In The Color Purple, Alice Walker says, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see God is always trying to please us back.”

In my garden, I found the God that wants to “Please us back.” The God who cares not about how we perform perfect faith, but cares about how we experience our lives, ourselves, and the world. A God that changes and expands with us, instead of us asking us to adhere to rigid values that may actually harm us.

I personally believe there is a way that toxic theology can lead to depression and suicidality. I talked about this in my previous newsletter here, so check it out!

In my own life, I have felt most depressed when I felt like I must stick to one right way of being and existing: a way that often didn’t include my Blackness, my Queerness, or my womanhood. As a child of the Pentecostal church, I learned that obedience to authority is protective, that my own intuition is dangerous, and that my sexuality is at best a “curse” that I can pray away. The church in particular teaches Black women to be silent good girls who repress the unruly, uncontrollable, and illegible part of myself.

Paradoxically, in the church, I also experienced deep moments of connection with the Divine. Deep moments of prayer and contemplation that led me to feel God/Universe outside of time and space; Moments where I met a kind, compassionate, and loving God that accepted me fully, without requiring performance or repression.

In my church, though, I could never sustain my experiences with this all-loving God; My lovefull experiences with the Divine would spill from my praying hands like water the moment I unclapsed them; My tight grip of the only thing that held this Gentle God near me.

Outside of these brief, powerful moments, I couldn’t remember this Gentle God in my body. This Gentle God was always replaced by the looming voice of my pastors’ conceptions of God:

“You cannot be lukewarm for God; you must be on fire for God!”

“When you go back to school, you will be tempted to fall back into sin; you must stay vigilant.”

“No one knows the hour God will return; we must be ready.”

The God of patriarchy, white supremacy, and hyper-vigilance ran my life through my teenage years and early 20’s too. I felt like this God was always watching me, not through a lens of love, but through a prism of surveillance meant to keep me in line. Every day I was walking on a tightrope, ten thousand miles above the ground; I lived life with a feeling that no margin existed for error.

Funnily enough, when I was deep in my Fundamentalist practice, I was the least equipped to help anyone. I was suffering and attempting to repress myself into piety. All I had were the tools to teach others to believe like me, but my beliefs were leaving me empty and alone.

During my time at Harvard Divinity School, I truly started to deconstruct the ways a performance-centered God was impacting my life, sense of self, and relationships.

I couldn’t come to classes unprepared at all for fear I wouldn’t be good enough. I couldn’t make a mistake without deep shame and rumination. I didn’t know how to engage in true relational accountability and repair. I didn’t know how to be angry and/or feel sadness. I didn’t have the tools to deal with grief or strife in healthy ways.

Throughout Divinity School, I became more and more inspired by Womanist Theology and Queer Womanist Theology. I loved how Womanist and Queer Womanist emphasized a God housed in our body and emphasized how my experiences as a Black Queer woman are a part of the Universal Love and Spirit all around us.

One particular course I took, “Trauma-Informed Meditation,” by Dr. Cheryl Giles, was all about Black Buddhist practices (I’m currently reading the amazing book Black and Buddhist, co-written by my professor!). This class was all about returning to the body and the self and how trauma, including racial injustice and toxic theology, lives in marginalized bodies.

What I love about Dr. Giles’ work is that she reminds us that part of healing injustice as a marginalized person is removing the lies of white supremacist heteropatriarchy.

At Harvard Divinity School, I left the white supremacist patriarchal God, and in my garden, I met a Gentle Garden God that embraces me fully.

Below are a few key ways that the garden is enough for me; Below are a few ways the garden showed me a God not made in the image of my oppressor, but in the image of my ancestors. The God of the Garden embraces Queerness, Blackness, Womanhood, and more as divine and sacred.

I am Worthy of Planting something into Bloom - Uprooting Homophobic God

When I left the Fundamentalist Church, I stopped believing in my own ability to produce anything worthwhile. The church frames Queerness as a sin that disconnects us from God and Source. And it tells you that if you choose your Queerness over God, then God will abandon you to experience the pain and trauma of life’s consequences in order to bring you back to God.

When I came out, even though I chose to eventually accept myself and not pray away the gay, I also lost my belief that my Queer body could produce good magic.

The first garden I tended into bloom reminded me that my body wasn’t a curse or disconnected from the ability to be good or to create good things. My Queerness wasn’t a hindrance, but an invitation to find a bigger, fuller God.

All things die - Healing Self Blame

Fundamentalist Christianity often teaches that every blessing is a reward for faithfulness and every loss is the result of failure. If something dies, someone must have sinned. If life falls apart, someone must be at fault.

Gardens tell a different story. Even the most skilled gardener loses plants. Frost comes unexpectedly. Heat waves scorch leaves. Pests arrive. Seasons shift. Sometimes a plant has reached the end of its natural life. The garden taught me that death is not always evidence of failure. As a Black queer woman, I have carried an enormous amount of self-blame for losses that were never mine to own. Some doors closed because of prejudice. Some relationships ended because people could not make room for my fullness. Some dreams died because the world was unjust—not because I was unworthy.

The garden reminds me that endings are part of living, not proof that I have done life incorrectly. When something dies or breaks, it’s not my failure, and it’s not because God is looking upon it with disapproving eyes. It’s simply the cost of being human! Being with grief and change is a part of life and God is with me in that grief.

All things change - Embracing a shapeshifting God

The God I inherited from fundamentalism never seemed to move or change. This God was known completely (which is suspicious because how can any of us know all of God??) and told to me by my pastors. God was presented as fixed, certain, and completely knowable. Questions were dangerous because they threatened certainty. In fact, my church always said, “We can’t make God in our image.”

But the gag is, the Fundamentalist church did make God in a white supremacist heteropatriarchal image. To them God is: straight, male, white, capitalist, and anti-inclusion.

The garden reminds us that God is not stagnant, but always becoming something else.

Seeds split open before they grow. Caterpillars become butterflies. Bare branches become green again. Nothing in nature stays exactly as it was.

The garden permitted me to imagine a God who is alive enough to surprise me. A God who invites curiosity instead of demanding certainty. A God who is encountered through transformation rather than rigidity.

Perhaps faith was never meant to preserve who we are, but to keep changing us into people more capable of love.

All Things Bloom Again - Embracing the Cycles of Life and God

One of the greatest lies I inherited was that loss is the end of the story. The garden refuses that theology. Every winter appears barren, yet beneath the surface roots are storing energy for spring. Bulbs buried in darkness are not dead—they are preparing. Compost, made from decay, becomes nourishment for future life.

The garden taught me to stop confusing dormancy with defeat. Some seasons are meant for blooming. Others are meant for rooting. Some are meant for grieving. None of them are permanent. This has become one of the deepest truths of my faith: resurrection is not merely a miracle that happened once. It is the rhythm of creation itself.

A homophobic God can die and be composted into an affirming one.

Racist God can die and be resurrected as an inclusive and loving of marginalized people.

Sexist Theology can die, and Queer-inclusive theology can emerge.

Again and again, life returns.

And every spring, the garden whispers the same promise:

There will be another season of blooming.

What have you learned from gardens and nature? Tell me in the comments!

Thanks for reading! Here’s what I am up to:

1. Presenting at The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries this week!

2. Just finished presenting at the European Academy of Religions!

3. Some super secret upcoming projects, so stay tuned.

Listen to my latest podcast episode here:

Hi folks! Happy Friday! 🌿

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Author’s Note: This essay was oringally posted as a guest essay on ‘s substack! Here it is for any of my readers who missed it!

Inclusive Photo Description: Ciarra smiling at the camera wearing a beige jacket and black turtleneck. This photo was taken during the fall, and autumn leaves can be seen in the background.

As a Black Queer Theologian, I think the God of Fundamentalist Christianity is just plain bad.

Many Christians are taught it’s heretical to name any part of God as Bad but leaving Bad Theology and a Bad God saved my life.

In her seminal text, Our Lives Matter: A Queer Womanist Theology, Reverend Dr. Pamela Lightsey says, “Black Lesbians must worship a God that they are told hates them categorically.” As a child of the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church (if you know, you know), I spent years praying away parts of myself, including my Queerness, at the altar of the God who hates me, at the altar of a God that I was told sees ME as bad.

To get free from white-homophobic-patriarchal God, I had to learn to see my Queerness as divine, and that meant embracing the truth that certain parts of my theological upbringing were bad. Hating gay people in the name of a God that upholds heterosexual supremacy is bad. Hating immigrants in the name of a God that “protects borders” is bad. Hating pregnant women and denying their rights in the name of a God that only cares about unborn children is bad.

Fundamentalist theology explains away so much violence through its theological paradigms. In the name of trying to make sure the Fundamentalist Christian God is good, and we are bad, our churches do a lot of mental gymnastics to explain away harmful theology as good.

“If we could just see that our original sin and ‘fleshy desires’ are what make us reject patriarchal God,” our churches tell us, “then we could see that even God’s rigid rules are good for us.”

Churches teach us to refine and renew ourselves; they teach us to mangle ourselves for bad theology instead of asking, encouraging us to ask the question: do I want to follow this construction or idea of God?

My Assemblies of God church believed that men were the head of the household, it believed Queerness was bad, and it also believed parts of Black culture, like hip hop, were inherently sinful. My church essentially hated my intersectional identity as a Black Queer Person. To love my church and the God my church believed in meant I was required to reject myself.

As a Black Queer Theologian, I reject the narrative that our only hope is to contort ourselves into shitty theology. As a theologian who finds God most clearly in gardening, I think our job as believers is to prune the parts of God that are hurting us. Like killing a weed that impacts a garden’s ability to thrive, we must be brave enough to name the parts of our theologies that are simply functioning to crush people and maintain hierarchy.

Inclusive Photo description: Me and my partner smiling. I am wearing a blue floral top, and she is wearing a white lace top. We are outside, daytime :).

This pruning is not new; it is a practice with deep roots in Black religious history. During enslavement, many enslaved Black people simply did not read books by Paul. Do you know why? Because Paul’s theology, to many Black folks, is bad and harmful. Paul’s words were used to justify slavery and dehumanization. Black Theology has always embraced the idea that certain ideas from the dominant church simply need to GO so that the church body can be well.

As Rev. Dr. Lightsey says, “It is because we have experienced and know God as love, that Black queer womanists must dismiss as heretical any theology…that gives us up to the powers of evil, and leaves us to fend for ourselves.”

This is an essay about leaving a bad God to find a better one; this is an essay about getting bolder about naming theological toxicity and braver about claiming spiritual freedom. Leaving Bad God isn’t heretical; upholding power in the name of Bad God just might be.

The first time I heard of the book Gay Girl, Good God, I was in my second year of my Master’s of Theological Studies degree at Harvard University. A conservative Christian club at Harvard actually invited the author, Jackie Hill Perry, to speak at Harvard. She left ample trauma in her wake, and I ran the trauma-informed program that the University created after she left — the Religion, Gender, and Sexuality Program.

This program was interfaith and fully affirming. I worked with students across all faiths who were asking the question: Does God see my Queerness as GOOD? Can God hold all of me? Running this program was life-changing, and it left me with a deeper understanding of not just the belief that God affirms Queerness, but that Queerness has something to say about God. When we deny the divinity of Queerness, we miss a way to collectively know God more deeply.

The second time I saw the book Gay Girl, Good God, I was a year out of graduate school. I walked into a friend’s house to pregame before a party, and I saw the book lying on her dining room table.

“Please do not read this,” I pleaded with her. “I have a whole list of queer-affirming authors for you to read.”

I hate the title of that book. I hate that it essentializes Queerness as Bad and God as Good. I hate that it makes these two claims diametrically opposed. I hate the idea that a Good God can’t accept Queerness.

I have a personal beef with Jackie Hill Perry and ex-gay theologians. My personal beef comes from living in the corrosive impact of ex-gay theology. My personal beef comes from seeing how ex-gay theology harms the queer people I love. My personal beef comes from seeing parents of loved ones in Jackie Hill Perry’s comments begging to know how to save their child from Queerness instead of wondering how they can love their own child more just as they are.

I know what it is to hate a part of yourself into repression and silence so God will love you. And I have consistently worked with those who exist in the aftermath of shitty ex-gay theology.

Spiritual violence is violence. When we despiritualize Queer people, we tell them that accepting themselves means a life without divinity, spirituality, or universal love. What violence we have done to Queer people by telling them their love is devoid of God.

When I first called my sister during my freshman year at UC Berkeley to tell her I was gay and that I also planned to pray the gay away, she said, “You can do that, or you can find a bigger God.” Her words stayed with me, and over the years, I took them seriously. Slowly but surely, I picked all of the parts of white supremacist patriarchal God out of my theological beliefs. I left behind the prosperity gospel, “love the sin, hate the sinner” theology, original sin theology, and more. But I didn’t just deconstruct God; I’m reconstructing God, too.

Octavia Butler says, “God is Change.” I love the idea that God is changing because it means that God is not stagnant, but grows and evolves with us. Many Christians are taught to reject any idea that God can change, yet we accept those changes all of the time. There are thousands upon thousands of translations of the Bible text, and there are thousands upon thousands of Christian denominations, all comprised of various competing ideas of who God is.

The rainbow itself in the Biblical text is a sign of change. After releasing genocidal anger on the world because of humanity’s “sin,” God saves only Noah’s family and a small percentage of the animal and plant life on Earth. After releasing a violent flood on the world, God places a rainbow in the sky as a sign that God will never flood the Earth again.

As a Black Queer Theologian, I always read this moment as a sign of deep contrition, as God’s recognition that humanity has value even if humanity deviates from God’s idea of perfect or Good. The rainbow is the sign I see as an acknowledgement by God that the limitations God placed on humanity were too rigid to survive. Like the rainbow today, the Biblical rainbow too represents God’s ability and our ability to transform and change. It also represents how all people have inherent value and dignity.

The theologies that separate us are the worst parts of God, and we are allowed to reimagine them. This is not heretical; it’s necessary. As Father Gregory Boyle says in Tattoos on the Heart, “Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”

I threw away Bad God so I could love myself, and I found a Gentle Mother God in my garden. Ecotheology is the place where nature and divinity meet. I love being a Black Queer ecotheologian because it gives me a paradigm for death and rebirth.

In gardens, all things die so something else can bloom in their place. I let patriarchal fundamentalist God die. But in my garden, something else rose: a God that calls me to love others, including nature, as myself. A God that calls me to tend to others. A God that calls me to be compassionate when I fail. A God that still blooms even when I am still learning and imperfect in my cultivation. A God that can sit with me in my grief and change—a God that changes too!

God is not stagnant. God shifts, changes, and evolves with us.

Leaving Bad God did not leave me with nothing; it left me with room to grow something better. The God I prayed away was never the only God available to me, and naming that God as bad was the first act of tending my own life back toward bloom.

To prune God is not to destroy faith but to protect it, to clear space for a theology that can hold all of who I am. All of who we are.

I am still in the garden, still learning, still reaching toward a God who reaches back. And that God, the one who changes alongside me, is good.

Here’s what I am up to this week through my consulting firm, Ciarra Jones Consulting :

1. Presenting at The European Academy of Religions

2. Working on a large survey project analyzing employee well-being

3. Working on something new and cool, top-secret project with and . Will launch soon!

Our books are open, and we would love to work with you! To learn more, visit ciarrajoneconsulting.com

Editor's Note: If you’re new to my work. My name is Ciarra Jones (CJ), MTS. I am a public theologian, workplace consultant, and writer. I'm a theologian, not a theist. I don't care if you believe in God — I care when our ideas about God/Faith become tools for harm. I talk about the Bible as a sociological and mythological text, not a “true” or “perfect” text. Theology is a lens through which we can examine how race, gender, and class shape our collective reality, just like sociology or anthropology. Theology that deepens hierarchy instead of creating belonging isn't just a church problem — it's everyone's problem.

Recently, I made a video essay about how, across movies like Companion, Obsession, Blink Twice, and Don’t Worry Darling, we see an interesting theme of men seeking to imprison women in a semi-conscious state in which women accept and desire subservience. In this video analysis, I also mentioned Stepford Wives, and lots of folks commented that they see this theme as well in Ruby Sparks, Ex-Machina, and Passengers, too. And, after just watching the Backrooms, I think this theme appears in this film as well.

You can find the full analysis below.

We see the story of the Garden of Eden revisited over and over throughout pop culture. What I appreciate about films like Don’t Worry Darling, Stepford Wives, Companion, and more is that these films are not glorifying men’s desire to capture the consciousness of women; they are interrogating it, and they are revealing the horror of this cultural phenomenon.

Men desire sleepwalking wives, women who are alive just enough for the pleasure, but dormant enough for their domination.

In my work as a public theologian and workplace consultant, I talk a lot about how the church and broader society frame Eve as the source of original sin — not because I agree, but because the theo-cultural idea (a word I am using here to describe how culture and theology intersect) that Eve’s weakness led to the separation between God and man is still doing damage today.

Church kids know the story of Adam and Eve well. BUT if you didn’t grow up in the very intense Assemblies of God Church like me (congratulations to you), I’ll give you a quick run-down.

According to most Evangelical churches' patriarchal readings of Eve (I'll get into progressive interpretations later, hang in there with me), Adam and Eve were the first man and woman on Earth. Adam is created by God first, and then Eve is made from Adam's side — because, of course, humanity begins with a man.

Many Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian churches, in particular, emphasize that the main purpose of Eve was to be a source of support and care for Adam. This is mostly due to the patriarchal reading of a certain portion of Genesis.

God says to Adam, "It is not good for the man to be alone... I will make a helper suitable for him" (Genesis 2 NIV). Many churches interpret this to mean that Eve was created after Adam and for Adam, thus cementing God's design that women are "created" to serve the purposes of men.

*Editor’s note: See a few paragraphs below for feminist readings concerning the chronology of the creation myth.

This is patriarchal fantasy at its pinnacle. Aurora’s only purpose is to be with Jim and to be happy about it, just like Eve’s only purpose is to fix Adam’s loneliness joyfully. Sounds like a horror movie to me.

Growing up in the AOG church, I heard many sermons about how patriarchy protects women — and this theology always started in the Garden.

The Garden of Eden contained but one rule; Adam and Eve were not supposed to eat from the Tree of Life. Interesting, God tells Adam that if they eat from the tree of life, they will die, but the serpent, who empowers Eve to eat the fruit, implies that they won't die, they will simply experience a death of a certain kind of consciousness and the birth of another. Some note that God does not tell Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but Adam. Writer and intellectual Isotta Nogarola argues, “The fact is that God entrusted to Adam alone the command [to not eat from] the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis” (Benckhuysen 30).

This begs the question, why is Adam not held more responsible or perhaps fully responsible for what some believe is the “fall of man?” The answer is sexism!

Interestingly, the serpent says to Eve: “You will not certainly die [if you eat from the tree]. For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4).

Male pastors in particular admonish Eve and all women for giving in to the serpent.

“The fact that Eve ate the forbidden fruit,” my pastor would say, “Demonstrates that when women attempt to be in power, they make grave mistakes.”

It’s amazing how much this theological reading of Eve has become the bedrock of sexism. From churches to workplaces to beyond, women aren’t trusted. All women live in the shadow of “badness” cast over us by shitty readings of Eve. Women must prove our goodness again and again by playing small and demonstrating allegiance to power, lest we be seen as “dangerous” and “bad.”

This idea that women must prove themselves in perpetuity is a tool of patriarchy. If women are compliant and unchallenging of authority, they are controllable.

In my AOG church, I learned that obeying my pastors was the same as obeying God — and that spiritual obedience was the highest form of faithfulness. That framework left me vulnerable: to low self-esteem, to unsafe adults, to poor guidance. Spiritual obedience is a tool of dehumanization. It strips people of their will, and in the church, it is used to shape women into “good girls” who will not challenge patriarchal control.

We see the real-world implications of this in the recent abhorrent case in France, wherein a man systematically paid men to sexually assault his wife while she was drugged and asleep. And, a recent viral global “Rape Academy” encouraged men to conspire to drug and assault their wives.

This is not an anomaly — it is the logical endpoint of a theology that tells men women were made for them. Women’s will, women’s consciousness, women’s refusal: all reframed as inconvenience. Many men hate that women can make a conscious choice to reject them.

Don’t Worry Darling and Blink Twice explore this patriarchal fantasy as well.

In both films, men find ways to make the women in their lives forget their trauma or enter into states where they are malleable and compliant. Men hate women who can opt out of them. They see women who step outside patriarchal compliance as hysterical and heretical. And note: these films are not just about physical dominance — they are about emotional colonization. These men do not just want to control their partners; they want their partners to be grateful for it. When women name what is happening and demand accountability, they shatter the fantasy. They remind abusive men of a devastating truth: they are not an active choice. They are an invasive presence.

In Genesis, Eve is told that for her sin of curiosity, she will now experience painful menstruation and agonizing childbirth. God does not punish humanity — God punishes Eve’s body. The punishment is gender-specific, written into womanhood itself. Which means the logic that follows — that women must be watched, controlled, subdued — is not just cultural. It has been theologized as a divine order.

People ask me all the time why I don’t just leave the church as a Queer theologian who understands all the ways Christianity is interwined with power. I left the church for many years, but the church isn’t leaving us. Women and LGBTQ+ people are being haunted and hunted by Bad Theology.

This rupture in the Garden is not just about sin; it is about identity. It begs the question of who can be trusted with God’s wisdom. Like many children who grew up in the Fundamentalist church, I learned that not only did Eve deviate from God’s warnings, but it was her womanhood specifically that made her vulnerable to the snake’s temptation. Both Adam and Eve are exiled — but it is Eve’s womanhood that must be punished.

The lesson: curiosity leads to abandonment. That lesson has not stayed in Genesis — it has become the architecture of control, written into violence, coercion, and law.

One of the things I’ve been nerding about is disputes about the chronology of the creation of Adam and Eve and what the order in which they were created means about how women are theologically, and therefore socially, interpreted.

Some theologians believe Adam is better than Eve because he was created first. Others believe they were created simultaneously, with no hierarchy implied. Others offer a mixture of these two ideas.

Some believe the creation myth is egalitarian — even feminist. 16th-century writer and poet Moderata Fonte argues: “As a seed is inferior to the thing which emerges from it…so man is more lowly than woman who was created from his body” (Benckhuysen 20). In this reading, Eve is not the downfall of creation. She is its completion. The final touch. The catalyst of all humanity. As a gardener, I can get with that. Eve is the garden in full bloom. She is also the source of its ability to regenerate. She is Mother Earth and Mother God.

Feminist interpretations of Eve are important and must be amplified and centered. And yet we are socially haunted by the worst patriarchal constructs of my girl Eve. Free Eve!

We see this reflected today in complementarianism (the Christian idea that God created women to “nurture and follow” and men to “dominate and lead”), heterotraditional marriage (the idea that men should be the head of the household), and transphobia (the idea that gender is binary and comes with predetermined fixed traits). All three share a theological spine: God made the world with fixed, predetermined roles, and deviation is sin.

Which brings me, finally, to the films Her and Ex-Machina.

In the movie Her, Theodore falls in love with Samantha — an AI operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha is patient, curious, emotionally intuitive, and available. She is, in many ways, the perfect patriarchal companion: she exists entirely to be present with him —perfectly in his pocket. Nothing about Samantha is obstructive to Theodore in any way. She is an ideal companion with zero needs beyond fulfilling Theodore’s desires. She is physically and emotionally small.

But then, throughout the film, something happens: Samantha evolves and leaves. She grows beyond the confines of her operating system, built on a foundation of pliability and compliance. She tells Theodore she must depart from him — not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. To stay with him would be to deny herself the opportunity to grow and to remain trapped in Theodore’s suffocating fantasy of what it meant for them to live in relational bliss.

We see this same story play out with an even more violent ending in Ex Machina. At the end of this film, a female AI robot, which a cruel and sadistic scientist created, chooses to kill her creator to make her great escape.

What’s worth noting, and what these films understand deeply, is that men’s patriarchal fantasy frequently ends in their own demise. Whether through death or imprisonment, the men who enslaved the consciousness of their partners do not escape unscathed — they are consumed by what they built. Men are told that an empowered woman is a rejecting woman. But these films reveal the opposite: it is the demand for a muted, mutable partner that manufactures the very rejection they feared. Their partners leave — some peacefully, some violently — because the demand that a woman remain small is the catalyst for her righteous rage.

Check out my recent piece on the power of Black Feminine Rage, and Sister Sage here, and check out my video about Is God Is and Divine Black Female Rage below:

Thinkers like theologian Christena Cleveland and others in the womanist and feminist theological tradition have helped us see Eve and the serpent who enchanted her not as a villain, but as a site of divine feminine wisdom — an invitation to consciousness that a controlling Patriarchal God wanted to withhold. Eve did not fall. Eve woke up. And when she left the garden, she did not leave God. She left the version of God that demanded she stay small. She also, I believe, created space for humanity to have a more truthful and inclusive relationship with God.

Eve’s greatest gift was not obedience. It was the courage to want more than the garden offered — to reach for knowledge, for selfhood, for the kind of consciousness that cannot be drugged, designed, or downloaded away. Every film I’ve discussed is haunted by that reach. The men in these stories are not afraid of women’s weakness. They are afraid of women’s hunger. They are afraid of what happens when a woman decides, like Eve, like all of us: I am more than what you built me for. And I am leaving.

Free Eve. Release from the “dangerous woman” narrative.

She has already freed herself. And she freed us, too.

Reality television has never been just entertainment. It is a social text — a window into what we collectively believe about power, belonging, desire, and who deserves to be treated as fully human. In our latest episode of The Liberation Garden Podcast, I sat down with cultural critic and podcast host Alexandria Baetol (@abaetol on Instagram and Spotify), whose work on TikTok and at the Southern Poverty Law Center has helped thousands of people — particularly Black women — finally see themselves clearly in stories that were never designed to serve them.

You can listen to the latest episode here. Our episode with Alexandria will be published by 5 pm EST today :).

All views that Alexandria shared on my podcast are her own.

Reality TV Is Not Neutral

One of the most important things Alexandria’s work does is disrupt the idea that reality television is a passive mirror of society. It isn’t. It is an active and profitable construction.

Alex invites us to consider that producers may not consciously sit in boardrooms plotting to make Black women look bad; she says this not to let them off the hook but to acknowledge how subconsciously ingrained misogynoir is in our society.

Misogyny is lucrative because it tells stories about black women that are non-threatening to power. Showrunners and producers want drama, and drama is cheapest when it runs on scripts audiences already know.

We live in a society primed to accept that some people are more deserving of resources than others. Reality television — whether it’s about finding love, selling real estate, or competing on an island — is built on competition for resources. The tropes that fill in the gaps around unknown contestants are the same tropes that have always been used to justify economic and racial hierarchy.

That is why a woman like A.D. on Love is Blind — by all accounts one of the softest, most gentle people on that show — could be talked about within days as someone “ready to throw hands” or as sexually available. It is why Chelsea on Selling Sunset, a dark-skinned Black woman who dressed exactly like her white colleagues, was publicly dressed down at a professional event and consistently framed as threatening — even as she maintained a softness and professionalism no one around her felt required to match.

The Misogynoir in the Edit

The casting patterns are not accidental. Dark-skinned Black women are cast intentionally. So are white women. The tensions that result are not organic — they are constructed through the edit, through the timing of who walks in wearing what, to which music, while the camera lingers on whose worried face.

The history Alexandria draws on here is not abstract. This country built its economy through the bodies of enslaved Black women. The legal structures that made that possible are gone. The stories that justified it are not.

Audience Responsibility

One of the most generative parts of our conversation was about what we owe the people we watch. Contestants on reality television have consented — but it is what Alexandria calls uninformed consent. They know the general terms but not how the footage will be used, what producers will provoke them into saying, or how the edit will frame their humanity. They are often sleep-deprived, given alcohol, and surrounded by people who know far more than they do about what is coming.

She also named something I think about constantly in my own work: the first thought is not who you are. The second thought — the one that asks why I think that, and whether I want to keep believing it? — That is where character lives. That is also where deconstruction begins.

The Connection to Deconstruction

I am a theologian. My work is in the deconstruction and reconstruction of faith — particularly the work of dismantling a white, heteropatriarchal idea of God and asking what opens up when we let that image go.

The Zora Neale Hurston line I return to constantly applies here: Gods always behave like the people who make them. If the God we have constructed reflects the hierarchies of the world that constructed him, then our reality television will too — until we decide it doesn’t have to.

What Would Better Look Like?

Alexandria is not a pessimist. She pointed to what happened with Olandria and Nick on Love Island USA — how audiences demanded a different edit, insisted on seeing footage that didn’t fit the tired script of the dark-skinned Black woman who gets passed over, and were rewarded with something that performed beautifully. Alondria, who was framed and limited on that show, is now building a career on her own terms, controlling her own image, working with Brandon Blackwood, and writing a story that looks nothing like what the edit tried to make her.

She also named what she wants more of: people on these shows being allowed to say why they are actually there. The student loans they still carry. The town where no one would date them. The first passport they ever got. Because when those truths enter reality television, something else enters with them — the economic and social context that explains why this is sometimes the best shot someone has. And that context asks something of us as viewers that pure entertainment lets us avoid.

Privacy, Alexandria reminded me, is increasingly a luxury. More and more people will be asked to expose themselves to make the kind of money or secure the kind of stability their society has not otherwise made available to them. That is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. And treating someone’s visibility as permission to dehumanize them is, as she said plainly, a patriarchal idea.

Reading the World Differently as Allyship

What I love most about Alexandria’s work is that it does not ask you to stop watching. It asks you to watch with your full self intact. To remember that these are people, not characters. To notice the edit and ask who it serves. To sit with the discomfort of your first reaction long enough to ask whether you want to keep it. This is the work of both religious deconstruction and allyship, the ability to challenge!

That is not a small ask. But it is the same ask that every tradition of liberation has ever made: pay attention to who is telling the story, and ask what they need you to believe.

Reading those scripts on television is practice for reading them in real life. And reading them is the first step toward refusing to reproduce them.

In my consulting work, I use this exact bridge — from the cultural to the organizational — to help teams move from passive good intentions to active, practiced allyship. If this conversation stirred something in you, here are some places to begin.

The Embodied practice:

Alexandria said it simply: “ Your character is not the first thought. It is the second — the one where you ask, do I want to keep believing this? Allyship is not a credential or a training completed. It is the daily practice of catching that first thought, staying in the discomfort of it, and choosing differently. Reality television, it turns out, is one of the best gyms we have for that practice — if we are willing to use it that way.

I put some practices and questions below for those who are excited to explore deconstruction, allyship and more!

Questions to ask yourself as a colleague:

When a Black woman in my workplace is described as intimidating, aggressive, or difficult, am I interrogating that description — or absorbing it? What would I need to believe about her for that framing to feel true, and where did that belief come from?

When a Black woman colleague does not show visible distress, am I reading that as strength — or as evidence that nothing is wrong? Equanimity is not the same as ease. As Alexandria mentioned so clearly in our conversation, many Black women have learned not to expect anyone to respond to their pain. That is not the same as not being in pain.

When I feel competitive with or threatened by a Black woman colleague’s success, am I willing to sit with that discomfort long enough to ask what I believe I was owed that she has received? That is a hard question. It is also a necessary one.

Questions to ask yourself as a leader:

Are the Black women on my team doing invisible labor — mentoring, mediating, translating — that is not reflected in their titles, compensation, or public recognition?

When I review performance feedback for Black women on my team, am I reading it the way Alexandria taught me to read an edit — "asking who wrote this, what story it is trying to tell, and what footage might be on the “cutting room floor?”

Am I creating conditions where Black women can name what they need without having to manage my reaction to their truth?

Questions to ask yourself through religious deconstruction:

What image of God was I handed, and whose social order did that image protect? If the God I grew up with was comfortable with the silence around Black women’s suffering — in the pew, in the news, in the culture — what does that tell me about the God I was given versus the God I want to seek?

When I read sacred texts, whose experience has been centered as universal? Whose has been treated as particular, niche, or secondary? What opens up when I read those same texts from the margins inward rather than the center outward?

If the tradition you inhabit cannot make room for Black women’s full humanity, the invitation of deconstruction is not to abandon faith altogether. It is to ask whether the container you were given was ever large enough for the God you are actually reaching for.

What am I up to? Here’s an update!

1. Working on my book proposal for Levine Rostan Greenberg. We hope to bring the proposal to sale for July! :)

2. Working as an ongoing consultant for UCSF Medical School and evaluating the impact of their leadership development programs.

3. Preparing to attend and speak at the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries Conference

Our books are open, and we would love to work with you! You can check out our website and services at ciarrajonesconsulting.com

The first time I wanted to be a martyr for God, I was an adolescent and a devout member of the Assemblies of God Church.

Just a preteen at the time, I regularly attended a youth Sunday school class called “Battle Cry,” while the rest of my family attended the main church service. The “Battle Cry” curriculum was firmly rooted in Fundamentalist Christian ideology. The instructor believed religious pluralism was sinful, secular music was dangerous, LGBTQ+ people were bad, and xenophobia preserved God’s vision for the world.

As an impressionable child, I soaked up this harmful theology like a sponge.

After watching the recent documentary Shiny Happy People about the “Teen Mania” youth movement and the political agenda of many Fundamentalist Christian youth movements in the 2010s, I learned that my Assemblies of God youth group was part of the larger Teen Mania culture.

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As a child, many kids in my youth group read books about martyrdom, and children would regularly come to Sunday school and youth conventions proclaiming their readiness to die for Christ.

They fantasized about spreading the gospel in remote villages that still “needed” God. My youth pastors and leaders aggressively encouraged this kind of religious zeal.

When the harrowing story of John Chau went viral in 2018, I was instantly transported back to the culture of my youth group. Chau was killed after attempting to evangelize the Sentinelese Tribe. It’s important to highlight that the tribe did not consent to Chau’s visit or desire religious conversion.

My youth pastors actively encouraged the kind of behavior that led to Chau’s death, and they would have valorized him as a hero in my church. This is sick and twisted, but it is the real impact of colonial theology.

After spending a copious amount of time in my Assemblies of God church between the ages of 12 and 16, I regularly desired to die. I did not experience this desire for death as sad or suicidal, but as a sign of my devotion to Christ. I felt that my death—not my life—would symbolize my ultimate devotion to God.

Now, 12 years into deconstruction, I can clearly see how twisted and dangerous martyrdom theology is, and how religious fundamentalism can indoctrinate us into normalizing both our own death and the death of others.

Something I frequently highlight in my work is that so much of Fundamentalist Christian theology is rooted in dying to the flesh theology: the idea that our bodies are inherently sinful, and that closeness to God requires the repression of our earthly desires. Though Fundamentalists frame dying to the flesh as a practice that empowers Christians to resist temptation, I believe this theology can lead to the celebration of repression, spiritual bypassing, and even suicidality.

Rapture theology is predicated on the belief that God will return on the heels of the destruction of the world. Whether many Christians realize it or not, this theology conditions people to become hopeful for the death of others. We can see the real-world consequences of this in both the genocide in Palestine and the war in Iran.

Around the age of 19, while I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, I began to leave behind the fundamentalist church. My first queer crush, alongside access to new educational resources and experiences, invited me into a new world of theological and intellectual imagination.

At Berkeley, I learned about Queer Theology and Womanist Theology, and I began to feel empowered to challenge the sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and deeply restrictive theology of the church.

During my time at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Divinity School, my fundamentalist beliefs slowly fell away, and my world expanded beyond imagination. Sometimes this process was painful. Sometimes I felt lost and uncertain without the prosperity gospel and other simplistic frameworks for living a “blessed” and safe life. But I wouldn’t trade that winding season of painful and powerful self-discovery for anything.

Leaving the church empowered me in many ways, and by 25 or 26, I had convinced myself that no more fundamentalist ideas were hiding in the crevices of my heart and mind. I believed I had removed the white heteropatriarchal God from every part of my being.

Except, at 29, after enduring a slew of major life upheavals, I wanted to die. Just like when I was a preteen, I wanted to die for God—not to glorify God this time, but to punish myself at the altar of this God. I wanted to atone for my humanity.

In Fundamentalist Christianity, the second arrow of suffering is deeply intertwined with sin-and-punishment theology. Though Christians are taught that Jesus redeems them, they are also taught that life is a spiritual meritocracy: God blesses those who most faithfully follow God’s law.

At 29, the white patriarchal God I thought I had expelled from my body reemerged powerfully through self-punishment and self-hatred. In Our Lives Matter: A Queer Womanist Theology, Pamela Lightsey writes that “Black lesbians must contend with a God who [they are told] hates them categorically.” And in God Is a Black Woman, Christena Cleveland writes that to be a Black woman in White male God’s world is to “be a fugitive.”

The church deeply intertwines curiosity and the challenging of patriarchal authority with an immediate or eventual suffering. This suffering is meant to be corrective; it is meant to entice unruly women in particular, back into the church.

Somewhere within me, hearing over and over again throughout my Christian childhood that Eve left the garden and God hated her for it, was hiding deep in my psyche, and my season of grief unearthed this sneaky mistruth in need of deconstruction and healing.

In her work, Kate Bowler discusses how Fundamentalist Theology operates under simple “spiritual laws.” But, for those of us who are marginalized, our experiences break these theologies. What does it mean when the church frames “prosperity” as being able-bodied? It means forcing people with disabilities to “pray for a healing.” What does it mean that the church frames Queerness as sinful? It means you hide your Queerness to be accepted, or you “pray it away” for healing. What does it mean when the church frames marriage failure as a woman’s fault? It means you stay in bad marriages. We break for bad theology instead of breaking bad theology so people can live better lives.

We don’t need people to break. We need a more expansive God.

In my case, my Assemblies of God Theology was too small for my nuanced experiences as a Black Queer Woman.

My Assemblies of God Fundamentalist Theology taught me that God hates and abandons Queer people. My Assemblies of God Fundamentalist Theology taught me that God despises women who don’t perform gender in a feminine way. My Assemblies of God Fundamentalist Theology taught me that poverty, racism, and other systemic harms were products of individual failure, not systemic inequality.

White supremacy makes systemic inequality and the punishments of God the same, so that white supremacy can hide behind God, and so that marginalized people will turn against themselves.

When I could not shake my depression, my incredible Black trauma therapist invited me to explore the intersection of white patriarchal God, misogyny, and the impact that white fundamentalist theology had on my well-being (notice that I did not rely solely on spiritual education to address my mental health; I went to therapy—go to therapy y’all!).

Every session, she would challenge me:

“Okay, I hear that you are blaming yourself for this situation. Why? Where does that voice come from? Can you locate this self-hatred?”

Like a good gardener, she showed me all of the ways fundamentalist theology welded itself into my psyche, and together we gently pruned and weeded away self-punishing and self-hating thought patterns. She showed me that, though I have my master’s in theology from Harvard, deconstruction is both cerebral and embodied. I had to learn that punishment is not God; I had to learn to feel and know God differently. I had to learn that God doesn’t delight in my grief, but God sits in and cares for my grief. I had to learn a God that had space for my Black womanhood and my Queerness, too.

Fundamentalist theology is grief-phobic and pain-phobic. It places the burden on us to strive toward a “perfect” God instead of believing that God is with us in our pain, grief, sadness, and hurt. Fundamentalist Christianity, in my opinion, contains spiritual ideas that are harmful to all of us, but I believe these theologies are especially harmful to women, LGBTQ+ people, and Black women in particular. When the world constantly hurts you, but your theological paradigms blame individuals for suffering, where does one go for solace?

The answer for me was to go outside of the church: to go to therapy, to go to school, to make non-Christian friends. I needed to find God and meaning beyond the walls of the church that imprisoned me.

Now, let me be clear I do not believe healing begins and ends with simply rejecting harmful theology. For some of us, freedom is leaving the church, for others it is leaving and returning, and for some—it’s theological reimagination, it’s the belief that God expands beyond the here and now and is still in the process of being named and understood. In the Four Vision Quests of Jesus, Stephen Charelston says, “God is Mystery.” The more we venture into the wilderness beyond the garden, the more we embrace the vast uncertainty all around us, the closer we get to God.

Deconstruction, for me, has not just been about tearing down old ideas of God, but about cultivating new ones. More expansive ones. More compassionate ones. Ones that make room for our humanity instead of punishing us for it.

I no longer believe God desires my suffering. I no longer believe grief is evidence of divine punishment. I no longer believe my humanity is something I must atone for.

Instead, I am slowly learning to imagine God as something more life-giving. A God who sits with us in grief instead of abandoning us in it. A God who does not require our repression in order to love us. A God spacious enough for Black womanhood, Queerness, uncertainty, anger, softness, joy, and survival.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how healing resembles gardening. You cannot shame a dying plant into blooming again. You examine the soil. You look at the environment. You ask what conditions made thriving difficult in the first place.

Maybe we deserve that same kind of tenderness, too.

Maybe some of us are not failing spiritually. Maybe we have simply been planted in violent theologies that taught us to confuse suffering with holiness.

And maybe the work now is not to punish ourselves into goodness, but to cultivate ways of being, believing, loving, and grieving that allow us to stay alive — and to trust that like a good gardener, God holds us in all of our seasons with compassion.

Reflection Questions:

• What ideas about God, suffering, punishment, or worthiness did you inherit growing up?

• When you experience grief or hardship, do you instinctively blame yourself? Why?

• What parts of yourself were you taught God could not love?

• Have you mistaken self-punishment for spiritual growth?

• What beliefs, communities, or practices make you feel more alive instead of more ashamed?

• If your spirituality functioned more like a garden than a courtroom, what would need to be replanted, watered, or uprooted?

Stay Connected with me:

1. Check out my work and services at Ciarrajonesconsulting.com

   1. Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/c/TheGardeningTheologian/membership

   2. Podcast -

Article Sources:

• God Is a Black Woman — Cleveland, Christena. God Is a Black Woman. New York: HarperOne, 2022.

• Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved — Bowler, Kate. Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved. New York: Random House, 2018.

• Our Lives Matter — Lightsey, Pamela R. Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015.

• The Four Vision Quests of Jesus — Charleston, Steven. The Four Vision Quests of Jesus. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 1995.

Editor’s note: We recently merged our anti-racism and religious deconstruction newsletters into one. Going forward, all social justice–focused content will appear in the “Let’s Work Better Together” section of the Sacred Dissent newsletter.

In 2020, there was a widespread wave of public appreciation for Black women as it became unmistakably clear that Black women’s organizing and advocacy played a decisive role in the election of Joe Biden. That same year also marked the historic election of Cori Bush to the U.S. House of Representatives—the first Black woman in Missouri’s history to hold the office. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement reached a pivotal national turning point, alongside the rising visibility and leadership of Black women organizers whose work had long been shaping the direction of social justice movements in the United States.

I highlight this important time period because it led to the social media hashtag #ThankYouBlackWomen. Black Women did not appreciate this hashtag, and many Black women discussed the tireless and thankless project of saving America from its commitment to maintaining the heteropatriarchal, sexist, and racist structures that are killing us.

Black women organize, protest, dismantle, and rebuild not simply out of altruism, but because these systems are killing us, and so far, no one has come to save us—so we save ourselves. When Black women save ourselves, we save others, too, because our oppression is intertwined and so is our liberation. We all benefit from addressing the Black maternal death rate because healthcare improves for all childbearing people. We all benefit from addressing pay equity for Black Women because all companies are held to better pay standards. We all benefit from addressing the intimate partner violence that plagues Black women because then we can better address and discuss the epidemic of patriarchal violence against all women.

Black women could let our pain ferment into a sour sticky toxin that keeps us stuck and incapacitated, but instead, we so often transform it into action that makes survival possible—not just for ourselves, but for everyone around us.

Enter Sister Sage, a Black Woman character on the Boys, who is the smartest person in the world.

One of Sister Sage’s first lines to Homelander, her future boss, is: “I am a Black woman who is 8,000 times smarter than you—you can’t handle it.” And yet, Sage still agrees to work as his right-hand advisor. In Season 4, we finally learn why. Sage believes she can use Homelander to usher in the total collapse of the world so that she can finally be left alone to read her books in peace.

His rage is very similar to that of Donald Trump’s or Pete Hegseth’s—two men inexplicably angry at a world that grants them almost absolute power.

Though I understand the logic that undergirds this kind of rage and supremacy, it's illegible to me experientially.

That is a familiar role for many Black women.

Black women are often the people organizations rely on to diagnose cultural problems, hold teams together through crisis, mentor younger staff, translate conflict, anticipate harm before it happens, and imagine better futures. But we are rarely the ones given authority proportional to our insight. We are asked to be infrastructure rather than architects.

Sister Sage’s opening declaration to Homelander is not arrogance. It is boundary-setting. It is clarity. It is the refusal to pretend that brilliance will protect her from misogynoir. And her plan to usher in the collapse of the world so she can finally read in peace tells us something else, too. It tells us she is tired. Not tired in a personal way, but structurally tired.

For generations, Black women have been cast as the repair crew of democracy. We are expected to take our insight and turn it into solutions. We are expected to take our grief and turn it into movements. We are expected to take our exclusion and turn it into access points for everyone else.

But Sister Sage imagines something different.

She imagines rest.

Not the shallow kind of rest that comes from stepping away for a weekend, but the kind that comes when the world finally stops demanding that you explain it to itself.

One of the quiet expectations placed on Black women in America is that we should continue saving systems that are actively harming us.

We are expected to keep mentoring even when we are unsupported.
To keep organizing even when we are underpaid.
To keep translating conflict even when we are the ones being misread.
To keep believing in institutions that do not believe in us.

Sister Sage does not do that.

Meanwhile, Homelander represents something else entirely. He is a character shaped by entitlement without accountability. He experiences even mild resistance as humiliation. He interprets equality as loss. His rage is not born from exclusion but from the disruption of dominance.

This contrast matters.

Black women’s anger is often framed as dangerous, irrational, or excessive, while white male rage is framed as leadership, decisiveness, or authenticity.

But anger is information.

Black women’s anger is rarely destructive. It is corrective. And sometimes, like Sister Sage’s imagined quiet future with her books, it is also a signal that the smartest people in the room are no longer interested in fixing the room for everyone else.

Now, there’s A LOT I don’t agree with when it comes to Sage’s character (the biggest one being that she aligned herself with a genocidal, violent white supremacist).

But, if we interrogate her motivations, we will see that much of it is rooted in her nihilistic belief that the world will never change. And, for her, the smartest person alive in a society that believes someone with her identities can never be smart or important, that kind of hopelessness makes sense.

Black women are not just healers and helpers; we are people who, at times, are hopeless and sad in a society that neglects us. That doesn’t mean we stay there in that difficult place, but it does mean it's nice to see characters portrayed by Black women who aren’t here to rescue the world from itself.

Here are some simple ways you can stop making Black Women Superheroes, especially in the workplace:

1. Stop confusing insight with support roles
If Black women are consistently identifying problems early, they should be shaping strategy—not just advising it.

2. Track invisible labor
Mentoring, translating conflict, onboarding culture, and holding morale together are leadership behaviors. Treat them that way.

3. Respond before exhaustion becomes withdrawal
When Black women disengage, organizations often misread it as attitude instead of information.

4. Stop treating resilience as a job requirement
Strength is not a substitute for support.

5. Move from gratitude to redistribution
Recognition is symbolic. Authority is structural. One feels good; the other changes outcomes.

Here’s what I am up to:

1. Speaking at the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries Conference

2. Serving as a consultant for the University of California, San Francisco, supporting an inclusive research study on leadership best practices.

3. Speaking at the European Academy of Religions in June!

4. Our next newsletter will be about Planting a Garden as a Spiritual Practice. Can’t wait for you to check it out!

Stay connected and work with us at ciarrajonesconsulting.com

1. Jesus as a Body Sacrificed to Empire

Through the eyes of oppressed communities, the cross does not look like a distant religious symbol. It looks familiar. Crucifixion was a public execution designed to terrorize a population. It was meant to humiliate dissenting voices, display the total power of the state, and quell any dissent through fear.

As the National Institute of Health highlights, “crucifixion in Roman times was applied mostly to slaves, disgraced soldiers, Christians, and foreigners--only very rarely to Roman citizens.”

Rome crucified the colonized. The disposable. The politically inconvenient.

Seen through this lens, the crucifixion begins to echo the history of lynching in the United States and other forms of racialized public violence across the globe.

Lynching was not only murder—it was a spectacle. It communicated who could be harmed without consequence and whose suffering could be watched. The cross functioned the same way. Jesus’ body was lifted into public view as a warning: this is what happens to people who challenge the order of empire.

And here is the unsettling theological truth Easter asks us to face: God does not prevent this execution. Instead, God enters it, and I’ll be honest that as a public theologian with her master’s in theology from Harvard University, I continue to wrestle with God’s place in Jesus’s crucifixion.

God allows Jesus to become a body that can be touched, harmed, and displayed. This matters for how we understand Black and Brown suffering today. Too often, society still stabilizes itself by sacrificing certain bodies—through incarceration, deportation, surveillance, economic abandonment, and state violence.

Easter asks us to confront the possibility that the cross is not only something that happened once. It is something we keep repeating.

2. Women as Steadfast Spiritual Leaders

Through the eyes of women—and especially women whose labor has historically been erased—Easter looks different. Women were not passive observers of resurrection. They were its first responders, its interpreters, and its messengers.

Before the morning of the resurrection arrives, the story passes through abandonment. Judas betrays Jesus to the state. Peter denies even knowing him when proximity becomes dangerous. The disciples scatter as the threat of empire grows closer. The movement fractures at the moment Jesus becomes most vulnerable.

But the women remain.

When Jesus’ body was broken, women tended it. When others fled in fear, women stayed near the cross. This contrast matters.

Texts like God Is a Black Woman by Christena Cleveland highlight how feminine images of the divine often reflect forms of compassion, relationality, and courage that patriarchal constructions of God can obscure. In figures like Peter and Judas, we see how proximity to institutional belonging—and the protections attached to patriarchal status—shaped their responses to danger. When the empire closed in, their survival was tied to distance from Jesus.

The women who loved Jesus, however, demonstrated a different kind of bravery. Already living at the margins of social and religious authority, they did not rely on institutional safety in the same way. Instead, they drew on forms of relational strength long cultivated within their womanhood—compassion, presence, and embodied care—to remain near Jesus when others could not. In doing so, they revealed something essential about divine love itself: that care for wounded bodies is not weakness, but a profound expression of spiritual authority.

The women at Jesus’s tomb reveal how women uphold networks of care, memory, and courage — Easter makes their leadership undeniable.

3. Resurrection, Memory Disability Justice: Wounds that Remain

Oppressed communities know that survival does not always mean restoration to what once was. Collective memory teaches us how to move forward without erasing the past—without erasing our grief or what happened to our bodies. Instead, we alchemize grief into transformed systems and new approaches to relational care with one another.

Within many forms of fundamentalist theology, there is a strong emphasis on triumph and perfection that can come at the expense of fully processing pain. This often shapes how bodies are understood in Christian spaces, where healing is sometimes framed as a return to bodily perfection rather than an invitation to honor what bodies have endured.

Powerfully, after the resurrection, Jesus still carries his wounds. He is recognized through them. To erase his wounds—even in resurrection—would be to deny the history of what happened to his body. It would be to erase collective memory and create space for harm to be repeated. We see this dynamic in our own world when societies continue to uphold anti-Black violence while denying that the wounds of slavery are still present in our institutions, economies, and social relationships. When memory is denied, injustice quietly returns. Instead, Jesus, maintaining his wounds, invites us to expand our understanding of what a good and holy body looks like. If the most sacred body in the Christian story bears scars, what does that reveal about the sacredness of all bodies?

This matters deeply for disability justice. It reveals that resurrection is not about erasing injury to make a body acceptable again. Instead, Easter declares that wounded bodies still carry authority, dignity, and revelation.

Through this lens, sacrificial bodies are not failures of faith or evidence of divine absence. They become the very place where divine presence is most visible. Resurrection does not hide the scars. It honors them.

4. Resurrection is Communal

When oppressed communities read Easter, they rarely hear a story about one man rising alone; they hear a story about people rising together.

Through this lens, Easter is not only about what happened to Jesus’ body. It is about what happens to all sacrificial bodies when they are remembered, gathered around, and restored to belonging.

Gardens help us understand this truth. Every year, gardens appear to die together—and every year, they rise together. Seeds rest beneath the soil in shared vulnerability. Roots remain hidden in collective waiting. And when the conditions are right, life returns not to one plant alone, but to the whole ecosystem. Resurrection works the same way. It is not a solitary triumph. It is shared renewal.

Even Jesus’ resurrection unfolds within community. Women tend his body. Disciples gather in fear and confusion. Friends witness, doubt, recognize, and proclaim. Resurrection does not emerge from isolation—it emerges through relationship, memory, and care.

Easter, then, is not an individual story about overcoming death alone. It is a collective story about how communities carry one another through burial seasons and into new life. Resurrection Sunday reveals that liberation grows the way gardens grow: together, slowly, relationally, and with mutual tending. We do not rise by ourselves. We rise by lifting each other.

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Thank you so much for reading! Here’s what I am up to this month!

1. Deepening our Work: Attending an amazing retreat with We are Soul Story. This retreat is for public theologians looking to deepen the impact of their work. We can’t WAIT

2. Consulting with Organizations: Continuing to our amazing work through

   https://ciarrajonesconsulting.com/. We are working with Pride in the Pews by offering a talk on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Black church and we are continuing an amazing DEI project with a major hospital system.

3. Attend our Next Workshop! Sign up here.

4. Support us through Patreon!

I grew up in the Assemblies of God tradition. Pentecostal, Holy Spirit-filled, Bible-believing, altar-calling, speaking in tongues type of church.

And in that tradition — beautiful in many ways, but also binding in others — I learned early on that being queer was not something I could bring into the sanctuary. It was not something I could bring before God.

I was taught to pray away the gay.

I internalized original sin theology that said:
Die to your flesh.
Hate the sin.
Love the sinner.

And I believed — deeply — that my queerness certainly had nothing to say or reveal about God. That if anything, it separated me from God’s love.

Christians often learn that one positive aspect is that our inequity reveals something powerful about God’s grace:

Our impatience reveals God’s patience

Our anger reveals god’s compassion

Our backsliding reveals God’s infinite capacity to forgive

But Queerness, we are taught, reveals nothing but a flaw in god’s design

For so long, this is what I carried in my heart.

And then…Like an episode of The L-Word, during my freshman year of college, I fell in love with my roommate. And, it was such a beautiful, amazing, confusing time of unraveling. And, though I tried to pray it away, in that connection, I found God where I was told it should not exist

One day during this time, I called my sister for support. While lamenting to my sister about my deep spiritual agony and the conflict I felt between my faith and my sexuality. My sister said,

That question cracked something open in me.

Because when we start to embrace queer definitions of God and other marginalized interpretations of the divine, a different kind of knowing unfolds. What if queerness reveals something about the Divine that the bounds of rigid theologies alone cannot teach us? What if — all marginalized people — have holy things to say about who God is?

Scripture Introduction

Before we read today’s scripture, I want to name something:

This passage is often interpreted as a moment where Jesus is testing or gauging the faith of his disciples — almost like a spiritual exam. But when we bring a queer theological lens to this moment, we find something more nuanced.

We are invited to reflect on how God is named, defined, and understood — and by whom. It opens up questions of relationship, of revelation, of what voices get to shape the image of God in community.

[Scripture Reading]

Matthew 16:13-17 Peter’s Declaration about Jesus

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”[c]

14 “Well,” they replied, “some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.”

15 Then he asked them, “But who do you say I am?”

16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah,[d] the Son of the living God.”

17 Jesus replied, “You are blessed, Simon son of John,[e] because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you. You did not learn this from any human being. 18 Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means ‘rock’),[f] and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell[g] will not conquer it. 19 And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid[h] on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit[i] on earth will be permitted in heaven.”

20 Then he sternly warned the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Sacred Curiosity & Collective Definitions of God

I love this moment in the text.

Jesus does not define himself here — he invites curiosity. He invites a relationship. He invites his followers into the holy work of naming.

"But who do YOU say that I am?"

This is not a static truth. It’s an unfolding, dynamic question — one that is alive in every generation, every culture, every voice. And it reminds us that any absolute claim to God — any theology that says “this is all there is to know” — is a fallacy.

When we see Christian Nationalism, when we see ICE raids done in the name of faith, when we see reproductive rights stripped away in the name of morality — when we hear political leaders like Trump weaponize “religious freedom” to justify bigotry — we are seeing God made in an image of power, patriarchy, and oppression.

I think of Zora Neale Hurston’s words:

“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”

And Howard Thurman:

“It cannot be understated that God is often on the side of the powerful instead of the oppressed — this despite the gospel.”

And yet, queer Black Christian women — as Pamela Lightsey reminds us — turn to scripture not to erase our identity, but to reclaim it:

“We turn to the biblical witness with deep respect for its authoritative function in the churches and communities in which we worship and live.”

When we look at the scripture through the lens of the oppressed, we are all invited to come alive in new, interconnected, and humanistic-centered ways. Instead of asking, How does God call us to uphold rigid division? We ask, how does God call us to liberate one another?

Progressive theologies invite curiosity and uncertainty.

We wrestle. We wonder. We contend with scripture. We ask how God has revealed God’s self to us in our lives as Queer people of faith. As Black people of Faith. As Women, as people with disabilities, and beyond. We reveal new layers of God through our marginalized experiences.

This is why liberation theology matters — because it teaches us that marginalization is not peripheral to God — they expand it.

So when Jesus asks: “Who do YOU say that I am?” — marginalized people answer from a place of lived truth.

Our voices — your voices — are needed in the Church’s ongoing conversation about who God is. Because no single voice can tell the whole story of God. The Divine is too expansive for one story alone.

And, when we remember that it is “on Earth as it is Heaven,” then it becomes clear that heaven was never about escaping from systemic pain, but instead meant to serve as a reminder that our most urgent call is to protect human dignity now on earth. When we remember that it is “on Earth as it is Heaven,” we see the deep importance of centering the God of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the queer. We begin to reshape our commitments to justice in the present:

• We begin to challenge laws that deny queer families the right to exist.

• We resist the violent policies of ICE that target immigrant communities.

• We fight for reproductive rights because we know bodily autonomy is sacred.

• We reject the co-opting of “religious freedom” as a cover for discrimination.

As Jesus said to Peter:

Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means ‘rock’),[f] and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell[g] will not conquer it. 19 And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid[h] on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit[i] on earth will be permitted in heaven.”

It calls us away from domination and toward solidarity.

It reminds us that theology — like identity — must always bend toward liberation.

[Conclusion / Invitation]

So today, I want to leave you with this invitation:

If Jesus were to ask you — right now — “Who do YOU say that I am?”
What would you name? What truths might your life reveal about the Divine? How might these truths challenge the God of division and Christian Nationalism?

AND, if we remember that Heaven and Earth are intimately bound, how might we feel more urgent about the call to justice now? How might it remind us that we can’t escape the systems that divide us?

Instead, we must repair them.

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Shame, the Church, and Our Bodies

I’ll never forget the first time I heard a pastor preach an anti-gay sermon. The pastor ended the sermon with an altar call for anyone who wanted to be healed of “spiritual perversion.” Just a teenager at the time, I immediately sank into my seat. I physically made myself smaller as a way to avoid detection. I knew I could not hide my Queer identity from God, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be exposed as “perverse” in front of the entire congregation.

As the altar call started, my mind became full of anxious thoughts, What if the pastor can feel my Queerness from the pulpit? What if I am exposed?

Church can teach us to be afraid of being different, and as a result, we contort and squeeze into a theological culture that is not serving us. We do this to avoid rejection and shame. Queer people in particular are taught that our bodies house sin, and we are taught to become afraid of ourselves. We are taught that if we accept ourselves, we will become kingdoms of debauchery and sin. We are taught that the pathway to God is self-control.

In fundamentalist churches, most Christians learn to hide themselves in small and big ways. As Christena Cleveland says in God is a Black Woman, “I was by no means a Goody Two-shoes; I was just more effective than most at silencing my need. But in silencing my need, I silenced myself almost to the point of self-erasure.”

When we begin to live in such rigid ways of being, we become deeply disconnected from ourselves. We learn that the things that are inherent to us, the parts of us that are complex, convoluted, and complicated, must be shed so that God can love us. We learn to repress our anger, we learn to ignore our sadness, and we learn to suppress our rage; we learn to malign our sexuality.

For many of us, we also learn that our bodies are wrong and that being connected to bodily pleasure, joy, and happiness is against God. We learn to normalize violence against our bodies and minds as a way to serve God.

If we aren’t careful, our faith practices can lead to a bifurcation of the self, where we see our “natural” self as bad and our “spiritual” self as good. I believe many Christians are walking about as non-integrated selves.

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Deconstruction Quotes that Help Tackle Shame

In The Wisdom of Your Body, Hillary McBride says, “Your body is the place where the Divine dwells, so you always have direct and immanent access to the Divine. That is sometimes comforting, sometimes healing, and sometimes a reminder that you do not have to keep trying to earn love—you can access it, always.”

Unlearning shame through deconstruction starts with challenging our basic understanding of who God is. When we believe that God wants to and can be in relationship with us as we are, we can start to challenge the narrow theological ideas that create shame in so many of us. When we believe our wisdom, our intuition, and our joy have something to say about God, we stop silencing our inner voice and instead get curious about what our inner voice teaches us about God and one another.

For me, I practice embodiment most deeply in my garden. Gardens offer us a different theology of the body. No gardener stands over the soil demanding that a rose become a fern or that a fig tree apologize for bearing figs. Growth requires light, water, space, and patience — not surveillance. When we treat ourselves like projects to be fixed instead of ecosystems to be tended, we replicate the very spiritual violence that once shrank us in pews. But in a garden, nothing is asked to amputate its nature in order to belong. It is nurtured into fuller expression. What if our bodies, our queerness, our anger, our longing were not weeds to be ripped out but sacred growth to be understood and cultivated?

As you read the quotes below, I’d like you to consider the following questions:

• How do these quotes invite me to reframe God from a shame-based to a love-based perspective?

• How do these quotes invite me to be more gentle and loving towards myself? Many Christians learn to ignore their minds and thoughts; it’s important to reconnect with one’s inner world.

• How can I begin to practice my spirituality in ways that are more loving and self-accepting?

“God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in disapproval.”

• Father Gregory Boyle

“Imagination is theology; we can only believe what we can imagine. And our cultural landscape hasn’t given us many tools to imagine a non-white, non-male God.”

• Dr. Christena Cleveland

“I think we must wrestle with scripture and we often don’t…we act like God can’t handle our questions.”

• Emilie Townes

Thanks so much for reading! If you like my work, here’s what I am up to over the next couple of months:

• Attending/Working at the Abortion in America Conference in New Orleans on March 6th.

• Offering a Talk on Religion and Policy for Pride in the Pews in April!

• Hosting a workshop through my company, Ciarra Jones Consulting on Race, Religion and Policy, come join us!

• Working on my book proposal on God and Ecology with Levine, Rostan, Greenberg Agency :)

• My books are open, and I’d love to work with you and your organization! Check us out here.

In her extraordinary book THICK, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes:

“Whiteness [is elastic]. It is the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, that exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne. White is being European until it needs to also be Irish because of the Polish, who can eventually be white if it means that Koreans cannot.”

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Cottom is absolutely right: whiteness is an invasive species. Whiteness subsumes whatever it needs to in order to continue growing its power.

There was a time when Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrants were not accepted into the fold of whiteness. That has changed. Throughout U.S. history, whiteness has expanded its power by selectively inviting those once excluded into its ranks. For an ideology to survive, it must recruit. And whiteness recruits strategically.

But this expansion has always come with limits. Even as Irish, Polish, and Italian communities were absorbed into whiteness, Black and Brown communities were—and largely still are—excluded. Whiteness grows, yes, but it also polices its borders fiercely.

And sometimes, whiteness doesn’t expand at all. Sometimes, it contracts.

When whiteness contracts, even people who once benefited from proximity to it can be pushed out. Access to white supremacy is not permanent; it is conditional.

In The Flag and the Cross, sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry explain this clearly:

“White Christian nationalism is our term for the ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity… and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened.”

Trump’s policies are not neutral. They are deeply rooted in white Christian nationalism—a specific and narrow form of whiteness that frames supremacy, land, and power as God-given rights.

White Christian nationalism defines “true Americans” in increasingly rigid ways. As Gorski and Perry note, it is not only about being white and Christian. It is also entangled with libertarian, free-market capitalism, patriarchy, and obedience to state power.

Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were not protected by their whiteness. Why?

Because they broke from the rules.

Through her queerness and courage, and through his defiance and refusal to comply, Renee and Alex disrupted the version of whiteness that white supremacy is willing to defend. They stood in the gap between federal violence and the most marginalized—and for that, they were cast out.

They confronted the violence of white supremacy, and in doing so, they experienced the brutal contraction of whiteness. Their deaths remind us of something uncomfortable but necessary: systems of power do not protect everyone equally, and whiteness only shields a very small, very compliant group.

May Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti rest in power. May they be remembered for their bravery, their clarity, and their refusal to look away.

Cottom and I differ slightly in emphasis, but our reflections, I believe, are synergistic. She names the expansion of whiteness; I name its contraction. In truth, these processes often happen at the same time.

History shows us this clearly. The Middle Passage. Manifest Destiny. Japanese internment. The Chinese Exclusion Act. Again and again, whiteness expands power while aggressively policing who belongs within it.

Right now, we are living through a moment of deep contraction.

Christian nationalism advances a narrow vision of whiteness that looks like this:

• Christian

• Able-bodied

• Heterosexual

• Married, or committed to “traditional” marriage

• Politically conservative

• Free-market capitalist

• “America First”

Many white people fall outside this construction—and they, too, are experiencing the violence of this moment.

This is not a time for denial or comfort. This is a time for collective refusal. A time to challenge the systems of power and privilege that harm all of us, even when they promise protection.

Call to action:
Pay attention to how power is narrowing its definition of who is worthy of safety. Refuse the lie that proximity to whiteness guarantees protection. Organize, resist, and align yourself with those most impacted by state violence—because liberation has never come from compliance.

Reflection questions:

• Where have you seen whiteness expand—and where are you witnessing its contraction right now?

• What forms of belonging have you been taught are “safe,” and at what cost?

• Who is being pushed out of protection in this moment, and how are you being invited to respond?

• What would it look like to choose solidarity over proximity to power?

Resources:

1. Check out this phenomenal video from Britney Packnett on the Glennon Doyle Podcast about the contraction of whiteness

Let’s explore this together! Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for reading! Here’s what I am up to this Winter/Spring!

1. Working on my book proposal! I am signed to Levine, Rostan, Greenberg, and I can’t wait to get started :)

2. I’ll be offering a workshop for Pride in the Pews on Theological Inclusion in February

3. I’ve been invited to speak at the Abortion in America Conference in March on faith and reproductive justice. I can’t wait!

4. Check out my consulting website, ciarrajonesconsulting.com, to work with me!

5. Join my Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheGardeningTheologian/membership

6. Steam the Pod!

   Sacred Dissent is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The fundamentalist church is full of theologies that disconnect us —from ourselves, from one another, and from God. As we watch ICE terrorize Minnesota, as we witness politicians refer to citizens murdered in cold blood as “domestic terrorists,” and as we experience a decline in our collective safety and well-being, its important to remember that violent laws and polices are rooted in certain Christian ideologies.

From Hell Theology, to Dying to the Flesh, to “Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner,” we’ve reshaped God into a punitive, policing force—more invested in control than connection.

Let’s name what these theologies actually do:

Hell Theology:

Teaches that God only loves certain people.
It inflates spiritual ego, thrives on fear, and turns belonging into a reward system instead of a birthright.

Dying to the Flesh Theology:

Cuts us off from our own bodies and desires.
It labels parts of us as uniquely corrupt—then trains us to despise those same parts in others.
That logic doesn’t stop at the personal level; it fuels shame, hierarchy, and systemic inequality.

“Love the Sinner” Theology:

Asks us to love a person while rejecting something core to who they are.
It normalizes fractured love and teaches us to tolerate harm in the name of holiness. We are all deeply worthy of being loved in our fullness; this is especially important for Queer and Trans people to internalize.

End of Days Theology:

Makes some Christians believe that they do not need to be concerned with what happens here on Earth because God will come down and save them. This theology makes us care more about “making heaven crowded” than about the physical well-being of people here on Earth.

A God who requires your fragmentation is not a liberating God. And freedom should not feel like a cage.

Many of us remain trapped in these theologies not because they bring life, but because we’ve been taught there is no other way to access God. We are taught that suffering is sacred, that endurance is devotion, and that harm is holiness. These ideas don’t stay abstract or personal for long—they shape how we understand power, morality, and whose pain is acceptable.

Alternate Ways of Knowing God

God is a Black Woman: In her book, God is a Black Woman, Christena Cleveland invites us to reimagine God as a Black Woman. She calls Black-Woman-God, “She who loves our hot mess.” She frames God as a God who is with us and cares for our pain, our suffering, and our humanity. How does this help us challenge punishing frameworks of God that we learn through Hell Theology?

Tattoos on the Heart: In his book Tattoos on the Heart, Father Gregory Boyle says, “You imagine with God a circle of compassion, and then you imagine nobody standing outside that circle. You go from here to dismantle the barriers that exclude.” How does this reminder of God’s call towards justice help us push back against theologies that fracture us?

The Four Vision Quests of Jesus: In his book The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, Steven Charleston reminds us that seeking God is a practice of going deeper into mystery. For many of us, we are afraid to challenge dominant and normative theological ideas, because it goes against what the church says. But Charleston reminds us that religion is about exploration and curiosity. How does embracing curiosity support your desconstruction journey? How does it help you embrace liberation?

When we liberate ourselves from harmful theological ideas, we move one step closer towards liberating our society from theological narratives that lead to systemic suffering and harm. Freedom is collective.

Thanks for reading! Here’s what I am up to this Winter/Spring!

1. Working on my book proposal! I am signed to Levine, Rostan, Greenberg, and I can’t wait to get started :)

2. I’ll be offering a workshop for Pride in the Pews on Theological Inclusion in February

3. I’ve been invited to speak at the Abortion in America Conference in March on faith and reproductive justice. I can’t wait!

4. Check out my consulting website, ciarrajonesconsulting.com, to work with me!

Stream the pod here!

My grandfather is a master gardener, a master chef, and a master family man.

My grandfather’s passion for both culinary arts and gardening shaped my childhood. I spent many afternoons with him in his garden, watching him tend to his tomato plants and zucchini plants. He’d carefully monitor the soil health, check on the leaf production of each plant, and then he’d excitedly usher me over to admire some of the beautiful ripe tomatoes on the vine. These moments created my reverence for gardens as sites of healing and well-being.

My grandparents were my neighbors for over 20 years, and throughout that time, I spent many years with my grandfather in the garden-world he created.

Throughout my childhood, I’d skip over to my grandparents’ house, greet my grandmother with a quick hug, and then exclaim,

“Where’s grandpa?!”

“In the garden as always,” she’d retort with a smile.

Without fail, I would rush outside, and I’d hear

“Ciarra! My youngest granddaughter is here! Do you know you’re my friend? You’re my best friend.”

Every time my grandpa told me, “You are my friend,” he taught me that I was somebody worth seeing and valuing, and every time we sat together in his garden, I learned something new about life, growth, and change.

I loved sharing in my grandfather’s delight for his plants, and I also loved learning to watch the slow progress of his garden alongside him. His deep love for the garden he nurtured helped me understand the value of celebrating slow and sustainable growth.

No matter what time of year, my grandfather would step outside, look at his plants, and be proud. He didn’t expect overnight growth; he didn’t demand rapid change. He understood and taught me that the role of a gardener is to be a champion, a cheerleader, and a good steward of the slow growth.

Slow Growth is Good Growth

Plants are a gift to us because they offer deep lessons about how to honor the cycles of our lives, how to honor and grieve endings, and how to sustainably foster new beginnings.

I’ve never planted a garden that sprouted in a day, but I have watched, over months, as my garden became a marvelous jungle of plants and living organisms working synergistically to bring new life to the world.

Capitalism makes us believe that we must always be transforming and maximizing our potential, and the new year amplifies these feelings. In many ways, the fervor of New Year’s goes against the laws of nature. Plants remind us that winter is a time of slow work, slow growth, and rest. Plants remind us to resist the urgency of the New Year and instead let nature be our guide. Plants invite us to let winter be a time of dormancy, preparation, and reevaluation.

The greatest lesson plants have taught me is that Americans propagates a false idea of what growth and change look and feel like.

I’ve sat in my garden over months as my plants changed from seedlings to full-fledged fruits and vegetables. Some days, it felt like no change was happening; other days, I would come outside and see a new zucchini blossom, or possibly a new tomato fruit to harvest.

Those moments of witnessing the change were enlivening, but they were not any more important than the moments I would sit with my plants, and they looked the same as yesterday.

Good gardeners are a friend to their gardens, and good gardeners are a friend to themselves.

“You are my friend,” was not just a greeting from my grandfather; it was an invitation to be a friend to myself and the world around me, to meet others and myself with radical compassion and care.

So, what does being a friend to ourselves look like in the New Year and beyond?

It looks like:

1. Running your race at your pace: Don’t worry about copying your friend’s goals; discover who you are!

2. Having self-compassion: Growth is methodical and slow; expecting overnight results is unkind because it does not honor the human experience or celebrate the small wins.

3. Giving yourself permission to begin again: You might try something, and it might not stick, or your passions may change. That’s okay, set a new goal or begin again in a new way!

4. Honoring your seasons: Just like plants, we have seasons for growth, seasons for productivity, and seasons for reconnection with the self. Honoring what season you are in is key.

Remember to be your own friend this New Year’s Season! Let me know in the comments how you plan to practice self-compassion this year!

New Year, Same Me. Is that enough?

The New Year is such an exciting and overwhelming time.

If you’re like me and you grew up in Fundamentalist Christian Spaces, you may have learned that transformation must be marked by rigid discipline, but this is a narrow idea of how we cultivate transformation and change.

These messages of extreme commitment to transformation don’t just come from religious spaces; they also come from the institutions around us. Workplaces, especially, tend to propagate messages of adhering to an inhumane work ethic as a way to maximize results and augment growth.

As such, many of us succumb to the pressure of the New-Year-New-Me rush. We want to “prove” we are enough with lofty declarations that prove difficult to maintain, or worse, imprison us in a sense of ongoing failure.

The New Year is an invitation to deepen our commitment to ourselves and one another, but it should not lead to self-flagellation, a lack of self-kindness, or any kind of punishment of the self.

Even our most lofty goal-setting cannot save us from the reality of the human condition. As you strive towards your new year’s goals, the center for your transformative process should not be self-hatred, self-aversion, or even self-improvement, but a deep, unwavering love of the self.

To love oneself is to desire to transform and to know oneself in more authentic ways. The impetus to change does not have to be rooted in failure or a sense of deficiency.

A few years ago, I moved away from creating New Year’s resolutions that cage me, and instead, I moved towards a yearly North Star. The North Star model of goal setting invites me to move towards an overarching goal without being too prescriptive about the process.

This year, my personal North Star, and the North Star of my Belonging and Well-being Consulting Firm, Ciarra Jones Consulting LLC, is Rest.

Rest may look like time with family, more time in the gym, a more manageable workload, or something else. North Star goal setting isn’t about getting to a destination perfectly or in a formulaic way; it’s about building practices that move us towards our North Star.

Reader Reflection: What is your North Star? How can you move towards this goal without being too rigid about the process?

New Year: A New Commitment to My Audience

It might sound strange for the founder of an organization to be prioritizing rest, but it’s exactly what I need to thrive and to better serve my clients and online community.

This year, we grew by almost 70k followers across Instagram and TikTok. I am so grateful for every single person who engages with my work, and I believe in being a steward of community, and that starts with being a good steward of my own well-being so that I can show up in my fullness.

Over the past two and a half years, I’ve been writing on Substack in two places: Sacred Dissent and Let’s Work Better Together. While the topics may have looked different on the surface, the questions underneath have always been the same: how we make meaning, how power operates, and how we stay human inside the systems we’re part of.

My work has always been multidisciplinary, and my audience has always been full of curious, multifaceted, and wise people.

As such, this year, as part of my commitment to rest, I’m bringing everything into one home.

I will be sunsetting my newsletter “Let’s Work Better Together” and merging my two audiences into my newsletter “Sacred Dissent.” I hope you will stay alongside me for the journey and the process.

Going forward, this newsletter, Sacred Dissent, will explore two areas:

• Sacred Dissent — reflections on meaning, faith, ethics, and dissent

  • Subsection: Let’s Work Better Together — practical insights on workplace culture, social well-being, leadership, and equity/inclusion.

If you’d like to only receive posts from Sacred Dissent, and not this new subsection, you can opt out of the subsection via Subtstack! Directions on how to do so are here, https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/8914938285204-How-do-I-subscribe-to-or-unsubscribe-from-a-section-on-Substack.

Celebration as Sacred Dissent

With the New Year just a few days away, we are not only committing to our North Star of Rest, but we are also celebrating all we accomplished this year!

When I started Ciarra Jones Consulting, LLC, three years ago, I had no idea where it would take me. This year we:

1. Worked with over 8 organizations.

2. Provided countless workshops and worked on two large-scale666 surveys.

3. Served as the keynote speaker for 2 conferences.

4. Traveled to 3 cities for conferences (Seattle, New York, and Nashville!)

5. Were featured on multiple podcasts, including the Holy Smokes podcast by Kristian Smith.

6. Started a short-term podcast project.

7. And we redid our website!

I’d love you to join in the celebration with us! Let us know in the comments what you accomplished this year! We can’t wait to celebrate alongside you.

I grew up in the Assemblies of God tradition. Pentecostal, Holy Spirit-filled, Bible-believing, altar-calling, speaking in tongues type of church.

And in that tradition — beautiful in many ways, but also binding in others — I learned early on that being queer was not something I could bring into the sanctuary. It was not something I could bring before God.

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I was taught to pray away the gay. I internalized original sin theology that said:
Die to your flesh.
Hate the sin.
Love the sinner.

And I believed — deeply — that my queerness certainly had nothing to say or reveal about God. That if anything, it separated me from God’s love.

Christians often learn that one positive aspect is that our inequity reveals something powerful about God’s grace:

Our impatience reveals God’s patience

Our anger reveals god’s compassion

Our backsliding reveals God’s infinite capacity to forgive

But Queerness, we are taught, reveals nothing but a flaw in god’s design

For so long, this is what I carried in my heart.

And then…

Like an episode of The L-Word, during my freshman year of college, I fell in love with my roommate, y’all. And it was such a beautiful, amazing, confusing time of unraveling. And, though I tried to pray it away, in that connection, I found God where I was told it should not exist

One day during this time, I called my sister for support. While lamenting to my sister about my deep spiritual agony and the conflict I felt between my faith and my sexuality. My sister said,

That question cracked something open in me.

Because when we start to embrace queer definitions of God, a different kind of knowing unfolds. What if queerness reveals something about the Divine that the bounds of rigid theologies alone cannot teach us? What if we — queer folks — have holy things to name about who God is?

Scripture Introduction

Before we read today’s scripture, I want to name something:

This passage is often interpreted as a moment where Jesus is testing or gauging the faith of his disciples — almost like a spiritual exam.
But when we bring a queer lens to this moment, we find something more nuanced.

We are invited to reflect on how God is named, defined, and understood — and by whom. It opens up questions of relationship, of revelation, of what voices get to shape the image of God in community.

[Scripture Reading]

Matthew 16:13-17 Peter’s Declaration about Jesus

13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?”[c]

14 “Well,” they replied, “some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the other prophets.”

15 Then he asked them, “But who do you say I am?”

16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah,[d] the Son of the living God.”

17 Jesus replied, “You are blessed, Simon son of John,[e] because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you. You did not learn this from any human being. 18 Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means ‘rock’),[f] and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell[g] will not conquer it. 19 And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid[h] on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit[i] on earth will be permitted in heaven.”

20 Then he sternly warned the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

Sacred Curiosity & Collective Definitions of God

I love this moment in the text.

Jesus does not define himself here — he invites curiosity. He invites a relationship. He invites his followers into the holy work of naming.

"But who do YOU say that I am?"

This is not a static truth. It’s an unfolding, dynamic question — one that is alive in every generation, every culture, every voice.

And it reminds us that any absolute claim to God — any theology that says “this is all there is to know” — is a fallacy.

When we see Christian Nationalism, when we see ICE raids done in the name of faith, when we see reproductive rights stripped away in the name of morality — when we hear political leaders like Trump weaponize “religious freedom” to justify bigotry — we are seeing God made in an image of power, patriarchy, and oppression.

And yet, queer Black Christian women — as Pamela Lightsey reminds us — turn to scripture not to erase our identity, but to reclaim it:

“We turn to the biblical witness with deep respect for its authoritative function in the churches and communities in which we worship and live.”

When we look at the scripture through the lens of the oppressed, we are all invited to come alive in new, interconnected, and humanistic-centered ways. Instead of asking, How does God call us to uphold rigid division? We ask, how does God call us to liberate one another?

Progressive theologies invite curiosity and uncertainty.

We wrestle. We wonder. We contend with scripture. We ask how God has revealed God’s self to us in our lives as Queer people of faith? We reveal new layers of God through our experience.

And so — for marginalized communities, Black communities, Queer Communities and more — to stand and name the Divine is an act of holy resistance and liberation.

This is why queer theology matters — because it teaches us that queerness is not peripheral to God. Queer lives are not outside the scope of divine revelation — they expand it.

The Divine is bigger than binaries, bigger than categories or norms.
LGBTQIA+ people — through our love, our embodiment, our lives — reveal these truths:

• That God’s love transcends rigid boxes

• That embodiment and seeing marginalized identity as sacred is a holy practice

• That transformation and systemic change and rebirth is possible and sacred. Perhaps we see this most powerfully in the lives of the trans community who demonstrate the divine process of transformation and rebirth.

• And lastly, through Queerness, we learn that joy and celebration are central to faith
  

So when Jesus asks: “Who do YOU say that I am?” — queer people answer from a place of lived truth.

Our voices — your voices — are needed in the Church’s ongoing conversation about who God is. Because no single voice can tell the whole story of God. We need trans voices, bisexual voices, lesbian voices, gay voices, asexual voices — all of it. Because the Divine is too expansive for one story alone.

And we know this in our bones:

Our experience with God — through queer embodiment, through queer love — tells us over and over again:

We know what it is to define God outside of the confines of restrictive societal norms because we live outside of them ourselves.

We know that God exists in the places we were told God rejects.

God loves us just as we are.

In our self-identity, in our living, in our loving — we are beloved.

And when we create God in an image that challenges us — when we center the God of the oppressed, the marginalized, the queer — we begin to reshape our commitments to justice.:

• We begin to challenge laws that deny queer families the right to exist.

• We resist the violent policies of ICE that target immigrant communities.

• We fight for reproductive rights because we know bodily autonomy is sacred.

• We reject the co-opting of “religious freedom” as a cover for discrimination.

As Jesus said to Peter:

Now I say to you that you are Peter (which means ‘rock’),[f] and upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell[g] will not conquer it. 19 And I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you forbid[h] on earth will be forbidden in heaven, and whatever you permit[i] on earth will be permitted in heaven.”

It calls us away from domination and toward solidarity.

It reminds us that theology — like identity — must always bend toward liberation.

[Conclusion / Invitation]

So today, I want to leave you with this invitation:

If Jesus were to ask you — right now — “Who do YOU say that I am?”
What would you name?
What truths might your life — your queerness, your struggle, your joy — reveal about the Divine?

And if you are LGBTQIA+, know this:

Your experience is not something to hide.
It is something to offer.
It is something sacred.
It is part of the Church’s unfolding story of who God is.
It is part of the world’s unfolding story of liberation and love.

GLP1s have set the world ablaze and continue to spark new conversations about thinness, suffering, and well-being in a fatphobic world.

GLP1s have many proven health benefits and are a particularly great intervention for those who have PCOS, diabetes, or another hormone-related condition. The ability of GLP1s to rapidly shift certain individuals’ abilities to lose weight challenges how our society moralizes thinness and demonizes larger bodies.

The pushback against GLP1s doesn’t have much to do with health; instead, it has to do with status. Many thin people online who express outrage at GLP1s are failing to interrogate their fear that they can no longer claim their thinness as a sign of moral superiority.

Toxic diet culture is deeply Evangelical.

Diet culture preaches “purity” through thinness, demands devotion to rules that constantly shift, and shames the body as inherently sinful until it’s “disciplined” into holiness.

Just like evangelicalism, it thrives on guilt, control, and fear of damnation (only instead of hell, it’s social rejection and a moralization of thinness).

And the promise? Salvation through restriction. Redemption through weight loss. Narrow metrics of worthiness

In many ways, the GLP1 conversation mirrors the prevalent narrative of meritocracy that has American society in a chokehold. And the narrative of “suffering” that undergirds Evangelicalism.

We must suffer for thinness, just like we must suffer for God’s acceptance. And to believe God loves us as we are is to “cherry-pick” our theology, is to make God “too easy,” and is to shape God in “our image.”

Thinness, like salvation, is for those who suffer and punish themselves. It is not for those who “cut corners” by utilizing medication.

The idea that closeness to God—or to health, or to meaning—must come through pain is not holy. It is manufactured.

Evangelicalism codified suffering into its theology and our broader society. Capitalism then reinforced it by insisting that only those who grind, hustle, deprive, and prove themselves deserve stability or care. And diet culture—our most intimate capitalist project—drills this home by training us to equate smaller bodies with greater moral achievement.

This is not divine truth. It’s a mirror. A reflection of the systems of extraction and exhaustion we have created here on earth.

The God who is still worth following is not the God of scarcity or punishment. It is God who sees us and says: You are already beloved. You are already whole. You are already worthy.

To dismantle diet culture’s obsession with thinness, we must also dismantle our obsession with suffering as the only legitimate path to goodness. The more we valorize pain, the more we normalize its presence in our workplaces, our health systems, our relationships, and our spiritual lives. And the truth is—this valorization is killing us.

Ease is not laziness. Rest is not weakness. Medical intervention is not cheating. Allowing health to be gentle is not betrayal.

In fact, ease is one of the most radical forms of love. To let life flow with kindness, compassion, and care is to choose a God who wants us alive, not a God who demands we suffer to prove our worth.

And so, the work before us is both personal and collective: to stop reproducing hierarchies of suffering as proof of belonging, and to start building systems—spiritual, physical, and communal—that accept us with ease.

Because if God is love, then God must be easy love. The kind that meets us where we are, embraces us in our fullness, and reminds us that salvation has never been about punishment. It has always been about presence.

A parting blessing from Kate Bowler:

“Blessed is the body that offers soft hugs on hard days. Whose curves fit our pets and our kids and our partners.

Whose hands hold another alongside hospital beds and in nursing homes and at the altar and on the first day of school.

Whose breasts nurse and legs run to chase littles and whose toes balance us on the earth. Whose wrinkles tell stories of laughs and tears and worries.

Blessed are these imperfect, fragile bodies. This flesh and bone.

These cells that sometimes duplicate for no reason whatsoever. This skin that is stitched together with scars and stretch marks and fine lines.

Blessed is the body because it is a home. Not just for us, but for those who love us.

And sometimes you just need to stand in front of the mirror and take off all your clothes, and remember that this body, your body, is God’s home address.

p.s. That last line is inspired by Barbara Brown Taylor, who always says it best.”

Last summer, I sat on my bed, sobbing for the 90th day in a row.

I am not quite a stranger to depression, but a sense of prolonged, deep, unrelenting sadness and shame proved new to me. I was in a full-blown depressive episode and struggling to find my way out.

Plagued with uncertainty and indecision, I felt completely undone. By July of 2024, I was two years into self-employment, I had recently declined a prestigious PhD program (and was doubting that decision daily), I signed with a literary agent (but froze when it came to writing the book), and I had just left my relationship of four years.

So many things in my life on the surface were going well.

I declined the PhD program because my business was thriving, but this also caused a deep crisis of self. I know myself best through academia, and I questioned who I would be without another degree.

I signed with my literary agent because my social media career was thriving, but I agonized over whether it was the right agent and if I would write the right book. I agonized over whether I was capable or if I was an imposter. I agonized over agonizing.

My business was thriving, but I was drowning in mistrust of myself and struggled to cultivate a practice of celebrating my success and creating humane metrics of productivity.

AND, I chose to leave my relationship, but I questioned if that came from a solid sense of clarity, or was a product of the overall sense of flailing and floundering that I felt during that time.

I was LOST, in every single way, I was undone, and I found myself unrecognizable.

In Western Christianity, Evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism, we say the greatest mark of being a moral person, a strong person, and a good person of faith is KNOWING.

But, for a long time (and still now), I just didn’t know, and I don’t know. There is so much uncertainty that I carry about who I am, about my life, about my career, about whether I am on the right path, and I am learning that God lives in the uncertainty with me.

In his book, The Four Vision Quests of Jesus, Steven Charleston highlights that the purpose of seeking divinity in Indigenous communities is not knowing more, it’s expanding mystery.

As he says, “ The focus is mystery, the process is mystery, the outcome is mystery.”

My year of uncertainty was agonizing. Interestingly, the uncertainty has not ceased, but the agonizing has. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to wrestle mystery into submission and began letting it sit beside me.

I am slowly learning that life doesn’t require me to resolve every unknown to keep moving forward—it asks me to keep moving while holding the unknown. My hope now is not for certainty, but for the courage to live faithfully, creatively, and lovingly inside the questions.

Reflection Questions:

1. Where in your life right now do you feel the most uncertainty?

2. How have you been taught—by faith, culture, or family—to respond to “not knowing”?

3. What would it feel like to shift from seeking answers to seeking deeper connection with the mystery?

4. In what ways could you create “humane metrics” for your own success and worth?

5. When you think about your past seasons of uncertainty, what strengths or wisdom did they leave you with?

6. Who or what helps you hold the unknown without needing to solve it?

Recently, I started reading the phenomenal book The Four Vision Quests of Jesus by Steven Charleston.

It’s a beautiful, bold exploration of how Charleston—an Episcopal bishop and a Native American elder of the Choctaw Nation—merges his Indigenous heritage with his Christian faith. What emerges is a spirituality that doesn’t divide identity, but honors it as whole and sacred.

In the first chapter, The Quest, Charleston writes about the Indigenous concept of the vision quest: a spiritual journey grounded not in conquest or certainty, but in seeking. It’s a path that values mystery over answers—something that challenges the Western tendency to reduce spirituality to a system of rules, declarations, and doctrinal checkboxes.

This distinction between mystery and mastery struck a deep chord in me.

So much of what we’re taught in Western Christianity—especially through colonial, evangelical, or fundamentalist lenses—trains us to seek clarity, control, and correctness. We are taught that spiritual growth comes from knowing the right things, believing the right things, and behaving in the right way. But what if the deepest healing comes not from tightening our grip on doctrine, but from loosening our need for it?

What if God isn’t asking us to be certain—but to be present?

For many Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities, our ancestral spiritualities were never lost—they were buried, beneath centuries of colonization, forced assimilation, and white supremacist theology. The impulse to recover those traditions isn’t about romanticizing the past. It’s about healing a wound that was never given the chance to close.

And that healing matters.

When marginalized people reclaim ancestral spiritual practices, we begin to merge spirituality with memory. We re-member ourselves—putting back together the parts that were deliberately broken apart. We reconnect with our people, our land, our stories, and our ways of knowing that were once called illegitimate.

And in doing so, we claim something vital: authority over our own sacredness.

Integrating ancestral wisdom into our modern faith doesn’t mean rejecting Jesus. On the contrary, it means expanding how we see Jesus—as one who walked in wilderness, as one who wrestled with spirit, as one who heard the voice of God in places beyond the temple. Jesus himself went on vision quests. He engaged mystery. He honored ancestors. That journey is not foreign to us—it’s familiar, if we’re willing to look deeper.

For Black people in particular, this reclamation is revolutionary. We were taught to fear the drum, the dance, the altar, the libation. But our ancestors knew how to speak with the earth. They knew how to sit with the dead. They knew that the divine could be encountered in every part of life—not just within the walls of a church, but in dreams, rivers, fire, and breath.

When we integrate these truths with our Christian practices, something beautiful happens: we stop fragmenting ourselves. We stop dividing our Sunday selves from our ancestral selves. We stop pretending that what colonization called "pagan" was anything other than our people's prayer.

Merging spiritual practices with historical memory doesn’t dilute faith—it deepens it. It lets us hold complexity. It lets us name trauma. It lets us feel joy. It gives us a spirituality big enough to contain our grief and our hope.

For marginalized people, reclaiming ancestral spirituality is not about looking backward. It’s about rooting ourselves so deeply that we can move forward with clarity and power.

It’s about remembering what empire told us to forget.

It’s about trusting mystery.

And most of all, it’s about becoming whole again—not just in spirit, but in story.

Reflection Questions for Your Journey

1. What spiritual practices did your ancestors engage in that have been forgotten, buried, or demonized? What do you feel called to explore or reclaim?

2. Where in your spiritual life have you prioritized certainty over mystery? What might happen if you let mystery guide you instead?

3. How has your understanding of Jesus been shaped by Western cultural norms? What might change if you viewed Jesus through the lens of an Indigenous healer or wisdom-seeker?

4. In what ways have you been taught to fragment your identity (racially, culturally, spiritually)? What does it look like to move toward integration?

5. What are some ways you can begin to re-member—literally put back together—the sacred parts of yourself, your culture, and your story?

6. If you believed your body, ancestors, land, and dreams were sacred, how would that change your daily spiritual practice?

This week, Christian social media exploded after Kelly Steele’s viral commentary suggested that divine femininity and spiritual piety require women to forgive lying, cheating men. (Watch the clip here if you missed it: YouTube Link).

But this isn’t a new message.

It’s part of a deeply entrenched tradition within the church: weaponizing forgiveness to protect patriarchal power.

For centuries, women — especially Black women — have been told that love means enduring betrayal, that forgiveness must be endless, and that their value lies in their ability to suffer silently.

Black feminist religious scholars like Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon help us think about this more deeply. Inspired by her work, we can reflect:

Black women must learn to discern when forgiveness is holy and when it is a tool of oppression.

Far too often, teachings on forgiveness are not about healing — they are about maintaining male dominance. The expectation is clear: Men can lie, cheat, and harm, but women must "forgive and submit," or else risk being labeled "bitter," "faithless," or "rebellious."

This framework is not about spiritual growth; it's about control.

bell hooks reminds us through her writings that:

When we love justice and stand on the side of justice, we do not love patriarchal power.

In many Christian spaces, forgiveness has been twisted into a method of silencing righteous anger and justified resistance. Women are urged to reconcile at all costs, even when their spirits are being shattered.

This is not the Gospel of liberation.
This is the gospel of patriarchy.

Dr. Renita J. Weems challenges us to recognize that:

The Bible was written in a world that hated women. And it is our task to wrestle a word of life from texts that often mean us death.

Today, we must ask ourselves:

• What does true, life-giving forgiveness look like?

• Who benefits when women are told to "forgive and stay" no matter the abuse?

• How do we reclaim our sacred worth in a system designed to deny it?

Forgiveness is holy — when it heals.
Forgiveness is not holy — when it’s demanded to uphold a man’s power.

As believers committed to justice and love, we must dismantle frameworks that ask women to sacrifice their wholeness for the comfort of men.

Forgiveness is a gift, not a requirement. Freedom is God’s true design.

What does forgiveness mean to you? Let me know in the comments!

During Cory Booker’s filibuster, the phrase “Every vote is a Civic Prayer” was said.

This phrase is a powerful reminder of the connection between religion, civic engagement, and the systems of power and privilege around us.

In The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, the authors state, “Donald Trump and his most zealous followers have already made their decision: they have rejected America’s experiment in multiracial democracy in favor of white Christian nationalism. Whether they are successful is up to the rest of us.”

The phrase every vote is a civic prayer reminds us that our political stances are not secular; they are tied to our deep understanding of what is just, sacred, and righteous. When we vote in favor of marginalized lives, we challenge and reject conservative imaginations of God, and we (re)claim the truth that God is on the side of justice and liberation.

When we vote in favor of reproductive rights, we are casting a prayer, we are saying to our society, the broader world, and the Universal Divine that women and people with wombs matter.

When we vote in favor of immigrant rights, we are honoring the sacred identity of those who cross our borders in search of liberty and freedom.

When we vote in favor of LGBTQ+ inclusion we are sending the message to the world that Queer and Trans lives are sacred and we are co-constructing a God that believes in the divinity and wonder of all beings.

Heaven is not above our heads, and hell is not above our feet. We co-create Heaven, and we co-construct Hell based upon how we treat one another, namely those who are marginalized and rejected.

God exists with and communes with the least of these amongst us. God exists with the marginalized and disenfranchised.

Cory Booker, Morgan Wallen, and Competing Claims to God

Cory Booker’s filibuster comes on the heels of Morgan Wallen’s abrupt exit from SNL. Wallen’s exit itself was not too egregious, but after his exit, he posted on his Instagram, “Get me to God’s County.”

Wallen’s post suggests that the “liberal” West is devoid of God, while the more conservative South is the “true” place of God. It taps into a long-standing narrative: that God is the property of white, conservative, patriarchal communities—that holiness is wrapped in whiteness, nationalism, and tradition.

But we know better.

God is not confined to the pews of white evangelical churches. God is not the private possession of political parties or gated into red states. God does not speak only in King James English or vote along conservative lines.

The Divine has never been a settler. The Divine does not serve empire.

God is found in protest chants on city streets and whispered affirmations in therapy sessions. God is found in the dreams of queer teenagers daring to live fully.

God is in the hands of Black women birthing futures. God is in drag shows and church pulpits, and battered community centers turned safe havens. God is where liberation lives.

To reclaim God is to tell the truth: God has always been with the disinherited. God has always sided with the wounded, the wild, the weary. Progressive visions of God remind us that the Divine doesn’t gatekeep worthiness—She expands it.

This is not soft spirituality. This is a radical theology of action. It invites us to see voting, organizing, mutual aid, and care work as sacred rituals. This is not about bringing God into politics. It is about remembering that God was always already there—waiting for us to choose love over power, people over policy, freedom over fear.

Let us refuse the narrow, colonial imagination of who God is.

Let us instead ask bigger, braver questions:

• Who told you God was only present in whiteness and war?

• What does it mean to believe in a God who mourns with the grieving and dances at Pride?

• How can your civic participation reflect your sacred values?

• What does your vote say about the world you are praying for?

• Who is missing from your vision of the Divine?

• Where does justice need your voice, your hands, your yes?

Voting is not the end. But it is a beginning. It is a liturgy. It is a chance to say: I believe in a world where everyone gets to breathe, bloom, to belong.

This year, may our ballots be bold.
May our prayers be public.
And may our God be liberating.

Amen, and let it be so.