I’m still chewing on a New York Times article I came across this week: “MAHA Moms Take on Coal.”

Some highlights from the article, as I understand it:

• Our current US administration has been aggressively trying to fund and expand the coal industry, which is, of course, exactly the wrong thing to be doing in a time of climate crisis.

• In particular, they’re trying to power AI data centers via coal. (Double yuck.)

• Some MAHA Moms organizations aren’t having it. This is a relatively recent break from their usual support of the current administration.

• These MAHA Moms are concerned about the health impacts of increased coal use. And they’re suggesting solar energy as an alternative.

This blew my mind a little bit.

Because as much as I believe in—and have written about—the power of unlikely alliances, about finding what we have in common, about coming together when we fall apart (as activist and author Alicia Garza put it in the subtitle of her book The Purpose of Power)...to be honest, I just didn’t expect to have much in common with MAHA Moms.

When I think MAHA, I think of things like unfounded vaccine skepticism and telling pregnant women not to take Tylenol. Not here for it.

But reading that article felt a little bit hopeful. It reminded me that maybe there are things we can look around and see that are harming our communities—or that are harming other communities who are part of our human family too—and that drive us to speak out, to resist, to find other ways of being.

It reminded me that maybe some people who have long supported an administration that has wreaked so much havoc and caused so much harm are, for various reasons, now finding their hearts and minds and voices and power to resist. To pursue a different vision for how our world could be.

I wish more of us agreed on what exactly causes harm. I wish we shared more of a common vision for what another kind of world could look like. (The one that, as I was reflecting on recently, with gratitude to , is on her way.)

But maybe moving away from coal and toward clean energy is somewhere to start.

Maybe, as Alicia Garza wrote, “Movement building isn’t about finding your tribe—it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals. It’s about being able to solve real problems in people’s lives, and it’s about changing how we think about and express who we are together.”

Sometimes more of us share common goals than we might think. And maybe it’s worth examining the forces that keep us from imagining that we might have some shared purposes worth pursuing together.

wrote recently about the white supremacist forces that encouraged Irish immigrants to assimilate into whiteness in order to claim some sort of superiority over their Black peers. Because if Irish immigrants and their Black neighbors had embraced their common interests as people living in poverty, exploited by a small wealthy ruling class, they might have wielded a kind of power that the ruling class didn’t want them to have.

This has happened so many times in so many different contexts. I wonder what it looks like, now, to refuse to fall for it. To refuse to be separated and split apart from one another, made to believe we have nothing in common across lines of race, class, gender—or even, dare I say it, political affiliation.

I don’t plan on becoming a MAHA Mom anytime soon. There are so many things we disagree about. So many ways we see the world differently. But finding something surprisingly in common made me think about things.

And I’m curious what you think:

• Are there people or groups of people you thought you didn’t have anything in common with, but then you realized something that changed your mind?

• Have you seen people come together across dividing lines to pursue change toward our common interests? What did that look like?

• Do you know people who supported the current administration until something happened that made them realize their interests are not the same? What was that decisive moment or factor for them?

I’d love to hear.

In this with you,

Liz

I think the thought shook her a little bit. And it shook me a lot. I worried that there might be some truth to the idea.

I hadn’t quite thought about things in that way before. Really, I hadn’t been willing to think about things in that way. But once the thought lodged itself in the back of my brain—Are there some cult-like aspects to this thing that I’m giving my life to?—it was difficult to dislodge.

It impacted the way I saw everything. I did not want to be part of a cult. And I definitely didn’t want to be a cult leader,2 however part-time and tenuous my position might have been.

But there were some good reasons why some people were making the accusation. Or at least the connection. Perhaps a call to reexamine some things, an invitation to do better.

I found myself thinking about my college Christian fellowship group a lot as I read, more recently, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by linguist . (Fascinating book, by the way.)

The book isn’t really about evangelicalism. It goes into everything from the tragedies of Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown, to the cultlike elements of fitness groups like SoulCycle or Crossfit, to MLMs (which, by the way, do often recruit evangelicals).

Cultish isn’t about college campus ministry, or really about any of the kinds of faith communities I’ve been a part of. But so many pieces of it resonated anyway. The way communities use language to draw people in and keep them there, often persuading people to stay much longer than you might think they would—I wonder if a lot of us have experienced that in various evangelical spaces.

At one point, Montell tells this story:

“In middle school, my best friend’s mother was a born-again Christian, and I’d sometimes secretly skip Hebrew school on Sundays to accompany the family to their evangelical megachurch. Nothing enraptured me more than the way these churchgoers spoke—how, upon setting foot in the building, everyone slipped into a dialect of ‘evangelicalese.’ It wasn’t King James Bible English; it was modern and very distinct. I started using their glossary of buzzwords whenever I attended services, just to see if it affected how the congregants treated me. I picked up phrases like ‘on my heart’ (a synonym for ‘on my mind’), ‘love up on someone’ (to show someone love), ‘in the word’ (reading the Bible), ‘Father of Lies” (Satan, the evil that ‘governs the world’), and ‘convicted’ (to be divinely moved to do something). It was like the code language of an exclusive clubhouse. Though these special terms didn’t communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plain English, using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the group’s acceptance. Immediately, I was perceived as an insider. The language was a password, a disguise, a truth serum. It was so powerful.”

I’m fascinated by so many things about this story. First, that a middle schooler picked up on the key phrases of “evangelicalese” and was able to intentionally use them to gain acceptance and insider status. And it worked. Too easy.

Second, I’m fascinated by how the “evangelicalese” Montell picked up as a middle schooler in a random megachurch I’ve likely never set foot in in my life bears so much similarity to the phrases commonly used in communities I’ve been a part of.

(Okay, people I’ve known tend to say “love on,” not “love up on.” But maybe we can agree that both are a little…odd. There’s a whole other post I could—and might—write on that.)

Evangelicalism really is its own subculture more than anything. I recall Christian ethicist writing about this in After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity. How we might think evangelicalism refers to a set of beliefs or particular Christian practices, or even points to clear-cut differences between different denominations. But really, more than anything, it’s a set of shared cultural references: media consumption, language, music, that sort of thing. (And these days, too often, shared political preferences.)

Historian makes a related case in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. (Side note: Who else is psyched to read Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made when it comes out in September??)

All this to say. For those of us who have left evangelical communities and are sorting through the pieces—pondering what to let go of, what to reclaim, what to transform, what to decisively burn to ashes (perhaps including some of the evangelical marriage books examines brilliantly in her books and Substack posts, like this one from today)—the language we were once immersed in is all wrapped up in that.

The way we speak is something we can reimagine. Which is kind of cool. We get to think about the words we do and don’t want to use. They don’t have to sound the same—we don’t have to sound the same—as anyone else.

When we’re part of not-so-cultish faith communities—or other kinds of not-so-cultish communities—we’re free to develop our own unique vocabularies, our own unique voices, our own unique thoughts. Our communities love this diversity and are not threatened by it.

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That’s what I want for us. What I hope we’re all moving toward in our own ways, in our own contexts. (I might say a little more, by the way, next week or sometime soon-ish, about some particular words and phrases I realized recently are no longer part of my personal vocabulary.)

And I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this.

Do you relate to Montell’s experience of evangelicalese? What words or phrases did you or your fellow churchgoers once use that you now look back on with different eyes?

In this with you,

Liz

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing. -

I love this quote. I think of it often.

It speaks to what my soul needs to hear in these bonkers times. And it speaks to what I try to write about here. The possibility of another kind of world: a world where humans are kind, compassionate, community-oriented, justice-minded, connected with one another and with our whole Earth in healthy ways.

I love the quote so much I referenced it in my forthcoming book, Maybe We Could Pray Again. And that’s where I started to get into trouble.

It turns out that, when you work with a proper publisher with proper editors, “Aw, come on, it’s everywhere on the internet” is not actually a proper citation. Who knew?

And who knew the place where this quote came from would be so hard to find?

I Googled, and I Googled some more. I kept finding the same quote, attributed to the same person, but without any sort of reference as to where it came from. Maybe it was just something Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy posted online at some point, I wondered.

Along the way, I did find one lead (it might have been from Gemini? Never trust an AI agent!) that pointed me to a book that my local library doesn’t carry, so I ordered it off of Thriftbooks. Only to have the book arrive, check the page number I was given, and find that the quote was not even remotely there.

I skimmed the whole essay to make sure it wasn’t just the page number that was off. No luck.

So I did some more Googling and came up with another suggested citation. Another Arundhati Roy book not carried by my library. Another online used book purchase. This time, the quote really was there.

Well, sort of. The book, War Talk—and more specifically, the essay “Come September”—is indeed the source of this lovely, inspiring, encouraging quote. But the quote itself is not exactly as it’s portrayed everywhere on the internet.

This is the original quote:

Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

There’s a line that tends to get left out: “Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her.” And it feels like a vibe-changer to me.

In Maybe We Could Pray Again, I’ve got a chapter called “Why Is It So Hard to Be Honest?”

It starts with a story about a time, in college, when I was tagged in a Facebook post with a slightly disingenuous caption. Something about how God miraculously healed my twisted leg.

(In reality, I pulled a muscle, some people prayed for me, and it might have felt a little better right afterwards but I was still several weeks away from a full recovery.)

From there I get into…all sorts of things that I’ll save for the book, for now. But they all circle around that question: Why is it so hard to be honest? And specifically, when it comes to prayer: Why is it so hard to be honest about what does and doesn’t happen when we pray?

Along the way I draw on the work of some Very Cool People, like epically tattooed Lutheran pastor , “Professor Crunk” , and disabled scholar Amy Kenny. And on some fascinating stories from the Hebrew scriptures, like that of Naomi, and of an unnamed widow at Zarapheth.

All this to say, I thought of that chapter when I realized something crucial and sobering gets left out of Arundhati Roy’s words in the way I usually see them quoted.

I went back and read the whole “Come September” essay (brilliant, by the way) and realized that this sobering thread is kind of the point. I don’t know that we can fully articulate the kind of world we long for, dream of, and hope to build together, until we fully acknowledge the kind of world we’re living in now.

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Many of us, especially if we grew up in dominant US society like I did, were not taught the fullness of this reality. Thinkers like Arundhati Roy can help us see more clearly. They can help us become more honest about the hard things of our world.

In Roy’s “Come September” essay, for example, I learned about a whole history of what the date September 11th meant to particular groups of people long before the year 2001. So many historical instances of oppression, racism, imperialism, and betrayal, that underlie so much of the violence we see today. We were not taught these things.

To dream of the different kind of world who is on her way, we need to resist the urge—that is, the societally-imposed pressure—to bury our heads in the sand and deny the world that presently exists.

It’s often not easy, but we can be honest about our world as it is—and, still, we can listen, together, for that new world who is breathing.

We might not all be here to greet this new world. But we can carry our dreams for it together.

In this with you,

Liz

What does the biblical book of Genesis mean to you? How do you read it these days? Do its stories hold meaning, still, for those of us who have re-thought so many things?

I recently had the chance to write four reflections for The Christian Century on a couple passages from the lectionary—which is just a churchy word for the set of biblical texts that a lot of churches follow in their preaching over a three-year cycle.

(Side note: I remember once, in college, a friend from my Christian fellowship group was quite sure God was speaking directly to them because they went to one church that preached from a particular Bible chapter—and then another church that, miracle of miracles, preached on the exact same Bible chapter.

At the time, neither of us knew what a lectionary was. We didn’t know that lots of churches preach from the same set of passages in a given week. I’m not saying God wasn’t speaking to my friend. Just that perhaps this Bible chapter came up in the lectionary and both churches were following along.)

The passages from Genesis that came up in the lectionary on my assigned weeks were fascinating to me.

In the first one, Genesis 32:21-31, Jacob, in a place of deep uncertainty, is surprised by a stranger in the wilderness who wrestles with him all night and dislocates his hip. (Relatable. Well, mostly the hip issue part.)

As far as Jacob’s story goes:

• In one reflection, I get into what it looks like to wrestle with the Divine in a world where we are not guaranteed that things will turn out well. I think about our times of uncertainty, especially those where our personal worlds and political world meet. I hope the reflection feels realistic but not devoid of hope.

• In a second reflection, I focus more on some of the particular ways our times of wrestling might change us. Maybe, for example, our view of the Divine is expanded. Maybe this is painful but also good.

The second passage, Genesis 37:1-4 and 12-28, is a nasty story about a whole slew of older brothers who sell their younger brother into enslavement.

For no good reason. (Not that there ever would be a good reason.) Or maybe, for a few reasons, some of which we might relate to more than we would hope.

For this passage:

• In one reflection, I thought about what lies behind this kind of violence, and how we might uproot its origins where we find them in ourselves. And I thought about the people who dream audacious dreams of justice and flourishing in our world today and how the rest of us might listen to them.

• In a second reflection, I got interested in Reuben’s advocacy for Joseph, imperfect as it is. What can we learn? How might we do better?

Heads up that I was instructed to assume that people had read the Bible passages before reading these pieces. So that’s what I did.

If you do give the Bible stories a read, I’d love to hear what they get you thinking about, whether that’s similar to what they got me thinking about or totally different.

I hope something in one (or more) of these pieces resonates with you. If you’re in a place where nothing remotely Bible-y feels remotely appealing, that’s cool too, and I hope you’ll skip all this and come back here another time when I’m writing about something less Bible-y.

Regardless—as always, in this with you.

Liz

ps. If you’re into this sort of thing—open-minded, justice-minded, different-from-the-traditional-evangelical interpretations of Genesis, that is— wrote a whole book along these lines, and it’s a good one. Here’s the book, and here’s the Q&A she did with me about it.

If you’ve been tracking here the last few weeks, you may know that I’ve been thinking and writing quite a bit about what makes for faith communities that feel—and are—safe or unsafe. Particularly in the emotional, social, spiritual sense of the word, although of course physical safety is necessary for all these things.

This week the fourth and final part of the series was published over at Christians for Social Action. I hope you get a chance to give it a read and see what it sparks for you.

(If you want to start from the beginning, Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.)

I have to say—and fellow writers who tend a wee bit wordy might know what I mean—that in a world where most things I write are supposed to be closer to the 500-1000 words range, it was really nice to have the option of writing up to 2000 words each for a series of four pieces.

I felt like I could say a little more than I normally would. I loved being able to stretch those writing legs and get into a topic in a deeper way. And being able to edit in a way that still incorporates all the things I want to say, very cool authors I want to quote from, and nuances I want to maintain.

It felt like a lovely luxury on my end. And I hope that for those who have a few minutes to read, it feels like a gift of expansiveness and depth on your end too.

And, at the same time, if you don’t have quite so many minutes—which, trust me, I completely understand—I’d suggest giving just Part 4 a whirl.

Because I’m guessing many of us who are here don’t need to be convinced that people’s sense of emotional and spiritual safety in churches is crucial. That faith communities are often sources of trauma. Or that those of us who have been harmed—and really, all of us, whether or not we felt we were harmed directly—need something drastically different in order to heal.

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We already know. We have our own experiences of spiritual trauma. And our own needs for healing.

What we might want, though—and what Part 4 gets into—are some practices faith communities can seek to embody as we try to build safer communities together.

I’m not normally super into listicles. But in this piece I do offer ten practices. Because that felt like enough different ideas—and different sorts of ideas, and scales of ideas—that, hopefully, there’s something everyone can grab onto.

I hope you find something to take with you and chew on, pondering how it might take shape in your own community, whatever that looks like for you. (If you have a faith community, that is, or want to build one. I don’t assume that this is the case for everyone.)

So, if any of those ten practices resonates with you—if you’ve seen it done really well, or have wanted to see it done better than it was—I’d love to hear. I’d also love to hear what you would add to the list.

In this with you.

Liz

This week I wanted to draw your attention to part 2 and part 3 of the 4-part series on What makes for a sense of safety in church? that I’ve been writing for Christians for Social Action.

(If you missed part 1, I’d recommend starting there. And be on the lookout for part 4 coming next week!)

Part 2 dives into a couple of Jesus stories, a couple of Psalms, and some history from other eras of Christianity, as a way to keep exploring what safety does and doesn’t look like. (And why “faith over fear” just doesn’t cut it.)

Part 3, then, gets deeper into the connection between church as a place of emotional safety and church as a community that’s wholeheartedly pursuing liberation and justice for all people. (Spoiler: I don’t think you can have one without the other.)

I hope you get a chance to give these two pieces a read. You might even share them with your favorite church-y friends, formerly church-y friends, pastors, ex-pastors, etc. and see what resonates.

In the “behind the scenes” category, I thought it could be fun to highlight a few of the books I draw on in the safety in church series. (This will be an incomplete list, only because it would be too long if it were complete!)

Maybe one of these books has made an impact on you, too. Or maybe there’s one that you haven’t read yet but would like to. If either is the case, drop a comment—I’d love to hear about it.

So, in alphabetical order by author, here are a few book recs if you’re looking to think more about what makes faith communities feel safe or unsafe for all sorts of people—and how this is connected to justice:

1. #ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing by

An honest deep dive into all things complementarianism, patriarchy, church, and abuse. If you’ve experienced gendered harm in faith communities—or want to make your church feel and be safer for anyone who’s not a cisgender heterosexual man—this is well worth reading.

2. A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story by

Church history like you may not have heard it before. A detailed and fascinating story of all the different ways a stream of Christianity that promotes love, justice, and peace—and resists violence, greed, bigotry, and empire—has shown up over the many centuries of Christian history.

3. God Is a Black Woman by

For those ready and excited to reimagine God as not-white and not-male, and to explore all the healing power of the Sacred Black Feminine.

4. Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day by

For those ready and excited to pursue spirituality as resistance against white supremacy, patriarchy, and other expressions of empire, drawing on Indigenous perspectives and aiming toward kinship.

5. You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity by

For those ready to unpack and process all the issues evangelicalism left us with—and looking to rebuild a severed connection with our real selves.

6. Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—And How to Repair It All by

Family history and U.S. history interwoven in some fascinating, illuminating ways. Gets into what repentance and repair might begin to look like.

7. Raise Your Voice: Why We Stay Silent and How to Speak Up by

Situated within Christian contexts, a compelling guide to what it’s like to push for change in the direction of justice and how we might become more bold to do so.

8. Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle by

A memoir of what it was like for Stewart as a Black man to come to terms with where white-dominated evangelical churches are at and develop a powerful voice to call faith communities to do better.

Phew. Writing very brief summaries of what I loved about each of these books was surprisingly difficult. I hope you have a lot of grace with my highly imperfect words about each!

If you’re wanting to process your own experiences of safety/unsafety in past (or present) faith communities, I hope you find some of these authors to be wise guides on your journey. They sure have been on mine.

Or if you’re part of a faith community now that wants to be a place of safety, I hope you find some of these books (as well as the Christians for Social Action series!) to be helpful resources along the way.

In this with you,

Liz

Recently, while wandering along the rocky beach at a park on whulge / Puget Sound—the same park I mentioned in other recent reflections—I found myself tracking with a flock of Buffleheads. 

(I had to look up their name; fortunately, Googling something like “white and black duck-like bird” worked well enough.) 

Something about the camaraderie of their little group resonated with me as I watched them float along the salt water that morning. Other birds fished around on their own, but these ones were traveling together. 

I thought, I want that feeling. I want that traveling-together-ness. 

I looked away for a few moments, maybe at the beach rocks beneath my feet as I moseyed along, or at an interesting-shaped tree, its branches reaching toward the water. When I looked back, there were only four Buffleheads visible in the group. 

I knew I had seen more than that, just a few moments before. 

I kept watching. And sure enough, soon another Bufflehead appeared, and then another. They had all gone fishing underwater together.

I kept watching the Buffleheads, on and off, as I meandered along the beach and they took their time making their way northward in the water not too far away. At most, I counted fourteen birds. At their least, I counted just one. 

I watched as one Bufflehead would dive underwater, then another, then another, most of them following suit as they seemed to get the word that this is a good spot for food. 

Something struck me about the times where there was only one Bufflehead visible of the fourteen. I thought about how much I don’t see. How much I don’t know about what’s going on under the saline surface of whulge. 

(Actually, I’ve been swimming in the Sound a couple times, so I know a little bit of what’s under there. Yellow sea cucumbers come to mind, as well as an amazing mudflat full of sand dollars, very much alive and tilted at an angle to the sea floor, swaying with the waves. But I haven’t been swimming in this particular spot, and I’m sure the undersea world changes a great deal day to day anyway. There is so much I do not see, so much I don’t know.)

I thought about how sometimes we’re on a path and it might look like we’re alone. It might feel like we’re so alone. 

And then others come up from underneath the surface, ones we couldn’t see before, and they surround us. It turns out we were journeying together in a friendly little flock all along. 

I want this flock-ness. 

I reflected recently over at Red Tent Living about the process of writing Nice Churchy Patriarchy and sending it out into the world—and on how the more we speak the truths of our experience into the world, the more possibilities we create for connection with others who have similar experiences. The more traveling companions we might meet. 

For those on the underside of patriarchal power structures—and/or other interconnected power structures—the powers-that-be often want to make us think we’re alone. They want us to feel like that one Bufflehead who’s on the surface while its companions are nearby but out of sight underwater. Like that Bufflehead, though, we are not actually alone. 

We are surrounded by others who can affirm and support us, and whom we can affirm and support in turn. The journey of building a more just, inclusive, and loving world is not easy. But it doesn’t have to be lonely. 

So, a blessing:

May those on this journey toward peacemaking among all beings find one another.

May we know we are not alone.

In the times when we feel like we are alone, or when others try to make us think we are alone, may we take courage knowing there is camaraderie we don’t yet see.

May we find kinship with the Buffleheads who travel together even though they don’t always see each other at every moment on the way.

A few weeks back, I shared that I was working on a series of four pieces for Christians for Social Action, exploring what makes church communities feel safe or unsafe and how churches can do better.

I wanted to know: In a time when lots and lots of churches are wondering things like, Where have the younger generations gone? Why are our numbers shrinking?—Are there better questions we can ask? Questions that might acknowledge more of the reality of what people have gone through and are going through—and our political reality too, and how all this intersects?

I shared more in that initial Substack post about what interested me in the topic. (Spoiler: I spent some time in a church that made a lot of lofty claims about being a “safe place” but ended up feeling like nothing of the sort to me.)

Many of you responded to the questions I was asking in that post, questions about what makes a faith community feel like a safe or unsafe place to you. Which is amazing.

I hope you know I’ve been holding onto and metabolizing all of the thoughts and experiences you shared, whether or not they end up making it into the series with any kind of directness.

Please continue to share, if you like. I think we hold so many of these experiences in common, and it’s always good to be reminded of how very not alone we are.

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On that note, I wanted to share that the first piece of the four-part series is now live! It’s called The Invisible Baggage We Bring to Church, and I’d love for you to read it.

It draws on a few interviews I did with some very kind and generous friends who talked to me at length about their experiences in churches and why they left—or in some cases, stayed.

It casually works in some Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) research that I find fascinating and mind-boggling.

It reflects on the different kinds of wounds we carry, and how churches can ask questions that better honor our experiences and who we are—so that churches might have some chance of becoming places of healing and not further harm.

If you get a chance to take a look, I’d love to hear what you think. What does or doesn’t resonate? What would you add?

I hope there are some things to think about that feel fruitful, whether you’re a church leader (like former me), churchgoer (like current me), person who’s left a church or a stream of Christianity (also like me), or something other or in-between.

In this with you.

When I applied for seminary and envisioned what a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree might look like, I was picturing Bible classes. Lots and lots of Bible classes. Different classes each quarter on different books of the Bible.

(I did spend my twenties in a church whose middle name was “Bible,” after all.)

Different seminary curricula can be very different from one another. But as soon as I started looking more closely at mine, I realized that yes, some Bible classes were involved, but also so many other things.

We took classes in church history, historical theology, spiritual formation, ethics, preaching, languages, pastoral ministry. Amongst all that, I think I only took two classes that each focused on a specific book of the Bible. (For a hot second there, you could ask me anything about Lamentations or 1 Corinthians.)

All this to say, before seminary, I had very little concept of what any sort of systematic theology might entail. So I learned a few things. Many of them from a textbook that, while I found it interesting and helpful at the time,1 someone online later called “hella colonized,”2 and I reckon they’re not wrong.

I don’t think it was necessarily a bad thing for me to learn how the white-dominated, male-dominated, Western Protestant Christian tradition has historically been formed, the mainstream views it has tended to hold.

But I’ve also learned that things are so much more complicated than that. That this set of views has either directly caused or has failed to effectively challenge so much violence, injustice, and oppression in our world.

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In light of the history of dominant Western Christianity and its present-day reality, we might wonder: Which of its tenets do we need to push back on, to reimagine, to toss out entirely in favor of finding something more liberating for all people?

What might a theology of real hope, healing, love, and justice look like, if not this?

What parts of the things we were taught are malformed, and how can we build something more whole in its place? (More Whole and Human, if you will?)

Enter Whole and Human: Forty Meditations for Liberating Body & Spirit, a very cool new book by Nagassar. It’s not a systematic theology. It doesn’t read anything like a textbook. It’s short and sweet and personal and accessible and practical.

And I really think that, for those of us who want to rebuild a healthier and more liberating form of the Christian faith, it can help us do exactly that.

was kind enough to answer a few questions I had, and I’m so happy y’all get to hear from him!

Liz: Can you tell us a little about why you wrote this book and who it’s for?

Rohadi: I write for me, but I also think about the increasing number of people who are discovering the church traditions they know are more harmful than good. So what now? What are we going to do about that? I want to invite folks back into the possibilities of a faith that’s curious about the teachings of Jesus in a modern world.

Liz: In the introduction, you say you’re centering your book on three pillars: decolonization, embodiment, and justice. Super here for it. Among all the aspects of life, faith, healing, and wholeness that could serve as a focus for a book like this, how did you land on these three?

Rohadi: When it comes to showing up in a good way in the world today, what aspects are we missing? What will help us in terms of formation?

I land on decolonization because we must decenter supremacist ideologies and cultures in order to show up well. Embodiment is necessary because it accesses our humanity, and it counters so much of religion and culture that demand disembodiment—ignoring your body.

And justice is necessary in this moment especially to counter malformed powers like authoritarian governments and churches from perpetuating harm. Showing up well needs all three (and more).

Liz: I imagine most people reading this Substack relate to the idea of faith deconstruction in some way, but some may not be as familiar with decolonization as relates to faith. Can you talk a little about what decolonization is, why it’s crucial, and/or what it means to you?

Rohadi: Deconstruction means little if you are not broaching the bedrock formation, which includes supremacist ideology like white supremacy, patriarchy, or capitalism.

You can deconstruct without ever having to leave the safe confines of old cultural assumptions, particularly around whiteness. White folks don’t really like to hear that because they are not used to decentering their own selves. But it’s necessary, because most of Christian thought in the west is rooted in Christian supremacy—a bedrock of white supremacy ultimately—with a side of patriarchy and capitalism. That means we have to find renewed ways of being and thinking.

So what are we going to replace our old formation with? And I appeal back to both Indigenous wisdom unique to the lands where you dwell, and the teachings and practices of our own ancestral traditions. Notably telling, many folks no longer have a tether to their ancestors, swapping that identifying piece with cheap substitutes like religious theology or racialization (whiteness).

Liz: You write, “Those who lack a deep love for the self will struggle to love the one next to them. How you love your neighbor is a certain reflection of the type of love you have for yourself.” I appreciate this and feel it. How did this message of self-love become important to you? What do you think it does to us and our communities when we’re lacking this?

Rohadi: Because it’s literally the Greatest Commandment! Yet Christian traditions tend to cast deep suspicion on our bodies, calling them sinful and depraved.

This has built in a function within Christian thought—namely conservative and evangelical traditions—that you are not enough and your body is temporary. Troubling ideas that have taken a stranglehold on thought and practice.

Yet it’s not accurate, depending on how you read scripture, and whether or not you’re part of a tradition that is interested in following the central teachings of Jesus foremost. Many Christians are not interested in Jesus and care more about affiliating with power.

Liz: How has the way you think about sin, guilt, and human goodness changed over time? And how is this transformation reflected in Whole and Human?

Rohadi: Growing up evangelical I was formed to think and believe in opinions like ‘Original Sin’. That’s a choice. And when you note how much harm that does for Christians and those around them, you start to wonder if there’s a better way?

Turns out there is, and it’s been in the stories the whole time. The opening story in the Bible is about our goodness and our hope today to continuously unlock deeper components of our good humanity.

Many Christians today prefer to opt for a posture of hate. They openly hate themselves and spew their hatred on others.

It’s evident that they do not love well because internally they have been formed to hate themselves. So I think when we have alternatives that still work in scripture, that displace self-hatred and the stranglehold of individual sin, we open the door for freedom and liberation.

(back to Liz again)

So much richness and goodness and thought-provoking-ness here.

The conversation felt appropriate to me for the 4th of July and America’s 250th birthday and all that. Much to think about, perhaps especially for those of us who are white and/or have been formed in some white-dominated Christian traditions.

If something struck you or raised questions for you, or you find yourself still chewing on it hours or days later, I’d love to hear.

In this with you.

A former colleague, Brad, once told me he’s literally never read a book without finding a typo in it.

Not one single book.

To be honest, I’m not totally sure I believe it. Surely someone somewhere has written a book where the editors and the copy editors and the proofreaders and the author themselves managed to catch all the mistakes?

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Brad tends to read books published by people less careful about this sort of thing. Who knows.

Either way, I found myself thinking of him this week. Because I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last couple of weeks giving Book #2, Maybe We Could Pray Again, a careful read-through, trying to find as many issues as possible.

My first publisher told me I was “straining gnats” when I did this with Nice Churchy Patriarchy. (Yes and…isn’t that what we want? Aren’t our interests aligned in trying to make sure the final version of the book includes as few errors as possible?)

Fortunately, the publisher I’m working with now (Broadleaf Books, love them so much!) encourages the process. They even have a professional proofreader doing the same thing I’ve been doing at the same time. I’m so curious to see who finds more issues.

Just kidding. Mostly. It’s not a competition. But I am curious to compare results and see what they found that I would have missed.

I share all this because I thought you might enjoy a small behind-the-scenes update on the progress of Maybe We Could Pray Again, which is set to release next March. (So close, yet so far away!)

I once spoke with a literary agent who told me she has a set of rubber duckies sitting on her desk. Each one represents an author she works with.

She keeps them there to remind her of where each person is in the process of crafting book proposals, having those proposals submitted to different publishing houses, and hopefully eventually signing a contract with a publisher.

I do not have rubber duckies on my desk. But I thought of that agent this week, too. If Maybe We Could Pray Again were a rubber ducky, it would be chugging along in the process. Paddling its cute little legs, swimming slowly but surely toward its launch into our world. Looking more and more like a book every time I see it.

It’s typeset now, which means its pages look like book pages and not just a Google doc turned into a Word doc. It’s all formatted like it will be when it’s ready to order. And I must say it’s looking good.

I don’t know whether my former colleague Brad will ever read Maybe We Could Pray Again. If he does, I don’t know if he will find any typos in it. He might catch something.

Fortunately, although I believe in giving things like this as much careful attention as possible, perfection is not the goal. It’s impossible. And it’s not the point.

No matter what, Maybe We Could Pray Again will not be a perfect book. But I can tell you—it’s real. It’s full of heart, soul, sweat, tears, angst, beauty.

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And while a lot of people told me they appreciated how vulnerable Nice Churchy Patriarchy is—to me, Maybe We Could Pray Again actually feels like a much more vulnerable book.

I don’t assume that more vulnerable is automatically better. But I do think that vulnerability can be a powerful thing. That sometimes it’s what we need.

And I think the topic of prayer is by nature a vulnerable one. It is an intimate, thing, an intensely personal thing, a deeply felt thing.

I’m not here for intellectual treatments of prayer that try to teach us the One Right Way to think about it. That’s not what prayer is.

It’s not a disembodied set of ideas to think about. It’s flesh, heart, spirit, breath. Everything we are. I think this comes through strongly in Maybe We Could Pray Again. And I feel really good about that.

Thanks for being here for this journey together. I can’t wait to share Maybe We Could Pray Again with you in just a few short months.

In this with you.

This week marked the release of JD Vance’s new memoir Communion, which, I am pleased to report, at the moment I’m writing this, has only two reviews on Amazon; it also has a rating of 1.3 stars on Goodreads. (I am displeased to report that it’s also the #1 bestselling book on all of Amazon right now.)

In my little, highly-biased, artificially-algorithmically-controlled corner of the interwebs, this has meant that posts are popping up all over the place, saying that the only book called Communion that we want to buy or otherwise have anything to do with is the one by bell hooks.

I’m so here for this energy.

(And I’m with those who think it’s a little…odd…that JD Vance wrote a book called Hillbilly Elegy after bell hooks wrote a book called Appalachian Elegy, and now JD Vance has written a book called Communion after bell hooks wrote a book also called Communion.)

I do wonder, though—and it feels appropriate to wonder this aloud on Juneteenth—are we just talking about bell hooks’ work to offer a big “screw you” to JD Vance during his book launch week? (Not that I’m necessarily against this.)

Or are we actually engaging with bell hooks’ work? Reading it, taking it in, processing it, talking about it, letting it change us?

In other words—and yes, I am saying this in a Barney Stinson voice from How I Met Your Mother—Haaave you met bell hooks?

I haven’t read either Communion book—Vance’s or hooks’. But I’ve read quite a bit of hooks’ other work,* and I always feel like I’m transformed by it in the best ways.

There are a thousand amazing quotes that I could share here, and so many things that could be said. But to keep this post to a length I want to write (and you might want to read), I’ll just share a couple here.

I think of these quotes because I don’t know how many of us—myself included, as always, although of course I’m working on it—really see how interconnected all of our struggles for equality and liberation are. Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, all of it.

I still see so much disregard for class and race oppression in white-dominated feminist spaces. So much minimizing or dismissing of the voice of women of color.

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And I still see so much casual, unthinking, unintentional-but-no-less-damaging sexism in spaces that advocate racial justice.

bell hooks speaks to all of this. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, she writes:

Within our society, all forms of oppression are supported by traditional Western thinking. The primary contradiction in Western cultural thought is the belief that the superior should control the inferior…

Sexist oppression is of primary importance not because it is the basis of all other oppression, but because it is the practice of domination most people experience, whether their role be that of discriminator or discriminated against, exploiter or exploited. It is the practice of domination most people are socialized to accept before they even know that other forms of group oppression exist. This does not mean that eradicating sexist oppression would eliminate other forms of oppression. Since all forms of oppression are linked in our society because they are supported by similar institutional and social structures, one system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact. Challenging sexist oppression is a crucial step in the struggle to eliminate all forms of oppression.

I so appreciate her clarity here.

And then, on the flip side, also from Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center:

Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without supporting struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression. While they may initiate successful reforms, their efforts will not lead to revolutionary change. Their ambivalent relationship to oppression in general is a contradiction that must be resolved, or they will daily undermine their own radical work.

While hooks wrote these words decades ago (the book was published in 1984, to be exact), they feel so, so relevant today.

We need hooks’ insights into the ways all forms of oppression are interconnected. How they are not separate. How being indoctrinated into one system of dominance conditions us to think in a way that accepts other forms of dominance too.

And, for white women like me, we’re challenged to advocate feminism in a way that does not “undermine [our] own efforts” by accepting other forms of oppression for other people while fighting for our own freedom.

May hooks’ words invite us to reflect. May we collectively resolve our “ambivalent relationship to oppression” everywhere and anywhere it exists.

May we gain clarity on who we are, what we’re about, and the kind of mutually-honoring communities of equals we want to see and build in our world.

Happy Juneteenth to all who celebrate.

In this with you.

If you need more…

• A while back I wrote a two-part “super chill book review” with a bunch of quotes and thoughts from bell hooks’ The Will to Change. If you’re interested, here’s part 1 and here’s part 2.

• I’ve also written a piece on why bell hooks is a favorite theologian of mine. It’s over here at the lovely Feminism & Religion blog. Maybe take a look as a way of celebrating and pondering Juneteenth this year. I really do think hooks’ vision of active love and mutuality among all people is about the best theology I know of. And I think the Jesus who told his followers that the most important thing in the universe is to love God and to love others as ourselves would be here for it.

*To be specific, I’ve read All About Love: New Visions, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, and Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center. I’m also floored by how many other books she wrote that I haven’t read yet. Any recommendations for what comes next??

A couple months ago I had a great conversation with my brilliant friend . The topic: What do we make of prayer after rethinking how God’s power works?

This week I wanted to share with y’all something that came out of my mouth during that conversation.

It was something I didn’t plan on saying.

I mean, I never plan these things precisely. But I do like to have a few notes prepared when possible. And it’s not terribly often that I find myself saying something in a publicly recorded conversation without first chewing on the idea for quite a while. (Hello fellow introverts.)

But this time a thought popped into my brain during my conversation with Halley, and it felt right. So I went ahead and started talking about it. Fortunately, a couple months later I still stand by it.

The thought was this: God is not like the social media algorithms.

This is what I mean: When you take a week—or a few weeks, or a few months—off from social media and then come back and post again, the algorithms often penalize you for it. Fewer people see your posts if you haven’t been posting regularly enough to suit the algorithm’s whims. If you haven’t been playing the game.

This feels frustrating to me. Because I think a healthy, balanced, joyful, fully embodied life can include social media—but we also need breaks from it.

It feels right, good, and healthful to embrace times of Sabbath rest from the internet. To release ourselves from the scrolling, the consuming, the posting, the producing.

Whether we take breaks of hours, days, weeks, months, years, or whole lifetimes—it’s up to each of us to discern. I’m here for any and all of it. For all the time away we need.

Because sacrificing our mental health, our full presence in real-life relationships, the ways we show up in our local communities, or our attention to ourselves and to the Divine, all for the sake of likes, clicks, or building an empire? It’s never worth it.

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But the companies that control social media want us constantly online. Constantly engaged. Never taking time away. And so they reward us for ceaseless engagement. Even though we were never created for this. And some of us feel drained by it more acutely than others.

All this to say: God is not like that.

Divine Love invites us to resist the never-ending pressure to produce and consume. God invites us into rest, into healing, into embodiment, into wholeness.

And I fully believe that God is not petty. The Divine does not get back at us for not playing whatever religious games we might think we’re supposed to play.

God is not tracking how often we read the Bible, how often we write in our prayer journals, how many requests we send skyward every twenty-four hours like a social media story.

If we have not consciously, intentionally spoken with her in a while, God is still there. Just as present with us. Just as full of love for us. Our Creator does not get back at us by listening less closely if it’s been a minute since we tried to pray.

That’s not how Divine Love works. It’s available to every one of us, all the time.

I say all this because many of us have spent some formative time in faith traditions that tend to treat a relationship with the Divine like a social media algorithm. Something to cater to. Something we have to intentionally invest in daily in very particular ways, lest Divine favor or love withdraw from us. Lest our prayers fall on less attentive ears.

But I think God is delighted whenever we desire to connect, whatever that looks like for us. And I think our connection with the Divine is wired into us at our core. We haven’t destroyed it, cut it off, or weakened it if we haven’t prayed in a while.

So if I say Maybe We Could Pray Again (the title of Book #2!), this is the kind of thing I’m thinking about. A connection with Divine Love that is available to us always. An engagement with Divine Friendship that can look a million different ways, and that does look different for each of us. Any way a human heart reaches toward a love that is actually unconditional.

I have no interest in pushing anyone toward engaging with practices of prayer if that’s not something they want. But for those who do want to engage or reengage, the door is open. It’s so fully, widely, expansively, endlessly open.

No petty penalties. No judgment. No distance. Just love.

I hope something in this feels like a fresh breath of relief, of freedom. If it sparks something for you, I’d love to hear about it.

In this with you.

ps. I don’t really feel like writing about sexist Southern Baptist shenanigans, but if you’ve been following their latest terrible-ness and want to read a thoughtful post about it, I’d love to direct you to this one by : A Letter to SBC Women.

I’m listening to a young person share her testimony at a meeting of her college campus Christian fellowship group. The story of how she became a Christian.

But I find I’m no longer terribly interested in whether or not people self-identify as Christian.

People who self-identify as Christian do wonderful things and people who self-identify as Christian do terrible things. As do people who do not self-identify as Christian.

The thing about Christians these days, though, is that most U.S. Americans who are white and Christian voted into office someone who seems, to me, to be literally doing his best to destroy our world.

I don’t know about you. But that changes things for me.

I listen to the young woman share about her faith journey, and I’m not that interested in how she identifies religiously now versus when she first showed up on campus as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college freshman. But I am interested in what first drew her into this Christian community that has become so important to her.

It wasn’t an intellectual assent to Christian doctrines. It was love, expressed through prayer.

As someone who has deconstructed a lot of Christian stuff but still believes in a divine being who is more interesting and mysterious and feminine and fierce and tender and expansive than I was ever taught in evangelicalism—this caught my attention.

(And, of course, as someone who’s got a book on prayer coming out next March, I’m interested in the prayer part, too. What was once meaningful about prayer for those of us who used to pray in very evangelical ways? And what might still be meaningful about it once we’ve left evangelicalism behind?)

I think it’s true for many of us who once identified with evangelicalism but no longer do that the things that define evangelicalism were never actually the things that spoke most deeply to us. The things that met us in the core of our beings. That felt healing and good and life-giving.

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We became a part of particular faith communities not because penal substitutionary atonement suddenly made sense to us, but because we were loved.

We experienced belonging. We were cared for, and we enjoyed caring for others. We experienced a depth of relationships that felt healing. We spoke honestly with others and received their honesty in turn.

We felt something of Divine Love in community—in the love that flowed among us, the care we showed one another.

I know I’ve thought and written about this before. But hearing this young woman’s story about feeling cared for at a Christian prayer meeting reminded me once again: When we deconstruct, we often decide to part with beliefs that we’ve come to see as untrue or harmful. But those sketchy beliefs were never what we connected with most deeply in the first place.

They were just what people told us we should believe, in the spaces where we received love and felt belonging. And we said, Okay. We went along with what we were told. But in the meantime we’ve come to think more deeply.

Once again I find myself wondering—and this is a central question driving Maybe We Could Pray Again—what actually drew us to the Divine?

Before evangelicalism tried to indoctrinate us. Before things got messy with religious leaders who didn’t always have our best interests in mind. Before we were drawn into Christianity’s connections with imperial violence, or became aware of this unholy alliance and repulsed by it.

What did we experience of Divine Love? And where might that love—that connection, that belonging, that life source—still be available now? Now that we see through the damaging doctrines, reconsider the authoritarian approaches, reject the exclusivity of what we were taught—where might we still find what drew us toward divinity in the first place?

I still don’t have answers, of course.

But I believe in love. The care-filled kind that that young woman experienced unexpectedly in a prayer meeting. The expansive kind that the singers who were once part of the Christian band Avalon are still singing about, still testifying to love* all these years later.

I believe that wherever genuine love exists among people, that’s divine. That’s God.

How about you? Are there things that first drew you into evangelicalism that you’ve reclaimed—or wonder if you might reclaim—even as you’ve reexamined so many things? Are there doctrines you’ve left behind but spirituality you’ve held onto? I’d love to hear.

In this with you.

*The story of Melissa Greene, Ty Herndon, and Michael Passons re-releasing the 1997 Christian hit song Testify to Love a couple weeks ago is a beautifully redemptive one, told by over here.

Note: If you read my post last week on how I’m writing a series about what makes churches safe (or unsafe)—that’s still something I’m working on for the Christians for Social Action blog. Will be sure to let y’all know when the series launches, likely in August or thereabouts. In the meanwhile, if you have thoughts about the topic in the next couple weeks please comment on that post or message me!

Several years ago I attended a church whose tagline literally included the words “a safe place.”

This church turned out not to be a safe place. At least not by the time I stopped attending there. At least not for me.

I tell this story more fully (using the pseudonym “Life Church”) in Nice Churchy Patriarchy.

For now, suffice it to say that I experienced the pastor’s behavior in response to a stressful situation as deeply unsafe. (And more importantly than the initial behavior itself, his decision to double down in the aftermath and defend his choices rather than consider other perspectives.) So much so that I felt like I had to leave that church.

It was the first time I’d left a church for reasons that didn’t include moving to a different state, or a different city way on the other side of the same state.

And I would do it again.

Because I deserve better than to feel fundamentally emotionally unsafe around a church’s leadership. Because no one deserves to be part of a faith community whose leadership has broken trust and is not actively taking earnest steps to rebuild it.

We want more than this from faith communities, now. And we should.

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It doesn’t matter how often a faith community proclaims itself to be “safe.” It doesn’t matter how genuinely its pastors want the community to feel safe. Or how deeply its leaders might believe that the statement “this church is a safe place” is already true.

If proclamations of safety are aspirational at best—or maliciously manipulative at worst—or, somewhere in the middle, naively held but still untrue in reality—then that community isn’t something we need to be a part of. This seems clear to me now.

Experiences like mine at “Life Church” spark my curiosity. (Among plenty of other feelings, of course.)

They cause me to wonder: What makes churches feel like safe places more broadly? Not just for me, but in general. What makes a faith community an actually safe place?

And is a real, felt sense of emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical safety for all people in a diverse community even possible? If so, what would that look like?

Maybe it has to do with the things pastors are or aren’t willing to talk about from the pulpit, the groups of people they do or don’t express concern for or solidarity with. (As wrote about recently regarding voting rights.)

Maybe it has to do with the kinds of resources you can find in a church’s library, and whether these resources are actively causing harm. (As wrote about recently, focusing on books that teach toxic things about sex and marriage.)

Maybe it’s something else.

In the next few weeks I’ll be writing about these sorts of things. The end result, if all goes according to plan, will be a series of four pieces in Christians for Social Action’s blog. (Check them out if you don’t know them already—they’re awesome and I’m always excited to be able to contribute to their work.)

I have lots of thoughts, of course. And I’ve done a few interviews that will likely play into this in some form. But I’d also love to hear from you:

What have you experienced that has made a faith community feel unsafe for you?

What have you experienced that has made a faith community feel safe?

What do you wish church leaders thought about when they say they want church to be a safe place? What do you wish they knew?

I’ve been reading Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by psychologist Hillary McBride. It’s so good.

In Holy Hurt, McBride writes:

“I am here to tell you that from a scientific, psychological, and research-informed perspective…You were born good; we are all born good. We never questioned that or thought otherwise until some other message was hammered into us.”

And, similarly:

“It is your true nature to be connected, to feel pain and joy with others, to want to help, to ask for help when you need it, to be able to rest and receive love, to want good for others, to have hope for the future, and to have love in your heart and wonder in your eyes.”

McBride is speaking to how traumatizing it can be to be taught from a young age, as many Christians are, that we are bad (or “sinful”) to our core.

I share these quotes here because I think they’re connected to how we do or don’t experience emotional safety in faith communities.

Being told that the core of who we are is bad? This is fundamentally unsafe. We are not safe in communities that say this. Our dignity, agency, and worthiness as humans is not honored.

And when McBride says we were born good and it’s our true nature to be connected, to love and to be loved—for me, this affirms a sense that we deserve safety.

Not that we’ll never be harmed—or harm others—when we’re a part of faith communities. Of course, humans make mistakes. We hurt each other.

But when harm happens, we deserve recognition of it. We deserve movement toward healing. We deserve systems and cultures of respectful accountability and repair.

We don’t deserve denial, deflection, belittlement, or anything else that fails to take our emotional needs seriously.

Does any of this spark anything for you? If so, please do share your thoughts. I’d be so honored to hear them—in the comments if you don’t mind others reading them, or in a direct message or email if you prefer some privacy.

And as you reflect on your own experiences of spiritual safety or lack thereof, remember that you are fundamentally good. I’m with McBride in wanting all of us to have “love in [our] heart and wonder in [our] eyes.” We deserve this.

In this with you.

Last week I got to write for the lovely Feminism and Religion blog, sharing some thoughts that Shannon T. L. Kearns’ reflections on evangelical purity culture as a transgender man sparked for me as a cisgender woman.

The piece begins with a story about the time I broke an unspoken sixth grade camp taboo by packing my brother’s hand-me-down cargo shorts. (Gasp.) It ends with an invitation for those who (like me) keep engaging with the Christian faith to embrace a kind of feminism that learns from and with trans people to move toward a world where gender expression is not policed and where all individuals can flourish.

The full piece is here; I hope you get a chance to read and enjoy!

Also last week, I spent a lot of time contemplating the story in the biblical book of Genesis where Joseph’s older brothers plan to kill him and then end up selling him into enslavement instead. I got to write about this story for a couple pieces that will come out in August with The Christian Century. And I think it’s a fascinating one.

Often, when I’m writing about stories from the Hebrew scriptures, I like to see if Dr. Wil Gafney—biblical scholar and the author of the very cool Womanist Midrash books (among lots of other books that I’m sure are also very cool)—has written anything on the passage I’m learning about. (She usually has.)

In this case, Dr. Gafney has written a lovely sermon called Saving Joseph and All the Other Queer Kids.

Joseph, a queer kid? I’d heard this before. But I don’t think I’d fully understood why people sometimes associate Joseph with queerness.

Sure, he’s different from his brothers. Sure, his dad gave him a fancy coat as a gift—but that seemed more about parental favoritism than about the coat itself.

As I looked up the Hebrew words used to describe what Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice called Joseph’s “technicolor dream coat,” I noticed that the word sometimes translated as “multicolored” actually has an unclear meaning. It could mean “colorful,” or it could mean something like “ornate.” Or it could just mean “long-sleeved,” a tunic that reaches all the way to the hands and feet.

(Maybe Joseph is like Macklemore in his “big-ass coat from that thrift shop down the road”? He’s wearing your granddad’s clothes, and he looks incredible?)

Anyhow. Dr. Gafney helped me understand why people speculate about Joseph’s queerness. There are a few reasons (see her sermon), but one of them involves that word for “multicolored.”

It turns out that the only other time this word is used in the whole Bible, it refers to “the kind of garment the virgin daughters of the king wore.” Fascinating. It really was a “princess dress” that Joseph was wearing, as Dr. Gafney calls it.

She writes: “That one boy was treated as treasure. His daddy gave him—and just him—a richly embroidered tunic with lavish sleeves that would come to be known as the garments worn by the daughters of kings. Four hundred years later as the story goes, Tamar and her sisters, King David’s daughters, wore them as well. Yes, Joseph wore a princess dress.”

Was this part of the reason Joseph’s brothers bullied him and hated him so much? Definitely seems possible.

Maybe Joseph was not totally unlike Shannon Kearns wearing baggy shorts and oversized T-shirts as a teenager in a church that bought into purity culture—or like me and my brother’s old cargo shorts at sixth grade camp.

I’m not trying to say our experiences are the same, especially not that my brief moment of discomfort due to my unintentionally gender-role-subverting clothing choices in sixth grade holds a candle to how hard it is to be queer or trans in our world.

But it does feel striking to me that Kearns (trans), Joseph (possibly queer but likely not trans), and me (not queer or trans, just a cisgender girl wearing her brother’s shorts) share something in common: crossing the lines of gender norms and paying a price for it in different ways.

All the more reason to long for, pray for, and work together toward a world that offers more freedom, more expansiveness. More curiosity, less judgment. Fewer gendered straitjackets (as Brené Brown puts it) and more liberation. More celebration of all the wonderfully diverse ways we’re wired and all the beautifully different ways want to express ourselves.

Hope you enjoy the full piece over at Feminism and Religion—and that it feels freeing, healing, thought-provoking, or liberating in some way.

In this with you.

In Nice Churchy Patriarchy, I’ve got a chapter called “Her Eye Is on the Sparrow.”

I start with how a seminary chapel musician’s rewrite of the classic hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” hit me in the gut with truths I hadn’t quite yet been able to name.

Then I go into the mind-blowing stuff I learned in seminary about how historical theologians, male and female, have reflected on God as mother in a million different beautiful, gender-bending ways—but also a ton of breastfeeding—over the entire two thousand years of Christian history. No one told me any of that at the evangelical church of my twenties.

Then I talk about how, really, all these theologians were simply expounding on the feminine imagery for God that we find in the Bible itself. Imagery that is often overlooked. Imagery we desperately need to recover in order for churches to be healthy places for all sorts of humans, and maybe to do some good in our world too.

A quote from near the end of the chapter:

“How we speak of God—which reflects how we think about God—has everything to do with who is considered valuable in our world, and who is considered worthless. Exclusively male language for God plays into a more general devaluation of everything and everyone deemed feminine. It contributes to women’s disempowerment. On the flip side, speaking about God in a balanced way affirms women in our full humanity—worthy and good, just as God made us.

This is important for individual women’s flourishing. It’s also important for the flourishing of our communities and our world more broadly. It has implications for how power operates. It influences the extent to which women are esteemed and free—or degraded and repressed—in our societies” (p. 225).

I wrote these words in Nice Churchy Patriarchy a minute ago now, but I stand by them. And they’re why I’m so excited about ’s new book, Love Like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God, which just released this week.

Imagine that chapter on feminine God-talk in Nice Churchy Patriarchy—expanded out into a whole frickin book, and a beautiful one.

One that blends Elizabeth’s own stories of pregnancy, loss, labor, delivery, and motherhood together with a ton of research, as well as stories from other women who have experienced motherhood in different ways, like through foster care and adoption.

It’s well worth reading.

Elizabeth was so kind as to answer a few questions I came up with, and I’m so excited for you to hear from her.

Liz Cooledge Jenkins:

While your book speaks most directly to mothers (or to people who relate to motherhood in some way, including through infertility or loss), I feel like it also has so much to say to all humans about how we see and relate to the Divine. Could you speak a bit to this—who is this book for? What do you hope it’ll do for humans who are mothers, and for humans who are not mothers?

Elizabeth Berget:

I definitely wrote this with weary mothers in mind—moms who are tired physically, emotionally, and spiritually, moms who are feeling guilt or shame for not “keeping up” in a variety of ways. I’m hoping this book both elevates the work that they do as mothers by highlighting how they bear the image of God and opens their eyes to just how much God sees them in the unseen work of day to day mothering.

But I also wrote Love like a Mother for anyone who has grown up with an imbalanced view of God—one that was overly male, overly dominant, overly angry. I hope they’ll find an expanded view of God, rooted in Scripture, in its pages.

We are all born with the need for a mother, and it’s my firm belief that this need, like all others, is best met in God. I hope everyone who reads this book walks away knowing just how beloved they are.

Liz:

Is there one image of God as mother that’s speaking especially strongly to you right now, or that you feel speaks especially strongly to our world in this moment?

Elizabeth:

In Isaiah 66:13, we read, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” It’s one of the most direct comparisons of God to a mother that we get in the Bible.

As I unpack more in the book, this promise of maternal comfort is given to the Israelites just as they’re beginning their journey back to rebuilding after being exiled. And instead of only promising to protect and take care of them as king and warrior, as we find in other places in Isaiah, God gives the Israelites this really intimate promise of comfort and sustaining nourishment.

I think it’s significant that at one of the most vulnerable points in their history, God gives them a picture of a mother’s care.

We are living in such a disorienting time, when the world around us feels so uncertain, and our safety feels more tenuous than ever. And so many of us are actively deconstructing and reconstructing our fatih, standing in the unguarded ruins of what has always been.

I think this particular maternal imagery of a God holding us close and comforting us is incredibly needed for so many of us in this moment.

Liz: What’s one change you’d love to see churches make in order to more fully honor the feminine / mothering side of God?

Elizabeth:

I love this question. Midway through writing Love like a Mother, I had a lifelong evangelical pastor read it to ask what felt ruffled him or felt like an uncomfortable theological stretch for him.

After reading and conveying that he was happy to see just how much Scripture was woven into the book, he commented that he wished more male pastors would read it, since, especially in more complementarian churches, those with a maternal perspective are not often given the microphone.

And I think that’s my hope—that whether a church has women in leadership or not, that anyone leading would keep their female congregants in mind while writing sermons or planning teaching—that they would search whatever Bible passages they are unpacking that week for imagery of God’s maternal qualities, that they would write analogies and anecdotes into their sermons that women can more easily relate with.

I hope that there can be more inclusive teaching and preaching that accounts for feminine experiences and perspectives.

Liz:

What was it like to write into this book so many of your own very intimate experiences with pregnancy, birth, and motherhood? How does it feel to have those stories out there in the world?

Elizabeth:

It was really important for me to ground this book in story, primarily because I think we learn best through stories and that in the sharing of stories, we open ourselves up to such deep connection. And I hoped that by sharing my own life openly, I could avoid a prescriptive tone since individual experiences of motherhood are breathtakingly different, person to person.

While I’ve always been an open book and love diving right into the deep end with anyone I meet, I’ll admit there was some pause thinking about not only strangers on the internet but the pastor at my local church knowing about my third-degree tear after my first was born!

That said, in sharing my own story, I wanted to make this book accessible to any reader. I read a tremendous number of books in researching, and many of them were so good and deep and so…dense and hard to get through.

I wanted to write a book that landed square in the middle of stuffy theology textbook and fluffy mom devotional; I wanted to make people laugh…and cry. So while it feels a little vulnerable, laying it all metaphorically out there, sharing these stories was essential for me in striking the tone I was after in Love like a Mother.

“Square in the middle of stuffy theology textbook and fluffy mom devotional” sounds about right to me. There’s nothing stuffy about Love Like a Mother, and nothing fluffy either.

And while I firmly believe that complementarianism is terrible for everyone involved and would love to see all churches change their sexist ways, I also totally respect Elizabeth’s desire to connect with people in those spaces through this book, too.

Love Like a Mother is a book you could give your friend who goes to a church that doesn’t have women in leadership—and, like Elizabeth’s evangelical pastor friend, they’ll likely love how much Scripture is in it, and they’ll likely be able to learn something good and receive something healing from it.

On that note, happy Mothers’ Day to all who celebrate! So much gratitude to Elizabeth for writing this book and for being a part of this post!

In this with you.

Liz

I wanted to share three dream snippets from the last few months. Real, literal, nighttime dreams that I’ve had. Don’t worry, I’ll be brief.

Dream #1:

I’m running and hiding, trying to escape from agents of an evil empire (think Star Wars).

At first, I’m doing well. Up on rooftops, climbing in treetops. They can’t get me if I’m up high enough.

But then, somehow, I end up in a deep swimming pool. I duck underwater and dive down to the very bottom of the pool.

Fortunately, it turns out I can breathe underwater.

Unfortunately, a pastor from a former (evangelical) church shows up, peering through a sort of window, and he sees me down at the bottom of the pool. He smiles and waves—and then reports me to the evil empire.

Dream #2:

I’m home alone. A large skeleton appears just outside the door, like those giant Halloween skeletons people put up in their yards.

The skeleton is there to observe whether I’m being a good evangelical Christian. (It doesn’t speak; I just know.)

I keep trying to hide from it. I try not to let it in the house. I’m not sure how long I can keep it out for.

Dream #3:

A person in my current faith community starts grilling me about how often I go to church.

I tell them, through gritted teeth, that I have very good reasons for going when I go and not going when I don’t go, and I would be happy to say more about those reasons if they wanted to hear. (I’m not sure they do.)

(Funny side story: When I told a friend about this dream, I started by saying, “Soo, I had a dream about [redacted] last night.”

My friend, immediately: “Ooh, a sexy dream?”

Me: “What? No…”

My friend: “Hey I’m not judging, I mean, he’s a handsome person.”)

Friends—it was not a sexy dream.

It was an evangelical baggage dream, a religious anxiety dream. Not unlike when I was hiding from the skeleton outside the house as it looked for me. Not unlike when I was hiding at the bottom of a deep swimming pool but was found by a former pastor who was not on my side.

I share these dreams because I thought you might enjoy having some things to psychoanalyze today.

Just kidding. I share these dreams because I wonder if, for many of us who have spent some time in evangelical spaces, there’s some part of us that fears being found out as someone who has changed.

Maybe you too have felt some anxiety, at some point, about whether the journey you’re on is a good one.

Maybe there are people in your life who don’t quite understand that you are evolving and that this is a good thing, a necessary thing. Maybe you’re not sure how to engage, whether to engage; whether engagement would be safe or if anything good would come of it, or if it would just further your trauma.

Maybe you have some skeletons outside your home too—or some former pastors who still take up a little more of your brain space than you want to give them, or some people in your current circles whom you’re worried might be judging you.

Friends, the gorgeous, liberating beauty of being post-evangelical is that we are no longer beholden to what any of these people think of us. We are no longer constrained to stay inside their boxes.

There is actually no one who is going to “find us out” or “get us in trouble.” There are no exvangelical police coming for us.

(Or if there really are people in our lives who judge, criticize, or say unhelpful, cruel, or insensitive things, we don’t need to engage with this. They have no power over us.)

But we might still worry.

A while back, I wrote a piece for Red Tent Living called “What Exactly Are We Afraid of?”

I’m thinking about that piece now. I’m thinking about how Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” How in light of our own mortality, of the inevitability of pain, we might find ourselves liberated to speak the truest possible truths that live at the very core of our being.

We might find freedom to be who we are, believe what we believe, keep changing, keep growing, keep evolving.

We might feel concerned about the rise of fascism and whether or for how long we will be able to speak our minds on political matters and be safe. This is so valid.

But I think our fears about an imagined evangelical thought police coming to get us in the meanwhile—when we express or simply live out our evolving spiritualities—are not so valid. I think they’re vapid. They come up empty.

There is no evangelical thought police. And if there were, it would have no authority over us.

And if our anxieties go all the way to God—whether God approves of us, whether we are sinning by moving away from evangelical belief systems, churches, structures, etc.—we can examine this, too.

I think we’ll find that it comes up empty. That the demanding, exacting, vengeful god who requires people to exist within a “tiny, terrifying circle of acceptability,” as puts it in God Is a Black Woman—we don’t actually believe in this god anymore.

We believe in love. We believe in justice. We believe in a divine being who created people with care and wants all people—and all of Earth’s interconnected beings—to thrive.

This is what we’re growing into. It’s who we’re becoming, together.

We are free.

We are leaning into a divine love that really does cast out fear.

We are coming to embrace this love more and more fully.

We treat ourselves with grace and compassion when the vestiges of evangelicalism still haunt us.

We seek liberation, and keep seeking.

We heal, and we keep healing.

And we walk with one another gently, knowing we’re all healing and getting free together.

In this with you.

When I was in elementary school, maybe second grade, a class assignment invited each of us to do a little introspection.

The end result might have been a poster, or maybe it was just a packet or a sheet of paper filled with information about ourselves. We were probably asked to share about our families, our favorite school subjects, our favorite sports, our favorite colors. I don’t remember the details.

I do remember that at the center of it all, we were asked to come up with a four-word phrase to summarize who we are.

I’m not sure why it had to be exactly four words. But the constraints were clear. The task was vital. The stakes were high.

How do you say something essential about yourself in just four words? How do you describe the core of who you are?

A classmate turned to me and said, “Lizzie, I hope you don’t mind if I use Likes to Ride Horses for my four words.” She knew horses were kind of my thing. And she didn’t want to steal my thunder.

It was sweet. But I knew—I didn’t tell my classmate this, because I was a polite child, at least sometimes—but I knew I needed four words that sounded a little more sophisticated than “likes to ride horses.” I was going for something a little more poetic.

I thought about it and came up with my four words: Lover of All Horses.

Now, this story might carry a few different takeaways. Perhaps that I was an odd child, or a self-important one, or one that loved words from a young age. Or perhaps it says something about the materially privileged community I grew up in, that at least two kids in my class at my public elementary school were taking horseback riding lessons.

But I’m really just sharing this story to say: I have always loved animals. I was the Lover of All Horses—and cats and dogs and butterflies and salamanders, too.

I wonder if children often feel a kind of kinship with non-human beings that adults in our capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, materialistic, violent, Earth-subduing dominant US culture sometimes “grow” out of. I know I did.

But I still think about these things. I would love to see the progressive Christian, post-evangelical universe reclaim that sense of kinship. It’s all part of how we heal, how we learn different ways of being.

And we have some work to do.

A little while back, I heard a progressive Christian speaker refer to animals as “non-sentient.” He said something about “non-sentient birds,” I think—in order to contrast them with humans in some way I’ve now forgotten.

The next day, I heard a different progressive Christian speaker say that during the era of US chattel slavery, enslaved people were “treated like animals.”

And something about those two comments rattled me. Something about how these speakers talked about animals struck me as deeply disturbing.

Because animals are sentient. They sense and they feel, as Merriam-Webster defines sentience. They have personalities. They have experiences. They feel pain.

They have their own fascinatingly unique ways of encountering our world, understanding it, and engaging with it, as Ed Yong details in An Immense World. (I’ve only read part of this book, but what I did read was fascinating.)

Most non-human animals fall in the category of beings who have existed on Earth much longer than humans and who therefore have much to teach us about how we are meant to be in this world, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about so beautifully in Braiding Sweetgrass. (And as I reflect on from my own post-evangelical feminist perspective in Nice Churchy Patriarchy.)

And if white enslavers treated enslaved humans “like animals”? Well, there was something deeply wrong with the way they were treating humans, of course. But there was also something deeply wrong with the way they were treating animals. No animal should be treated as horrifically as enslaved people were.

I wish this were all so obvious it didn’t need saying. But we’ve got progressive Christian speakers casually talking as if it were otherwise.

Last weekend at the Festival of Faith and Writing, I got to hear Robin Wall Kimmerer speak in person for the first time, and she was every bit as amazing as I imagined she might be.

I jotted down a few notes that I want to share with you.

Kimmerer encouraged us to “challenge the forces that threaten life.” In our writing, in our living.

She reminded us that “we are all part of the Great Green We.” We are not separate from nature, but part of it. It’s not “us” (humans) and “them” (everyone and everything else). There’s only “we.”

She reflected on how when we pay more attention to the natural world, this “generates wonder, which generates more attention, and joy.”

She shared that attention can change our intention toward Earth and all her interconnected systems, which can lead to action.

She reminded us that “we are one member of a democracy of species.”

And she reflected that, when it comes to our relationship as humans to the other-than-human beings all around us, “we’re stuck in an old story.”

We’re stuck in false stories that damage us all. Stories, perhaps, that say that animals aren’t sentient. That they aren’t worth honoring and loving and respecting and protecting. That when human beings are treated like animals, it means they’re treated cruelly, callously, neglectfully, oppressively, violently—without questioning the assumption that this is how we treat animals.

Hearing Kimmerer name the poverty of these kinds of stories and suggest some new ones instead—ones where we really are all kin and treat each other as such, ones that might still hold the possibilities of healing Earth and thus healing humanity—healed something in me.

I hope her beautiful words heal, connect, open, or spark something in you, too. May we who hope to be people marked by love carry a love that stretches to non-human beings, too. A love that encompasses us all.

In this with you.

In the last couple weeks I’ve been noticing the idea of “main character energy” popping up all over the place.

Okay, so by “all over the place” maybe I mostly mean on a delightfully trashy radio show I listen to sometimes while driving to the pool for my morning lap swims.

If I remember right, a woman was recounting a lovely first date a man took her on. They went to a nice restaurant, and, after they ate, he invited her to the dance floor, where they took center stage. Very “main character energy.” She liked that.

(Personally I’d rather be in a quiet corner of that restaurant, enjoying my food and some conversation with the person or people I went there with, generally drawing as little attention from strangers as possible. Maybe I don’t have much “main character energy.” I think I’m okay with this.)

The idea of “main character energy” has also popped up a couple times recently in my own little creepily-Meta-curated corner of Instagram. It’s popped up enough times—and I’ve felt enough curiosity about it and tension with it—that I Googled it.

Turns out the idea is not new. I don’t know why I happened to notice it now, but it’s been around for a few years at least. But that’s okay. We can still talk about it.

Because I think it’s a little fascinating. And a little complicated.

When I’ve seen people reference “main character energy”—or embody it, or seek to embody it, or claim to embody it—it seems like they generally consider it a good thing.

And for sure, there can be something good about exuding “the confidence, charisma, and self-assuredness that we often see in the main characters from our favorite books, shows, and movies,” as this Psychology Today article puts it.

Nothing wrong with that. (Although I’d quibble with the assumption that most fictional main characters are like this. For one thing, I feel like there’s a whole slew of novels with neurodivergent or neurodivergent-coded protagonists who embody the opposite of conventional extroverted charisma. And we love them.)

It’s also a little complicated.

For one thing, of course, we’re all on our own journeys. And maybe some of us—I’m thinking of women who have spent time in patriarchal faith communities or just in our dominant patriarchal US culture; I’m thinking people of color who live in our dominant white supremacist US culture—could grow a little more “main character energy” in our lives.

Maybe there’s a kind of confidence we can learn to embrace even though our world would want us small. A kind of growing into the fullness of ourselves. Right-sizing ourselves. As my friend (and author of Permission to Matter) might say, a kind of remaining (or becoming) exactly “human-sized.”

Maybe embracing a little more “main character energy” is a healthy part of some of our journeys. (I wrote a whole chapter in my first book, Nice Churchy Patriarchy, about how we’re not all meant to decrease so that Jesus might increase, like John the Baptist said that one time; how the implications of this verse look really different for different people depending on our social locations.)

I wonder, though, if maybe it’s not always where we’re meant to stay.

I wonder if, long-term over the course of our lives, there’s a better alternative we might grow into. One that more fully honors the experiences and realities and full humanity of all people.

Because when I think I’m the main character and act like it—as I go about my day, in all the places where I interact with other people and impact them in some way—what does that say about everyone else around me? It suggests that they’re bit players.

And that’s not the goal.

It’s not just that I’m not meant to be a bit player. It’s that no one is meant to be a bit player.

I suggested in Nice Churchy Patriarchy that privileged white dudes are often socialized to see themselves as the protagonists in a movie of their own making. And how this mindset makes them treat women, people of color, and anyone else who’s not them like bit players. (NPCs, if you will, although I don’t think I was aware of this term when I wrote my first book.)

I stand by this. It’s real, and it’s a problem. But I don’t think we solve the problem by having more and more people act like main characters.

I think we solve it by all seeking to learn to operate in a whole different way.

Not as a main character. And not as a bit part in someone else’s story, either. Not as NPCs, hanging in the background and letting others call the shots. (Although we might sometimes feel like we’re rotating among all these roles depending on the context and the day, and maybe that’s okay, too.)

We can learn how to operate not exclusively in any of these roles, but maybe as something in the middle of it all. Or as something differently entirely from any of it.

We can imagine a different kind of world. Something other than one where some people are main characters and the rest of us orbit around them, swayed by their charisma, intimidated by their confidence, reacting to their self-assured energy.

We can build a world, together, where everyone’s lives, voices, perspectives, and experiences actually pull equal weight. Where we all carry equal value.

We can shift from seeking main character energy to seeking community-building energy. Collaborative energy. Equalizing energy. The kind of energy that sees ourselves as a valued part of a whole. That seeks the good of the entire community together—which includes our own good alongside the good of every other person.

In a time full of oppression, maybe this is how we build justice. In a time full of violence, maybe it’s how we build peace.

In this with you.

ps. If you’re going to the Festival of Faith and Writing this week, please say so—I’d love to meet you IRL! I don’t plan on bringing much main character energy, lol. But I do hope to meet some cool, mutually-supportive, collaborative-minded fellow writers who want to build a different kind of world together.

Depending on what kind of church tradition you’ve been steeped in (if any), these words might sound familiar.

They might get you humming a particular tune: “Friend of God,” by Israel Houghton and Michael Gungor. (It’s pretty catchy, really. And the version I linked to is a pretty lit one, in my opinion.)

I don’t hate the song.

I do think, though, that there’s a lot more we could think about when it comes to the idea of being God’s friends. There’s a lot more that could be said about this metaphor for who the Divine is, and who we are, and what our relationship is to each other—or what it could be.

The song seems to focus mostly on a vague feeling of human unworthiness. Who am I that you would even think of me? I don’t deserve your care, attention, or listening ear.

It expresses a sense of awe that someone who holds the loftiest titles in the universe, like God Almighty and Lord of Glory, would deign to call us “friend.” It’s amazing.

Now, I’m all for approaching the Divine—and other people, and our world, and ourselves—with a healthy posture of humility. I’m all for receiving care, attention, and a listening ear with gratitude, not entitlement.

It really is amazing. Human friends are amazing. The friendship of the Divine is both similarly and differently amazing. I’m here for all of that. (Even as I’m never here for the worm theology.)

And yet. I wonder what we miss, if these are the only places we go when we think of God as friend.

A couple days ago I got to have a great conversation with the very thoughtful and very cool , about prayer and how God’s power operates.

Since I’ve got a book on prayer coming out next March (Maybe We Could Pray Again: Reclaiming a Sacred Practice in Disorienting Times) and Halley is working on a book that reimagines ideas of God’s power through the lens of midwifery (SO cool), she invited me to talk with her about prayer and power.

Halley came up with some pressing, poignant questions. Ones that cut to the heart of What even is faith in our world as it is today. Questions like:

• What’s the point of prayer, if not to get the outcomes we want from an all-powerful God?

• How does our view of God affect the ways we pray?

• What does it look like to have permission to reinvent prayer, or to not pray at all?

And this one, which strikes me as so, so related to the idea of God as friend:

• Evangelical prayer assumed a vertical relationship with God. What would change about prayer if we had a horizontal relationship with God?

Halley’s questions got me thinking. Especially that last one. We touched on this in our recorded conversation, but I wanted to say a little more here.

I’m so intrigued by this idea of a horizontal relationship with God rather than a vertical one. (Or maybe there’s room for both.)

It’s not something I’ve really thought about in these terms—although over time I’ve definitely moved away from an evangelical view of God that feels a lot like relating to a very authoritarian authority figure.

I’ve definitely thought a lot (and written a lot, especially over on Patheos back in the day) about churches and religious leaders and how power operates; about how we might relate in healthier ways both to our faith communities, if we’re a part of one, and to God.

But I don’t know that I’d quite used the language of “horizontal” vs “vertical.” So I was struck by it. And I think it can be really helpful.

It might help us see the Divine as more of a comforting presence in our lives. An awareness that we are not alone. A sense of accompaniment, of gentle guidance like that of a friend.

Maybe we were once looking for a commanding, authoritative voice to tell us what to do in every situation. And maybe that’s what we found in the evangelical world. But we’re not there anymore. That’s not what we want anymore.

Maybe this sort of commanding God-voice now strikes us as a little bit like the “whispering earring” of a story my spouse recently shared with me. (I think the story is about AI, and I’m totally here for it. But maybe it could be about God, too.)

Maybe we don’t really want a God who just tells us what to do. Maybe over time this kind of relationship shrinks our brains. It makes us less human in some fundamental way.

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Hopefully that’s not what our Creator—the one who dreamt up humans in the first place, as we are, in all our complicated, messy glory—really wants for us.

When I think of relating to God in a more horizontal way, I think of learning to pray in ways that affirm and do not undermine our own God-given agency—the power we have, the power we’re meant to have.

I don’t think God is threatened by this. I think God wants us—all of us, and especially women, people of color, and others on the underside of the white supremacist patriarchal power structures of our world—to feel and to be strengthened, courageous, empowered.

Thinking back to the metaphor of God as friend—to me, a friend is someone who wants the best for us but also wants us to feel so much spaciousness to figure out what that is.

A friend is someone who wants us to discover for ourselves what makes our lives meaningful, joyful, worth living. Someone who knows we will make mistakes along the way, and who is there with us as we redirect and grow and change. Not threatened by any of this, but cheering us on.

This is what I think of, now, when I think of God as friend. I think it shapes everything about how we pray, how we engage with our world, how we see things, how we live.

Does any of this resonate? What does it surface for you? What (if anything) does it mean to you to be a friend of God, these days? I’d love to hear.

A big thank you to for sparking these kinds of thoughts, and for the invite to do a live recording together.

In this with y’all.