Shaky Kingdom: A Tiny Series on Christian Nationalism | Day 2

I’m in a bar with a friend who says with a detached resignation, “I wish I still had the faith of a child.” She had spent the last hour detailing a legacy of church hurt simultaneously heart wrenching and banal. Her story is one of hundreds I’ve heard. Being a queer Christian has forced me into these conversations regularly.

Christian Nationalists want to convince you that the reason the world is broken, the reason so many people are devoid of Christ’s influence and authority is because of what curriculum schools are indoctrinating children with. They want to convince you that a certain political party, news media, or TV show are brainwashing goodhearted children to leave the faith. As a person who is friends predominately with atheists and agnostics, the vast majority of whom grew up in the church, I have heard more stories than I can fit in my memory about people’s reasons for leaving the church. I can think of only two or three of those that left because they found Christian virtues boring and restrictive.

Here’s a drop in the bucket of the other stories I’ve heard of why people left the faith:

A woman who told me her last day in church was two days after she had an abortion. Her priest told her that because she went through with the appointment, she was no longer welcome.  

A woman who came out as a lesbian and could attend church but could no longer come up and receive communion.

A girl who relapsed on cocaine and, when she asked her youth pastor for help, he told her youth group friends they could no longer hang out with her because bad company corrupts good.

A girl who told her youth group friends and youth group leader that she had doubts about the authenticity of the Bible who said they would “pray for her to stop asking questions.”

A man fired from his job as a worship pastor because he said he thought the story of Noah on the Arc was an allegory instead of a historical event.

A boy who was sexually assaulted by a worship pastor.

A girl who heard the story of a Holocaust prisoner writing on the jail wall, “If there is a God, He will have to beg for my forgiveness.”

Do these stories sound like people who were lured away from religion by the evils of the world? Depending on your political and theological dispositions, I can see an argument forming. They got an abortion, chose to be gay, gave into temptation towards an addiction, heard and believed the devil’s lies about scripture. I can go there with you if that’s a more comfortable space to inhabit. Okay, the world corrupted these people so we need to legislate against abortions, homosexuality, drugs in order to protect and strengthen the faith. Let’s revisit what our original question was though: why did these people leave the church?

My friend who had an abortion came to church on Sunday. My friend who broke her sober streak came to Wednesday night youth group. My friend who had questions about how to reconcile scripture with what she knew about the world raised the question to her religious friends.

It was not the decision or the doubt that broke their faith; it was the response of the Church to their humanity that caused them to flee.

Christian Nationalists want you to believe that the biggest and most fervent danger to the continuation of the faith is outside the church. They certainly have a bulk of evidence on their side. The first chapters of the Bible extoll the evils of the world (Genesis 6:5) and both Paul and John the Evangelist caution against the temptation of the world (Romans 12:2; 1 John 2:16). The world is full of danger and falsehoods and I, a sinner, am not going to pretend like it isn’t.

But let us be clear on who killed Jesus the Christ: the Romans may have nailed him to the cross, but the religious leaders were the ones who funded his execution by paying Judas. The religious leaders found Jesus crass and dangerous; the government found him threatening. Christian Nationalists only want you to focus on the dangers of the world, but they have no interest in protecting Jesus either.

Let’s revisit my friend in the bar mourning the loss of her childhood faith. Immediately, I was reminded of the children who run to Jesus for healing in Mark 10 who are stopped by the group of people who should have known deepest the desires of Christ: his disciples. How does Jesus respond to them? He rebukes them: “Don’t keep them away. God’s kingdom belongs to people like them.”

If the voices you are listening to are more concerned with the limits of grace and the enforcement of legalism, and are not concerned with throwing up the arms of Jesus, don’t listen to or believe them.

Please enjoy this free preview of Bryce’s second book, Before We all Die, Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside which will be released tomorrow, January 21st, 2021. E-books are still available for preorder and paperbacks will be available for purchase beginning tomorrow. To keep up to date with Bryce, you can like him on Facebook.

Forward

It was January, maybe early February, and my friend and coworker asked if I was nervous about the virus that they had found in China. I told her I wasn’t, although I understood where her fear was coming from. She was from Taiwan. Her parents still lived there. It was something concrete to her, but it was so far away from me, my experiences, and anyone that I knew.

Our workplace was raising money for the Australian wildfires. While the virus seemed scary and heartbreaking, all it was was a disease. People would get sick and then get better. Doctors would find a cure down the road and everything would be okay. A wildfire seemed scarier. That felt out of control, like it could affect your life in a substantial way: smoke could trap you indoors, flames could affect your business.

I’ll admit that this blasé view of disease comes from an extraordinary place of privilege. I’ve always had healthcare even if I couldn’t always afford my medications or a trip to the doctor’s office. I’ve never lived somewhere without a hospital and doctor’s office nearby. I’ve never come down with something particularly scary or life-threatening, nor have many people that I know. I’ve never had a real, true reason to be afraid of a disease.

As we all are aware by now, things started to move closer to home and the news picked it up more and more. Coronavirus. COVID-19. Pandemic. It was a respiratory illness, and it seemed a lot like the flu. They started to talk about closing down the schools. They were monitoring it, frequently cleaning classrooms. I told someone on Facebook that this was just a flu. We needed to be careful of our seniors, ensure that they got what they needed, both physically and mentally, but our lives didn’t have to change. I needed to make money; children needed to be in school. I thought the guy who was telling people around our neighborhood to wear masks and goggles and stay inside was being exceptionally overdramatic.

With well-over 200,000 Americans dead, and one million people around the globe, I hope it goes without saying I know how wrong I was. Lest anyone be especially concerned, I caught on quickly, always wearing my mask in public and washing my hands. When our business shut down to plan our next move, I did what every young adult did: moved home. My sister, brother-in-law, nephew, parents, and myself all lived in my parents’ house. We pooled resources and spent time together during the shutdown.

Everything felt so hopeless, knowing we’d be stuck inside our houses until May, scared and shocked by the empty grocery store aisles, wiping down grocery bags, and feeling like going outside for a walk was your only form of entertainment. It felt like this could really be something, something you see in a movie or read about in a book. And then May came and went, as did the summer, and nothing changed. We all just adapted, or failed to adapt, or posted on social media calling it a hoax or the end times.

Now, it’s December and it’s worse than it’s ever been before, despite the hope of a vaccine on the horizon. If I’m being honest, I’m scared to get my hopes up again. I just kept thinking it would be over. Now that it actually might be, the hope feels as unreal as the quarantine did in the spring.

In April, I started writing and posting some happy short stories, an earnest attempt to make people feel a little better. My mother, very much not a fan of my typical sad stories, encouraged me. That’s what started this book. Most of the stories contained in this collection were written this year. A select few have appeared other places, been retrieved from abandoned documents on my computer and forgotten corners of the internet.

I was inspired by the things that make me happy. Although, I was not always happy when writing this. As a scientist, I became quickly frustrated by the widespread attacks on people who have dedicated their lives to the dark, unglamorous, often cruel scientific world to slowly make the world a safer, better place. I have felt isolated, betrayed, lonely, tired, frustrated, couped up, and crazy. This book resulted from the space in between all those seconds. Yet still, I wrote this. Still, I’m here.

There are stories in here about surviving suicidality, about being a sibling, about friends who meant a lot to you but now don’t play an active role in your life. I wrote about falling in love and having love work out. I even wrote about my actual happy place I developed with my therapist many years ago. 

As the collection grew, it felt increasingly empty. I began writing more poetry and posting it to my Instagram account, a way to cope through the never-ending night. I’ve written poetry for a decade and never really thought about including them, in this collection or any other. But I started to read more into my writing, into the hope and desperation, the fear and the longing for something more. Some of the poems contained here are from this year but most are from other seasons of my life, poems that still resonate with me.

I added essays last, portions of blog posts I’ve published or abandoned. I came up with a few topics of my own and searched my journals for writings that felt appropriate, that looked at the world with a certain lens of wonder, of hope, of courage amid tragedy.

This collection is a hodgepodge of experience. This book is a celebration of happiness to me, of resiliency, but I need you to understand that happiness is a subjective experience. My hope is that something in here gives you a reason to smile or continue a little taller through the Crushing. I understand that it may not. What may be happy to me, based on my experience and my perspectives, may not be happy to you. I hope you’ll read it anyway. I hope you walk away with something, gripping it carefully and tightly in both hands.

2020 has asked so much of you, but I’m going to ask you for a few more things. This book is self-published so there may be a lot of errors. There may be few. Hopefully, there are none. I ask that you forgive me for any you find.

I also ask that, as an independent writer, you leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or some other fun corner of the internet, so that other people can find this book.

Twenty percent of my personal profits from this book will go towards organizations that help people recover from horrible situations like global pandemics. I want to thank you on their behalf for your support.

I hope that when our lives get back to normal, we remember who the heroes were. I hope that we remember who kept society running, and who society dropped first when shit hit the fan. I hope we remember to visit our grandparents, to care for the imprisoned and outcasted. I hope we’re slower to take the little things for granted. Mostly, I hope that you’re well, that you recover from the scars 2020 gave you, that you carry yourself always into the future while never forgetting the past.

I am very thankful for you and for your life. I hope you love yourself a little more and cling, childish and hungry, to that which brings you hope and light.

With love,

Bryce

December 2020

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Bryce Van Vleet is the author of two collections which can be purchased here. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page). Like him on Facebook or follow him on Goodreads.

Author’s Note: If you have been watching commercials, you will have noticed a common theme and rhetoric: We are in this together. I have to wonder, though, if we are. We are anti-maskers and pro-maskers. We are fiscally-conservative small-business-owning small-government-supporting Republicans and we are fiscally-equalitive, minimum-wage-working, large-government-enabling Democrats. We are the at-risk and the invincible. You need only scroll through one or two tweets, posts, or news articles to be reminded that, if you are together with anyone (big if), you are against far more.

And yet there is something that, if angry customers, snippy emails, and expletive-filled comment threads are to be used as evidence, does seem to unite us: we are all suffering and the rage and fear each of us are harboring are at a boiling point. I recently listened to a sermon on lament and was reminded of the power of communal lamentations. I am far more clear on who I hate than who I love, far clearer on who has hurt me than how the harmer has been hurt themselves.

To remedy this, to tap into the power of communal suffering, to remind myself and others that the pain we feel does not exist in isolation, I have shared my work of lament after the jump. If you have a painting, a written work, a song, or something else of your own creation that conveys your story of lament, we are accepting submissions for our A Space to Speak series. You may submit original work here. If you need a distraction, please check out our free, happy short stories collection Before We All Die, Let’s Have One Last Chat By the Fireside.

Suffering is hard and holy work. May we accept its gift in ourselves and in each other.

Continue reading “A Tree Stuck Inside a Fence” →