Believe it or not, I don't like being the villain, especially not for minimum wage

Getting an early start responding to my haters

It is beginning. It was inevitable. But I’m still not excited.

I knew when I wrote my book—which is deeply critical of white evangelicalism and slightly less critical of its pride and joy of over two centuries, overseas missions—that I would become The Bad Guy in circles of which I am still somewhat part.

I’m still working on my evil laugh.

I honestly don’t give a crap what the average American evangelical thinks, especially not the Theobros, those misogynistic, self-appointed policemen of the steaming pile of sh*t they claim is Christianity. They can eat hairballs for all I care.

But the missionary and missionary kid (MK) community—that’s gonna hurt. It already is hurting, as word goes out in those small circles and some people are decrying it simply based on the title and publisher’s description (as well as the Publisher’s Weekly review, which honestly overplayed the drama). There are a lot of wonderful missionaries out there who will feel disrespected. And there are a lot of MKs out there who will not see themselves in this portrayal.

And to be clear, in many of those cases, they are simply too buried in that world—for many, it’s all they have ever known, cradle to grave—to see its flaws. It’s too much a part of their identity. It’s the only community they have. I understand that. In addition, in my experience, the vast majority have zero concept of the historical stage across which they still stride. There is a lot of very comfortable ignorance out there that doesn’t necessarily preclude good work in the world.

But the criticism that will hurt the most is that which contains a grain of truth. The truth is, there’s a lot of nuance to this story, and my biggest fear is that in trying to correct one oversimplified narrative—the heroic story of missions that evangelicals love to tell—and in trying to add nuance to that story, I have gone too far the other way. Nuance is hard to nail, and I am imperfect. My shortcomings will cause some people undeserved pain, which I regret.

But I won’t ever regret writing this book. I worked on it too hard and believe in its overall message with all my heart. What I regret is not writing it better. But I know I did my best. I will have to let the chips fall where they may.

Having said that, I’m going to pre-but a few things.

Why are you bashing missionaries? These are good people doing self-sacrificial work.

The main point of the book is not that missions and missionaries are bad or harmful in the places and to the people involved, although sometimes they have been and still are, and the book does detail instances of that. But I mostly leave that to others’ judgment.

The main point of the book is that missions have been harmful for the American church, inflating its sense of spiritual importance and distracting it from needed self-reflection and repentance in an American context. To the extent that the book “bashes” missions/missionaries, it is to peel away the layers of hagiography and myth that allow American evangelicals to live in the reflected glory of the missionary enterprise.

Engagement in missions has often changed and matured the missionaries—although that’s definitely not a given, either—but it has rarely done so for the American church as a whole. I’ve heard many, many true-believer missionaries themselves express a similar disappointment in the people who support and celebrate them.

I’m an MK, and I loved my childhood. Why are you making it sound bad?

Guess what, I loved my childhood, too! It’s who I am. In fact, this whole project started with me trying to write a humorous memoir about a childhood I cherished. But I realized as I delved into and processed my memories in a concerted way that there was a lot of pain there, too. It isn’t a one-dimensional story. That’s how life always is, and in fact, one of my big issues with evangelicalism as a culture is its insistence on simple stories that confirm belief, its rejection of experiences that depart from that, and its discomfort with moral complexity.

In addition, as I started to interview others (eventually over 80 MKs! plus I collected surveys from around 300 total), I realized my experience was on the positive side of a larger spectrum, and that so many MKs had felt their experiences were unrepresented or dismissed in the larger narrative of missions. The book actually presents many kinds of stories, including many that are equal parts happy memory and deep hurt.

But as I say in the book’s introduction, there is no one MK story. Attempting to tell one would be impossible, and claiming to tell one would be dishonest. My purpose was to draw out themes across many different types of experience to understand what the MK perspective has to say about missions’ importance for American evangelical self-conception.

Why are you adding to all the white evangelical hate out there? Just stop already.

I, and many others, would have probably never written a book critical of white evangelicalism were it not for one thing: The rise of an authoritarian movement on the votes of 80+ percent of white evangelicals, who make up a full one-quarter of the electorate. We would not have a President Trump I, much less II, without the immovable, energetic, committed voting of white evangelicals.

While I had long ago grown disenchanted with the particular form of Christianity with which I was raised, I would have most likely been content to leave quietly—maybe I would have written about my own personal journey—and let others alone. But when white evangelicals chose to endanger American democracy, they made their faith all of our business. And I felt compelled to speak out as loudly and as clearly as I can, with the expertise and skills I have to offer, to try to wake evangelicals up—yes, even the nice, non-MAGA ones!—to how and why their particular form of religion has brought us all to such a perilous place. And to try to help those outside that world to understand, too, in hopes that we all find a way back.

You’re just a grifter trying to make money.

To this I say

This type of accusation shows complete ignorance of the publishing business, just for starters. As any author will tell you, a very few writers can live off their book sales. I am almost certainly not going to be one of them. In fact, if you divide the number of hours I spent researching, writing, thinking about, editing, rewriting, looking for a literary agent, looking for a publisher, more editing, and finally promoting this book, my hourly wage is likely to be around a nickel. Maybe. There’s some pie-in-the-sky scenario in which this book becomes a best seller and gets me up to a middle class salary for like a year. There is no scenario in which writing matches my previous salary as a civil servant.

There are only two reasons I did what I did (and becoming despised definitely isn’t one of them):

I love to write. With all my being.

This is the message I felt utterly compelled to write.

Aside from the elbow grease involved, and the abundant human flaws on the page, this book practically wrote itself. It poured out of me with the clarity and ease of an underground spring finally discovered and tapped.

If I were still an evangelical, I would say God called me to write it. But having learned the hard way, I would never be so arrogant or presumptuous to speak for God. What I can say is that my joy, pain, healing, passion, talent, indignation, concern, grief, hope, faith, determination, and endurance met a most unexpected, highly improbable opportunity, and I seized it.

I hope and pray that my labors bring enlightenment to those searching for it, comfort to those who need it, frustration to those doing harm, and honor to whoever is in charge around here. And that my meager strength is added to the force bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice.