A friend told me that I seemed angry lately and at first it really pissed me off.
I instantly mounted a spirited, vigorous defense laying out the reasons she had assessed me incorrectly but soon found myself trailing off, resigned to a harsh, unwelcome truth:
She was right, or at least she was in the ballpark.
It’s an easy mistake to make. From the outside grief looks a lot like anger. The external markers tend to be similar: impatience, bitterness, violent outbursts, a loss of optimism—but the difference is that the source of it all is a profound loss. Something or someone has died and this is the mourning that has come to take up residence in your chest cavity in its absence.
Looking around at my country right now I can’t help but grieve at the passing of the faith I used to know, the one I grew up believing would always be home for me, the one I once wanted to make my life’s work.
I am witnessing the second death of Jesus here in American Christianity and no I’m not dealing with it well.
When someone you love dies the disorientation is profound, but when you lose your entire religion it’s an existential sh*t storm, so you’re going to have to excuse my unpleasantness while I process it.
Recently, I came across a social media post from an old friend from a church I served at nearly two decades ago that crystalized it all. She and I have remained in contact all these years, albeit through the artificial closeness social media provides. In truth, we hadn’t had a substantive conversation in well over a decade but she was one of those people I figured was on the same journey I was.
She was delivering a fiery manifesto about her undying allegiance to Donald Trump and sharing with great zeal why Jesus wanted her to vote the way she voted. Beneath her Bible references and heavily coded church words I could see it all: a fully ignited fear of terrorists, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ human beings, and people of color—mixed with some impending sky-is-falling spiritual doom that she believed only the Republican Party or the Second Coming could rescue us from. What made it worse is how common diatribes like hers have become, how many people she now represents.
Over the past few years these sentiments have become familiar in the circles I’ve traveled and I’ve spent a good deal of time rationalizing them away, minimizing them, and looking past them. Today, reading my old friend’s words I realized that whatever this thing is that she and I used to share as a common thread has frayed beyond repair. Her Jesus and mine bear no resemblance to one another. I don’t belong in this tribe anymore. I am the outlier now.
That’s not to say that Jesus matters any less to me or means any less to me, it’s just that in so much American Christianity it feels like all that’s left of him are ghosts and fading memories and this genuinely grieves me. It feels like a funeral for Jesus in the religion bears his name here.
I don’t say these things for hyperbolic effect or to curry attention or sympathy. This is just what is. It’s the clearest, most sober revelation I’ve had about the state of my spiritual union: that I feel like something is gone for good. I see what’s become of the Church here in America and it’s like a wake for the religion I once called home.
I’m not sure what all this angry, chest-thumping, bullying, “don’t tread on me” thing that we’ve come to call Christianity is, but here’s what I do know:
- It isn’t the Gospel.
- It isn’t Good News for the poor and marginalized.
- It isn’t the Prince of Peace.It isn’t the perfect love that casts out fear.
- It isn’t Jesus by any measure.
- It’s a toxic cocktail of power, control, fear, nationalism, and white privilege—and it looks much more like the bloated opulence of Rome than the early Church that resisted it.
People have said that the MAGA Evangelical movement has hijacked Jesus but I don’t believe that’s true. They have hijacked the word Christian. Jesus is of no use to them.
Many times over the past few decades, my faith tradition has been life to me. It’s been the place I’ve found hope and rest. There was something bigger that I knew I was a part of, and in the people of Jesus I felt like I belonged. This faith isn’t giving me life anymore. I am no longer finding hope and rest here. I don’t belong in that gathering like I once did. This is cause for real mourning.
But as with all funerals, they are necessary to mark the loss and to pivot toward life beyond it, as uncertain as that may be.
So yes, it might seem like I’m angry, but you’ll have to take my word for it I’m not. I’m just finally accepting the grief that comes when something you loved is gone and you wish that it wasn’t—and you need to figure out how to live differently.
How Trump’s State of the Union Guests Embodied His Politics of Fear and Dread
Trump is certainly not the first President to shape a story by inviting people to be lauded during his State of the Union address. Barack Obama invited twenty-three different people to his last address, in 2016; at least fifteen of them were activists, working on causes including homelessness, opioid addiction, access to education, same-sex marriage, discrimination against Muslims, and more. The stories they embodied were ones of overcoming adversity but also of working with others toward a better future. Trump’s guests, on the other hand, were all survivors.
They survived D Day.
They survived decades in American prisons and, through the study of religion, earned second chances in their late middle age.
They survived unimaginable grief.
They survived immigration.
They survived cancer. (Notably, although one of Trump’s more ambitious promises was to eliminate new H.I.V. infections within ten years, there was no guest with a story of surviving with H.I.V.)
They survived losing a child.
They survived a mass shooting.
And they survived the Holocaust.
The sole exception to this narrative was the astronaut whose achievement was fifty years old.
Living with a sense of danger so profound and so constant, a people would be unable to think of much beyond immediate survival. They could have little ambition for technological or scientific achievement. They could have no vision of organizing their society in a better, more equitable way. With fear as their only political motivator, their only goal could be a united front. If they felt constantly on the brink of extinction, that might help explain why, on the one hand, they armed themselves obsessively, and, on the other, they put people behind bars for decades at a time. And, living in this constant state of dread, they could not have the presence of mind, or the imagination, to tackle the longer-term danger of climate change—which, of course, makes it less likely that a future historian will be looking at Trump’s State of the Union address at all.
Nature, Joy, and Human Becoming: Michael McCarthy
It was the way in which, at the age of seven, in a time of great trauma in my family, I personally became attached to nature. And this was a day in August, 1954, when my mother had gone away to hospital because she’d had a mental breakdown, and my brother, who was a year older than me, was completely mortified. He was terribly, terribly upset, and yet, I felt nothing whatsoever, which took me 50 years and a certain amount of psychotherapy to discover why.
And we went to my aunt’s in a nearby suburb of the town where I grew up, which was greener than our house, which had been in the inner city, and there was a garden, two doors away. And over the wall of this garden hung a buddleia bush. And in those days, when wildlife was far more numerous in the U.K., as indeed all around the world, than it is now, on the first morning, as I ran out into the road to play, this bush was just simply covered in butterflies. And it was, very particularly, very colorful ones, the most colorful of all the British butterflies, four of them, in particular — the peacock, the red admiral, the small tortoiseshell, and the — what’s the other one? Vanessa cardui. And I was very taken by them. I was lost in contemplation of them. I thought they were remarkable. And it was a time when I should have had terrible feelings, but I had no feelings, and the feelings for the butterflies filled this hole, as it were. And from that moment on, I began to love the natural world, albeit in fairly strange circumstances.
.. But it all came crashing down in 1982, when I was 35, because my mother died at the age of 68, and I found, then, to my absolute amazement, that I could not mourn her and that, just as I felt nothing when she went away in 1954 when I was seven, now, when she went away forever, I couldn’t feel anything either. And I did not know how to react to this; it was — to have your grief taken away from you is a very, very strange situation.
And I came to understand what had happened, and the fact was that when my mother had gone away when I was seven, I had hated her for that. I had hated her because she hadn’t said farewell to us or anything like that; she’d just gone away and left me, although my psyche did not allow me to admit that, so it turned into indifference. And similarly, when she went away forever, when she died, the same feeling kicked in. I hated her because she had gone away again. I hated my mother because she was dead. And these are the sorts of tangled bits of your psyche that psychotherapy — which has lots of critics, but sometimes can help you actually sort out, and it did in my case. And so I was greatly thrilled to have recovered my feelings for my mother and to have understood what happened in my childhood, which had seemed so confused.
But I had no way of marking that. I didn’t have a way of commemorating this really big thing in my life. We like meaning-making, don’t we; that’s why we have ceremonies. We have ceremonies for christening; most of all, we have ceremonies for marriage, and we have ceremonies for funerals. We don’t let people be buried or cremated, just like that. We want to have some sort of solemnity, some sort of meaning-making. But I did not have one.
.. MS. TIPPETT: You do, of course, realize how — that the metaphor there, the allusion of that love for your mother and where we come from and how we can’t feel our grief at the loss of our insects and our birds and our blossoms, it’s — I don’t know; I hear it now more, having you tell the story, than I did when I read it, even.
MR. MCCARTHY: I hadn’t — I think, instinctively, but I didn’t make the explicit connection. I’ll make it now that you say it.
Richard Rohr: Suffering for Love
“Hate is just a bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they are forced to deal with the pain beneath.” [2] I guess we could say that King Herod and the poor soldiers who massacred the Jewish children (Matthew 2:16-18) were just not ready to deal with the pain underneath, which made them incapable of compassion—for that is where compassion comes from—holding the pain of the world.
Until we love and until we suffer, we all try to figure out life and death with our minds. Love, I believe, is the only way to initially and safely open the door of awareness and aliveness, and then suffering for that love keeps the door open and available for ever greater growth. We dare not refuse love or suffering or we close the door to life itself.