It was a hot and sultry July afternoon deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where cellphone signals can’t penetrate and sun-faded Confederate flags fly. I was part of a sweating crowd listening to a preacher. We sat in a big white tent with the sides rolled up, the type of tent religious revivalists might use when they’re crying out to the Lord to save us sinners from eternal hellfire. But this preacher was very different from that stereotype. In fact, that stereotypical pastor probably would have tried to exorcise what he would consider the demons possessing the crowd I sat with. And he would have started with our preacher — one Nadia-Bolz Weber, all six feet of her, dramatic streaks of gray in her dark hair, and a big Mary Magdalene tattoo on a bicep muscular enough to make Michelle Obama jealous. She is a Lutheran minister who says crazy things like sex is good. Even if you’re not married, even if you’re gay or trans or bi. A preacher who asks, “Isn’t forgiving abusive men over and over what keeps battered women battered?” A minister whose congregants don’t fit the cookie cutter that my Holy Roller preacher — and a lot of conservative Christians — would try to make us all fit into. No, her flock included straight, gay, trans, the newly sober, the-trying-to-be-sober, the eternally — and humanly — imperfect. As she wound up her talk, the crowd stayed with her, cheering and clapping. And then she said, “C’mon up and dance with me!” My new friend Jes, her asymmetrically cut hair swinging, a wicked glint in her eye, grabbed my hand and pulled a hesitant me out of my chair. “Okay, Kate, let’s go!” she said. And we ran up to the stage together, joining dozens of others as the loudspeakers blasted Prince’s Kiss. There I was dancing and singing, surprised at how many of the lyrics I knew by this artistic genius who transcended conventional boundaries of gender, sex and identity. It was the perfect soundtrack for this crowd, some straight, some gay, some transgender, some Christian, and some, like me, not Christian at all. Whatever I had expected of a progressive Christian festival, this was definitely not it. I had had no idea of what I’d be getting into when I’d left my triplex apartment on Manhattan’s deep blue Upper West Side two days earlier. I’d taken an early morning flight out of LaGuardia to Atlanta, then boarded a zippy little Bombardier for the quick hop to the Asheville, North Carolina, airport where I picked up a rental car. Driving out of Asheville, I wound north and west on US-25, my rented Chevy Spark's feeble but valiant engine laboring up the first hills leading into the Blue Ridge Mountains, That’s when I lost my internet connection for the bulk of the weekend. My route took me through a green-as-a-tropical-jungle landscape, occasionally passing a weather-beaten house with a tattered Confederate flag rippling in a hot breeze. C’mon, man, I thought, having internal monologues with the owners of homes flying those flags. It’s been more than 150 years! You lost! Then I realized we’re still fighting that battle. And I was headed toward a very different rebel enclave, one that fights against all that that flag stands for. My destination: Hot Springs, North Carolina., so named for the 100-degree-plus mineral springs that have attracted people for centuries. It's a small town that's a handful of one- and two-story buildings on one side of a railroad track. On the other side, the Hot Springs Resort & Spa and a giant campground. That big campground was the staging area for the Wild Goose Festival, part Woodstock, part Burning Man, part South by Southwest (SXSW) and 100 percent progressive Christian.
It’s a place where you see banners like “Who Would Jesus Torture?” and “Recovering From Religion.” Another intertwined hearts and the words “Jesus and Darwin” in a line drawing of a fish used to symbolize Christianity. Religion has always wrestled with sex in this nation. Sex is something that tempts you, gets you in to trouble. So if there were anywhere in the country where I would hear a minister talk about the joy of sex, this was it. And Bolz-Weber did not fail me. She is the founder of the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado, which caters to those on the margins, and a New York Times best-selling author. She gave a deliciously profanity-laced talk about her latest book, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. Martin Luther must be spinning in his grave! I’d thought when I first saw that title. Her take on sex and Christianity was music to my ears. Christianity, in my experience, has always had a big problem with sex. You need it to propagate the species, but it’s just a little too much fun to be good on its own. At the festival, Bolz-Weber did a major league deep dive into talking about the joys of shame-free sex, cutting the bonds that religion has tied around the joy of sex. Some parts of her talk were painful. That was when she described the end of her marriage and the start of a relationship with her new boyfriend. One reason she ended her marriage was because of sex. Or rather, lack of it. Or not enough of it. I actually can't remember exactly what she said because, instead of her voice, I heard my soon-to-be ex-husband’s voice telling me roughly the same thing about our sex life and that he had no more time to put into it. Or our marriage. That hurt. Because I had put so much time and effort into that marriage. And into him. And that included trying to revive our sex life. Because I love sex. In high school, my wiry, blond, Norwegian Lutheran boyfriend and I had torrid make-out sessions in his red Barracuda on county trunk roads up on the Ridge, hills that ringed Sparta, the small Wisconsin farm town where I grew up. We’d drive up Highway 71 towards Norwalk or Highway 27 toward Cashton, two little villages, passing barns, farmyards and fields of corn and hay. Heading uphill to the Ridge, the highways pass through stands of scrub pine and oak trees and then to the top, where the roads travel along the spine of the Ridge. It’s a stupendous view of seemingly endless sky, rolling farmland dipping down into forested valleys, with the occasional Amish horse-drawn buggy clip-clopping along. Of course, we weren’t up there for the view. At the drive-in movies, we were horizontal in the front seat and making out before the previews had ended, oblivious to whatever the couple double dating with us was doing in the back seat. His older sister let us use her apartment! Major score for high schoolers! I’d bought some book packed with ideas like squirting Reddi wip on each other for a little additional fun during oral sex. It made us both giggle. We were two small-town kids too afraid to buy condoms at the local drugstore, which sat on the main intersection of downtown Sparta next to the town’s only stop-and-go light. My family’s next-door neighbor ran that drugstore. So, blow jobs and oral sex were as far as we would go. There were more boyfriends after that, in college, in the small town where I had my first full-time job as a reporter, in Aspen where one of my best friends from college and I spent a season ski bumming and, finally, grad school in New York. There, I dated a couple of Columbia College English majors looking for their Molly Bloom, heroine of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It seemed to have been a core part of their curriculum. One of them thought he’d found her in me. Except that once I discovered what I thought was the high calorie count of seminal fluid (it’s apparently fairly low in calories, I’ve since learned), I started to spit it out. A very un-Molly move, he told me, laughing. I was also very un-Molly in that I only took one lover at a time. Finally, at a party, I met the guy I would eventually marry. He was slim and tautly muscled, olive skinned, with curly black hair and gorgeous hazel eyes. He was funny, sarcastic and totally unlike any of my other boyfriends. We met once and then, not again, for months. But we became part of an informal group of twenty- and thirty-somethings who loved concerts in Central Park, hiking, skiing, cooking, eating and drinking. I called us the Outdoors Sports and Photo Op Club because we’d have parties to look at photos after our weekend adventures in those pre-digital photo days. And, boy, was he an emotionally armored guy. But when we first kissed in his apartment, I stuck my tongue in his mouth. I got his attention. He already had mine. I loved him, blindly. We moved in together and bought our first apartment. I bored my coworkers as I rhapsodized about him and my adventures with New York real estate. It was fun and wonderful. There were lots of evenings of stopping for a bottle of wine on the way home from work and cooking dinner together before crashing into bed. I loved sitting at my desk at work and smelling his musky maleness on my skin. It came from a quick morning tumble that dictated a too quick shower that couldn’t quite wash away his scent. Years went by. Marriage, kids, mortgages. I had always felt that sex in the morning would guarantee a solid marriage. I just hadn’t factored in the exhaustion of work, freelance writing, cooking, lick-and-a-promise cleaning and getting kids to skating lessons, swimming lessons, horseback riding lessons, Hebrew school and on and on and on. The result? Those encounters didn’t happen nearly often enough. And it wasn’t just kids, too many hours at work, too little time at home and not enough money. It was all the baggage we all carry. Things can be falling apart and you can still have good sex short term. But sooner or later, what’s happening in other parts of your relationship catches up with sex and overtakes it. And that is what had happened between me and the driven, sexy, funny, depressed, angry and, in his deepest depths, terrified man I’d married. Those memories kept playing in the back of my head as I listened to Bolz-Weber. A lot of what she said went straight to my wounded heart and made it feel better. She talked about an ex-boyfriend who would routinely insult her — and then worry that the squirrels in a park wouldn’t have enough to eat. I knew that bewildering combination of cruelty and kindness all too well. This talk riveted me. Bolz-Weber was fearless enough to talk — and write — about her abortion. In one of her books (I read Shameless and Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People over the weekend and on my flight home, and Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and a Saint as soon as I got home) she wrote about how she had always loved babies...
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Christianity, in my experience, has always had a big problem with sex. You need it to propagate the species, but it’s just a little too much fun to be good on its own. At the festival, Bolz-Weber did a major league deep dive into talking about the joys of shame-free sex, cutting the bonds that religion has tied around the joy of sex...
And that's about when I perked up and wanted to learn more, right? Because America is so filled with sex--sexual movies, books, even ads for bread can have a sexy woman holding the slice of bread, or maybe even, spreading it thick with honey, licking her lips as she tells us that Wonder Bread is the best bread ever! Or, seriously, do we really need a female in a short skirt, dancing around a golf course, right where the ball is supposed to go in... Yes, there is such an ad, and I have no idea what it is supposed to advertise. Neither does the man's wife who takes one look at what her husband is staring at through his binoculars and walks away...
And, to me, that's exactly the point... When something involves some type of sexual innuendo, most individuals either walk away, turn the TV off...OR, sit down and watch! How many of you would say that you've never watched anything in which sexuality is part of the program? I certainly can't. Me, I'm even old enough to see how television, in particular, has moved more and more to include sex as openly as possible... So here's the basic question. If you are white, single and find yourself turned off of a church because, while chastity is the only course for teens, at the same time you hear of those in the church, who are acting on their own sexual interests, while, say, the same preacher or priest is counseling abstinence? Or you see your parents involved in parties where somebody might get a little drunk...and...
Or, is it the issue that some have a different type of preference of who to love and , heaven forbid, that individual is your own daughter or son? Do you hide in shame, refusing to accept that child or allow them to be what they tell you that they are? Homophobe?
This man was part of the original planning group of Evangelical Christians...who walked away when he saw what was planned... Is Now
an Activist!
~~~
Well...
Seriously, can any of us really believe that any teenager watching television will accept religious training that claims that there is to be no sex prior to marriage? Or that if you've realized that you see yourself different in any way related to your sexuality, you can bet that you will be ostracized, perhaps even physically hurt or killed--in the name of religion?
Kate Rice, early in her life, did what many young people who have and are doing daily. Turning away from the church. But that doesn't stop her from going where things are happening--strange things! Like, the attendees may be addicted to drugs or alcohol, or they are gay and with their spouses, or they are secular, but interested? Well, as you can see above, Kate went to visit what was to be a Christian event. One that she soon realized was not in any way what she had thought it would be--especially those who had gathered there! And, especially, what was discussed there!
The Love of Jesus for All...
I was once again reminded of the recent book which proclaims that Jesus does not judge (things of the earth) He loves us as we are, whether we've made bad decisions or even decided to reject some things that they had been taught in their old home church, which they had left or, perhaps, had never even been inside a church in their lives, but merely wanted to listen and maybe get a little food or fellowship...
And as I continue to explore, just as Kate Rice is doing through traveling--mine through books--(My next read is Jesus and John Wayne!) I am finding that there are many patches of those who are trying to do what they believed was their mission. To spread the word of the love of Jesus...
Rice tackles Racism, White Nationalism, Anti-Vaxers, Sexuality--various issues, Progressive Christianity and more... She writes in the first person, often adding personal anecdotes of the people who she met along the way and who added "more color" to her own perceptions and opinions. As we move toward the close, she hones in on the topic of the Evangelical Exodus. Indeed, this topic might not have been covered if it wasn't for Kate meeting Kayla Cannon who she met as they sat in a jet waiting...
Kate remembered that she was lost in thought thinking about proceeding to write this book, but then realized that the woman sitting by her wanted to chat. All of a sudden, Kate was thinking to herself, "God, did you arrange these seating arrangements?" Well, you all know that I would have called this a God Incident. But then, since Kate considered herself a secular liberal (LOL), I chuckled when I read that internal question to God...
Kayla was on her way to a business conference, leaving her baby for the first time, yet happy to have a little time for herself. As they talked Kayla openly told that she had been an Evangelical Christian, but had rejected it.
She talked freely about her horror when ICE conducted a raid and people she worked with at a restaurant in Telluride suddenly disappeared. Anyone with half an eye in any resort area knows how many workers are Hispanic and may be undocumented, or afraid of exposing a friend or relative who is undocumented. I sat up in my seat. “ICE conducted a raid in Telluride?” I was equally horror-struck. ICE is a constant in New York, packed as it is with people of color and immigrants. But in a remote mountain town like Telluride? Only 2,500 people live there. But it is a blue enclave. People in Cortez, which is seventy miles away and also blue, but surrounded by a lot of red, talk about the Telluride hippies — although in a town where the median home price is about a million dollars, you’ve got to be a pretty capitalist hippie. ICE strikes tactically — resort towns and meatpacking towns as well as in big cities, which usually have far more diverse populations. It’s all part of its strategy to terrorize and intimidate. Kayla wasn’t afraid to talk about that, or anything else, as it turned out. Going to a secular high school and American University clearly opened her eyes to a much broader world than the one she’d been raised in. Early on, she had begun questioning the credos she’d been taught. She had an outgoing personality. She wanted to run for student council, but her conservative brethren talked her out of it. Why? She was a woman. That kind of leadership position was for men. She was realizing that “I’m a strong woman who does not fit the biblical interpretation of what a woman should be.” She pushed her parents to let her go to Rutland Public High School in Vermont because the religious school she attended did not offer the advanced placement courses she wanted to take. When she won her scholarship to American University, her parents were supportive. But, she said, they clearly worried about her move to a liberal school. Once she began attending American University, which is in Washington, D.C., she found herself intensely studying bills that were going before Congress. “Being Republican was against everything I stood for and cared about,” she realized. One of her first friends at American University was flamboyantly gay. Her religion had taught her that it was her job to tell him that his lifestyle would land him in hell. She did not. And then there were the gaping holes in the theology she’d been raised on. “The Bible talks about divine intervention,” she told me. But in a world where children starve and can be sold into the sex trade, she saw no divine intervention at all. Growing up, expressing any kind of doubt was forbidden. To doubt was to sin. She quit going to church while at college, although she continued to believe in God and still identified as a Christian. Then came the 2016 election and the swell of support among evangelical churches and their congregants for Trump. “The way the Church championed Trump, that was when I could not associate with Christianity. Period. I was also angry at how many of my friends and family didn’t talk to me for supporting Hillary,” meaning Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Kayla lasted only two years at American University. She had long been plagued by anxiety and it peaked while she attended college. Her evangelical upbringing had taught her that everything, including things like anxiety and other emotional distress could be overcome by prayer. If she was suffering, it was because of her personal failure to fully embrace her faith. She left American to stay with a cousin attending a conservative religious school, to try praying her mental health problems away. There she met her future husband, who was attending the school. His calmness and rationality helped her enormously. They fell in love and planned to marry. He went home to Telluride, Colorado, and she returned to her family in Vermont, where her anxiety spiked. And there, with her mother’s support, despite evangelical doctrine, she finally got the professional help she needed. She and her husband continued to wrestle with faith, personally and as a couple. She sees this a lot among millennials, and some are leaving their churches. “They are sick of having to hate because of their church,” she said. And here is the problem for the religious right. Once these young people question one thing, the whole house of cards falls apart. Because, as Kayla sees it, conservative Christianity is based on absolutism and blind faith. So once there is room to question one thing, everything is open to debate. Kayla stopped associating with any kind of religion and considers herself agnostic. She is not alone. Her best friend, whom she met at a Bible school she attended, has also renounced organized religion. Twitter is a great way to find this community, she told me. Just use the hashtag #exvangelical. That hashtag reminded me of Rebeca and Charlie Seitz and their podcast, Freevangelic. These are two more people who told me the same thing. Once you ask one question, a torrent follows. I found Rebeca and Charlie on Instagram just before I went to Wild Goose. I had been using social media to connect with Wild Goose attendees, but we didn’t manage to meet during the festival. Having been reminded of the podcasters I missed at Wild Goose, I contacted Rebeca through Instagram. She is a blast, funny as hell. She can find the humor in terrible things. She told me how her parents became evangelicals. By age nineteen, her mother was married for the second time with two kids of her own plus stepchildren. It was a rough situation, Rebeca said. Neither of her parents were churchgoers, but Rebeca’s mom found a conservative church that gave her a much-needed framework to help her handle her chaotic life. Her mother does nothing halfway, Rebeca told me. She quit wearing shorts. Makeup was verboten. Rebeca compared it to someone going on a diet and throwing out everything in the pantry that has sugar or carbs. In her mom’s case, it meant every book in the house was about religion and every song she sang was religious. “My mom’s finding faith was never going to be Lutheran,” Rebeca said. This embrace of a very conservative religion startled Rebeca’s father. So he went down to the church to give that pastor a piece of his mind, or maybe even a punch in the face, according to the family story, Rebeca said. Instead, the pastor converted her father and baptized him. It was such a drastic change that it alienated almost all of Rebeca’s relatives. But it was the world into which Rebeca was born, and she knew nothing else. Rebeca grew up memorizing the Bible. When she hit adolescence, her mother handed her a book by the right-wing guru James Dobson, Everything You Need to Know About Adolescence, and it was all about female subservience, Rebeca recalled. ) You may recall, I've reviewed another of his books, Dare to Discipline, where he encourages use of physical punishment for children.) You can’t call boys or ask boys out. You can’t wear anything low cut. Your makeup has to look natural. There was an emphasis on your body because it was the temple of the Lord. But your sexuality was not about women, it was about how women related to men. Rebeca matured physically early. “I was very well-endowed from sixth grade on,” she remembered. Ultimately, she had a breast reduction. But throughout her childhood and adolescence, her family lectured her on her appearance. “Don’t put on lipstick; don’t look like a hussy.” A man sexually abused her when she was eleven. “What were you wearing?” her mother asked when Rebeca went to her. And it happened again and again, in high school and in college. The response was always something to the tune of “you probably asked for it...”
And, of course, Kate had to include the personal thoughts of the Reverend about the time when Trump had protestors gassed so he could have a photo op...
Rev. Gerbasi was there. She had been on St. John’s patio, which had become a refuge and an aid station for demonstrators. She’d been handing out water to demonstrators when riot police descended upon her, chasing her from her own church. Shortly after the incident, she talked about her experience in an interview on Unholier Than Thou. This was a podcast produced by Crooked Media, originators of Pod Save America, whose politically savvy (they’re former Obama staffers) and bitingly funny hosts have had some fun remembering times when Democratic candidates have clumsily tried to assert that God guides them. In that podcast. she told host Phillip Picardi about her anger. She was coldly angry about the way Trump subverted her church and I think she epitomized the anger driving many Christians who are outraged at how the right has co-opted Christianity. Gerbasi trained first as a lawyer and had to overcome a lot of interior resistance in order to become a priest — it sounds as though one part of her dragged the other part of her kicking and screaming into the holy orders. I think it was that same voice that Sylvia Clahchischilli heard, the nilch’iyazhi. Gerbasi described those conversations as talking with God, who, she said, has a sense of humor. Hey, I like that!
There is so much we don't know about our God Almighty! But there are many people talking, writing and sharing about what their personal experiences have brought into their lives. And, many, like Kate Rice concluded, Jesus is Not Republican.
God Bless,
Gabbie
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