Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

Listen: repackaging the Pilgrims as well-meaning white folks with pointy hats, buckled shoes, and a turkey craving trying to escape religious persecution is some of the best marketing this country has ever done. The Pilgrims, and later groups of Puritans, didn’t colonize this part of North America for freedom. They didn’t travel across an ocean because of an idealistic investment in religious pluralism. No. The Puritans came here to establish a supremacist religious theocracy: full stop. To them, England had lost its way. They despised what they saw as the leniency of the Church of England and craved a stricter rule of law. For the Puritans, the church was the state, and anyone who didn’t believe this could hang. The first waves of Puritans were extreme in their commitment to establishing a purified theocracy, regularly executing dissenters and heretics on the Boston Common—members of the Wampanoag tribe on an ongoing basis, and Quakers as early as 1656, mere decades after the Pilgrims first arrived. 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. Eventually, restricted by the Crown, the Puritans were forced to halt the murder of Quakers, who were, after all, their fellow European colonists.* Not good for settler-colonialism, if the religious zealots who got here first killed any newcomers who disagreed with them.

It would be a grave mistake to believe that the church and state are, or have ever been, truly separate in the United States. “The idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country,” Jerry Falwell Sr., the founder of Liberty University, a prominent developer of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and one of the most influential leaders of the early Religious Right, said. These last four centuries have been defined by consistent affirmations of Christian dominance at all costs, now fully championed by the modern-day American evangelical church. 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. There are the obvious newsworthy incidents like Muslim bans and racial profiling at the airport, court cases about bakeries that don’t want to do a wedding cake for a gay couple, and government workers who refuse to issue a marriage license for lesbians. There was the early gutting of the Voting Rights Act. 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 trainin...

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. Collectively, these events were seen as an assault on white men and white women’s inherent “God-given” gender roles, on women’s role in the home, and on the absolute necessity of women’s sexual purity. Controlling white women’s bodies and reproductive capabilities is central to the project of white supremacy, but that developed as a secondary, more politically acceptable concern in the aftermath of evangelicals’ initial obsession, segregation. Bible studies, women’s ministries, publications, and conferences emerged to affirm and perpetuate evangelicals’ rigid patriarchal practices around gender and sexuality—while simultaneously marketing the evangelical lifestyle as “countercultural” to the sinful, lustful ways of the world.

likeness.” In Discipline and Punish, philosopher Michel Foucault frames the concept a little differently. Foucault writes that the creation of docile, obedient bodies is essential to a well-ordered society or, in this case, a functioning and effective church. But in order to create docile bodies, disciplinary institutions like churches must be able to constantly observe and record the bodies they control. Given that this is an impossible task in the real world, it becomes vital for institutions to then ensure that people have internalized the necessary beliefs to the point that they don’t require direct surveillance in order to behave. 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.

Because scripture itself doesn’t say what evangelical leaders want it to say about sexual purity, they’ve created other sacred texts instead. The first purity icon to emerge was Elisabeth Elliot, whose Passion and Purity, published in 1984, during the Reagan years, was part autobiography, part instruction guide on how to find a godly man and engage in a pure, God-honoring romantic relationship prior to marriage. The book largely focuses on Elliot’s relationship and marriage with her first husband, Jim Elliot, a missionary, which began in the 1940s and ended with his death in 1956.

Scott’s faith and life, with an accompanying devotional tie-in. For the price of financial backing from the NRA that keeps conservative evangelical Christians in power, politicians and voters are willing to sacrifice their own children to gun violence—at least they will become martyrs who can continue to rally the church. Unregulated gun culture has created a new kind of martyr myth, one uniquely tailored for the rise of religious extremism in the twenty-first century: teenagers purportedly dying for their faith in school shootings, and also dying for their parents’ so-called right to have automatic weapons, as per the Second Amendment.

The way that some people read the Bible affects how they read the Constitution—and how they want Supreme Court justices to read it, too. The United States has the oldest active codified constitution in the world, and yet it also remains one of the most unchanged—a fact that is sometimes attributed to the influence of evangelicals’ insistence on scriptural “inerrancy” that has come to inflect our founding documents. “One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison wrote, “is that it seems never to produce new knowledge.”*