God Land Quotes

“[T]his book is an attempt to sit in the brokenness of our nation and our lives and seek to find redemption. I don’t believe in bridges anymore. I don’t even believe in fixing all broken things. Instead, what I believe is that we need to stare deep into the darkness of loss and to see the divine.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Church is supposed to be a place of community, where together we try to figure out how to live and love and grapple with the great mystery of what it means to be human. It should be a place that provides harbor from storms, not a place that uses white privilege to pretend those storms don’t exist.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Why did I stay in churches that I didn’t like for so long? Why did any of us? Because we loved the people there, and we had been taught God was big enough for all of us, and we had the audacity to take those lessons at their word.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Because I could not imagine life outside the womb of my faith, I struggled inside its limitations. I thought there would always be room for me. But the reality was, there was only room for me if I made myself smaller and smaller and smaller, until I disappeared. Or else I’d be pushed out into a bright new horrible, beautiful world, where I would gasp and scream and try to breathe, for once, on my own.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“When I first interviewed her for this book, the woman who would become my pastor, Pastor Ritva, told me “If churches are dying in America, let them die. If faith is dying in America, let it. After all, we believe in resurrection. There can’t be new life without death.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“It’s a racist narrative trick we always do when we talk about Christianity in America. When we say “Christian” we mean white people. When we talk about great Evangelists in American history, we mean Billy Graham, not Martin Luther King. King is a black activist. But Graham is allowed to be for all. This is the narrative trick being pulled when people tell me to disregard Chicago. It’s the erasure of othering. As if centuries of struggling together and against one another hasn’t left us all deeply and irrevocably changed.

Chicago’s story, like the story of St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Iowa City, is a Midwestern story. The story of the black Evangelical church is the story of the Evangelical church. These stories might not fit the narrative we want to tell about ourselves, but they are as essential to the meaning of who we are as any other story.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“How good is a place, how big are its horizons, if there isn’t room for everyone?”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“According to Gallup, church attendance hovered around 39 percent in the 1930s and 1940s.7 It increased in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower encouraged Americans everywhere to go to services. This was the sales pitch: America was now at war with communism, which was perpetuated by atheism. Americans could differentiate themselves from the godless hordes by exercising their freedom of religion. The call was taken up by religious leaders such as Billy Graham, and soon going to church was more than just something for the religious, it was part of being a good American.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“I was used to being the outsider—the lone voice of dissent. I was comfortable with this role because I wasn’t threatened by it. Not yet, anyway. I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t a person of color. I was a woman, but the gentle grasp of patriarchy hadn’t yet threatened to strangle me, because I hadn’t yet tried to get free.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Compliance is easier than questioning. The appearance of unity is easier than messy actualities. And I think part of me always understood that if I pushed too hard, I would be cast out of everything. So, I smiled during sermons I hated. I kept silent during Bible studies where people spoke of dinosaurs and humans roaming the earth together before Noah’s flood.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“I’m not good at believing the things I’m supposed to,” I said. “I’m not good at being the person I’m supposed to be.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Everything is political. Our wounds and our worship. We want our faith to transcend the political, but we can only do that when we exist in sameness. When barriers collapse, our wounds are revealed, and wounds are political because they involve pain.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Sometimes your biggest freedom is found in your greatest fear: letting go.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“People often ask me why I believe still. I ask myself that too. Why do I still go to church through all of this? Why do any of us? If faith is changing and dying, why do we still participate? Why do 70 percent of Americans still profess to be Christian? Even more still believe in God.

I imagine it’s the same reason why people in Middle America don’t just move. In these small towns, where loss has eviscerated them and their communities, they stay. Because this place is part of their identity—this land that gives and destroys, that creates and breaks.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“In the stories of faith I grew up with, men were allowed a full range of emotion: King David, who calls on God to destroy his enemies. Absalom rising up against his father the king. Jonah stewing under his tree, looking out on the city God saved but he hates. Job crying out to God for his miserable fate.

But the rage of good women in the Bible is all in the subtext. Nowhere is there an Eve angry for being removed from Eden and the loss of her two sons. Where is Esther, where is her horror and pain watching the genocide of her people? Or Ruth, who followed her miserable mother-in-law to a foreign land and had to listen to that lady bitching as if she felt nothing?

The women allowed to have feelings in the Bible are always the villains. Michal sneering at David that he ought to put his clothes on and stop dancing like a naked fool. She is indicted for her words, but hadn’t she just been married, abandoned, and then taken back by this man? Used as a political pawn, then ignored for Bathsheba. Then there is Sarah, who beat her maidservant Hagar, blaming her for what should have rightly fallen on the shoulders of Abraham. And Job’s wife, who Biblical scholars condemn for telling her husband to curse God and die. But wasn’t she just wishing him a swift end to the suffering that they had walked through hand in hand?”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“In her book Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America, Jennifer Sherman posits that in places lacking resources, morality is social capital. Appearing “good” unlocks jobs and community resources. But morality is determined in a fluid way; it’s just as much about fitting in and looking the part as it is about good behavior. Being white, wearing the right clothes (not too fancy, not too dirty), being male, being married, and having children were all part of the appearance of morality. But it wasn’t just about “good” behavior. John Sadler had stretched the law in an extra-legal way to get around the tax code. But this was looked on as an example of good behavior—he was conning the government after all. This made him smart and quick-witted, a cunning businessman and someone you would respect. Hell, he was a leader in his community.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“I want to squeeze myself into this role assigned to me—doting wife, good mother, worshipper of the male voice, the male god, the muscular Jesus, that requires I only work in the children’s ministry, or go to women’s Bible studies.

And what does that matter anyway? I don’t want to be a pastor, do I? Why can’t I just fit in? Why can’t I just make it work? And I had for many years. My whole life. I know the moves and the language. I know how to brush my hair, wear my earrings, which books to read, and when to stay silent. I’ve spent my whole life doing it, believing that this was the cost of my life. The sacrifice of faith was to constantly feel the blisters of this ill-fitting religion. So why now?”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Online discussion boards and Facebook groups, where covert communities of queers, feminists, and Christians of color gather and find solace—to Matt these replicate the early church in the New Testament, where gatherings were organic and happened in homes or in secret, for fear of persecution.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“It’s a very colonizing impulse to look at something—a land, a city, a culture—and instead of seeing what is there, see a barren landscape that needs your new ideas. It’s an American impulse to see a problem and think you can solve it with a little hard work and some bootstraps. It’s a deeply human impulse to look all around you and see a problem but never consider that you might be the actual problem.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Two men came to look for Jesus and he told them about death. Put a seed into the ground and let it die. Only then can it grow.

Seeds outside of soil are inert things. Put into the ground, a seed falls apart -- it becomes a fluid nourishment to the seedling. It's a dissolution. A rearrangement of the elements.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Mark longs for the days when his father was a farmer. Things were hard, but life was good. Easier somehow. He’s conveniently forgetting the farm crisis of the ’80s in order to justify his worldview. In reality, there was never a time when people didn’t engage in a relentless battle with the earth. There was never a time when it wasn’t hard to be a farmer, or a time when all families were good and moral and Christian. Even the belief in the wholesome rural community is ill-founded. According to Rural People and Communities in the Twenty-First Century, rural residents are “more likely to experience chronic or life-threatening illnesses.”5 They are more likely to have cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and mental illness. While rates of drug and alcohol use overall are slightly higher in metro areas, use among young people in rural areas is significantly higher than among their urban peers. Additionally, according to the Rural Health Information Hub, “A 2010 report to Congress from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF)6 states that the incidence for all categories of maltreatment was higher in rural counties than in urban counties, with rural children being [two] times more likely to experience harm or endangerment.”7”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“I am comforted by the ritual of liturgy, the way it provides a scaffolding to access the mystery of what is happening around us.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“The store beneath is a kind of junk store—the windows are filled with plastic dolls, a wooden chair draped with beads and a large Confederate flag hanging in the background. Illinois, billed “the Land of Lincoln,” was firmly in the Union during the Civil War. That flag is not there for even superficial history reasons. It’s there as a symbol.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“How does a mission of outreach and support to immigrant communities square with the repressive politics of the region? In a way, it’s the guiding question of this book—how can a nation that professes to be majority Christian become a breeding ground for hate? How can Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham preach purity for women from the pulpit and still support as president a man who brags about grabbing women by the pussy? How can people who have seen me spend my whole life struggling to live and practice my faith call me godless?

How can a message of peace and unity bring so much pain and loss and destruction?

When I ask what is happening to our churches, what I really want to know is what is happening to our souls?”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“In his book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl argues that the consumer aspect of American Christianity is a kind of a feel-good cop-out of deeper truths. But for those who have been hurt by the church, who have been told their bodies are unacceptable in the eyes of God, or have witnessed other’s pain perpetuated by religion, it is nothing of the sort. It’s actually freedom. And it’s freedom that has been sought and found by religious outsiders for millennia. The saints we revere like Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi, were difficult nomadic outsiders who created their own religious spaces when none could be found for them. Even the model of Jesus, walking smelly and dirty in the desert with his band of fishermen, all men, was a rogue, cast out by the religious authorities. But these thoughts can be cold comfort when you are the one deemed unacceptable, deemed sinful by the very community that by its very precepts ought to love you.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“We find significance in our sense of place. The way a New Yorker brags about the cost of a studio in Queens and the time he got punched on the subway, a Midwesterner brags about those two weeks the buses wouldn’t run because it was colder here than it was in the Arctic. Our pain is our significance. Our survival is our belonging.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Driving home to Iowa from Marion, Indiana, I went through Chicago, sure, but it was far easier to find a field than a town. Far easier to find empty spaces than people. Even in my town, Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city in Iowa, you are never more than minutes from a cornfield. It’s a bigness that can feel limiting if you are the only one of you that you see. But the internet is an equalizer—bringing together voices that once felt alone, realigning boundaries, creating spaces where there were none before.

There is a danger too of creating ideological bubbles. Of filtering out dissent. It’s a criticism that was leveled heavily against blue states after the 2016 election. But when you are in the minority—the voice that is silenced—you are never in a bubble, even if you try. And finding a place where you don’t have to fight for acceptance, where you can just be accepted, even if that is online is the difference between pain and hope.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“I want to explain to her about work, about how I feel and experience value. I want to tell her how deeply I love my kids and how working isn’t a rejection of them but it’s an embrace of my life and my skills and oh, by the way, why is it the woman’s job anyway? But I can’t reargue the entire first wave of feminism in this church. And if I do, it won’t help. The line has been drawn at values. It’s one word but it means something vastly different to Marilyn than it does to me.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“There are so many churches that remain strong, while being awful to women or providing safe havens for the power hungry. And there are so many good places that close despite being a home for the hungry, the lost, and the hurting. To brush off problems with churches as the problems of the inherently flawed nature of people is to miss the bigger picture: that life and faith can function together in a place where all are welcome and respected.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

“Pastor Travis and Steven did try to reach out with apologies for the misunderstandings, but I refused to speak to them. There was no misunderstanding. I thought I was a smart person, fully capable of studying the Bible and engaging with spirituality on my own, and they disagreed. When someone denies the very core of who you are, it’s hard to dialogue.”
― Lyz Lenz, God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America