Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

The pursuit of one’s own religious “freedom” is a convenient justification for terrorizing others; this, not pluralism, is America’s real religious and political origin.

Schoolchildren recite a commitment to a Christian nation, one that was made law by an evangelical Presbyterian president,* encouraged by his evangelical adviser. “Out of faith in God, and through faith in themselves as His children, our forefathers designed and built the Republic,” Eisenhower said in a 1953 radio address, keen to encourage faith as an antidote to the perceived threat of communism.*

For a faith so famous for its stalwartness, it’s important to remember that it was born on the frontier, a movement that relies on moving its goalposts, on motivating its base believers toward retaining supremacy by constantly identifying new threats to its survival. First Indigenous peoples. Civil rights. The women’s movement. LGBTQ+ equality. Universal health care. Abortion. Evangelicalism perceives the most basic assertions of human dignity as threats to its power, and it uses the language of history and nostalgia to conflate and communicate these fears.

To wit: in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, a staggering 70 percent of Southern Baptist pastors supported abortion to protect the physical or mental health of the mother,* and in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) came to a denomination-wide resolution supporting legislation that would “allow the possibility of abortion” under a wide number of conditions.* They didn’t flip sides until well after Roe was decided—it was the increasingly unpopular and, of course, illegal practice of segregation that caused white evangelicals to seek out new issues to coalesce under.

It was the anti-Black Southern Strategy that would ultimately make the word “evangelical” indistinguishable from “Republican” while obscuring the explicitly racist goals of its economic policy with talk of “states’ rights” and “family values.”

But power is also often invisible, something that can escape conscious recognition. Power exists in the language we start absorbing from the time we are in our parents’ wombs, in the experiences for which there are no words; in who can say what to whom without repercussion. Power is not always solely possessed by certain individuals; it is also the unseen mechanism that informs how we position ourselves every day, how we make decisions in deference to whom—to God, to authority, or even to ourselves.

Today, heretics are symbolically executed. Non-evangelicals are punished on a social and civic level: you don’t ever have to have stepped foot in a church, let alone left one, to feel the efforts of American evangelicals pressing on your life.

But the everyday way the evangelical faith functions to govern and guide communities across the United States is a lot more in keeping with what philosopher Louis Althusser called ideological state apparatuses: via the ostensibly apolitical social institutions (churches, schools) that ultimately function to serve the state in training citizens to be good, obedient subjects.

Evangelicalism is defined by fear, any singular threat automatically interpreted as a threat to the whole: fallen Christians, like apples gone bad, pose a risk to the entire batch.

In spite of the fact that Jesus said that the second-greatest commandment was to love your neighbor as yourself, “love” has a specific meaning in evangelical Christianity. Believers must demonstrate the purity and truth of one’s faith through the abasement of oneself and through one’s conformity to “what God wants”—which is to say, one’s pastor’s interpretation of what the scripture asks one to do. There is little love, compassion, and empathy for individuals within the community, and even less for nonbelievers. In this framework, the only way you can possibly extend compassion to others is to try to introduce someone to the only way you can access compassion, which is through a personal relationship with Jesus, perhaps mediated through church leadership. The result is unyielding chains of judgment and criticism in an effort to fall in line and compel others to fall in line, a knowledge that obedience—not love—is the primary mechanism through which one demonstrates that one has received Christ’s love—which is, the gift of salvation from eternal damnation

Religious trauma syndrome, first proposed by psychologist Marlene Winell in 2011, is not in psychology’s treasured DSM; it’s new and, depending on who you talk to, controversial. People who fit the bill can experience a wide-ranging assortment of symptoms that look remarkably like those of folks who experience PTSD.

But I do not miss the authoritarian, rigidly patriarchal spaces where only men are onstage and in charge, where whiteness is the default. I do not miss preachers who wield scripture against me, who tell me that my obedience is the only valid expression of my spirituality. I do not miss the scriptural and hymnal insistence on humanity’s depravity and worthlessness. I do not miss being in spaces that diminish and demean women, that outright deny the validity and existence of queer and trans people, that would insist on established torture practices like conversion therapy to suppress us. I do not miss the people who tell me that they love me but hate my sin, and I do not miss—and still struggle with shame for—the version of myself who used to say that.

But I also know this: that there is something to the sacred, something special that happens when people gather communally, intentionally, and call on something greater than themselves. That community matters, that ritual matters, and that religion is one of the few bastions in an increasingly digital, disconnected world where we unlock the power of those things. But when we walk away from the harm of some organized religions, how do we recover the communal sacred for ourselves?

The Midwest is often called the heartland, a term associated with “mainstream” or “traditional” white values. The heartland is different from the Bible Belt, but there’s some overlap. Notably, the heartland and Bible Belt are two terms used to denote unofficial regions of the country that didn’t enter the American lexicon until the twentieth century, when the regional relationships with morality, religion, and political conservatism emerged in the wake of Prohibition, white women’s suffrage, and the midcentury civil rights movement.* As historian Kristin L. Hoganson puts it, “National mythologies have dumped an overwhelming load of baggage on the heartland’s shoulders.”*

Numerous studies have been done on Americans’ proclivity, in particular, for calling themselves middle class even when they are obscenely rich or obviously poor. A 2015 Pew Research survey revealed that almost 50 percent of Americans consider themselves to be middle class, with the number increasing if you take into account the qualifying descriptors of upper or lower middle class.* It goes back to the Protestant work ethic: to be middle class is to be moderate and hardworking. When presidents need to stoke morale around economic policy, they talk about having a “strong middle class.” After all, to be rich is to have a difficult time getting to heaven (as Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”*). To be poor is to be associated with an often racialized, “unAmerican” lack of discipline. Middle class is the marketing slogan.

I didn’t understand, then, that upward mobility usually has a ceiling, that the rags-to-riches exceptions who thank God in their Oscar and inaugural speeches are trotted out as examples that the American Dream works. But exceptionalism is a feature, not a bug, one designed to keep everyone else in their place. For religious Christians, the idea that what’s happening to you is “God’s will” is an essential part of this mythology.

The American Dream is a classic case of what the late theorist Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism”; which is to say, optimism is cruel when it does not—and, in fact, will not—measure up to what it has promised. For Berlant, this promise of the possible is especially cruel when the attachment to the promise, or optimism, continues to sustain even when what is sought is nonexistent. “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” Berlant says, such as the attachment to upward mobility. The fear that drives the maintenance of this condition is that “the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything.”*

The cruel optimism of America is supported by the mythos of God’s will in evangelical Christianity. The myth of the American Dream also performs a kind of racial isolation and siloing, a keeping of one’s own. Berlant says, “The American Dream does not allow a lot of time for people it is not convenient or productive to have curiosity about.”*

As Lauren Michelle Jackson writes in White Negroes, “Nothing is as predictive of success in America as being born white.”* Even white people born at the bottom of the class ladder are miles ahead, socioeconomically speaking, of people of color. A 2016 study that Jackson cites in her book from the Institute for Policy Studies “found that if current trends continue, the average black family won’t reach the amount of wealth white families own today for another 228 years.”* For so many Black Americans and other people of color, hard work is simply not enough to bridge that gap in this lifetime, and to pretend (and legislate) as if the reality is otherwise is profoundly harmful.

The Protestant work ethic has helped shape and create the ideal American citizen, which is to say, American whiteness, and the justification of white supremacy. Even more insidious is its encoding of “hard work” and “discipline” as the fruits of a godly life. American evangelicalism can reasonably be called a civil folk religion because of rhetoric like this: these religious ideas that have so smoothly transposed Puritanical theology into the mainstream and shifted it into a kind of xenophobic patriotism, transforming instructions on “how to be a good Christian” into an instruction manual for how to be an “America first” citizen. This is how it became possible for anyone to vote in line with evangelicals—or to consider themself an evangelical—without ever stepping foot in a church in the first place. This conflation of faith and politics has led to a collective forgetting of the foundational role of religion in white supremacy. This purposefully cultivated amnesia has occurred to the collective detriment of the United States, directly contributing to the rise of fascism.

In the current media climate, even preceding the election of the forty-fifth president, being religious was associated with being uneducated. And when the media says “uneducated,” what they actually mean is “bigoted.” There is a linguistic gymnastics happening here, coded for liberal white people’s comfort: if we are educated, if we are smart, therefore we cannot possibly be in that same group as those other white people, those bad white people who have those traditional and racist and sexist views, who save themselves for marriage and who value obedience to an invisible God and fall for Republicans like Trump.

The idea often associated with leftist thinking that religion is for people who are weak, stupid, or otherwise incapable of fending or thinking for themselves is deeply harmful. It’s colonialist, itself an idea embedded in white supremacist enlightenment, dismissive of animist traditions the world over and other Indigenous traditions. The same progressive thinking that wants to halt climate change in its tracks and favors turning over land management to Indigenous populations for their generational wisdom often fails to understand the ways in which that wisdom is itself grounded in animist traditions that treat the land with respect precisely because it is itself possessed of spirit.

Education, conceptually, is neutral, but institutions are not. Institutions have a goal. Schools were cited by theorist Louis Althusser as having replaced the church in America as the primary ideological state apparatus of the twentieth century; ideological in opposition to more visible repressive state apparatuses like the military.

It belies the naive liberal mythology that intellect somehow correlates to a lack of bigotry. Critical thinking can be and is readily employed in the service of tradition, of conservatism, of fascism, of bigotry. How else does horrific injustice become codified law? How else do multinational corporations become multinational corporations? White liberals’ commitment to the innate morality of a “good” education is embarrassingly spoon-fed, and is specifically designed to excuse them from examining their own psyches too closely, lest they not like what they find. Bigotry is not indicative of an intellectual failing, but of an emotional one. Of a lack of capacity for empathy, compassion, and love.

While Christianity, like most every major religion and state power, has historically commodified women’s sexuality into a good that can be bought and sold, training women to commodify themselves is new. Put another way: it is an old cultural value with new religious marketing.

In order to understand the emergence and popularity of purity culture in the latter half of the twentieth century, it’s essential to understand that it is, in part, a reactive movement against the slow but steady progressions in gender equality and sexual freedom, particularly in the United States. Saving oneself for marriage is often marketed as protection against the evils of abortion and feminism, which white evangelicals have been taught to fear as implicit threats to racial “purity.”

Evangelicals interpret women’s sexuality, exercised without men’s permission, as a direct threat to the faith; women assuming control and asserting their agency in any capacity is perceived as a sin against the God-ordained order of things in which white men are in charge of churches, marriages, and countries alike. Bearing this in mind, we should find it unsurprising to realize that the evangelical marketing push for purity culture emerged and consolidated itself specifically in response to the women’s, civil rights, and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Congress’ Title V Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Program (also known as AOUM) was federally funded, theoretically part of a 1996 welfare reform package, but in reality, a conservative, reactionary response to the comprehensive sex education and HIV education programs that grew out of the feminist and gay rights movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The US government spent more than $2 billion funding abstinence-only programs between 1982 and 2017, and more than $1.6 billion in foreign assistance promoting AOUM around the globe.* AOUM expired in 2009, but Congress has already replaced it several times over with the “Competitive Abstinence Program” and, most recently, “Sexual Risk Avoidance Education.”

As long as the rights of the church are protected, contemporary evangelicals do not see their support of policies that infringe on others’ autonomy as anything but maintaining their rightful foothold in American politics.

This is the endgame: Christianity builds a prison inside a person. The Holy Spirit is Foucault’s ideal panopticon, the penitentiary where inmates never know if they are being watched, a system of surveillance that requires no external guards, instead running entirely on internal self-policing. The real-life result is an entire voting bloc of the citizenry more concerned with obeying an invisible sky god than engaging with systemic oppression or truly loving their neighbor.

assault. The framework of purity culture, so particularly insistent on women’s virginity, teaches us, insidiously, that boys are allowed sexual transgressions in a way girls are not. “In the evangelical community, an ‘impure’ girl or woman isn’t just seen as damaged; she’s considered dangerous,” Linda Kay Klein writes in Pure.* 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.

Evangelicals’ interpretation of gender and sexuality outright rejects the existence of queerness and gender expansiveness, of folks who do not want to marry or have children, of folks who are not monogamous. Purity culture then categorically lumps any nonheteronormative behavior together with sexual abuse as “sin.”

No matter the power she may accrue in the secular world, even if devout or in the service of proselytizing, a woman is beholden and subject to evangelical standards—and in the church, a woman’s job is to surrender. There should be a father, husband, or pastor to step in and speak for her. In evangelical Christianity, the strength of a woman’s personal relationship with God is not based on her own testimony, but on how visible that testimony is to others; which is to say, how well she performs the right kind of Christianity.

Purity culture is about normalizing rape culture and calling it good citizenship. The god who insists on sexual purity is the same god who has exceptionally blessed America above all other nations—who has put white men in charge, whose will, according to the Republican Party, is that women not receive the reproductive health care we so desperately need, not have any agency whatsoever over what happens to our bodies, let alone any recourse for justice.

As Beth Allison Barr writes in The Making of Biblical Womanhood, the Protestant Reformation changed things: before it, women could gain spiritual authority by rejecting their sexuality, by becoming nuns and taking religious vows. But after the Reformation, the opposite proved true for Protestants. “The more closely they identified with being wives and mothers,” Barr writes, “the godlier they became.”*

This is evangelicalism today: the civil religion of white fear, of brittle ego, of sameness that cannot abide any difference whatsoever. It is predicated on the cruel optimism of denial: Christianity continues to believe its own underdog hype even as it achieved world dominance.

However, even as there is a resurgence of alternative modalities, there is often a stigma in liberal and progressive circles associated with recognizing any kind of other-than-human influence or higher power at all. Many of us flee from the conservative orthodoxy of evangelical Christianity only to encounter a similarly orthodox commitment to Enlightenment rationalism and “objectivity,” itself rooted in the denial of intuition, emotion, and other knowledges that are coded as feminine and therefore less than. There is a rich opportunity, then, especially in queer communities, to interrogate the oppressive structures that devalue our experiences, regardless of whether they are rooted in organized religion or secular philosophy. These lessons in emergent spiritual seeking can offer a path toward integrating intuition, emotion, and spirit alongside reason, logic, and a healthy skepticism.

Brené Brown, a sociologist and researcher, defines shame as the belief that we are flawed and unworthy of love and belonging, that we are undeserving of any connection itself.* Shame is different from guilt; it is not productive or useful, and its ability to isolate us from each other is profoundly degenerative to the human condition. According to the findings of Dr. Brown and her team, the antidote to shame is simultaneously simple and complex: empathy.*

This is what the church wanted us to fear, but it is, in fact, the erotic that they fear, women and queers and people the world over imbued with the force of its grounded confidence and power.

The church is broken. It cannot be fixed from the inside. Evangelicalism is rotten, shot through to the core with the kind of infectious hatred that cannot be undone one person at a time. The institution is designed to work against women, against queers, against anyone who isn’t white, against anyone who wakes up while still plugged in; it’s designed to press on us until we are crushed within it, unrecognizable to ourselves. Leave it behind. Burn it down. Go build something new. And know this: You aren’t alone. You were never alone. The damage the church has done is extraordinary; witness the wake of its destruction, of its spiritual abuse and political maneuvering. Human beings are driven by belonging, by hope. The urge to believe in and belong to ourselves, to each other, and to something greater is real and profound—and the harm that it has caused in the past need not continue in the future. There are other systems. There are other ways.

Queer joy is not hierarchical. Queerness is the freedom to belong to yourself and others without societal restriction, without the bonds of natal family, hierarchy, and the state pressing on you. “Queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world,” José Estaban Muñoz writes.* Queerness is getting to invent the communal structures that best serve your beloveds in real time.

This is the truth about queer people: We have resurrected ourselves. We are born again. Our tombs are empty. We are risen.