthly sense of deduction would comprehend a heavenly messenger.

I listened to him speak to this room of mostly white, mostly Midwestern, mostly mainline pastors. He said he wanted to deal with weightier matters, the ones Jesus tells the Pharisees they overlooked, and none of us wants to be a Pharisee, though they often make their home in the church.

Barber refused to give in to the liberal temptation of referencing Trump, directly or obliquely, preferring to focus instead on the American roots of the division at hand today between black and white, rich and poor, man and woman, gay and straight.

“Only deeply committed moral fusion movements deeply rooted in our religious institutions have brought justice,” he said, rebuking those of us who had clung to the Mueller Report as a sort of savior.

He talked of the moral health of the nation, the moral heart of the nation, a broken heart I witness each day when we fail to acknowledge each other, fail to listen, dismiss one another even behind the wheel of our cars or on social media.

“America has always had great difficulty with a kind of social schizophrenia saying one thing on paper and struggling to live up to it,” he said.

He led us from the 1930s to the 1970s to the 1990s to 2019, reminding us that racist culture — words and jokes — is an outgrowth of racist policies, that racism is not natural but created purposefully for the sake of power and fear.

“It’s sick sociology, bad biology…heretical ontology, that God designed it this way,” Barber said of racism. “It’s where people put their ultimate hope…one of the biggest problems in the church is we want to address cultural racism but not systemic racism.”

He closed with a drumbeat, a synthesis and a call to action: repenting of the sin of racist idolatrous voter suppression — and speaking against it.

He paraphrased Matthew 23: “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights…We can break the demonic hold of systemic idolatrous sinful racist voter suppression, and in doing so we will all be set free.”

The crowd, stunned, paused a moment when he finished, then one by one we rose to our feet. The standing ovation felt like one of a people called not to applaud but to take action — a crowd of people who had heard the word of the Lord and stood up in its midst.

As we sat back down, Barber walked slowly down the stairs and out the door toward the airport. I tripped over the seats, rushing toward the door, rushing to catch a word with him before he left. I didn’t want to miss speaking with him this time, five years later, as I saw who he was and repented of my own blindness in the face of the word of the Lord.

This article originally appeared on Angela’s blog.

I see you. I see you rising early and pulling on pants and flats or a dress over your head, wondering if it goes with your clerical collar or if your outfit is OK to wear to preach without a clerical collar — wondering if you can add a belt to your dress so you have somewhere to clip your microphone; lifting up your hair to position said microphone, which is almost always designed to fit a man’s head, a man’s ear.

I see you nursing babies in your office, or in the church bathroom between services, or ducking your head to fasten on a breast pump, or measuring out formula to pack in your purse next to your sermon manuscript and wallet.

I see you park in the church parking lot before anyone else arrives, wondering if you parked too close or too far, unlocking the doors, checking your alb in the mirror.

I watch you as you nod in response to awkward compliments and subtle jabs, as you worry if anyone heard what you meant to say, as you frantically make eye contact with your spouse, as your heart swells when the little girl tells you that she, too, wants to be a pastor, and her eyes shine when you look at her and so do yours.

I see you drag yourself past your back door after services end, wearily emptying the dishwasher or filling the sink with dirty breakfast dishes and dish soap. I see you kissing kids goodnight, I see you in your chair, answering emergency care calls and rushing to the hospital after you’d already put your pajamas on.

I watch you lift up your colleagues; I hear you speak truth. I put you on each day as I put on the Armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes (cute and comfortable ones: mine are Adidas Superstars) to carry the Good News, the helmet of Salvation, the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God.

You stand around me like my own armor, reminding me that I am not alone.

You speak truth when sometimes the world is not ready to hear it, not from you. The ones who are ready, you cherish them and hold them in your heart: the senior women whose love and wisdom fills you up, the young men who champion your leadership, the old men who invite you to speak and really listen when you do.

Maybe the world is still not ready for you, my sisters in ministry, as it was not ready for Jesus, but he came and he spoke and he ministered anyway, like you do.

As I write this, I look out my window at the Methodist church across the street. Their dynamic woman pastor resigned her call recently. Down the road, a church mourns the death of its dynamic woman co-lead pastor, a sudden death caused by complications of a heart attack. She was young, in her 40s, as is the pastor who left the church across the street.

As I write this, the Christian world is praying desperately for the health of dynamic woman leader and writer Rachel Held Evans, who was placed into a medically induced coma after doctors discovered she was experiencing constant seizures. RHE, as she’s known, is a beacon of light for Christians all across America. Her health scare has been shocking and scary, especially for those of us who write and challenge American Christianity as she does so bravely, knowing we may do so because of her work.

As I write this, I remember the texts I exchanged with the dynamic female leader who used to be the lead pastor at the church where I serve as an interim teaching pastor. Her leadership was courageous and powerful. She resigned her position about a year ago.

Surrounded as I am by this great cloud of witnesses, a cloud of witnesses who has been trampled and persecuted and prosecuted and derided, for everything from leggings to hairstyles to weight to the sound of our voices — I can’t help but think the American Church stands at a threshold when it comes to women’s leadership in the church: not only in the overt patriarchalism of conservative churches, but also in the so-called progressive churches.

As I watch these dynamic leaders suffer for their brilliance and their courage — as I watch you suffer for your calling to ministry — I have to point out that this is not a story about individual women. It’s not only about Rachel or about Angela or about you.

We are confronting a cancer of bias; a perhaps, at times, unconscious reaction to #MeToo and Trump’s presidency and female gains in graduate school and income and costs of childcare and impossible parenting standards and devaluation of teachers and an impossibly toxic yet superficial social media environment.

I feel called to bring these stories to light and to challenge the American church and her leadership to root out this evil. I hope you’ll join me. But even if you’re not ready to share your story, know you are never standing alone. We stand together.

I want to leave you with a Bible passage God called me to this morning, as I put on my own armor and black eyeliner and Tupac t-shirt (Keep Ya Head Up) and white blazer for women’s suffrage, and I walked into the open arms of the women’s Bible Study that has held me aloft in my church.

God kept whispering to me today: clay jars, clay jars, clay jars …

I turned to 2 Corinthians 4: … we have this treasure in clay jars …

You, my sisters, are this treasure. Sometimes the clay jars — our outward bodies in which we carry this unspeakable treasure — feel exhausted and worn down, confused and heavy-laden. But God’s promise to us is that we hold the treasure in ourselves nonetheless, in our bodies that are not naturally sinful but naturally holy. And we will not be crushed, forsaken, and driven to despair.

I invite you to dwell with me today in the words of this text. May they strengthen you as they have strengthened me.

2 Corinthians 4:1-18

“Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. ² We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. ³ And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. ⁴ In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. ⁵ For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. ⁶ For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

⁷ But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. ⁸ We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰ always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. ¹¹ For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. ¹² So death is at work in us, but life in you.

¹³ But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—“I believed, and so I spoke”—we also believe, and so we speak, ¹⁴ because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. ¹⁵ Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.

¹⁶ So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, ¹⁸ because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”

Notre Dame was burning.

Notre Dame, our Lady, our monument, our relic, our symbol, our defeat.

Social media across America and across the world exploded with photos of tiny tourists, smiling in their white tennis shoes and bulging backpacks, dwarfed by the gigantic, centuries-old sanctuary behind them — a symbol of Western decadence and Christian victory.

It burned, flames licking the spires and brushing up against the formidable flying buttresses, on Monday of Holy Week, the Monday before Easter, a dark week in which Christians are called to walk with Jesus from ignominy and arrest to crucifixion and death — a long seven days until resurrection and an empty tomb on Easter Sunday.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 21, on Holy Monday an angry and rash Jesus storms into the Jerusalem temple and overturns the tables of the moneychangers.

“My house shall be called a house of prayer; but you are making it a den of thieves!”

He is not the Jesus with whom we are well-acquainted, the peaceful, vaguely Scandinavian looking white man with a well-groomed beard, who stares down at us from fireplace mantles with a thoughtful and placid expression on his face, arms outstretched, palms up, beseeching us.

No, the God of peace on Holy Monday became the Son of rage, wreaking havoc in a holy place because his words of truth exposed the cracking facade that made what had been corrupted still appear holy.

Notre Dame was burning.

Like the rest I winced and shuddered, forcing myself to view again and again the horrifying photos of a cathedral in flames, licking its spires and knocking down its height. It had once stretched to the heavens; now it was left exposed and naked to the sky, exposing us, too, for the times we did not pray in its pews, the times we Instagrammed its windows and stepped over its poor, naked, and hungry huddling in the doorsteps of the nearby cafes, too invisible to be seen by us.

I do not believe, necessarily, in a God who punishes with flame and flood, though we read of that God in the Bible. I believe instead that God wept too this Holy Monday, another relic in flames, another sanctuary destroyed, another holy place desecrated.

Still, perhaps we need a reminder of the desecration that has already burned its way through our churches and our hearts.

Holy Week has become unholy. The American government fights to detain those who have a “credible fear,” sentencing those fleeing violence and abuse to cold detention and virtual imprisonment inside the golden door that once tried to mean freedom, if only in theory, if only for those whose skin was pale and wallets were fat.

We await reports of our government’s war with itself, exposing hatred and lies and deceits that cross party lines and stretch from one end of the earth to another, never a limit to the places people will go to be wealthy and powerful, or, in tiny dark and dank computer labs on the other side of the world, to feed their families and pay their rent.

We celebrate as our Good News the tragic story of a man who had earned everything, broken barriers in a blood red mock turtleneck and overcome his own propensity to violence and unchastity and adultery, to become victorious again, and we celebrate his own aggrandizement but ignore the lasting scars on the son who hugged him, because winning erases a multitude of sins.

Just win, baby, has become our national motto.

America, America! You mock the prophets and deny those who are sent to you! How often God has desired to gather you to Herself, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.

Our Christian nation has been revealed for its utter un-Christianity, its utter selfishness and self-love, its zero-sum games and elevation of all that is outrageous, ignominious, and fleeting.

Still, it is only Wednesday.

Tomorrow Jesus gathers with his disciples, with you and with me — if we only see him — around our dinner tables humble and grand, breaking bread and giving thanks, laying himself before us and sacrificing himself so that true power might be seen in the humble, meek, and lowly.

This is my body, given for you.
This is my blood, shed for you and for all creation for the forgiveness of sins.
Do this in remembrance of me.

As we remember and restore the grand burning cathedral in the city of Love, this Unholy Week may we reclaim too what might become holy in us: a confession, a forgiveness of one another, a love that is costly and free all at once, a justice that will not be denied.

This article originally appeared on Angela’s blog.