Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

In my experience, what drives belief is often not ignorance, but hope.

For many Christians, and especially conservative, “Bible-believing” evangelical Christians, to walk away from the faith is to lose, or risk losing, just about everything and everyone they have ever known. The loss of community and identity can be totalizing, and we are only beginning to create the language and space for it in contemporary society.

There is no framework of restorative justice for victims of sexual assault and rape within the cult of sexual purity, no real punishment for abusers, and certainly no chance for the recuperation of what we have dangerously been taught is our primary spiritual good. What’s more, sexually abused, unmarried women and girls are implicitly interpreted as having “asked for it” anyway, our bodies an inherent source of temptation, “dangerous” to ourselves and to others. If you can make a man want you, you’re responsible for what comes next.

Purity culture is about normalizing rape culture and calling it good citizenship.

His deconstruction is often accused of nihilism, because for Derrida, to deconstruct is to be willing to live in the tension of the unresolved, to risk never actually (re)constructing. But in the hands of the marginalized, deconstruction looks a little different. As philosopher and Derrida scholar John D. Caputo, writing about Derrida’s Jewish identity, puts it, “The idea of deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and native tongue. . . . The passion of deconstruction is deeply political.”

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science,” Hodge wrote. “It is his store-house of facts.”* It cannot be overstated how much Hodge’s thesis, that the Bible was the completely inerrant, infallible word of God, was an astonishing break with Protestant church fathers and the traditional interpretation of the authority and limitations of scripture. Martin Luther, who had been a theology professor, used to acknowledge that the Bible contained contradictions and historical errors.

“One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison wrote, “is that it seems never to produce new knowledge.”

Systematic Theology is one of my ex-husband’s favorite books. Red flags I ignored early on: his perpetual insistence that a word could only mean one thing, and that its meaning was bound up in his own worldview and life experience. That if someone did not live as he did and make choices he approved of, they were a sinner condemned to hell for all eternity. That even within the wide and