Brian and I were both students at a fundamentalist Bible college. I had gone there to become a missionary pilot, but was told upon arrival that women couldn’t fly planes. They explained to me that when I got pregnant, I wouldn’t be able to pilot, and so it would be a waste of their resources to train me. I stayed at the school, changing my major into something more acceptable for women. Yet, the further I got into my studies, I realized a whole realm of things that women were not allowed to do, and they were the things I wanted to do—pastor, preach, and teach.

When I would complain, students often responded with jokes, reminding me that I was at a “Bridal” Institute (as opposed to a Bible Institute) and, as a woman, I was there to get an “M.R.S.” The jokes never sat well with me. At first it was because I had vocational dreams that didn’t include being some mythical husband’s “helpmate.” Then the banter incited another fear. If I wasn’t at the school in order to gain the necessary tools to teach and preach, why was I there?

I asked to borrow Brian’s book, then I went to a coffeehouse and settled down for a marathon read. The world within those pages felt eerily similar to the school I attended. They certainly weren’t poking any eyes out at the Bible Institute, but the focus on women as wombs felt the same. We were encouraged to marry as soon as possible and had intricate rituals that celebrated each time a woman got engaged. We were encouraged to be wives, mothers, and perhaps piano players in our husband’s churches—and little else.

When it got close to curfew, I gathered my books, still dazed in Offred’s hazy world. I walked to campus and looked at the students surrounding me. It was a beautiful place, filled with rows of tulips and smiling faces. It was a comfortable bubble, made up of home-schooled students and missionary’s kids. My life had been different than many of my classmates. I had gone to public school and grown up on the beaches of Florida, where people don’t wear a lot of clothes. I was demure, so I felt overexposed and oversexualized—like an object to be graded based on the quality of my body parts. In response, the Bible school felt like a welcome relief. It was a place where my body was hidden, purity was prized, and men were not rewarded for their sexual conquests.

Yet, in the fog of Margaret Atwood’s story, I realized that I was being sexualized, just in a different way. I walked to my dorm, Houghton Hall. As a resident, I was called a “Houghton Heifer.” I always thought that the name was put on us because of the extra 20 pounds we gained in our first year at the school. But it had a new meaning as I held the worn tale. I was a young female cow, who had not yet borne a calf. I was a breeder. I shuddered.

Decades later, at the 30th anniversary of The Handmaid’s Tale, I traveled to a nearby university to hear Atwood talk about the book. With a wry smile, Atwood said that she had been accused of being anti-religion. The idea for the novel did come from studying the Puritans in New England, but Atwood seemed appalled at the notion that she was anti-religion. She answered the criticism by turning it back on the accuser: “What sort of religion do you have?” I took the answer to mean that if The Handmaid’s Tale feels like an indictment of your religion, perhaps you need to reassess your faith.

Certainly, Atwood loves to explore the different ways that religion emerges in society, and she plays with doctrinal themes in many of her books. The apocalyptic MaddAddam Trilogy has a Trinitarian theme, which is reflected through the structure as well as its three main characters. In the pages, she pits the Petrobaptists against God’s Gardeners, showing us how religion can be toxic or restorative. Atwood might be a strict agnostic, she might show us how religion harms, but she has also given us an idea of how it can be a healing force in our society as well.

Now that The Handmaid’s Tale has been made into a television series, many people have described how scary it feels. In the United States, the Religious Right has moved from the fringe of our society to the heart of the White House. In this stunning partnership, moral purity has partnered with a wealthy businessman who has so little regard for women’s rights that he brags about sexual assault and walking in on naked teens. We can feel the echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale reverberating through our own reality of mock piety, white supremacy, and economic disparity. In the heart of it, religion seems to be set on dismantling many rights for women.

Atwood first forced me to look at my religion at that Bible school, a process that I describe in my book Healing Spiritual Wounds. If I could not teach or preach, and if I was being groomed to be a “helpmate” and a mother, I needed to reassess my religion. And so I did.

I became a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a denomination that has been fighting for women’s rights for decades. Now Atwood’s work is allowing us all to take another look at our religion and reassess our faith. Is it toxic or is it healing? Does our faith give us a vision for liberation for women and health for our environment?

Yes, religion in our country has been used to set back the rights of women. There has been a portion of our religious landscape that has been laser-focused on taking away our healthcare. The Handmaid’s Tale is a haunting trajectory of where that could lead.

Many of us have turned our heads as the church fights to take the rights of women away. But perhaps Atwood’s brilliant work, now illuminated on our television screens, will invite all of us to finally ask, “What sort of religion do we have?”

Rev. Carol Howard Merritt is a minister in the Presbyterian (USA). She is the award-winning author of Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church (HarperOne), Reframing Hope: Vital Ministry in a New Generation (Alban), and Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation (Alban). Carol blogs for the Christian Century.

We began to march, and our numbers kept swelling, as people joined us from neighboring apartment buildings. The organizers had hoped for five hundred—they could have never predicted the thousands who joined. We could no longer fit on the sidewalk, so we moved to the streets and onto the bridge where cars normally travelled. As our voices soared, we sang for our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters. My heart swelled with love for my neighbors, and I longed to keep this lens that the March had lent to me. The tint and hue of the view was so much different from the one with which I had been raised.

As a white conservative Christian, growing up in the religious Right and prosperity gospel movements, I was taught that no one was good, unless they went to the same sort of church, adhered to the same doctrines, held the same political convictions, and read the Bible the same way that I did. If they did not, I could not love them. To love them would mean that I could be seduced by their thought, and that they would surely lure me into corruption.

No. If I had any interaction, it would be to cajole and convert them. Since I was never very good at changing people, I tried to keep to my own kind. I would look for signs that people were like me—a Jesus fish or a Bible camp t-shirt. I tried to see if they listened to contemporary Christian music or read C.S. Lewis. Because art and artists were also not good, unless they believed as I did.

I’m sad for that girl, as I look back on her. I’ve been writing about my journey, my young self, so eager to be good, that she was trapped in an unending cycle of trying to control everyone around her until they reflected her. In my mind, I try to embrace her, because I know it was lonely living that way, and if there is anything that I’ve learned in my middle age, it is that I need friendship like other people need air.

I am reminded of the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who could not appreciate the white roses that surrounded her, unless they were red. Her minions scurried around, painting the flowers until they matched her, until they became a reflection of her own self.

It was the same way with me. I could not appreciate the diverse beauty of those around me, unless they reflected my own thoughts and beliefs. I didn’t do it because I was malicious. Instead, it was out of a deep unease and mistrust that had been engrained in me.

I want to embrace my younger self, because I didn’t know how to love. It was cruel to take love away from someone so young. I had never been taught to love someone on their own terms. I could not appreciate their own delicate color, until it matched mine. Even at such a young age, my love was all wrapped up in controlling other people’s thoughts, actions, and even emotions.

As I marched alongside sisters, mothers, and daughters, remembering how my religious upbringing robbed my ability to love, I knew that the inability to see the good in other people, affected my politics. If justice is what love looks like in public, as Cornel West often says, I had failed to love. I didn’t care about people who were hungry or homeless, unless they passed some theological litmus test. I had a justification for this, telling myself that it was more import to feed the soul than it was to feed the body. But really, it was just my way of letting conditional love keep me from following Jesus.

The good news is that it’s not too late to learn to love—to appreciate the crooked smile, the anxious voice, and the infinite beauty of my neighbor. It is not too late to become enraptured with someone, not because they reflect who I am and what believe, but because their thoughts are so deeply their own. It is not too late to call out for justice and to love in public. It is not too late for us to do the things that Jesus taught us.

As a kid raised in a conservative Baptist home, I was taught that sexual sins were much worse than the everyday, garden variety vice. We heard a lot about staying pure and straight. Jesus would reward virgin girls with an extra jewel in their heavenly crown, if we saved ourselves for marriage.

But the worst sexual sin was homosexuality.

I was told that the “gay lifestyle” was a choice, and that people who made that choice would suffer terrible consequences of depression and even suicide.

This didn’t make much sense. I was really into art in my public high school, many of my friends were gay or lesbian, and they didn’t seem any more depraved or depressed than anyone else.

I got older. When I was 17, I went to a fundamentalist Bible school, where I also met gay friends. Things were different. They were, of course, closeted because of the fear of being thrown out of school and shunned by their families.

At first, I tried to separate things—hate the sin and love the sinner. When I continued to call it a “lifestyle, ” a friend gently smiled and said, “Carol, I didn’t choose this, anymore than you choose to be attracted to men.” And with that, the tidy wall I built between the action and the person crumbled.

When I became an adult, I began to see that being LGBTQ wasn’t actually hurting anyone, but my faith was hurting a lot of people. At the Bible college we forced people to stay closeted and drove them into sham marriages. Students were sent to conversion therapies and worked really hard to be ex-gay. Parents were encouraged to use “tough love” and scare them straight, and so I heard horrifying stories of abuse. We shunned anyone who didn’t uphold gender norms and we continually degraded sex. I saw wounded people and shattered lives, and I was aching. I anguished with their pain and my self-righteous piety began to sicken me.

Eventually, I had a faith crisis. Jesus said, “There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” So how could I be a part of such horrifying practices against my friends? And if I loved them, as a mere mortal, how much more did God love them? Would Jesus really condone such religious abuse in God’s name? I knew that I had to leave Christianity, because I could no longer be a part of ripping up the lives of those I loved.

But could there be another way? Could I stay true to my faith and to those I loved?

I had always been a devout child, and had read the Bible cover-to-cover dozens of times. So I knew that the Bible did not actually line up with my conservative views of morality with any tidy succinctness. I knew about the genocides that God commanded. I had read the horrifying laws on slavery. As a little girl, I was stunned to find out that if a woman was raped, she would have to marry the man who raped her. If a woman’s hand touched a man’s private parts during a fight, her hand was to be cut off. Women were defying the tidy roles we set up all the time.

And if there was anything in the Bible that was truly messy, it was the concept of marriage. Perhaps it was because I read of these relationships as a little girl—imagining myself in Esther’s harem, or as one of Solomon’s 700 concubines. It was easy for me to identify with the women as I thought about what it would be like to have a bride price, and watch my future go to the highest bidder. I knew that if there was ever a tenuous idea in the text, it was that of marriage between one man and one woman. It was barely existent in Scripture. The idea of loving relationships seemed to be utterly dynamic.

Since I had read the Bible so many times, I never really held to a literalist view of Scripture. I mean, women were getting stoned on a regular basis in those pages, clearly things had changed. But the Bible was still the heartbeat of my life. I expanded with the poetry and beauty of the words.

I needed to read the text differently, so that I could have some way to sort out what to cling to. “The letter kills, ” as 2 Corinthians says, “but the Spirit gives life.” I could see how my friends suffered when they struggled with their sexuality. I had seen people use the blunt force of religion to abuse children and shun adults. How could I move with the Spirit and leave behind the murderous letters?

I began to use the lens of love to read the texts. God is love. Our greatest command is love. Love became my hermeneutic, my method of interpreting culture-bound norms and relationships.

I can’t tell you the weight that lifted when I became free to love, without judgment or reserve. When I began to understand that I could repent of the toxicity of my religion. I could celebrate the love that my LGBTQ friends shared and realize that God made us with a myriad of sexual longings and desires.

God is love. And with that simple, beautiful fact, I changed my mind.

His rhetoric reminded me of a bumper sticker I see here in Tennessee: “Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun.”

I went to a Bible school, where students sometimes imagined that they were the good people and everyone else was a bad person. It was a warped view, for sure. But at least we just passed out tracts and tried to get the “bad people” to repeat the “sinner’s prayer” after us. We didn’t have a college president packing heat in his back pocket, providing free gun training courses, and inciting us to “end those Muslims before they walked in.” Falwell has since clarified that he meant Muslim terrorists, but that’s a very big and telling omission to make as you fire up a hundred thousand young people to arm themselves and kill.

There are the obvious interfaith concerns with this. We work across faithful traditions, because we know that our holy wars have been far from holy. I hope and pray that in the days to come, there will be many voices encouraging love and peace toward our one billion Muslim neighbors.

There is another aspect about the rhetoric that concerns me. I denounced Falwell on Facebook and had a lively discussion that quickly turned to a person’s right to defend himself and his family.

These streams represent the lies of patriarchy. For patriarchal ideas assume:

• Men should hold moral, financial, and physical power. Men will protect and provide for women.

• Women should give up some of their freedom, in order to be protected and provided for.

So why would I call it a lie to say that men who carry guns will protect their families from the bad guys?

Fourteen people died in San Bernardino, and each loss of life was a tragedy. But, in response, American men should not imagine that they are now heat-packing heroes, protecting their wives from the enemy. Because a woman is more likely to be injured by the hands of her partner than anything or anyone else. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500 percent. 

These ideas are dangerous, as women in our country can attest.

• Three women are murdered every day by a current or former male partner in the US.

• 18, 000 women have been killed by men in domestic violence disputes since 2003.

• Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women.

• Domestic violence cuts across faith lines. Whether you’re a conservative Christian, a liberal Christian, or an atheist, domestic violence can affect you. (There has been some interesting reporting linking complementarian views and violence.) The one place where faith matters most is that a person who has a strong faith community will be more likely to leave an abusive spouse.

The idea that all Christian men wear white hats, carry guns, and protect their women and children could not be farther from the truth.

It’s Advent, and there’s another voice calling out among the political pundits and talking heads. It echoes in our longings and liturgies. We have visions of lions and lambs relaxing with one another. We have the dream of beating our swords into plowshares, learning to feed rather than fight with one another. We have Mary, with swollen ankles and sciatic nerve pain, reminding us all of what it means to bear God. We have that realization that we have been born again by the water-breaking Spirit.

In other words, there is another way to be a civilization. We can be nurturing parents, working together, finding dignity in one another, and feeding one another. Throughout history, we are our best when we strive for peace, fight for justice, and stoke the courage to love.

Squelch the anxious fears. Our guns will not save us. God, who is kicking about within us, who is longing to be flesh in our world, will save us. Nurture peace.

I think it was when Facebook was messing with our minds, seeing if they could toy with our emotions (they could), when I read research that said that people were happier on Friday than they were on the weekend. They had scoured statuses and found out what was already known—people, generally, love the longing for something more than they do the actuality of that something.

People love planning a vacation more than the actual travel.

The building sexual tension in a TV show is better than when the couple actually gets together.

The messed up life reflected in a memoir is fascinating—until the person sobers up and grows up.

The dream of creating a piece of artwork or writing is much more exciting than finishing that inevitably imperfect work.

The planning, longing, and hope—I suppose that’s how I’ve learned to think of Christmas. When I was a child, I would madly dash into the living room on Christmas morning. I was the youngest child by many years, so my siblings were in a teen stupor, wanting to sleep until noon, while I bounced on the couch in anticipation for 6:00 a.m. to see if the whims on my list had been fulfilled.

Then, as I grew older, I began to shift my focus on what other people desired. Could I purchase the perfect gift? Could I make them happy, even for a sparkling second? I couldn’t wait for that look of rapture when they tore open the present.

Now, it’s all a bit more complicated, especially during this Advent season, when the news is full of brutality, retaliation, and torture.

And it’s not just the national news; my personal relationships feel riddled with grief. Marriages are falling apart. A family mourns the death of a son. Work anxiety looms. I watch friends suffer, and I long. And my gut is yearning for something much deeper than a restful weekend, a pair of roller skates, or even to buy the perfect gifts for my loved ones.

As I anticipate the coming Christ, I’m trying to find the beauty in the longing—as it comes out in so many different ways. We protest with throngs of people. We yearn for peace. We weep over torture revelations. We miss loved ones who have died. And, particularly in this season, I’m reminded that God is with us, even in the midst of the headline news, our loss, and our sorrow.

Christmas is more complicated now, with its layers of meaning. Joy can no longer be wrapped up with a tidy bow. But, for me, this year, since I cannot have the world as it ought to be, I’m determined to find beauty in the yearning. We will keep lighting candles, knowing that darkness cannot drive out darkness. And when we see things that have hidden in the shadowy corners of our society, we will refuse to yield for nihilism. We will rise up from our depression. We will keep dreaming of wholeness in our shattered lives. We will claim that God is with us—because there rests our hope and in our longing.

A young college student went on a shooting spree, killing because he felt rejected by women. A pulsing wave of men, ignited with grief and frustration began a hashtag on Twitter: #notallmen. Not all men have violence pumping through their veins. Not all men need sadistic payback. Not all men hate women.

Then, like a rolling tide, another wave emerged: #yesallwomen. Not all men are misogynists, but all women have lived with threats. All women have to be cautious when they walk after dark. All women hear degrading slurs about their bodies. All women are told that what they wear will cause a man to rape them. Women know that one out of every four of us have been victims of domestic violence. Yes, all women know how to live in fear.

In the wake of these Twitter waves of violence, grief and confession, Christians were also a part of the conversation. Barna’s Research (which I helped to reflect on with Tyler Wigg-Stevenson) said that Christians are most concerned about domestic violence when compared to other types of violence. But that concern is not reflected in the pulpit. Sojourners worries that pastors don’t preach about domestic violence in the church and do not feel equipped to address it. Lifeway Research explains that pastors believe that domestic or sexual violence is a problem, but not among their church members.

Related: 50 Shades of Broken, Why Do Women Fantasize About Abuse?

I’m sad to say #yesallchurches. We may think that it doesn’t happen in our faith communities, but our opinions do not match up with reality. Our members and leaders are not immune to perpetrating violence. Research has shown that the incidents of violence do not change, no matter what religion a person confesses.

Even though we have a faith that encourages love and peace, in some corners of the church, spanking and submission are also taught. Both can cause people to use violence to maintain order and promote inequality, and they can also lead to domestic violence. How can we find another way? How can we become reflections of the Prince of Peace in our homes?

We need to stop spanking. If someone hits a grown person, he or she will be arrested for assault, but if a parent hits a child who is half his or her size, it’s considered discipline. Can we be smarter and less violent as we discipline? How can we be wise as serpents and gentle as doves as parents?

Boys are more likely to be spanked than girls. Religious conservatives are more likely to spank. Mothers are more likely to spank. Not only can spanking cause aggression and psychological damage, it teaches boys that they should use violence to solve problems. Violence maintains order. Violence is the prerogative of the one in charge. People take these lessons from their childhood and apply it to their adult lives.

Can we take Jesus’ words seriously, and use wisdom rather than a belt to discipline?

We need to stop preaching submission. When I was growing up, I heard countless sermons on Ephesians 5:22 admonishing women to submit.

I don’t believe wives should submit to their husbands. The letter to Ephesus is full of insight and beauty, but when we turn the page, we find the command “slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). This verse was used in our history to promote and protect slavery. Then, Christians realized that all people were made in the image of God and the institution of slavery was a sin. As a result, we do not preach on this verse.

Also by Carol: Why the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision upsets women and men of faith

It’s the same thing with the instruction for wives to submit to a husband. The ancient world’s ideas of women are much different than our understandings. In our culture, women can more freely grasp on to the biblical truths that we are made in the image of God, and that in Jesus Christ, there is no male or female, slave or free. Just as we struggled with the admonition to slaves and found it sinful, we need to see submission of women as sinful.

We need to create sanctuary. Misogyny has festered in our country, making half of our population live in fear. But a faith community can also be a woman’s most important lifeline. When church members surround, believe and support a woman, she can find the resilience and courage she needs to leave an abusive situation.

Domestic violence is rampant in our country. Women have learned to live in fear. Now, in this important moment, can churches respond by teaching peace and creating sanctuary for families who suffer?

The Supreme Court’s decision to side with Hobby Lobby is a setback for all women, but particularly for many women of faith. Why? Well, let me count the ways.

Christians should always uphold human rights. Jesus taught us a great deal when he healed the women who had been bleeding. He taught us that women who demand healing ought to find that cure. Jesus restored her to health, even though the established religion deemed that she was unclean. Jesus ignored the men in charge, and he listened to the woman in suffering.

That medical condition would now be treated with contraception. Birth Control is considered a basic human right, according to the United Nations. It’s important for the health of women. It keeps women and children out of poverty. Contraception stems abortions.

The fact that a corporation would want to deny (yes, I said deny. If you’re making a Hobby Lobby clerk’s salary, it’s very difficult to pay for contraception without insurance coverage) a woman’s basic human right is disgraceful. People of faith should care about the dignity of all humans—particularly those who cannot afford to have children. We should always be willing to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, and see to the dignity, worth, and healing of women, even when the established religious power says that she should be denied.

Related: Hobby Lobby and the Myth of a Christian Corporation

Christians should encourage life-saving science and medicine. It has been frustrating to watch people say that contraception is an “abortifacient” when the medical and scientific community has said that it is not.

A religious person’s belief should not trump the facts and take away basic medical care for women. Plus, we really should have a faith that is strong enough to endure an eighth grade sex education class.

Christians should care about the environment. One of the very first commands in Genesis was when God told us to care for creation. We were to be stewards of the fish, birds, cattle, wild animals, and every creeping thing.

In the United States, we use more resources than people in other parts of the world, and we are causing our destruction. Wars are being fought over petroleum. We frack the ground God gave us because we’re hungry for more fuel. Tension is growing over water rights. Because of our overuse of resources, overpopulation can cause us to defy one of God’s first instructions to us. Allowing for birth control helps us care for creation.

Christians believe that men and women are made in the image of God. People are made in the image of God, not corporations. Because of that basic theological understanding, we know that corporations should not be considered over individuals.  One of the guiding principles of the Supreme Court’s decision is one of “corporate personhood.” Corporations have corrupted our political process as they have given more power and because they have more money than individual people.  We have watched as poor and working class people have lost their voice to the will of corporations. Our economy strains with the increased disparity between the rich and poor. Our country is watching that gap become deep and wide with the related disparities in our quality of education.

Also by Carol: Sex, Pills, and the Image of God

Now, we give corporations even more power, through allowing the greatest stakeholders the right to withhold medical care to women. Jesus said that we should always be looking after “the least of these.” Through giving corporations more power, we are taking away a woman’s human rights and we are ensuring more poverty among women and children.

As a Christian, I am profoundly upset by the Supreme Courts’ decision. And I hope that other men and women of faith might stand with individuals, who are made in the image of God, and who have the right to access the medical care they need.

Photo Credit: Rob Wilson / Shutterstock.com

“One failed attempt at a shoe bomb, and we all take off our shoes in the airport. Thirty-one shootings since Columbine, and no change in the regulation of guns, ” the comedian, John Oliver quipped, reminding us how the jester can startle us with our tragedies.

The numbers are wrong, of course. The shootings on our nation’s campuses keep escalating. In the last months, our stomachs lurched when we read the headlines. Two middle school students were injured in New Mexico. A student at Widener University was shot. A teaching assistant was killed at Purdue University. A student was killed with a gun at South Carolina State University. This week, a music major was killed by her fiancé, at a Christian school. He was majoring in Christian ministries.

The events continue a worrisome trend. In 2013, someone fired or threatened to fire a gun 28 times on our campuses. In the United States, children are twelve times more likely to die from a firearm injury than in twenty-five other industrial nations combined. Since 1963 more than 166, 000 children and youth died from guns in our country, a number that exceeds the number of U.S. Soldiers who died from wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq by three fold.

In light of all the shootings, it seems like we ought to be able to pass gun restrictions. Isn’t it obvious that we are causing harm to ourselves? How can we, at least, learn how to reduce harm? Why are efforts to stem the violence so fleeting? Instead, it seems like we’re entertained by violence.

Related: If Jesus is a Pansy, I want to be one too — Reflections on Christlikeness

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, wrestles with our attraction to violence in Fighting for Peace: Your Role in a Culture too Comfortable with Violence (Zondervan 2014). As he looks at violence, particularly when it comes to our entertainment, he writes, “Violence is a weird thing to enjoy. Violence is different, after all, than our other extreme impulses. Fat and sugar taste delicious; that’s why we eat too much of them. Sex feels fantastic, primally so, that’s why we crave it. But violence? Violence hurts. So why on earth do we want it so badly?”

The question becomes even more perplexing for practicing Christians. We are called to follow the Prince of Peace, a man who preached “blessed are the peacemakers.” And yet, there is a stunning difference between what practicing Christians would do in particular situations and what we believe that Jesus would do.

Why is there such a difference? Wigg-Stevenson explains that our nation is addicted. In much the same way that we crave other destructive behaviors, we are a culture with a lust for violence. What can we do in response? How can we begin to reduce the harm we cause ourselves?

A psychologist told me about a young patient he had. The girl was a cutter. After living through a childhood of horrible abuse, she had become emotionally numb. The dulling was a mechanism that allowed her to survive, but now that she was a teenager, she wanted to be able to feel things.  She cut her wrists, not in an attempt to kill herself, but because she wanted to remind herself that she was alive.

The psychologist had been skilled at turning around this particular behavior and I asked him how he did it.

“I don’t tell them to stop, ” He answered. “Instead, invite them to experiment with different tools. After a while, I can usually talk them into going from a razor, to an eraser, to a red pen.”

I was horrified. “Isn’t that scary? Aren’t you condoning risky behavior?”

He angled his head thoughtfully, “Yes. But it works when nothing else does.” When the interventions, hospitalizations, and medications had no effect, meeting the girl where she was did cure her.

The psychologist engaged in a harm reduction model of therapy. Social workers and counselors often use this model to meet people where they are, then lead them through steps to reduce risks.

It’s very controversial, especially when it comes to things that seem so black-and-white for Christians. Advocates of harm reduction may not be able to persuade a sex worker to leave her trade, but they might be able to get her to use a condom or get tested for AIDS. A social worker may not be able to get someone to stop abusing drugs, but she might be able to get him to use clean needles.

Also by Carol: Sex, Pills and the Image of God

So, if we as a nation have an addiction to violence and we cannot stop handguns on our streets, can we at least do something to reduce the harm?

This is what Christians have been doing in the D.C. area. When D.C. churches found out that nearly one in three guns confiscated in the District and Prince George’s County came from one place, the faith community began to organize a prayer vigil at Realco guns. The store had been selling without background checks, and their customers were people with criminal records and mental health issues. The Christians gathered, prayed, and commemorated the victims and families that had been touched by shootings. Vigils, protests and prayers became a weekly practice, a discipline for those concerned about violence, a way to reduce harm.

The gun lobby is strong in our country. We may not be able to stop the guns that have been flooding into our streets. Some Christians may not even want to. But in light of what we are doing with our addiction to violence, can we at least look at ways to reduce harm? Can we get behind common-sense restrictions? Can we begin to understand that this is a spiritual problem and try to align what we would do with what we believe that Jesus would do?

Source for graphics: Fighting for Peace: Your Role in a Culture Too Comfortable with Violence (HarperOne)

One of the most fun films I saw this year was World’s End—the final installment of the trilogy that included Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. While the first two were about zombies and buddy cops, this one was about saving the planet from Stepford-like robots.

I can’t just watch a monster movie any longer, now that Scott Poole has made me think critically about the creatures we encounter in film and books. Monsters in America made me understand how dreaded beasts reflect our moment and incarnate our fears in history. Sometimes we use monsters to bolster our racism or xenophobia.

In this particular era, it seems appropriate that robots would entrap our collective demons. Her, a movie where the main character falls in love with his operating system, has been called the scariest movie of 2013. Machines are taking over our lives by making them more perfect and pleasant.

Throughout World’s End, there is hope, because we root for the human. We long for messy, recalcitrant humanity to win. Our survival instincts connect with the struggling, imperfect heroes.

Related: Christianity Means Not Knowing All the Answers

Oddly enough, once we leave the theater, we forget to do this in our every day lives. We forget that we are supposed to vote for the human.

I’m at the grocery store with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and I have two options. There is a pod of four empty check-out stands, wooing me with self-service convenience or there is the clerk, chewing her gum, rolling her eyes, and looking like she would rather be any where else in the world. It’s time for me to choose. I can either have no line, or I can wait behind the elderly woman who is clutching a wad of coupons and a checkbook.

I’m like everyone else. I don’t have a lot of time. And I have the added reality that I’m an introvert, who cringes a little when I have to come up with some semblance of small talk. So, I would rather do my business without any human interaction. I can muster up a barely audible “thanks” for one person who is overseeing the four automated check-outs. That seems painless.

Just as I head toward the self-service, I stop. Then I stand in line. Behind the elderly woman. I can already see from my position in line that her coupons are out of date. But I wait for the gum-smacking clerk.

Why? Because even though I would like convenience, I am making a conscious vote for humanity. I want the humans to win.

Does that sound extreme? Maybe it is. But I worry about the workers in our country who are increasingly being replaced by machines. So much of what we do has become automated, for the sake of productivity. We moved robots into the production line long ago, displacing the workers. Bank tellers no longer count our money for deposit; instead, we take pictures of checks on our phone. Screens entertain our children far more than friends. We donate creative content on wiki sites, contributing anonymously, and dehumanizing ourselves. We can no longer find a human to find out how much an item costs; instead, we search for an automated price-checker. People no longer in habit our shopping areas, asking if they can help us; instead, cameras hover from the ceiling, keeping an eye on us. Amazon plans to use drones to deliver our books, so before we can get over the demise of our comfortable bookstores, we have to face losing the humanity of the UPS guy telling us where to sign.

Also by Carol: Sex, Pills and the Image of God

There were thousands of jobs in our country that used to be thriving occupations with creative minds working through important challenges, but they became automated, without much of a struggle on behalf of humanity’s sake.

I am no luddite. I understand that in our relentless pursuit of the bottom line, if we can find robots that are more efficient, companies will use them. But as our largest corporations amass more wealth while gutting our workers and our creatives, we need to root for humanity. I understand that Siri’s soothing voice may entice us with its kindness. Nonetheless, there seems to be some choices we can make. In the check-out lines, in our creative content, in our employment practices—humanity needs to win. We can overcome our fear of waiting. We can tolerate some attitude. We can conquer our resistance to small talk. We can be understanding in the face of error. We can look one another in the eye, and treat each other like people. We must. Humanity is depending on us.

I grew up along the beaches of Florida and couldn’t get enough of the pounding waves on the sand. I swam against the tide and rolled with the force of the water. I loved the feeling of getting caught up in the turmoil of the waves until I didn’t know which way was up.

But there was something I had to do before I would get to that shore. I often had to walk by a row of surfers, who would grade me. Standing with their lean, tan bodies, they looked me over and assigned me a number from one to ten, based on a few cuts of meat.

I went to school with most of them, so I could give them a big eye-rolling, undergirded with a sigh and a “seriously?” But the dreaded experience stuck with me. To this day, I wear a massive cover-up (it can also be used as a tent), until I get to the very edge of the water to shed it.

The sad thing is that women are not only reduced to their sexuality when they’re on the shoreline. Even in our Christian theology, we have a terrible tendency to reduce the complicated facets of a woman—her intelligence, creativity, energy, talents, and fortitude—into one aspect. We can make it all about sex.

Related: This Pope is a Sinner

When St. Augustine wrote On the Trinity, he tried to work out a conundrum. He wanted to figure out how women could be the image of God. He finally solved the puzzle by writing that when a woman is alone, then she is not in the image of God. It is only when she is joined with a man, when she is one flesh with him, she can be considered the image of God.

Of course, we cannot take our ideas of gender equality and try to compare them to a different time and culture. We shouldn’t judge Augustine by our liberated standards. But, it is important to ask if we let Augustine ideas seep into our current debates. Do we still do this? Do we reduce a woman’s worth to her sexuality or her fertility?

It seems when we determine a woman’s value based on whether she is sexually “pure, ” we do. In youth group, I was often told that if I went “too far” on a date, I would become “damaged goods.” Like those surfers on the beach, the Christians around me were judging my worth solely on my sexuality.

It seems that our current debates on birth control have the ability to reduce a woman to her sexuality as well. We know that contraception is good for the health of women. Birth control allows women to finish their education and be productive in the workforce. It keeps women and children out of poverty. In fact, the United Nations has determined that contraception is a basic human right.

Yet, Christians want to fight for a corporation’s right to practice its faith by refusing to provide insurance coverage for contraception. The voices of clergy tell us that birth control is tearing at the moral fabric of our society and many point to contraception as the reason for decline of Christianity.

When we fight against contraception, we tell a generation of women that Christians don’t care about their education, productivity, or empowerment. We highlight the brooding sense that Christians don’t want women to be intelligent, working beings, but we want a woman’s worth to be solely based on her sexuality.

Related: A Dialogue on What It Means to Be Pro-Life – by Tony Campolo & Shane Claiborne

Where is the other faith narrative about birth control? Where are the voices that remind us that women are made in the image of God, whether they are joined with a man or not? Can we loudly proclaim that the moral fabric of our society will be stronger if women are educated and productive? Can Christians affirm contraception’s ability to lift women and children out of poverty? Can we begin to understand that access to birth control is a social justice issue?

As the Supreme Court gears up to hear whether corporations can act as individuals, extending their personal rights to the practice of religion, the voices of Christians who affirm a woman’s rights have been drowned out. May we stand up with women, with the loud proclamation that we care about women’s health and empowerment, because women are fully made in the image of God.