The hardest departure of all

Religious belief is like quick sand

As

Kristin Du Mez

neatly summarized, new PRRI data shows almost all groups of Trump voters souring on him. Except for one.

Yep, his old faithful friends, white evangelicals, 76% of whom are still lockstep with him.¹ Most of them are even fine with him putting undocumented immigrants in concentration camps. Seriously.

Before continuing, let me say again to the pundit/journalist class: Our present crisis is fundamentally a religious one. We would not be here without the collective action of white evangelicals. If you aren’t analyzing this aspect of things, if you aren’t trying to understand why, if you aren’t going deep on American religion, you aren’t fully covering the story. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Also, you should read my book and have me on your platforms.

I’ve written quite a bit about why white evangelicals are so stubbornly in his camp here, here, here, here, and here. Today, I want to tell you more of my personal story.

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The hardest thing I have ever done—by far—was leaving my first marriage. It wasn’t because I was torn about it in my heart. There wasn’t part of me that was fulfilled by it or that was emotionally attached to my then husband. There were no children to think of. There were few financial considerations. The only reason I stayed for seven years—seven years longer than I wanted to stay—was religious belief. I was afraid the decision to leave would unravel the entire framework of my faith.

And it did. Thank God.

That faith led me into the marriage to begin with. After having grown up in an evangelical bubble (it made it all the way across the Atlantic to Kenya!), I went to an evangelical college, where students got married very young. It was encouraged, in fact, as a hedge against premarital sex, which in evangelicalism is only slightly below murder in the Official Register of Deadly Sins (gay sex is above murder; rape is…basically the same thing premarital sex, unless committed by a stranger/real criminal, which do not exist within the walls of the church, obviously).²

I met my first husband my second week of my freshman year and married him at age 19. On paper, he was perfect. Nice person, committed Christian, fellow missionary kid (I thought that to be imperative), good student. Responsible, decent, no red flags. And most importantly, he found me attractive, which at the time I believed to be an impossibility for a human man. I was a layer cake of low self-esteem, grief, brokenness, cluelessness, lostness, fear, sadness. Marrying him, I thought, was a way to address these problems. Adult achievement unlocked.

How I really felt about him—nauseous, if we’re honest—was immaterial. In evangelicalism, one’s feelings always are. You are trained to discount them, to ignore instinct, experience, intuition, even logic. There is only the Bible, and its strict interpretation. There is only the Will of God, which you are told is as plain as day. You choose to follow him. You choose to obey. You choose to commit. You will yourself to love. And you know what, sometimes love does have to be a choice. But the kind of love that leads you to call a difficult relative every now and then or volunteer at a soup kitchen. Not the kind that has you give yourself body and soul to another person. That kind of compulsory love on an intimate level leaves you feeling violated, angry, and traumatized.

I knew on some level I was making a mistake. But I thought I could just power-Christian my way through. God wanted me to be holy, not happy, as the evangelical saying goes. A lifetime of commitment to someone for whom I had no feelings would surely make me holy. It would surely prove I was a real, heaven-bound Christian, as I always feared I was not.

I regretted my decision immediately. Literally on day one. But I spent the next seven years trying to make it work. I prayed. I did Bible studies. We went to marriage seminars and Christian counseling. I read books. I cried. And cried. And cried. On my knees, on my face, day after day. My body physically rebelled. Eventually I began behaving in ways that were way out of character for me, before then and ever since. I saw myself slipping away. Everything in me told me I had to get out.

Except for my faith. My very rigid, authoritarian faith. It put up a fight almost to my death. I never seriously considered taking my own life, but I often prayed for my own death.

Any kind of fundamentalist religion is a carefully constructed tower of blocks. Every new piece of information or experience has to fit. If it can’t be integrated into the structure, it has to be discredited, denied, or destroyed. For evangelicalism, the structure is an elevation of the Bible into an infallible, authoritative but also authoritarian, oversimplified handbook, the interpretation of which is hoarded and used as a weapon. Whoever owns the Bible has the power, controls the narrative, leads the people.

And the Bible—even Jesus himself!—says divorce is wrong. Right there on the page. The historical and cultural context did not matter. My particular story did not matter. My experience did not matter. “God said it, we believe it, and that settles it!”

By the way, that one phrase more than any other efficiently encapsulates white evangelicalism. Pat, insistent, willfully blind, absolutely allergic to complexity.

I knew that choosing to get a divorce would stigmatize me. It would provoke dozens of uncomfortable conversations. It would make me the subject of whispered “concern.” It would embarrass my missionary parents, heroes in that world. It would further bar me—I was already constrained as a woman—from various roles and functions in the church. I would never fully belong in a community that had been my main source of identity in a life of jumbled up cultural affinity and attenuated family ties.

But much more than feeling cast out, I felt my choice would be the end of my faith. I already had a lot of doubts about my faith, but not the validity of its basis. My doubts mainly lay with my own sincerity. I feared I didn’t really believe or didn’t believe enough. The consequences of that were are dire as they came: Eternal, fiery damnation. Willfully choosing divorce? That would be the ultimate proof of my soul’s sorry state.

I was trapped in a hall of mirrors. Evangelicalism’s strict biblicism—via the doctrine of inerrancy—is a self-licking ice cream cone of defining and policing the boundaries of “true” Christianity based on creating the boundaries in the first place. We are the only true Christians according to the terms of our own Christianity. We are right because we insist rightness is the attainable goal. We are right because we are certain.

Getting a divorce—or affirming LGBTQ people or believing in women’s equality—interrupts this self-reinforcing cycle. It removes a major block from the tower. It reveals an exit from the maze. It really does take you down the feared “slippery slope” that you are constantly warned about in that world. If you go down a road without clear signs and strict rules and lots of stoplights—you’re going to end up broken down in a damned ditch.

He shouldn’t have made friends with a lesbian!

If you come to a point in your life of cognitive dissonance—when the belief system you’ve inherited is telling you one thing, but everything else in your life, to include your own physical well being, is telling you something completely different—I can tell you from experience, it’s terrifying and excruciating. It is in fact psychological torture.

Ideally, you arrange your life and experience to avoid such a fate at all costs. For white evangelicals, this has increasingly entailed building a cultural ghetto with high walls to keep out the information, people, institutions, experiences, emotions, and ideas that could serve as cognitive Trojan Horses.

But in a free, open, and pluralistic society, walls can only be so impenetrable. The outside world tends to seep in. And if that happens, you have a few choices.

1. You can double down on your belief system and ignore/discredit/attack the troublesome experience, people, ideas, or information. Pros=you get to stay in the good graces of your tight knit community and avoid major life disruption. Cons=You will never live a life of authenticity, truth, and freedom.

You’re more likely to go this way if you have no other source of community. If you do develop other sources of support and community outside the belief system—this is what happened for me—you might go a different way.

2. You can completely throw out your belief system and adopt a wholly new one. Pros=You efficiently get rid of toxic beliefs, people, and communities. Cons=You might lose the positive parts of yourself and your experience that were rooted in those things (and maybe there are truly none). The temptation to completely give in to anger, judgment, and a new kind of intolerant fundamentalist belief may settle into the well worn crevices of habitual thought (but doesn’t have to).

3. Or you can basically make peace with uncertainty and living a life of constant sifting, wondering, doubting, questioning, and showing grace to those who come up with different answers to life’s questions, including the community you left.

I have strived to stay on path #3, but I definitely fall into #2 quite a bit. Especially these days, when my former community is causing widespread destruction that affects us all.

So as a personal matter, I aim for the third option and am disappointed in myself when I fail. But as a political matter, I feel called to more militant rejection. I don’t know if I’m doing it right.

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Inerrancy and strict biblicism has been political in American Christianity from the beginning, when it was formalized in defense of slavery. Ever since, it has been employed to stave off social change. But while it’s easy to see how divorce, women’s roles, and LGBTQ issues derive from a literal reading of the Bible, it’s hard to understand how issues such as abortion, tax policy, racial equality, climate, welfare, and foreign policy derive from an ancient text that has nothing explicit to say (or honestly, has explicit language pointing the other direction than evangelicals have gone with it).

I think you have to consider the ultimate purpose behind strict doctrinal religion rather than the specifics. To state a rather obvious, oft repeated point, at bottom, it’s about fear. We all know we are going to die, none of us know quite what to make of that or the meaning of our lives in the meantime, and we don’t like it. We crave certainty, some of us more than others. And that is what fundamentalism delivers in spades. So do authoritarian politics.

And as you form communities around certain beliefs that everyone agrees to uphold, or around leaders whom everyone agrees to follow, another foundational human need is met, that of belonging. And as communities envelope their members and form boundaries of belonging, those inside feel secure and protected.

White evangelicalism isn’t unique in any of this. But it is one of the more sizable, consequential anomalies in our modern, pluralistic, democratic society. White evangelicals feel that society is out to get them. But the truth is, they are their own worst enemies, by creating a belief system that short-circuits so easily, that insists on controlling a world that can’t be controlled.

Faced with the tsunami of cognitive dissonance presented by Donald Trump—a man who on the one hand, is a direct affront to Christian teachings, but on the other hand, appeals to Christian identity—most white evangelicals have not had the tools or the courage to look critically at themselves. And importantly, most of them live in pretty insular environments and lack other community supports. So most have integrated him into their cherished established structures and doubled all the way down.

And drug us all along with them into the quicksand. God help us.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any sure-fire, quick solutions for countering fundamentalist belief, especially when its believers have so sealed themselves off. But I am reminded of Caleb Cambpell’s relational approach of changing people’s hearts and minds, and that my own hard-won exodus probably would not have happened without the embrace of a loving, supportive community outside my belief system. That group of people changed my life. They gave me my happiness. They gave me my husband and children.

I’m still not sure how to balance this approach with the imperative to call out wrong in no uncertain terms. But I suppose on an interpersonal level, we would all do well to be gracious, kind, and hospitable. To offer people a soft place to land. For me, it’s remembering how fraught it was to leave.

I know that deep in my heart, but I think I often forget, even though the gratitude for having left is the abiding force of my life.

1. This is still a few points’ slippage, I think, depending on which polls you look at. But on the whole, still his most solid support.

2. This is sarcasm.