Paula Stone Williams's Blog, page 2

Here We Go Again

This is my summer of of air travel discontent. The season is halfway over and I have taken eighteen flights. Four have flown on time. On Saturday we sat on a taxiway in Dallas for thirty-five minutes as the flight crew fixed an electronic gauge issue. Fixing it took five minutes. Filing the paperwork and getting approval to depart took the other half hour. The flight to Austin, once we took off, was only 33 minutes, two minutes shorter than the time we sat on the taxiway. They could have told us what was going on while we waited, but nope, they kept us in suspense until the end. It was 100 degrees outside and pushing 80 inside the plane.

While we sat on the taxiway I had no idea where we were because everyone on the entire flight was staring at their phones. From the time people sat down after they boarded until the seatbelt sign went off and they could leave the plane, they stared at their phones. If they happened to be sitting in a window seat, the window shade was never opened – not ever. You could be flying over the Grand Canyon, but you would never know because heaven forbid someone should open a window shade and cause a glare on someone else’s phone screen.

I used to sit in the first row on the aisle, to be close to the bathroom and to be the first person off the plane. Now I sit in the window seat in row one, so I can control the window shade and actually look out the window. The Front Range of Colorado was beautiful Saturday morning.

Saturday’s was not the hottest flight I’ve been on. There are a couple of aircraft types that do well with air conditioning when you are on the ground. On the whole Airbus is better than Boeing. As for the worst aircraft for keeping you cool when you are on the ground – a Bombardier CRJ200 wins, hands down. The CRJ200 is a clown car with wings. It also serves nicely as an oven should you want to bake a bunch of flyers while you wait to take off in Phoenix.

I should have expected the DEN-DFW-AUS fiasco. Do not ever fly through Dallas in the summertime. Come to think of it, do not ever fly through DFW anytime. Everyone who works there is surly, even more than Philadelphia, and PHL has a high bar for surliness.

Do not fly into Denver after one in the afternoon during the summertime. The thunderstorms that come off the mountains will get ya. Never fly into Newark, ever, regardless of the time of day. The reasons are too numerous to list. Cathy and I flew into Newark once from Vienna. It took us longer to drive home to Long Island than it did to fly from Vienna to New Jersey. It was a Friday afternoon in the summertime. If you live in metro New York, you understand.

On the list of airports to avoid, you can add Chicago O’Hare, unless you like taxiing for hours on end to and from the terminal. I’m pretty sure you land in Wisconsin and they drive the planes the rest of the way to the ORD gates.

Heaven forbid the flight you are taking into ORD should be late and therefore miss it’s slot at the gate. If that happens you will go to the penalty box (yep, that’s what the pilots call it) until the following weekend. And of course, since you are on the ground, you cannot get up to go to the bathroom the entire time you are in the penalty box. Should you defy their firm orders and get up to use the bathroom anyway, you’d better hope they don’t get clearance to leave the penalty box while you are in the bathroom. For the record, I do not say this from experience, but I have seen what happens to people who do. It’s not pretty.

Other things not to do when traveling – do not get a rental car in Phoenix. The rental car complex is 279 miles from the airport. The same is true of the rental car complex at Cleveland Hopkins airport. The rental building is somewhere across Lake Erie in rural Ontario. You have to have your passport to get there.

What four flights have flown on time for me this summer, you might ask. Believe it or not, two were flying into and out of LaGuardia, which is now one of the best airports in the nation. (Yep, I’m not kidding.) The others were into and out of LAX. If New York City and Los Angeles can figure out how to run on-time airports, why can’t anybody else?

Which airport has the worst TSA experience? Denver, without a doubt. They spent literally 2.3 billion dollars to update the terminal and TSA screening is now less efficient than it was before the updates. How do you even do that? I waited 30 minutes to get through the TSA checkpoint in Denver on my way to New York last month, and I have both pre-check and Clear. It took me literally 30 seconds to get through at LaGuardia on the way home. You read that right – 30 minutes at Denver and 30 seconds at LaGuardia! I have a theory about that. Denver’s TSA workers are from Denver, which has the worst drivers in America. LaGuardia’s TSA workers are from New York, which has the best drivers in America. Wasting time is not a New York option.

Do I have a favorite airport? Yep. It’s any airport where the lines are quick, the workers efficient,  the gate agents known how to board a flight, and there are enough marshallers and wing walkers when you arrive to actually get you to your gate. Don’t get me started about waiting for wing walkers.

Why can’t other gate agents be as efficient as Karen at DEN, or MaryLynn or Debbie were at ISP, or pretty much 90 percent of the USAir people, folks who now have to deal with legacy American Airlines agents who board stray cats before first class flyers, especially at DFW.

I flew with Edwin Colodny once. I sat across from him. He was the CEO of USAir. I thanked him for running a wonderful airline. He was very gracious. Employees said he was one of the best airline CEO’s ever, along with Tom Davis at Piedmont. If I ran into Robert Isom on a flight, today’s American CEO, I would not be praising him for his wonderful airline.

I’m writing all of this on Sunday evening, while I wait for my flight back to Denver. My first two return flights cancelled. American said they can’t get me home until Monday evening. I switched to United. The flight that is supposed to leave at 8:30 is now pushed back to 10:10, arriving in Denver at midnight.

Reading through this I’m pretty sure I sound like that cranky old person who says, “Dang it, things ain’t as good as they used to be.” Come to think of it, when it comes to flying, things ain’t as good as they used to be.

I’ll let you know if I ever get home.

And so it goes.

The Old Lone Ranger

I was reading an article the other day about the difficulty getting biographies right. It is rare that anyone does. There are over 15,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln. As a kid I read every book about him that was available in my branch of the Akron, Ohio Public Library. Even those elementary level books didn’t agree amongst themselves. Did the Lincoln’s really have a three-sided cabin, and if so, for how long?

It took me years but I finally slogged through Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. Lin Manuel Miranda not only made his way through it, he wrote a musical about it. That’s biographical dedication. Not sure the musical or the biography have done as much for the nation as Miranda and Chernow would have liked.

While children’s books, young adult books, and novels get shorter and shorter, biographies keep getting longer. Chernow’s new book about Mark Twain is over1200 pages and if the reviews are right, they give us all the sordid details of his life and none of the fun stuff.

In the musical, Hamilton, the final song is Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. The anthropologist and philosopher René Girard reminded us that it is the victors who get to tell the story. They are the ones who create the “truth” of their generation. Doesn’t sound very objective.

I respect Chernow’s effort to get it right, or Jon Meacham’s, or any of the other respected biographers. Objectivity, however, is an illusion. If it is a subject perceiving the information, then it is no longer objective, no matter how hard the author tries to make it so. I suppose the best we can hope for is a biographer who has done his or her best to get out of their own way as much as possible.

Autobiographies don’t get it right any more than biographies do. I know a little something about that. My autobiography, As a Woman – What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned, was published by Simon & Schuster four years ago this month.

I tried to be as honest and truthful as I knew how to be. Yet today, just four years later, I wonder why I chose to include some stories and not others. And of course, all of the stories are told from my perspective. As I did with my TED Talks, I verified the information in the book. The fact checkers at Simon & Schuster did their part as well. But still, someone with another perspective would tell a different story.

Do any of us really know who we are? If we sat down for an interview with a biographer on a Monday, would we give the same answers we would have given the previous Friday? I mean, the weekend intervened between the two interviews. Who knows what insights we might have gained during that weekend? I am constantly changing, growing, unfolding into the next iteration of me. Unless I choose to stop growing, that process will never end.

James Hollis says dogma represents the afterthought of a people seeking to contain the mystery of an original experience. The experience is transformative, but the attempt to codify it is afterthought, and afterthought turns into dogma.

Our experience takes place in real time, but even then, as Pascal noted, we wander in times that are not ours. Rilke said something similar, “We are not much at home in the world we have created.”

We have lost the great metanarratives that grounded previous generations. In postmodern life the only metanarrative allowed is the one that says there can be no metanarratives, no big stories that explain the meaning of life.

The old myths are being crowded out in our postmodern age, but we need them to thrive. As a species, we impose order on chaos to bring meaning to life. Whether it’s Oedipus, Odysseus, or Beowulf, these stories all have patterns that are consistent throughout history. Jung called them archetypes. The same is true of the great religions. The Hero’s Journey is one such archetype. These patterns (archetypes) come to us through what Jung called the collective unconscious. We form these stories because, as Pascal said in Pensées, “The silence of these empty spaces frightens me.” We desperately want to make sense of our lives. That is ubiquitous to the human experience. Whether hero, accomplice, or acolyte, we want to place ourselves in a grand story.

That’s why biographies and even autobiographies always get it wrong, because making sense of one’s life is a shifting target in an ongoing story. You can’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. Even the Lone Ranger can’t do it. You can peel off layers, but the real you is not at some inner core. It’s being created as you peel off the layers.

I have a hard time reading my own autobiography without wanting to edit it. Interestingly, I can listen to it without a similar compulsion. I think that’s because my voice held all the things for which my left brain could not find words. Listen to the book, you’ll see what I mean.

I was fortunate to have an excellent sound engineer. I recorded the audiobook during the pandemic, and because he lived nearby, Simon & Schuster assigned me their top engineer. Steve used to be a rock and roll engineer who worked on Pet Sounds and Graceland, two of the most iconic albums in rock history. He knew how to get me beneath my ego and into my soul.

We finished the recording in three and a half days. It just about wrecked me. It was early April and before we recorded I had to turn the heating system off so there was utter silence in my study. After a while it’d get too cold and I’d take a break and turn the heat back on. The night after I finished I slept for ten hours. It wasn’t the temperature variations that got to me, it was the emotional yoyo I went through reliving the stories as I read them aloud. If you decide to read my book, and I hope you do, I’d suggest the audio version. It gets closer to the silence of the empty spaces.

I have another book with my agent right now. The working title is When Their Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, Receptive Spirit, and Curious Soul. The book will explore how to live when a culture has decided you are its enemy. So yes, it will also be autobiographical, and even finishing the proposal is hard interior work.

The more deeply you live into it, the easier life becomes. Yeah, that’s not true, not true at all. I was messing with ya. Life is hard. Frederick Buechner said, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”

The Radical Middle

The Buddha famously said life is suffering. The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck began his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, with the words “Life is difficult.” More poetically, Seamus Heaney said there are tears at the heart of things.

I have been writing a lot lately about the tears at the heart of things. I cannot read the newspaper any given morning without being overwhelmed by the heartless machinations of the current administration. Sadness gives birth to anger, and anger works, but only until sunset. Then your anger must be replaced by a receptive spirit, an open mind, and a curious soul.

I have been trying to bring a receptive spirit, open mind, and curious soul to understanding the anti-transgender agenda of the far right.

Before 2016, gender dysphoria was hardly a major political issue. Up until that time it was little more than the quiet stepchild of the LGBTQ movement. In 2016, the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School did a survey based on responses from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 19 states. They estimated that about 0.6 percent of the American population identified as transgender. The numbers fluctuated between 0.8 percent in Hawaii and 0.3 percent in North Dakota.

The margin of error suggested that somewhere between 0.36 percent to 0.95 percent of the population identified as transgender. In that 2016 study, the term transgender was used as a binary term, indicating that a transgender person was someone who felt they were the opposite gender from that listed on their birth certificate.

In the 2016 study 0 .7 percent of those between ages 18 and 24 identified as trans. A total of 0.6 percent of those between 25 and 64 identified as trans, and 0.5 percent over 65 identified as transgender. Those numbers are consistent with many other studies done before that time.

In their follow-up study in 2022, the Williams Institute found significant changes. A total of 1.3 percent of those between 18 and 24, and 1.4 percent of those between 13 and 17 identified as transgender, while the rest of the population (those over 24) remained at between 0.5 and 0.6 percent, the same percentage as in 2016.

That means that while the number of transgender adults remained steady, the number of transgender teens doubled. That is a statistically massive shift in just six years, a 100 percent increase in teens and early twenty-somethings identifying as transgender.

A Pew Research Study in 2022 found even higher numbers of young people who identified as transgender. Their surveys showed that 5.1 percent of those under 25 years of age identified as transgender or non-binary. About 2 percent identified as transgender, while 3 percent identified as non-binary (an option not presented in the Williams Institute 2016 study.)

I presented that information at a university several months ago and a number of people left the auditorium. Two confronted me in the hallway after the presentation and told me they had been traumatized by my presentation. At the point at which they chose to leave, all I had done was present the information above, without commentary.

When the right blasts the transgender community, this is part of what they are frustrated by – the wholesale refusal of the trans community to listen to any information that could call into question their understanding of gender dysphoria.

Whether these students liked it or not, a major university found a 100 percent increase in teens who identified as transgender. If we accept the Pew Research number, it was a 300 percent increase. That is information that should give one pause and be approached with an open mind.

Why have the numbers risen so dramatically? If the percentage of those over 25 who identify as transgender has remained steady at 0.5 percent, does that mean when those under 25 get older, between half and two-thirds of them will no longer identify as transgender? That is a really important question to answer.

It is of less importance if these young people are exploring their gender identity and not taking medications that have long term side effects. Let their individuation and differentiation continue unabated. They will figure things out on their own. Young people have been doing that for millennia.

If, on the other hand, they are taking testosterone or anti-androgens and estrogen that have life-long effects, what happens if they decide they are not transgender after all? The data would indicate it is possible that fully half of them might find themselves in that position.

These questions are not right or left. They are legitimate data-based queries. If a person storms out of the room because this data exists and these questions are being asked, are they any more fair-minded than those who blindly and arrogantly say, “God created only two genders, and the gender you were at birth is the gender you are.” Both are positions of passion rather than thoughtful conclusions based on the best scientific evidence. The Cass Report in England asked similar questions. It has been excoriated by most in the trans community.

During the Biden presidency I was twice invited to the White House for their Pride Celebration. I did not get there either time. The first time my flight was cancelled, but the second time was different. I was aware that most of those in attendance were not people who would appreciate my nuanced approach to gender dysphoria. Just mentioning the Cass report in that environment would have created a firestorm. I decided not to go.

My lifelong friend, David, and I started using a term in the 1980s that we still use today – the radical middle. The middle is radical because culture trumps truth every single time,  and culture demands that you take one side or the other. The middle is not an option. But what if the radical middle is where the truth lies?

Whether it comes from the right or the left, I’ve grown weary of the rhetoric on transgender issues. I want to take the radical middle, looking at the data and watching with great curiosity as the future unfolds. What percentage of the population is and shall remain transgender? Will it be a half percent, as it has historically been, or will today’s higher numbers remain? The truth is that we don’t know. And yes, the truth matters.

Abandon Hope?

Every day, I struggle. I open my computer and against my better judgment I read the Washington Post and the New York Times. It is not the best way to start out the morning. I really need to develop a different habit.

Never in my life have I been more aware of the moral foundation from which people operate. Apparently, many of the people who elected our current administration hold the moral foundation that there is no greater moral good than to protect the integrity of their tribe or the teachings of their gods.

Unfortunately, it appears some of those at the highest levels government are operating without any moral foundation. Their moral code is in service to nothing but their own ego and its tyrannical desire for just two things – power and safety. (By the way, every ego’s tyrannical desire is for power and safety. It’s why we need to grow beyond our ego.)

Then there is another half of the nation, the half without much power, the half that still operates from the moral standard that gave birth to Western Civilization. It is the moral standard baked into the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I typed that quote from memory. I think part of the problem is that most Americans could not type that quote from memory. In fact, many have no idea those words are from the Declaration of Independence, or even what the Declaration of Independence is. I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible the only reason my grandkids know those words is because they have virtually memorized the entire libretto of Hamilton, which is a good thing. Public schools barely teach civics anymore.

My discouragement is turning into hopelessness. That is dangerous. I’ve spoken on NPR and in live venues from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco about solutions to the current crisis. I spoke to a group of 35 Colorado mayors, most of whom held my perspective on politics. Outside of my keynote, most of their time was devoted to the loss of federal funding for most their social service programs.

That event took place in February, when I still had fight in me. Since January I’ve been talking with folks from TED about potentially doing a TED Talk on the working title of my new book, When the Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and an Inquiring Soul.

The new book, speaking wherever I can, serving as Mayor Pro Tem – all are attempts to make a difference. But with each passing week I become less motivated. The overwhelming onslaught of self-centered, bigoted decisions with international consequences has overwhelmed me.

I fear I am headed into the place called, “Without Hope.” “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is the inscription above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. I am afraid it has become the inscription above the gates of the entryway into the United States.

I am weary. Give me a way to fight and I will fight. Give me an articulate leader to follow, one not beholden to the right or the far left, and I will follow. Give me someone who believes in the Declaration of Independence and the future of our nation and I will do my part.

In Matthew 16:18 Jesus talked about a church so effective even the gates of hell could not withstand its onslaught. It is time for that church to rise up. If only I understood the part I am to play.

It’s a Good View from Here

I’ve always preferred flying at 30,000 feet, both literally and figuratively. I have accumulated some 2.8 million miles with American Airlines – that’s actual miles, not credit miles. I spend a lot of time on an airplane. The picture of southern Greenland above is from around 36,000 feet, taken on the way home from London in March.

Figuratively, I am a I/D on the DiSC, a Social Two on the Enneagram and an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs. I prefer looking at the big picture rather than getting down into the weeds. I would be very pleased if my life was filled with people who prefer the weeds and would love nothing more than to carry out my grand 30,000-foot plans. I had that for 25 years. I’m not going to lie. It was nice.

I did a keynote presentation in January for the Metro Mayor’s Caucus. There were 35 mayors in attendance from the greater Denver area. I watched them pour over charts, statutes, and codes like children on a playground. They clearly loved the details.

One of the attendees, a former mayor now directing the caucus, came over to me and said, “I will never understand this urge to obsess over data charts. These people love the details.” I told her that I have been encouraged to run for mayor and she said she’d be happy to get together to talk about how to be an effective mayor without having to get down into the weeds.

But I live in Lyons, Colorado. I have a vision of a town that trusts its staff and works from Carver Policy Governance. The elected officials determine the ends they want to achieve, based on the desires of their constituents. The staff determines the means. It worked for me for the better part of 30 years at the Orchard Group. Why not in Lyons, Colorado? Because culture trumps vision every time, that’s why.

Our town has been around for over 100 years and as far as I can tell, the board has always been down in the weeds. Meetings can last six hours. They start at 5:30 in the evening, the first and third Mondays of the month. Last night we were home by 9:30, a small miracle.

This term I am serving as mayor pro tem, a position chosen by the Board of Trustees. I have a few extra responsibilities, but mostly it just requires me to live in the details even more than before.

I’ve worked in the non-profit world, academia, corporate America, and now in the public sector. I worked a bit with the Biden administration’s faith-based initiatives team during the first two years of his presidency. I was invited to the White House three times. I couldn’t go two of the times and my flight cancelled on the third. I figured I’d just go during his second term. Yeah, well, we know how that worked out. So, it’s local government for me, digging into the weeds where the details live, waiting to ensnare you in their complicated web of ordinances, resolutions, and quasi-judicial proceedings.

It appears to me that most people think I know what I am doing. Honestly, I have no idea how they come to that conclusion. I do stuff wrong every month and misunderstand something in just about every meeting. I do not speak up often. People always think you are smarter when you remain quiet. If you speak up too much, as I am prone to do in most other settings, people quickly figure out you’re not as smart as they thought you were. It’s humbling to see that recognition come over their faces.

I loved leading a nonprofit through 25 years of unprecedented growth. The key is that I hired well. The people on our senior leadership team were fantastic. Well, at least until I transitioned and all. But that does not take away from what we accomplished together with their hard work.

If I have a gift as a leader, it is that when I trust my instincts I tend to hire well. I see what people are capable of and empower them to achieve it. It’s fun to watch. Yeah, sometimes they come off the tracks and things go sideways, but we always figure it out.

The first couple of years after transitioning I became convicted that I had contributed in unhealthy ways to the patriarchy and I stopped trusting my instincts. My work experiences since that time confirmed that not trusting my instincts was a bad idea. I’ve been trusting them again for a few years now, which has turned out well.

Whether flying at 30,000 feet or working in the weeds, I love the work I have been able to do. If life is worth living, then it is worth living robustly, with never ending curiosity, an open spirit, and a receptive soul.

And so it goes.

Tis a Holy Thing

Several nights a month I dream about my former denomination and the friendships I lost. They are difficult dreams. As happened last night, I often dream of our national convention, which I attended every year from 1966 through 1971, and again from 1981 through 2013, a total of 39 national conventions.

My first North American Christian Conventnion was in Atlanta in 1959. I was eight years old. We stayed at a nice motel with a pool and my cousins got ridiculously sunburned. My parents let me buy a Bible storybook published by Standard Publishing. I remember what the exhibit hall looked like – concrete floors and a plethora of colorful exhibits. I still have the book. Forty-four years later I went to work for Standard Publishing as Editor-at-Large of Christian Standard, the denominational magazine published since 1866.

Standard Publishing no longer exists. The North American Christian Convention no longer exists. Yet they persist in my dreams.

I loved the convention because that is where my friends gathered. We ate meals together and planned for the ongoing growth and health of our religious community. It was a safe space, where you could relax with others in similar positions of responsibility. The convention was where I raised money for the ministry I directed, found staff for our new churches, and dreamed dreams of a growing future.

I was talking with an old acquaintance from that world last month and he told me how many people from my denomination quietly and respectfully watched my transition, understanding that I had been called to give up my former life for the more authentic life I am living today. I was grateful for the conversation, because it came in the same month as another former friend castigated me for “always having lived a lie.” It is interesting that I knew enough about that person’s life to have gotten him fired fifty years ago. But as was my inclination, I opted for grace and mercy. I have discovered that many of those who have attacked the most vociferously are those who had the most to hide. When you know that, you are less inclined take their attacks personally.

That world is gone, though I would still be a part of it if I could. For a decade nothing rose to take its place. I was a part of the Open Network from 2016 to 2018 or so, but its leadership was transferred to a group with whom I did not have much affinity, and it died a year or two later.

Last year I spoke for the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference, a ministry established by church pastors from around the nation, including two from my former denomination. I did the opening keynote and received a wonderful response from the crowd. It was the first time I was in a religious community whose response was as animated as the audiences are when I speak for corporations or the TED world. It was marvelous.

I was invited to speak again this year. I led a workshop, interviewed another keynote speaker, and closed the conference with a call to action. After the final session, eight attendees from my former denomination gathered for a picture. Each night of the conference I spent time with dear friends who have also walked through fire and come out the other side intact, stronger, wiser. The conversations were similar to those I enjoyed at my former denomination’s national convention, but deeper. I probably do not have to explain the deeper part. We ate meals together and planned for the ongoing growth and health of our religious community. Most were guys. I’m not sure what that means.

All of this year’s keynote speakers were wonderful, unafraid to go where they felt called to go. I have great respect for their wisdom, insight, intelligence, oratorical skills, and spirit. Unlike my previous life, where I loved the convention but avoided the main sessions because of the predictable messages, at the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference I did not want to miss a single speaker. Aha moments were frequent.

These people have paid a price to be where they are, and they have the wisdom, insight, and prophetic voices that come from having followed the path less traveled by. It is an honor to count them as friends and to navigate through the shoals of post-evangelicalism together. I am grateful for my new friends from the Post-Evangelical Collective. I look forward to many years serving together.

Still, one longs for continuity in life – the book of Bible stories that is 66 years old – the people who stood with you at your wedding – the co-worker you sat across from as you set themes, chose writers, and shared gratitude for the heritage you share. Those things are gone. But that is life. Chapters close and new chapters begin. I think about this as I repeat lines from Chaim Stern’s poem, Tis A Fearful Thing:

Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch

A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be

To be, and Oh, to lose,

A things for fools this, and a holy thing

For your life once lived in me

Your laughter lifted me, your word was gift to me

To remember this brings painful joy

Tis a human thing to love, and a holy thing to love what death has touched.

Friendships are lost and friendships are born. And so it goes.

It Feels Like Morning

Between 1999 and 2021, America went from a nation in which 70 percent of the population identified with a local religious body, to 47 percent, a drop of 23 points in 22 years. This caused the New Atheists to celebrate the death of religion. It turned out to be a short-lived celebration. Since 2021 the number of Americans who identify with a local religious body has remained stable at 47 percent, and now appears to be modestly increasing. What changed?

There has never been a culture in history that did not have robust religious communities. We did not take off as a species until we moved from the level of blood kin to the level of tribe. That is when civilizations developed and our species gained strong momentum.

What brought us together as tribes? As I’ve written before, it was not our need for safety. That was secondary. The primary reason was our search for meaning. Why do you think Stonehenge was built, and why over one million people a year visit the 5,000-year-old historic site? Our left hemisphere dismissively proclaims, “This is just a bunch of rocks in a circle.” The right hemisphere says, “Quiet, there’s something going on here.”

When my daughter Jael and I went to Stonehenge last month, we arrived just as it opened, before the crowds. It was a cold, gray morning, the only cloudy and cold day of our trip, and it felt just right. It somehow enhanced the experience. The last time I was that mesmerized was when I first saw Monet’s The Red Kerchief in the Cleveland Museum of Art. But that’s a different post for a different day.

The modern age was built on the narrow foundation of the left hemisphere and its fixation with categorization and analysis. It only wants data. For the last 500 years we have virtually ignored the right hemisphere, the primary hemisphere, that puts knowledge in context, giving meaning to the bigger picture.

The modern age was also built on the human ego and its tyrannical demand for just two things, power and safety. The right hemisphere is the realm of what Carl Jung called the self, and every major religion calls the soul. The left hemisphere might bring us knowledge, but the right hemisphere is where knowledge grows into wisdom.

Classic liberalism did not kill religion. The two coexisted nicely. Classic liberalism said there is more that unites us than separates us. Religion says the same. Post-liberalism and religious fundamentalism are what brought about the downturn in religious affiliation. The desert religions may have understandably begun as religions of scarcity, but in their mature forms they have become religions of abundance, compatible with classic liberalism. In their fundamentalist forms, however, they remain religions of scarcity, forever fragmenting into ever smaller groups in the fruitless search for power and safety.

Unfortunately, religious fundamentalists of all religions also believe it is all right to force their religious convictions on the rest of us. We used to look at Afghanistan and think, “Well at least we don’t have to worry about that here.” Notice I said “used to.”

And always, there is the other extreme. Post-liberalism also tried to force their worldview on us, becoming ever more extreme until we were left with standpoint theory, strategic essentialism, the rejection of anything approaching objective truth, cultural appropriation, and other teachings that say there is more that divides us than unites us. Only capitulation to the oppressed group, whomever they are, will allow us to move forward, they say. They captured the major universities, but that has now brought about a powerful pushback.

On the conservative side, Christianity gave up Jesus in favor of a Bible they could worship. Not the Bible as it was written, mind you, but the Bible as their religious leaders interpreted it. Instead of Jesus’s preference for metaphor, they reimagined the Bible as a book of literal meaning. Instead of Jesus’s teaching awe of the creation, the Bible became a book of scientific explanation. Instead of Jesus’s embrace of mystery, the Bible became an inerrant book of certainty.

When you abandon Jesus for a simplistic version of the Bible, no wonder you end up leaving a church with a fear-based political perspective that knows nothing of love and forgiveness. There are two kinds of Christianity. There is the kind that focuses on fear, and the kind that focuses on love. They opted for a fear-based faith.

In the midst of all of that madness from the religious right and radical left, where did hope go? I am happy to say while hope may still be elusive, people are at least searching for it again. They are looking for a church that is not going to tell them they are going to hell, but also not going to tell them that because they are white and educated they are the primary cause of someone else’s living hell.

So where are the churches that welcome with open arms, and do not focus their primary attention on telling you that you are the problem? These are churches that boldly preach the good news of loving God, neighbor, and self. They are places in which we can figure out how to be human together, learn to worship that which is beyond our ego, and synergistically serve to lessen suffering.

Do these churches exist? I preach at a number of them regularly. I saw signs of the church moving anew at the Center for Faith and Justice Conference in San Francisco in February. I will see it again next week at the Post-Evangelical Collective Conference in Nashville and this August at the Wild Goose Festival.

If we can focus on love and forgiveness, a movement will flourish that brings hope. I believe it has already begun. In fact, I am getting ready to write a book about it. I will write about what brought us to this point, and how we are digging ourselves out of this current mess. More about that later.

And so it goes.

Do Not Cede Robustness to the Religious Right

I was in London a couple of weeks ago and had lunch with Rocky Roggio, the creator of 1946, the excellent documentary about what the Bible says about being gay. We talked a bit about what it would be like to produce a similar movie supporting the transgender community. It was a very preliminary conversation, but it got me thinking.

Marriage equality became the law of the land because the media, primarily comedic television, normalized gay people. As I have written before, it started with Norman Lear’s All in the Family, which introduced the subject in a sympathetic way. From there it went to the scripted Ellen show, in which the protagonist came out as a gay woman. After that is was Will and Grace, a comedy in which the showrunners wanted to focus on the concepts of will and grace and what life is like for those who are gay. From there we went to Modern Family in which one of three storylines was about a gay family. Today, in television, characters are incidentally gay. It is evidence that our culture has come to embrace gay people, a wonderful thing.

Unfortunately, the same has not happened for the transgender population. We could use a few television shows or movies to help our cause. As Jonathan Haidt said in The Righteous Mind, humans do change their minds, but not unless information comes to them in a non-threatening way. As I’ve written before, I do have a life rights deal for a three-season 30 episode television show with a Hollywood studio, but getting the show funded is a whole different story.

Short of a media miracle, what can ordinary Christians do? First, we must return to teaching Jesus. As I have written recently, for the last 500 years we have lived in a culture fixated with the left brain, the hemisphere focused on what it knows rather than what it experiences.  It is the hemisphere that wants literal meaning, scientific explanation, and certainty.

Evangelical Christianity long ago sold its soul to the modern age, which was not good for the teachings of Jesus. Jesus taught in metaphor; they want literal meaning. Jesus taught awe for the creation; they want scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery; they want certainty.

So they jettisoned the teaching of Jesus and started worshipping the Bible – not as it was written, but as their religious leaders interpreted it. The Bible became a book of literal meaning. Therefore the earth was created in six days and is only 6,000 years old. They wanted scientific explanation, so the Bible became a book of science. They wanted certainty so the Bible became a book without errors, something it never claimed for itself. And they focused on the teachings of Paul, more left brain, rather than the teachings of Jesus, which were decidedly right brain.

Therefore there is nothing more important than returning to the Gospels. If we teach the stories of the Gospels, we will not go wrong.

Second, we can refuse to work from an evangelical hermeneutic. There is no value in getting in debates over exegesis. The Bible is silent on transgender issues. If you wanted to make a case for the New Testament saying anything about trans people, it would be the positive words spoken by Jesus in Matthew 19: 11-12. Do not take their bait suggesting Genesis 1 precludes the existence of transgender people. It is lousy exegesis that absolutely no one taught until being anti-trans became a thing.

Third, stop teaching the rhetoric of the extreme left. Essentialism, standpoint theory, cultural appropriation, and the like have not helped anyone’s cause except the anti-woke cultural pushback. A return to classical liberalism, in which we believe there is more that unites us as humans than divides us, is the only way out of this morass.

Fourth, speak up. There are more than a few similarities between what is happening here now and what happened with Jews in Germany. From vilifying rhetoric to extermination took just 9 years. Look at these striking similarities. Jews were a tiny fraction of the population. Vilifying rhetoric began in 1933. Bureaucratic measures stripped away rights. Jews were banned from the military in 1935. In 1942 mass extermination began. One of the most striking things was the silence of the masses.

Trump in his State of the Nation speech spent five minutes denigrating trans people and ten denigrating immigrants. In the Democratic response there was no mention of trans people and one mention of immigrants. That is not speaking up for a beleagured minority.

The silence of our potential allies is stunning. Back in the day, Francis Schaeffer wrote about modern man wanting only personal peace and affluency. He equated that attitude with the end of the Roman Empire, when people only wanted bread and circuses. It appears most people are too comfortable to do anything about the plight of transgender people or immigrants. It is time to speak up.

Fifth, own what you know. Stop apologizing for being a Christian and start having confidence in the Jesus story, rightly told. No culture has thrived without robust religious communities. We have ceded robustness to the religious right. It is time to properly claim what we know to be true – that loving God, neighbor, and self is the hope of the world.

Yes, I believe a robust church can change the narrative. The reality is that a perverted church claimed the narrative while the rest of us stood by and watched. It is time to return the church to its rightful place as a cultural influencer, and make America what it has never truly been, the land of the free.

I Love a Good “Aha”

One of the great joys of this life is that we get to keep learning new information right to the end of our days. I am currently reading Iain McGilchrist’s groundbreaking book, The Master and His Emissary, about the two hemispheres of the brain and how they function in humans. I have already written a bit about it, but I am just beginning to scratch the surface.

To refresh your memory, McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher who taught at Oxford. He writes that the right hemisphere of the brain is the primary hemisphere, with the left serving as its emissary. There are a plethora of differences between functions of the hemispheres. I find it all fascinating, but every now and again one insight pops out that is so obviously true, you have no idea how you’ve never noticed it.

Humans (and primates) most commonly hold infants in the crook of the elbow of their left arm. The reason is that the left side of a face, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, shows a greater range of emotion than the right side of the face, controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. (By the way, this tends to be true whether you are right-handed or left handed. The reasons for that are a little complicated.) By showing the left side of the face to the infant, you are teaching them how to read facial expressions, critical in developing an emotional quotient.

It is also easier for us to see the left side of the face of the infant when the infant is held in the left arm. That enables us to be able to read the emotions of the child’s face better than if we see the right side of the infant’s face.

Other fascinating tidbits? Sadness comes from the right brain and anger from the left. The right hemisphere has a preference for the color green and the left for the color red. The right prefers vertical lines and the left horizontal lines. The right brain is what identifies the moral of a story or the point of a joke. It is the hemisphere that recognizes sarcasm. If you have a right brain deficit, sarcasm is lost to you.

When a word or thought is on the tip of your tongue, your left brain is trying to retrieve it and can’t quite get there. If you stop trying to remember it, your right brain will bring it forth easily. That is why when you move on and stop consciously trying to remember a thought, it suddenly pops into your brain. The right brain is the location of “Aha” moments. Since it places information in the context of a greater whole, it is the place disparate ideas come together in a unified whole.

Arts and literature are primarily from the right hemisphere. Music is primarily in the right hemisphere, but learned musicians who can read and write music and understand music theory experience music in both the right and left hemispheres. They first become interested in a musical piece because it touches their right hemisphere. Then they began to study and master the piece to be able to play it well. That is a left hemisphere process. If it remains in the left hemisphere, the artist with play the piece technically well, but there will be no soul or vibrancy to it. Once it has been mastered, it must be returned to the right hemisphere for the soul and vibrancy to emerge.

The left brain says I have a body. The right brain says I am a body. It is the right brain that experiences ourselves as embodied. The left brain is necessary to create civilization but complete capitulation to it can destroy civilization.

Okay, so at this point you are probably thinking, “Uh, so if a person has a stroke and loses the left hemisphere of the brain, they’d basically be okay?” Nope. We need both hemispheres. Without the left hemisphere we lose the ability to form words, though the meaning of phrases and sentences is in the right hemisphere. Both hemispheres are necessary for the species, but as McGilchrist says, the right is the primary hemisphere.

The problem is that for the last 500 years we have, as a culture, focused almost exclusively on the left brain. You know, Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Locke, Silicon Valley and all. The left prefers manmade objects, the right living individuals. The right is more personal and the left more impersonal. I could go on, but I’m getting dizzy. Also, I need to finish the book.

Suffice it to say, I like learning new information, particularly when it creates one “Aha” moment after another. Insight is a marvelous thing. I love when the light comes on and you suddenly see a clear picture of what you have only been able to see through a glass darkly. With McGilchrist’s book, so much that has always been elusive about understanding how humans function is starting to become more clear. I find it also explains a lot about the functioning of the current Washington administration. But that is a different article for another day.

And so it goes.

To Everything There Is a Season

I rarely write about my family because my relationship with them is private. I define a difference between what is public, what is private, and what is a secret. What is public is something I am comfortable with the whole world knowing. My memoir is public.

I define a secret as something you withhold from others because you do not want to face the moral consequence of having it made public. M. Scott Peck always said lying was creating a shortcut around legitimate suffering. In my own definition, a secret is something about which you feel guilt or shame. It is moral.

That which is private is just that – private. It is withheld because it is no one else’s business, not because you are avoiding legitimate suffering. For decades only a small of handful of people knew I had gender dysphoria. I do not believe having gender dysphoria is a moral issue any more than not liking mayonnaise is a moral issue. If being transgender had been a moral issue, then keeping it from others would have been keeping a secret. Since it was not a moral issue, it was private.

Now that my definitions have been established, let me say again that I do not write about my family because my relationship with them is private. In Q&A when I speak, I am often asked about my relationship with my family and I do share basic information, but nothing more.

My transition has been difficult on my family. Because of their age when I transitioned and how comfortable their generation is with all things related to gender, it was pretty much a non-starter for my five granddaughters, all between 14 and 17 years of age. If you want to know Jonathan’s deepest thoughts on the subject, I’d suggest you read his excellent book, She’s My Dad.

Jael and Jana have not written publicly about my transition, nor has Cathy. Jana did join Jonathan and me on an episode of Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith and her mother and daughter.

Jonathan is the director of development of a non-profit in New York, and a teaching pastor at Forefront Church in Brooklyn. Jael is an administrator with Denver Public Schools. Jana directs a large pre-school in Golden, Colorado. Cathy is a therapist in Boulder County, where we both live. Cathy and I, while close and still working together at RLT Pathways, do not identify as a married couple. We are good friends.

Of all the people previously in my life, my nuclear family has been by far the most supportive of my transition. My children and their spouses have been wonderful. If you’ve read my memoir, you know how I feel about Cathy.

It is extremely difficult for a family to go through the transition of a father. Our family will never be what it was before. In some ways we are stronger. In some ways the losses are just that, losses, which cannot be redeemed. They can be ameliorated, and the open wounds can scar over, but the scars remain. I have said many times that had I known how difficult my transition would be on my family, I would have worked even harder to live without transitioning.

For years my depression was great, almost unbearable. My family knows that better than anyone. Those with whom I worked knew it to a lesser degree. That knowledge, coupled with the lifting of my depression post-transition, has been some slight compensation for what they all have gone through, but from my perspective, it is not enough. If there was a way to stop gender dysphoria before it begins, I would be 100 percent supportive of it. That is one of the incredible arrogances of the right. How dare they have the nerve to say that we choose to be trans. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would give anything if I did not have to visit this difficulty upon my family and close friends.

People show a lot of compassion toward me. I wish they did the same for my family. Too often they behave as people are inclined to behave after someone has passed. They avoid the person. Virtually no one from my former denomination has reached out to Cathy. Once I was out of their lives, she was gone as well. Here in Colorado, Cathy had highly visible involvement with the church we were a part of for for seven years. After my transition, one single person has reached out to her.

My transition has been very hard on my family. To put it bluntly, the evangelical church has not helped – at all. I know what I did to gain their ire. What did Cathy do?

In these days in which animosity toward transgender people is growing exponentially, it is painful to remember these truths, and to know that it is evangelicals who have driven the current hatred toward so many minorities in this nation.

Hubris precedes a downfall. If anyone studied history anymore they would know that. I do not know when it will happen, but it will be soon. Evangelical triumphalism will implode under the weight of its own hubris, and American exceptionalism will do the same. Their demise has inexorably begun. To everything there is a season.

And so it goes.