Why I am cutting ties with the White Evangelical church
In 2010, I cut off contact with my family of origin.
This wasn’t out of hate or spite.
It was because I realized that they had nothing more to teach me and that remaining in close proximity to them would only result in more damage.
And people did what people nearly always do. They judged my behavior based on their own pre-understanding and their own perception of my behavior and came to the false conclusion that I was angry, bitter and mentally unbalanced.
And nearly every person remains stuck with those beliefs about me because that eases their comfort with dismissing me so easily.
And I let them.
Because I didn’t have time to argue with people whose minds were already made up about me. By that point, I had spent a lifetime begging, pleading, raging, weeping—every emotion in the rainbow—trying anything I could think of to try to get them to wake up and see that I needed help.
Nothing stuck.
Because they were—and remain—committed to their perspective, unwilling to risk losing their comfort should they see the damage they are complicit in. The people who sing “Amazing Grace” are unable to see the disconnect between their adoration of a scandalous, transformative grace and the freedom to enter into the shame that keeps them detached from any reality other than the one of their own making.
Recognizing how stuck they were, I decided to spend my time finding a new way forward instead of trying to convince them that their getting it wrong was destroying me.
I needed to rescue myself because I realized that outside help was not coming.
James 1:5 says, “If you lack wisdom, ask God and He will give it to you.”
So I started asking.
I was desperate for solutions over answers. All the answers I had been given in my life—and used faithfully—had led me into an inescapable canyon where I nearly took my own life.
I needed solutions.
I laid facedown on the floor of my bedroom, seeking God’s face and begging Him for wisdom.
And I didn’t just pray. I read my Bible, begging God to speak to me through His Word.
I was drawn to the prophets and the story of ancient Israel and their eventual captivity.
One phrase in Nehemiah 1 leapt off the pages to me, and it became my daily prayer for weeks afterwards.
“…let your eyes be open and your ears be attentive to hear your servant’s prayer that I now pray to you day and night of you servants…I confess the sins we have committed against you. Both I and my father’s family have sinned.” (Nehemiah 1:6, CSB)
Here was Nehemiah, a leader of his people as they return from being held captive for 70 years by a foreign nation as punishment by God, asking God to hear his prayer and show him his complicity in the judgment of his people by God.
As someone who was suffering because of the choices of generations before me, I was drawn to his prayer for answers. He was asking for how to make different choices, asking to be shown how his own actions were complicit in the suffering.
For the first time, it dawned on me that, while I had not chosen the abuse and trauma that had brought on an incurable neurological disorder, I could still unwittingly repeat patterns that would continue the suffering into the next generation.
Another prayer came to during that time.
“Oh, God, how can I see my sin except You show me and how can I face my sin except You hold me?”
The pain and shame of realizing that for all that I had gone through, I might blindly inflict that same pain on my future generations if I didn’t make some changes was overwhelming. I could see how the people who had caused so much damage in my life were so certain that they were right. They weren’t just proud and stubborn. They were locked in their pain and shame, so shut down and detached from the shame and fear, they could not—and still cannot—see the damage they were—and are—doing.
My worst nightmare was becoming like them.
Blinded by pain and shame, committed to doing right, but unable to see how lost and wayward I truly was.
As I continued to pray, I was drawn into more passages that laid out the sins of God’s people that ultimately led to their captivity.
In Isaiah 1, I saw God instructing His people to stop their festivals, ceremonies and celebrations. That the very institutions He had set in place were now offensive to Him because those who claimed to know Him and act on His behalf were missing His heart for people. He tells them how much He hates hearing from them and how He refuses to look at them because they are doing evil.
“Wash yourselves. Cleanse yourselves. Remove your evil deeds from my sight. Stop doing evil. Learn to do what is good. Pursue justice. Correct the oppressor. Defend the rights of the fatherless. Plead the widows cause” (Isaiah 1:16-17, CSB)
In spite of such a stern, specific rebuke, our gracious God offers an opportunity to repair.
“‘Come, let’s settle this,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are crimson red, they will be like wool.’” (Isaiah 1:18, CSB)
As I read through the rest of the prophets, I found a theme.
The people of God were being judged for not defending the helpless, for taking advantage of the weak, for not correcting the oppressor, for refusing to bind up wounds or care for victims and for doing all of this in the name of God.
I spent months asking God to show me how I was complicit in the oppression of the weak.
And He did.
I learned about the ways that my faith communities had presented Christian Nationalism as the Gospel while suppressing and attempting to erase minority cultures. I studied the history of our nation through the eyes of a Righteous God and saw the injustices and oppression that has been done in His name.
When I asked Him to show me the vulnerable communities of today, He showed me the marginalized communities all around me. The Black peoples. The Latino peoples. The Asian peoples. The widows and orphans. The victims of rape and incest. The victims of domestic violence. The LGBTQ+ communities. The disabled community. The poor. The unhoused. The immigrants. The women of our nation whose health is at risk because of so many who place a misguided standard of morality over the actual physical health of our female image bearers.
I am what so many would call “woke” or “radicalized.”
But I did not wake up or become radical because of some liberal educational system or the mainstream media.
I got here by spending time on my face before the God I have followed for over thirty years, desperate for a new path after coming to understand the damage that was done by blindly following my previous understanding of God and His Word.
As I moved forward with new awareness, I searched for others within the White Evangelical spaces who were experiencing similar awakening and repentance.
Sadly, I found that the majority of White Evangelical Christians were being fed the same misguided interpretations by their spiritual leaders—men who are more shaped by popular culture and various marketing tactics of today than their humble, quiet walk with the God I’ve come to know.
Upon walking away from our ministry in 2010, we attended church after church, even getting heavily involved with the hope of finding this dynamic. Instead, we found cover ups, excuses and dead silence from the leaders. We tried to point out the problems—sometimes gently, sometimes more directly—with no real progress.
After our last involvement with our most recent congregation, we could see that there is little to no desire by leadership to engage in the kind of soul-searching repentance required to travel a different path. There is an unwillingness to engage in the discomfort and grief required to see ourselves as the culture at large sees us. And more importantly, as God Himself sees us.
So we left.
The decision to walk away was not easy.
I love these people! White Evangelicalism is my culture and my people. I had such hope that those who claim to be earnestly seeking God would be able to hear His voice. But time after, time, they tune His calls out, avoiding the very people that Jesus reached for first.
My challenge to any of my readers who claim to have a relationship with God is this.
If you are supporting the bastardized version of Christianity that is rapidly overtaking over this nation, do not think that we serve the same God. The terms are not interchangeable. This is not an “agree to disagree” situation or a difference of opinion. Dismiss my pleas for a repentant encounter with God if you need to, but do not presume that we are close or that you are trusted any longer. You have made it clear that you are comfortable propping up a system that destroyed my life and the lives of countless others. I want no part of your “faith,” since it is the exact same system I barely escaped from with my life.
Or…
Don’t take my word for it.
Do the work.
Seek His heart.
Lay on your face and beg Him to show you who you are and ask Him to hold you while He does.
He is faithful and will do it!
And there is such freedom on the other side of the painful shame you don't want to admit exists!
But do not suppose that your current misshapen faith will lead somewhere different if you continue to repeat the patterns of oppression and abuse by defending and supporting the false religion of the majority culture.