Knife, Meet Back
The stupid deep pain of being betrayed by your people in an election three times in a row. A theory and a hope. I love you.
In 2016 around midnight I flung my Republican self on the sidewalk to sell my soul to God in exchange for electoral votes. I wanted Donald Trump to lose. I disagreed with Hillary Clinton, but I saw in her respect for democracy and other people. I could work with that. I wanted Jeb Bush, but okay. I knew how to lose.
As the sidewalk bit into my little knees, I did the most Evangelical thing I knew how to do: exchange my life for something from the most powerful man in the room.
This is in keeping with tradition: begging for mercy, grace, and life as a fundamentally broken piece of s*** that deserves to burn forever in a place God has prepared for us and all the ways we destroy everything all the time. In this understanding of God, some of us by grace will be covered in the blood of Jesus and find the kingdom of God. And whatever comes to those who did not get with the program is too bad. Well deserved and forewarned.
I trot out this part of my past in my work trying to understand our shared future often. This is not my first choice of writing subjects. I could be discussing the new Mirror Palais collection, dear people.
But I was raised on Jesus and American Girl Dolls, and we are in cycle three of Donald Trump running with the support of people we know and love. Readers are asking why it hurts so badly to see their friends, family, and favourite artists support for the third time the filthy-mouthed Mr. Trump. What do we do with this information?
Why, knowing fully well how openly racist, sexist, and anti-democratic the convicted rapist is, would they throw their support behind them?
Why, when it would cost so many people their medicine, fair wages, safety, environmental protections, and more?
Why do they think it is right to make an eight-year-old rape victim carry a fetus to full term and have a baby?
Why choose conspiracy and pretend Kamala Harris’s upper-class liberalism is communism?
Why did no one research what a tariff was?
Why was the violent language against fellow Americans and women not enough?
Why spread misinformation about a handful of Transgender children and think that Donald Trump of all people could put together an administration to kindly and generously guide a community to mutual understanding?
Why does his sin get a pass but the supposed sin of Kamala Harris becomes unforgivable?
And how dare they reach out now like they didn’t just sell us to the highest bidder?
It would take me four years to figure out how that framing of the relationship between people, their neighbors, and God would lead my people to crown Donald Trump three times, and make him our president twice now. It might be helpful to you who cannot believe you are here again!
The theology that believes God himself will violently and eternally unmake and torture his creations for being what they are - imperfect humans- has a ripple effect in our politics.
For example.
Women who are in abusive relationships, raped, or who made a mistake must suffer to the bitter end.
Children who are different are to be punished brutally, and if the language we use to describe them leads our children to beat them? Maybe if other people beat their kids first more we wouldn’t be dealing with this.
Black people and rural little White boys would not be brutalized over traffic stops if they had better tones.
Maybe if the Palestinians were smaller and asked for less they wouldn’t have to be evicted by bombs and fire.
The comfort and ease with the destruction of our neighbors and their bodies is in part a comfort with what we believe God will do to the sinful at the end of all things.
Women will sell other women out over a morally complicated issue like pregnancy and abortion because they have already deemed their lives and bodies as less. They have already cosigned their choices and bodies to other people. If they have a gut feeling about what is right, it will be overridden.
Evangelical Christians will sell their own out for the offer of the Good Old Days and the lie that Socialism Is Almost Here because the actual work of love, community, and sacrifice is too hard when someone is offering to bully your theology into the public square and law.
Feeling comfortable and not having to deal with the people we are disgusted by (and that we believe God is disgusted by) is very important and simmers beneath a veneer of commitment to holiness.
While many of these people are not even brave enough to live out these convictions boldly, they make their peace by voting for a man who will do it for them.
You are going to be asked by these people to “unify” and not let their politics “ruin” your relationship. You are going to be asked to separate the danger and harm they have put you and others in from them. You are going to be asked to be an adult about how they weighed your life and ranked it below their comfort and grocery bills. You are going to be asked to believe that they did it for the hypothetical babies who their party cannot even vote to provide formula for.
Part of this is because they have done this with their version of God: a good and just being who created them imperfectly and then had to save those people from his own system and destroy the ones he knew from the beginning of time would not be made pure by his sacrifice. They too can be good and just while throwing you off the side of the cliff. They will watch you dead in the face and tell you racism is not a problem if you just don’t think about it. You will see in their eyes that if God let them, they would volunteer for shifts in hell to shoot the gays themselves. And others, kinder and softer, will quietly stand behind men who will make your American life nearly impossible. They will remember your birthday, go out to lunch with you, text you hi, and then vote like your fact-based concerns are nothing.
Some have drank too much of a particular misinformation Kool Aid and didn’t fact check. Bless. It happens to the best of us. Many more will see the filth and think of the men they have learned to tolerate in their homes and churches and give him the White House. Dang it. That happens. It’s a mixed bag.
If you are ever to find the still, small voice of God and the Christ who did not run the Roman Empire but died willingly by its unjust system to save us from ourselves and the lies we think will save us, it will be after you have left the church populated by people who justify men like Donald Trump and the predators they hide in their churches.
Okay wait I lied: that small voice actually speaks to you from anywhere, and for many of you it was right IN those churches.
I was told the other day - with spite- that I must have been hurt by the church and that is why I am how I am.
That is only half of my story, and probably yours too. The other half of the story is that sometimes you try to run far, far from the hell that is your old life and inconveniently find God, other people, and grace, and everything changes. You get braver. You repent eleven thousand times a day now because you are not afraid to be remade.
You find that the fire is Love, and it refuses to leave you barren, scared, and selfish. You realize sin is so small compared to the work of Christ and there is not a single atom of creation that will not eventually return to Him. This changes everything. You have no proof of this. Just your tiny life that you keep giving back to God. This is awkward to explain to people.
Now I cannot tell you what is the exact right thing to do with the information you have about people who do not think a little bit of research or reading was in order before justifying their support of an insurrectionist rapist. Sometimes we stay and we open minds. Sometimes we stay and get abused by people who think they can hurt their friends with their choices.
The only thing I can ask you, as an Evangelical whose culture laid the bricks for Donald Trump to rise, is that you believe them when they show you who they are and act accordingly.
Understand that in ten years, your fears and concerns were not that important to them.
Understand that they trust strangers on TV who make money off outrage over your pain and conversations.
Understand that they are okay with risking your life.
Understand that money matters more.
Understand that the desperate conditions of migrants and immigrants will be ignored because some of them were violent in some tragedy. They will tend to take this undocumented violence more seriously than the sexual and gun violence of their documented bros Connor and Chad.
Understand that there is no end to the bodies needed to build this American Nightmare and some of you as Lord Farquad said, will die but that is a price they are willing to pay.
These next four years, please understand where you stand with the people who say they love you. You deserve to at least add to your circle people who truly invest, care, grow, and change because of their love for you.
You were made for a love that calls you into life. You deserve a community that does not tell you to stop crying because you are scared. You deserve a love that sacrifices itself for the common good. You deserve friends who think you can be trusted to make a tough theological call. You deserve friends who do not pretend they are supporting the same people the KKK do. You deserve people who when they find out what is untrue and how they hurt others and they change their stance.
I will tell you what I truly believe God told me when I was eyeing him sideways trying to come back into my life. You matter. Your body matters*. Your experience matters. You are beloved. You were made for the center of God’s love.
Locking into that will give us the grace to know where to spend our precious friendship energy. It will remind us that when we have limited energy, arguing with people who do not care to read a policy or hear what we are saying might need to go on their journey. It might give you the grace and humility to stomach their betrayal or ignorance ( I have believed some THINGS so my capacity for empathy is bigger here) or it might give you the strength to not be the provider of the racism and sexism fire insurance they get from you.
It is okay if the only grace you can extend to people who betrayed you right now is the promise to make a world in which they can flourish too even if they do not see it yet. Pray and maybe God will give you more, but if not just keep doing good. Come in peace, but mean business. It is okay if you need to pull back a bit from people whose character you find suspect. It is okay to realize good friends take care of each other and some people are not good friends in that way.
I hope you have boyfriends who don’t put up with rapists to make more money. I hope you have husbands who value your life. I hope you have girlfriends who don’t want to be associated with the TRUMP OVER TRAMP shirts. I hope you go to a church where you don’t feel your soul being crushed and dimmed by hypocrisy. I hope you know what it is like to be picked up by your Christian friend to get tacos while you cry over election results.
Next week I will try to articulate something useful about Kamala Harris’ concession speech and what she gave us in three months.
Until then, please find your people. To love another person is to see the face of God. You don’t have to save anyone from the social consequences of their choices. You don’t have to cut everyone off, but you don’t have to stay where you are not loved. They are grown-ups. Please stay well. We will, as my friend reminded me this week, keep planting trees.
The Soiling of Old Glory, photograph taken by Stanley Forman on April 5th, 1976. American Joseph Rakes who considers himself “White” attempts to use the American Flag to impale a young American Yale Lawyer he believes to be “Black” named Ted Landsmark for supporting the busing movement. Racial categories are put in quotation marks because they are social constructions with real consequences.
* But doesn’t a developing fetus and baby matter? Yes, they do to me and God I believe. I feel protective of small beings and the miracle of life. That is why I support Democratic policies because abortion is about money. These fetuses and growing babies do not to the current Republican platform that continually defends measures that increase mass shootings, destroy the environment those kids would inherit, mass incarcerates poor children, measures that entrench poverty, police systems that brutalize children, and legislation that cause grown women to die trying to give birth. I am told that I weigh a woman’s life as more important than a developing fetus and the unborn. I think that is complicated and tragedies can have horrible choices woven into them, but still are ultimately choices Ted Cruz and some elders cannot make for a family. I also know the church has often deemed the developing fetus more important than a grown woman, her husband, and her born children. We’re both choosing here. Is there a chance I might be a hypocrite? Always. I say very nice things about loving people and then get very angry when people block my view of the ducklings at the park. But I am aware this is complicated and sad and hard. Due to the state of patriarchy, I find it dangerous to cede this issue to the state alone.