Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

A devout born-again evangelical Christian for, at the time, my entire twenty-five years of life, the divorce would declare publicly, for my faith community from the Midwest to the East Coast to see, that God was not enough for me—that my belief had faltered. Even if trying to suppress my queerness had felt like a kind of death and had driven me to consider taking my own life, I knew these struggles would not matter to my husband, my family, and to fellow evangelicals, to whom it would appear that I was purposefully, belligerently straying from the straight and narrow.

I was leaving the Garden, the evangelical church, and the only version of myself that I had ever known. I was choosing who I wanted to be—but I had no idea who she was.

if you want to have a meaningful support system for when life comes at you sideways: get thee to church.

Any social life outside of school revolved around church: Sunday school in the early mornings and seeing if I could tag along later with the junior high kids who were in the youth group my mom led, Vacation Bible School in the summer, and evening potlucks with other church families.

These early moments of friction began to draw me to feminism before I even had a name for it. But at church, I already knew better than to argue that the girls were treated unfairly, and I kept my opinions to myself.

In spite of the fact that my dad was what believers call a “baby Christian,” the evangelical emphasis on “male headship” in marriage meant that my mom’s decades of faith and our years of investment in the church plant were rendered meaningless—my dad was now the spiritual head of our household and would get to decide all religious matters, including where we went to church.

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.

Calvary had a heightened level of intercommunity surveillance that trickled down from the senior pastor to the youth leaders to the congregants.

Schoolchildren recite a commitment to a Christian nation, one that was made law by an evangelical Presbyterian president,* encouraged by his evangelical adviser.

It would be a grave mistake to believe that the church and state are, or have ever been, truly separate in the United States.

After I stopped attending church with my husband, filed for divorce, and slowly came out, my Christian community stopped reaching out to me. My college friends, who were my closest friends, and also my most religious friends, wouldn’t respond to my emails or texts. One by one, folks dropped off as I reached out, as I said, Hey, I’m struggling.

This was simply their years of evangelical training in action: the accepted practices that, when a fellow believer “falls” into “temptation,” you can try to have a corrective conversation, or you can use the power of silence, of shunning.

For all the talk of Christ’s love, there isn’t a lot of compassion or empathy within white American evangelicalism.

Religious trauma is something that many people in this country are walking around with, without having a label for it.

But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.”*

Heightened volume, the kind of internal disruption that leaves bruises on another person the next morning.

raised, fists slamming the table. He rises to stand over her, and we crouch in our seats, crying. Mom rises to meet him; she fights back, she always fights back. I scream at my dad to stop.

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. * * *

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

I was one of millions of American teenagers in the late 1990s and early 2000s who were part of a mass revival of purity culture. Beyond the effects ingrained into public education systems, there was an entire evangelical-driven cottage industry organized around the perpetuation of abstinence-only education, “True

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,

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.

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;

Controlling white women’s bodies and reproductive capabilities is central to the project of white supremacy,

Listen to me, Jeanna: You can’t change men. You can only marry the right one. As long as he loves God more than he loves you, you’ll be fine.

boys consistently receive the simultaneous message that they are going to assume power in their adulthood. Men are told that they are God’s chosen ones. It will be their job to lead a household, a church, a country—this is what they grow up seeing modeled in both their faith communities and the secular United States. For women of faith, there is no such promise of agency or power tempering the message of total surrender and obedience, only the constant reminder that a complete denial of self is what makes you faithful.

There, these women pulled out their Bibles and told me, a seventeen-year-old girl, all the ways my body was wrong. They reiterated how inappropriate my clothing was. They told me I was tempting my brothers to sin, that I was too loud, too flirtatious, and that I shouldn’t laugh at boys’ jokes, as it encouraged them.

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

The words—“teachable,” “submissive”—lingered in the air after the speech was over. I deliberately suppressed my discomfort at how trapped I felt. This was my new role: I was his wife now. I couldn’t express my displeasure; I had to be nice to his friends, no matter what they said about me.

My new husband was totally oblivious to my emotions. It was as if we were attending two separate wedding receptions.

He would tell me that he was going to sin, and that it would be my fault. In this instance, “sin” is evangelical code for “masturbate”;

According to evangelical logic, his sin would be my fault, since he wanted to have sex with me, his wife, and I was the one denying him—and he, a man with uncontrollable sexual urges, would be driven to pursue them elsewhere, outside marriage. In

This is why my mother advised me to never say no—because once you say no to your husband, you find out who he really is.

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.

A dead wife is better than a bad wife was a phrase that cycled through my head, over and over, on repeat. Walking into the ocean while I still had a modicum of faith to my name felt like a better option. I was in Boston, after all. The ocean was right there.

To stay in my marriage, I realized, would be to die,

He looked me dead in the eye, his mouth set in a straight line, and said, You’re not an individual. You’re my wife.

there was a veiled threat in how he said “my wife” that reeked of possessiveness.

You’re not a person. You’re my wife.

The historical erasure of a woman’s legal personhood upon marriage is so well documented that it is practically rote to do so here.

“two become one” was revolting to me was because I was too aware of how white women had been historically subsumed under their husband’s ownership, their husband’s name, their husband’s vote, their husband’s property. It was exponentially worse if that woman was Black, Indigenous, undocumented, enslaved, indentured, or nonwhite in the United States. But

For right-wing evangelicals, their focus is not on the dying, sinful, fallen earth, but rather, on social issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights that, in their view, contribute to the increased spread of sin.

Kyle wanted to take me to my doctor, because my disobedience had reached a point that, to him, indicated that I was sick. You’ve changed, he said. You’re not the woman I married. You’re different. He’ll fix you.

Friendship between women produces . . . what, exactly? Friendship between women is supposed to take a back seat when a woman marries, once a man becomes her priority.

I tell him in a public place, at a bus stop at the bottom of the hill we live on. He has never been violent with me, but my mother taught me well: sometimes, you have to tell your man hard things in public so he can’t react in a certain way.

Christianity is, at the root, deeply strange: it sets up your faith family as your “true” family.

In the church, a woman’s worth is found in coupledom.

What would my faith have been if women had been visible and respected in this way, threaded through church leadership? If it was normal for me to see women in relationship with God like this? To see rainbow and trans flags planted proudly in the front lawn?