The Pain of Watching Your Home Disappear

When I was a kid, there was a big comic book event that I read called Zero Hour. The conceit was a bad guy sought to wipe out all of history by somehow devouring the time stream from both ends. I know…but comics. The ending of one issue in particular has always stuck with me. Lois Lane stood on the top of the Daily Planet building and watched as a blinding whiteness consumed the city in front of her. The color on the page faded panel by panel. The inked lines around her lost volume and became dashed marks. Finally she vanished. The panels became white and the last two pages were completely blank.

Everything was gone (everything eventually got better) and that filled my child-aged mind with this existential horror. It was upsetting. What if everything I loved, everything I knew, all just disappeared?

Part of me feels like something that I loved and knew well has vanished. It has been fading for years and yet it keeps gnawing at me. I have been writing about the unhealthy marriage between the evangelical church and conservative American politics for as long as I have been an adult. And I thought that I had healthy distance from it. I moved to attending a Lutheran church and then a more moderate Baptist church and now I work in a Disciples of Christ congregation. 

But as we keep plunging further down the rabbit hole of this present administration, I feel like I am experiencing a genuinely painful loss. And for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why whatever nonsense Jerry Falwell said or why Mike Pence speaking at the Southern Baptist Convention hurt me so much.

I’ve come to realize that it has been like standing from a distance and watching my home disappear. The church in which I grew up is vanishing before my eyes. It’s not that tidy. I mainly learned about faith from my family and there are many people with whom I grew up that I would not put alongside Falwell or Franklin Graham. A lot of the people who make up my spiritual homeland still exist but they are beautiful people standing in front of a blank background. The rest is fading.

I don’t recognize the church of my youth anymore. And maybe what I see now was always there. I hope it wasn't. But here’s the thing: when a bunch of evangelical leaders go to the White House and sign a Bible for this president saying that he is a great man of faith on the same night that he refers to Christianity as “your religion,” it feels like a knife. It hurts. Because I learned the Bible from you. I learned the importance of telling the truth from you. I learned that the gospel was for everybody from you.

This guy is playing you like a fiddle and you are either too blind to see it, too afraid to say anything, or you are perfectly fine with the lies and the tearing children from their families and all the other things that stand against what you always taught me. You say you care so much about the gospel but you smother it with a flag and suffocate it to the point that the faith looks dead to so many people.

It pisses me off and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart for the kids who are still in your churches. It breaks my heart because there are so many good people in your churches who are being dragged down with you. It breaks my heart because it is shouting the wrong message about our faith to the rest of the world through a megaphone. This isn’t about politics. Yeah, I don’t want you to wed yourselves to politics of the right or the left.

But, this is about putting a vile man and his cruel policies on a pedestal and holding it up as Christian. I grew up hearing you preach about truth, integrity, and caring for others only to rally behind a man who lies, cheats, and seems to only care for himself. And I know not everyone agrees with how he behaves, but your silence in the face of it is a deafening roar. I need you, the world needs you to speak truth to power.

And I know I have written these words seemingly a thousand times, but I can’t let go. You were my home and in your walls I was baptized. The first stirrings of my call to ministry happened in your midst. My love for scripture, my belief in a passionate relationship with God, it came from those churches in the Bible Belt South. And despite our differences, I am forever grateful for all of that. But I feel like you are vanishing before my eyes. And losing one’s home is a painful thing. That’s probably why I rant and rave and clench my fists and care to the point that it hurts even though I’m not there anymore. I wonder if part of me is going to vanish too.

I don't know if these words will do any good. I don't want to hurt and I realize that I have a lot of blindspots myself, but the pain and anger I feel is real and it doesn't seem to be going away. I need to let go of it, but that letting go is difficult.

Music often does a better job of conveying emotions than words. A few weeks ago, I was looking for songs to play before Youth Group and stumbled upon this song by John Mark McMillan and Propganda. It hit me like a punch in a gut. This is how I've felt: