Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

Your actual investment in the faith may vary, but if you want to have a meaningful support system for when life comes at you sideways: get thee to church.

the kind of unifying collective feeling that can build up at ritualistic religious events like these—what French sociologist Émile Durkheim calls “collective effervescence”—my

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.

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.

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.

Do you miss it? she sometimes asks. I tell her what I always tell her while she cooks me dinner in my Brooklyn apartment. That I miss having people who come together for a common belief. That the multiple experiences of shunning still sting, years later. That, as grateful as I am for disparate individual connections with highly spiritual, even witch-identified, individuals, I miss the collective experience of calling in the divine. That I miss—that I crave—worship. Religion is meaning-making: something that offers a worldview, a culture, a community.

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?

Novelists existed only in movies like Little Women and Finding Forrester.

“God gave me this big mouth, so I think it can be no sin to use it,” says the titular character in Karen Cushman’s 1994 middle-grade classic Catherine, Called Birdy, something I, as a seven-year-old, desperately needed to read and promptly internalized.* From an early age, I had been, problematically, the only girl placed in our rural elementary school’s fledgling “Talented and Gifted” program, won poetry competitions at the public library with my simple A-B-A-B rhyme schemes, and was perpetually a teacher’s pet. Like Birdy, I felt that my smarts and big mouth were God-given talent. My teachers and the media reflected back to me that if you put in the effort, people with few resources could compete with people who had everything and still come out on top. In such a worldview, God-given talent was, theoretically, enough.

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.

Bigotry is not indicative of an intellectual failing, but of an emotional one. Of a lack of capacity for empathy, compassion, and love.

Women’s virginity, particularly upper-class and noble-born women’s virginity, is historically one of the most valuable global commodities. It was often women’s only commodity, one that was bought, traded, and sold by the men who gave them away at the altar; in ancient Rome, marriage vows were traded between a bride’s father and her husband-to-be. Understanding women’s virginity as an economic good that, for most of history, was owned by men puts other aspects of women’s sexual experiences into perspective. Historically, rape is a property crime; a rapist is ruining another man’s property, not violating another person’s actual agency. That person is not fully a person, because she does not have the right to decide what happens to her own body. In the Book of Genesis, which contains perhaps the most famous rape story in the Bible, Dinah’s brothers Simeon and Levi are not enraged because she is personally violated, but rather, because her rape is interpreted as an insult to their family and their own honor.

This elevation of motherhood in addition to wifehood, specifically, is a marked shift in women’s spiritual authority from historical church tradition. 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.”

In the months leading up to my wedding, I became obsessed with banshees. A figure of Celtic mythology, the banshee—bean sídhe, or “woman of the fairy mound”—is a feminine spirit whose shriek is said to hail the imminent death of a family member. Banshees vary wildly depending on the source. Some are redheaded young virgins; others, weathered crones with silver, gray, or white hair. They are, unsurprisingly, either astonishingly beautiful or dreadfully ugly, with eyes bright as the clear-blue sky or blood streaked. They can be headless, naked, or shrouded in their funeral vestments. Some banshees are purportedly good-natured protectors of their bloodline, while it is said that others are harbingers of great evil. The unifying factor is that the banshee is always, always a woman whose mournful keen of warning can be heard from beyond her lifetime. Once you’re dead, they have to pay attention to you.

If I had a baby with him, I would be tied to him for life, and the feelings that arose in me, sudden and vicious, informed me that this was, in fact, impossible.

You are your own. You are a temple, and you belong to no one.

Lilith was cast out of the Garden for a lack of sexual submissiveness, Jewish legend tells us. The first woman created by Yahweh, by Jehovah God, was born of dust, like Adam—a signal of her equality that a misogynist creator would rectify with Eve the second time around. The stories say that Lilith’s sin was in wanting to be on top, but I sometimes wonder if she was exiled from Paradise for saying no. One thing is sure: she is a woman of myth who prefers the eternal wilderness to marital submission, the solitude of a cave to sharing a man’s bed—or obeying a god who would order her to do so, no matter that he was her maker.

In its earliest days, Christianity was accurately identified as a death cult—a religion whose teachings revolved around death and eternal life, the willingness to die for one’s faith a hallmark of its believers. Over the centuries, not much about this central ethos has changed, save the political power the church has acquired, which has made the frequency and necessity of martyrs rare, although the persecution complex remains central to the faith.

The ocean always has purpose. The ocean can always carry you.

I dyed my hair red, I screeched like an owl, I wandered in the wilderness until I created myself anew. Back home, back at church, among my college friends and the folks who had known me—known him—to them, I became a Lilith, a terror, a nightmare, a demon wife: a woman possessed of herself, bereft of God and country, lost to all hope; a woman who had fled righteousness, whose example must be kept from your children and most especially your daughters. Hang charms around their necks and pray over them before they go to sleep lest their dreams take them to some faraway place where they, too, are inspired to flee the confines of the cross, where a strange redheaded woman, beautiful of face but snake of body, lures them away from the light of God and toward the shadows of themselves.

It is strange, to know that someone played a profound, defining role in your life when you were barely a blip in theirs.

I didn’t start wearing cowboy boots or reading comics till I met Tony. Didn’t think I could write about fairy tales and Disney in grad school, let alone at conferences, until she took me seriously, ranting into the wee hours about academic fussiness and how I shouldn’t let the faculty stop me from doing what I was passionate about.

Friendship between women, between queers, is a category of relationship that has been historically dismissed in a society that has no utility for it, that cannot name what, precisely, the friendship “produces.” The nuclear family produces stable citizens. Heterosexual marriage produces more citizens. Friendship between men, within white supremacist capitalism, can produce more businesses, the exchange of capital. Friendship between women produces . . . what, exactly?

If my husband is the evangelical city boy who couldn’t have been less like my father if he tried, then Tony is everything I grew up never knowing I wanted, a butch from shitkicker Missouri who can strut into a room full of Boston academics wearing cowboy boots and a flannel and spin a story that leaves them all in her thrall. The rural redneck, roughneck boys and men of my youth never felt right, but everything about the way she moves settles something in me like fresh morning dew on a quiet field. Her natural charisma reminds me of my father’s, bright like the sun just before the eclipse shadow. She smells like every man in my family, all whiskey and tobacco, the kind a candle can never quite distill. On her, the masculinity I used to think I hated is suddenly resplendent, a gravitational pull I don’t want to resist. She fucks with gender on purpose, and when I tell her she is the best man I’ve ever met, she looks me straight in the eye and says thank you, the subtle twang in her voice reaching parts of me I thought I’d buried.

When it’s just the two of us, she talks in hypotheticals about the future. Occasionally, we talk about raising kids together back home in the Midwest (platonically, of course), ignoring the fact that we’re both in a tenure-track PhD program, entirely at the mercy of the market, and also how fucking gay that kind of conversation is.

Her adviser is there, seated next to me, chomping on Goldfish throughout the whole thing, and what kind of entitled cisnormal white man do you have to be to loudly chomp your way through everyone’s presentations on a child’s snack at an Ivy League event? (It’s really the ultimate sign of institutional belonging, though I don’t realize it at the time.)

Queer time is different from hetero time, the theorists say. Jack Halberstam reminds us that we do not “outgrow” certain things (like, say, clubbing) the way heteros do.* We do not have a sacred timeline; to be queer is to inherently step outside the hetero trajectory that society trains us to go down from the time we are born. Our spaces—our bars, our parties, our protests—are often multigenerational, and the same goes for our friendships and relationships.

The rave feels like the biggest worship service I’ve ever been to. Thousands of people wordlessly swaying in unison, the collective effervescence of everyone in the room rising and falling together with the beat, as one. The cheers of exaltation. The solemnity of pause. The dissolve of self in the face of holy commune with each other.

I am changing, changing: ripping my body out of the cocoon, shedding everything that made me in an attempt to remake myself anew. She witnesses it all, an apostle to my resurrection, but she has no desire to testify or worship. She has no holy terror. She pulls away from the me who chooses herself, who does not put others above herself at all costs. I pretend I don’t notice, even as I chase after her, grasping at what I don’t think she is capable of giving.

But if you have a choice between a once-in-a-lifetime thing that could be amazing but could blow up, and a normal friendship sandwich that you knew would be good every time, you’d pick the sandwich, she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Citing the source of the erotic in the Greek eros, born of Chaos, Audre Lorde writes in her essay “Uses of the Erotic”: This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone. . . . For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. . . . This is a grave responsibility . . . not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.*

Staring at the blank page of my journal—the journals I most recently used to talk to God, to process the here and now—I have no idea how to write what I am thinking without turning it into a prayer: a petition, a question, a conversation in which the answer lies outside myself. If I am not ultimately directing my thoughts and questions toward God, who am I directing them to? A self? Myself? My sinful, depraved, untrustworthy self that I have been taught to check at the door every time I’ve talked to Jesus for my entire life? I am seeking something, anything, that will help me better comprehend my nascent emotions without turning toward a god who I cannot—and no longer want to—hear. There is no ghost—holy or literal—but his absence is overwhelming, the kind of haunting that, in Avery Gordon’s words, produces a “something-to-be-done.”*

Pain connects us more quickly than almost anything, and praying for someone is a way of sitting with them in their hurt while also offering support. It is a powerful thing, to speak the same spiritual language as your closest friends. To pray for someone is to show care, to offer someone consistent energy on their behalf—spending your time with God talking about them.

Jesus prioritizes his found faith family above blood, above lineage, above inheritance.

I was sparking to something, then, that it would take me years to identify—that, for me, finding friends who speak the same language as I do could create a network of family.

I’d gone to monastic retreats in college, which my now ex-husband had been appalled by at the time. Something about the liturgy and ritual that had bored me in childhood, when I got stern looks from my grandfather for kicking the kneeler, spoke to me as an adult. But Catholicism was a nonstarter as a permanent community due to its similar patriarchal bullshit and rampant homophobia.

Jacques Derrida’s. 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

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. Even the famously strict arbiter of human depravity John Calvin had been known to suggest that biblical writers were not particularly concerned with factual accuracy, keen to remind believers that the Bible’s ideas about natural phenomena were clearly based on ancient understandings of the world.

The general decline in social infrastructure is yet another contributing factor that Petersen cites in discussing the lack of social cohesion found in millennials and Gen Z. Such an infrastructure, she writes, consisting of spaces “public and private, from libraries to supper clubs and synagogues . . . made it easy to cultivate informal, nonmonetary ties. These places still exist, but they have become less central, and less vital, and, most importantly, less accessible.”

Many alternative modalities, especially in New Age circles, have yet to move beyond an isolating focus on the individual; there is healing to be found in decentering traditional models of hierarchy and leadership, to be sure, but there is also healing to be found in coming together.

Coordinated group efforts in worship services, through song and prayer, harness the power of individuals together for a united purpose; it’s the kind of spiritual ritual I was practiced in when I was still actively participating. Say what you will about evangelicals—they know how to collectively call down spirit in a church service and do the kind of energy work that many Instagram witches can only talk about. This is also part of the shame and pain of leaving: knowing the ways in which I have enacted, and been a part of enacting, spiritual work that harmed others who I am now in community with.

But conversations tended to circle back to how we ourselves were in charge of our own lives, our own desire, in contrast to the way prayer was a petition to seek the will of God. Our tarot practice affirmed our own and each other’s agency. You can see what the cards are telling you, a friend might say. You know what you need to do. You just need to fucking do it.

Millennials have left the church, but we are still seeking spirituality. What are our options when the secular doesn’t always feel sufficient but the traditionally religious doesn’t feel safe? How do you learn to re-create a self, to trust an intentional and sacred community after experiencing the trauma of authoritarian extremism?

There has been a swath of media coverage of how young people, particularly women and LGBTQ+ folks, are looking for forms of spiritual expression that embrace us, that validate our identities, and that offer opportunities for connection without condemnation.

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.

These lessons in emergent spiritual seeking can offer a path toward integrating intuition, emotion, and spirit alongside reason, logic, and a healthy skepticism.

Today, when friends share a difficult thing happening in their lives and I know (or suspect) they might be receptive, one of the first questions I ask is: Can I pull a card for you? Not because I think the cards have the answer, exactly. But because the cards open up an opportunity for more dialogue, for more questions, but also for intimacy, for connection—for relationship building. They offer those I love the comfort of knowing that I’m here to support them, however I can. Much as I used to do with prayer, all those years ago.

“I desire therefore I exist,” Angela Carter wrote.

She’s a nurse who paints, and she is the least career driven person I’ve ever met. My work doesn’t define me, she says, and her ability to be so present and unattached to the future intrigues me. I don’t meet many people like her, whose immediate goals—painting more, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail—have nothing to do with productivity and monetary “success.”

this is what the church warns about because it is so good, so holy, how could anyone ever want to be anywhere but here—