Raised on Sweet Tea and Certainty

I grew up in the Mississippi River Delta of northeast Arkansas, a flat floodplain thick with cotton fields, combines, and the measured machinery of Southern life. If the heat didn’t get you, the mosquitos sure as hell would. Life felt slower then, and hotter. I was born in midsummer, and grew up on a diet of baseball, humidity, seersucker Sundays, and Vacation Bible School. My daddy preached at the local Christian Church. We were by all accounts, the only true believers in town.

For generations, this region was both hospitable and harmful, genteel and barbarous. The soil seemed to remember who had worked it and who had owned it, who belonged and who did not. There were thin places back in the bottom lands where the blood cried out from the silt and sand, where old Black men still lived in shacks surrounded by soybeans. I still remember the chain gangs with their shovels flashing in the sun as they dug ditches and built roads across a South where slavery and segregation mutated into the modern plantation —the State Penitentiary.

Poor white folks were better off, but not by much. My grandfather on my daddy’s side was the son of a sharecropper. He dropped out of school in the 8th grade to pick cotton. My grandmother grew up in tin huts on dirt floors all over West Tennessee, moving from shanty to lean-to, depending on the season. They both lived through the Great Depression and World War II to find themselves in old age the proprietors of a few acres they finally called home.

Nana’s house sat at the end of a dog-wood lined lane, where there was always room at the table for one more. But as I grew older, I noticed something disorienting beneath that hospitableness — not necessarily in her, but in the sweltering air we breathed. This was a world ordered by racial and gender hierarchy. Everyone had their place, and their role. It was all less a conscious ideology than an atmosphere, something understood, performed, and lived into long before it was examined.

My upbringing was both charming and supremacist, generous and exclusionary, dignified yet deeply insecure. How can an entire region of the country be so damn proud, yet rife with white grievance? Maybe it’s because Southerners have a peculiar gift for disguising one thing as another. The same hands that offered biscuits and gravy could just as easily fasten chains around your wrists. Respectable church ladies called you a damned fool without you even knowing it. They’d smile, squeeze your shoulder, and say, "Bless your heart,” as a way of masking their critique in kindness. This is the South in miniature: polite cruelty in the same breath, all while pretending not to notice the contradiction.

The Delta raised me in this double vision: superior yet insecure, poor but well-healed, rooted in a place that felt like home while slowly realizing that my belonging was inseparable from someone else’s unbelonging. Naming those tensions isn’t a betrayal of my heritage, it’s just the most honest thing I can say about it.

I left the South 25 years ago. Time and distance have a way of clarifying what proximity once blurred. I’m still close enough to know its cadences, humor, and accents, but far enough away to finally see it completely. From here, I recognize the culture I participated in and benefited from came at the cost of so many marginalized people. I now exist in what Father Richard Rohr calls “the edge of the inside,” a strange, holy place of disruption where you still belong to the people who formed you, yet you’re no longer captive to the way of life they gave you. In choosing exile, I’m neither an outsider throwing stones nor an insider defending the status quo. I’m something in between — a witness shaped by the South but no longer bound by its rules.

Leaving my physical home prepared me to recognize when it was time to leave my spiritual one. The same awakening that changed my understanding of the South eventually transformed my understanding of faith. Like the Delta, evangelical Christianity was a place I once called home. It gave me identity, superiority, stories, songs, language, purpose, and community. It taught me how to pray, how to read the Bible, and how to seek God. I was at home in evangelicalism because it was a religious house built with people like me in mind. As a white, male, cisgender, heterosexual Christian, I rarely had reason to question its architecture. Only later did I begin to see how that same structure often restricted, marginalized, and excluded women, People of Color, and LGBTQIA individuals. Beneath its welcome and warmth was a similar contradiction.

The church of my childhood was often kind, generous, and deeply sincere. But it was also shaped by the same rigid hierarchies of my home town. Certainty masqueraded as faith. Racial, sexual, and gender boundaries determined who belonged and who most certainly did not. White, heterosexual males were in charge of everything, while the women actually did everything. Much like the South, evangelicalism carried a double inheritance.