For years after walking away from toxic churches and religion, my life continued to be chronically chaotic as I deconstructed my faith. Turns out, that was only the beginning of the work I needed to do. I also had to deconstruct the many toxic beliefs handed to me as a white, female, American. These included grind culture, colonial culture, white supremacy, Christian supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy, just to name a few.
Ironically, long before I had even started all of this deconstruction, I had a vision for a vastly different way of doing church. What I eventually learned is that my vision wasn’t for a new way of “doing” church, but rather, an ancient one. I’ve been writing a lot recently about what specifically is so toxic about American churches because until we face what is most toxic about them, we can’t build something new and different, because we will carry the same old toxicity right into the new thing.
The thing we have to face is our own self-righteousness.
In and of itself, this is not inherently bad until it becomes a moral issue. Many of the issues we fight about the hardest are not or should not be moral issues, but clever businesses, politicians and media companies have figured out how to make them moral issues, so we will literally fight to the death over them. Even if that “death” is just the death of our rellationships with anyone who disagrees withus. This is how we have allowed ourselves to become siloed into millions of little digitally walled cities.
The way you can usually tell what has been turned into a moral issue, is the distance between disagreement and pure rage.
I’ll give you an example.
If you’ve ever spent pretty much any time around men, you probably know that it’s only a matter of time before they start arguing about who the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) is. Now, what category of GOAT they argue about will change depending on their interests (athletes, scientists, philosophers, Pokemon). This is such a common and universal occurrence among men, that three of the four gospels mention the disciples arguing amongst themselves about who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Men can and will argue this passionately for days, weeks, months and sometimes (depending on their relationship) years. But although they will double down, dig in and fight tooth and nail for their choice of GOAT, their arguments will almost never end a friendship or erupt in a physical fight, unless there is something else going on.
The way you can tell that something has been turned into a moral issue, however, is that people of opposing viewpoints literally cannot even have a discussion about their views without literal fights breaking out (even if they are just verbal or digital) or relationships ending. Although these “fights” generally occur on the internet, both sides are often so passionate about their position that if they were to happen in person, it’s not hard to imagine them erupting into physical altercations. Some of those topics include:
Vaccines/ healthcare
LGBTQ+
Transgender rights
Racism
Israel vs. Palestine
ICE/ Immigrants/ immigration
Conservatives vs. Liberals
So, this is the problem.
These are obviously very pressing issues in our country right now, and it’s not hard to see how some of them even seem like genuinely moral issues. But we have become so polarized that we seem to have lost the ability to have any sort of calm, rational discussion on these topics with people of opposing viewpoints.
We can’t have real community if we can’t actually discuss the things that matter, but we have become so polarized that literally the only way to meet in person with other people is to carefully choose people who look like us, think like us, and agree with us on important issues. Which is how we all end up in echo chambers, thinking clearly our position is right because everyone we know agrees with us.
The truth is, it’s actually really important to have these conversations with people who disagree with us, but we don’t know how to keep them from erupting into fights, arguments, and possibly even physical altercations. And that’s a real problem.
Conversations cannot happen until we formally acknowledge three things:
Not a single one of us is the sole possessor of Truth
Not a single one of us has all the right answers
Our views and opinions of others are heavily and highly shaped by media
What happens is that we have a certain image or ideal of people who align with a certain word, label or value. As soon as someone identifies or aligns themselves with that word, label or value, we label them in our own minds as friend or foe. This is why you have so many people hesitant to align themselves with any word or label, such as Christian, Democrat, Republican, Conservative or Liberal. As soon as you show alignment with one of these labels, people assume a whole library of things about you that may or may not be true. We are no longer dealing with each other as individuals but as labels.
At one time, if someone identified themselves as a Christian, we labeled them as “friend” if we also identified as Christians. Now, of course, we first have to ascertain what kind of Christian they are. If they are conservative Christians, then a liberal Christian might automatically assume they are a Christian Nationalist and consider them to be the enemy, and treat them as such.
This is why mega-churches are thriving and why we also simultaneously have a “loneliness epidemic.” The problem is not that our lives aren’t filled with people, they are. It’s that we can’t have deep conversations about things that actually matter unless we agree on those things, because social media algorithms and media in general has gotten so good at creating “us/ them” dynamics. Mega-churches are thriving (particularly among men) because they are offering a “religious experience” without all the messiness of trying to navigate deep and meaningful conversations among people with differing views.
There is ample evidence that we create strong bonds around shared hate, but the problem is those bonds also turn out to be highly toxic. In 2017, a former Wall Street worker named Brendan Alper appeared on the TV show Shark Tank to pitch a new dating app that matched people based on their shared hatred of things. The “sharks” excitedly invested and within the first year, the app had more than a million downloads. Less than five years later, the app had faded into complete obscurity. Turns out, bonding over things you hate doesn’t create the kind of healthy, life-giving relationships we all seem to be seeking.
One way to build these relationships, however, is to unite around a shared mission.
For ten years, I was a part of a traveling Christian theater ministry. During that time, I spent 15-18 hours a day for 4.5 months with three to four people from different cultures, races, denominations, and in some cases even different faiths. You didn’t have to be a Christian to join; you just had to agree to live by some pretty simple rules. Although we spent months together, sometimes talking for hours at a time, I couldn’t really tell you much about the religious, political or denominational beliefs of any of the people I spent so much time with. We spent hours and hours having deep, heartfelt conversations about things that really mattered to us, and apparently, those didn’t make the list.
Until recently.
I left that organization 20 years ago, but stayed connected with many people via social media. Up until a few years ago, I still couldn’t tell you the denominational/ religious or political beliefs of anyone I served with. Until about five years ago, when all of a sudden it seems to have become deeply critical for people to broadcast their faith, beliefs, and political affiliations to the world. I spent years serving alongside these people, sharing a common goal or mission, and our political and religious affiliations never mattered. Until suddenly, they did.
What I can assure you is I didn’t change and they didn’t suddenly change overnight. What changed is that social media algorithms figured out that they get the most engagement by showing people things that made them angry. By doing that, they also quickly figured out what people’s political and religious affiliations were by what they responded the strongest to. It didn’t take long for political and religious leaders to figure out how to use these same tactics to their advantage as well.
They all figured out right around the same time that they could get enormous traction and buy-in by uniting people around what they hate. Algorithms don’t need you to proclaim your beliefs, they can figure it out without you ever knowing they are doing it. Real world leaders, however, needed people to publicly sort and arrange themselves by loudly and proudly proclaiming their beliefs, so that they could unite with other “like-minded” individuals. This is where the polarization came in.
What I know for a fact, because I lived it, is that people of vastly different political and religious beliefs can work together to accomplish incredible things. I want to get back to that, but in order to do that, we have to let go of these beliefs we’ve slowly been led to hold that it is our differences that matter most.
I want to return to an ancient way of “doing church”, where we are not divided by race, skin color, political persuasion, religion or whether you think the earth is flat or not. Believe it or not, none of those things matter.
What matters is that people need to be fed, clothed, housed, visited, cared for and helped. Mothers are drowning, while single, childless women are often desperately lonely. Older women who have become estranged from their adult children, simultaneously cutting them off from connection with their grandchildren, often have enormous amounts of time and love to give and no one to give it to. Does it really matter that you are an exhausted atheist mother while the woman who has plenty of time and love to give to you and your children is a Christian? Or a Muslim? Or a Hindu?
Those who have been reading my Substack for a while now know that I have struggled to find the gap - the thing I had to offer that wasn’t already being offered by dozens of other voices and creators. I think I found it. I want to rebuild The Church. Not the Christian church, not a group of people that meets in a certain building and agrees to at least pretend to abide by a certain belief system. Rather a network of individuals of all different faiths, races and political persuasions that meet together to share what matters to them and discuss practical ways to start solving the problems and meeting the tangible needs of their own communities.
I hope you will join me.
The first way to do that is to please like and share this article.
The next steps are coming. I have a lot of ideas brewing that I will be sharing soon, and I hope you will join me. Thanks to those who have been here from the beginning and have stayed through all my twists and turns. I think I am finally on the right track and heading in the right direction to genuinely (I hope) make difference.
** For those following along on my Tiny Experiment, this was about 1,600 words, so about three times longer than I am aiming for, but I am largely staying true to publishing three articles per week! Thanks for following along!
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