Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

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.

Religious trauma is something that many people in this country are walking around with, without having a label for it. Compounded by the fact that religion is often dismissed in liberal, academic, queer, secular, and, depending on the geography, urban communities as foolish, as something only Hillbilly Elegy–type uneducated rural poor people would be ignorant enough to believe in, there is a silencing of the grief before it can be addressed. In my experience, what drives belief is often not ignorance, but hope.

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.

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.

I am realizing—for the first time in my adult life—that I do not know who I am, that I have no idea what I want, or how to think without an interlocutor and a set of guidelines.

To be a believer is to be of the body, to be able to connect to other believers intrinsically through faith. When you leave the church, when you leave your faith, you become disconnected from Christ, and from his body, other believers. You are no longer yourself; you are also no longer part of an intimate multitude.

I do not allow myself to be angry at God. I am not reckoning with the roiling, furious rage and wrath that is rolling like a river inside me. Anger still feels like sin, not like justice or righteousness. I am too embedded in grief and shame and the ideology of sin and repentance—instead, I try to ignore it, to distract myself. I pull The Devil card over and over.

When politicians say that the Constitution “says what it means,” that we should abide by what the Founders intended, they are drawing a clear parallel to how evangelicals interpret the Bible and understand the will of God. Ironically, they’re using their own trace to demonstrate how their own purported faith informs their governing—and their belief in how people should be governed.

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.

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?

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.* “If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment,” Brown says in her most famous