I'm not a writer

But this is what I want to write about

Photo by Carsten Stalljohann on Unsplash

This is an essay about my experience in my former church community, which I left in May 2023 after learning about widespread child sexual abuse and related coverups. You can read more of my writing about it here and here.

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When I was young, I knew I could never be a writer. I knew this because everyone said you have to write what you know. And I knew I could never be totally honest about my life. There was a higher priority, which was the church, and the church was not public. No one ever explained it to me, I just knew. The church wasn’t something we advertised. The church wasn’t something we made a spectacle of. We were little lights on a hill, only the lights were really, really little, and the hill very big, and we shrouded the lights so only the most subtle seeker would be able to spot them. No one could find out about us in any normal way. I said I was a Christian when people asked. I knew I could never be a writer.

When I was young, I wanted to write light-hearted stories about how I was raised. I wanted to write about the petty social dynamics, the squabbling and meddling and church lady gossip. I saw my world perfectly represented in Agatha Christie’s village vicars and Jane Austen’s drawing room restraint. I can’t bring any of those old plots to mind anymore, I just remember the shapes of them. Mrs. So-and-So’s tyrannical potluck. Bill and Betty kissing behind the barn. I imagined a tidy little collection of stories. The good times along with the bad, a procession of gentle tales culminating in a well-adjusted adult life, where I could look back and chuckle at all those silly adventures. Something to tell my grandchildren. I wish I could do that now, all cut and dry and pat and sweet. Or even not so sweet. Like when Catholics joke about their guilt complex, and everyone laughs. I guess it’s not too different, or wouldn’t be if I could develop a sense of humor about it. All those crazy old men who molested everyone and covered it up. Ha ha ha.

When I got a little older, I wanted to write about beautiful things. Back then my life felt pure, and my thoughts revolved around an urgency to preserve the good. Any fear I felt was a fear of jeopardizing it. I did not yet know despair. I loved dawn at our church conventions. We would wake up with the sun, fresh-faced and sleepy in the dormitories, stumbling through the dewy dead grass into the tent kitchen to drink burnt coffee out of Styrofoam cups and make eyes at the boys, all fresh-faced and sleepy in their glasses and sweaters, a sight more intimate than anything I had known before or have known since. I would go and get dressed and sit on the hard benches in the tent church and sing about heaven and iniquity, and weep when I thought about the mercy of God and the feeling of unity in the Spirit and the feeling that this was my family, that we loved the same thing purely and that we would always know and love each other, even when we didn’t like each other, even when sin got in the way. I wanted to write about that.

When I got even older, I wanted to be honest. I wanted to write about what it was really like to sit in silence for fifteen minutes to let your spirit settle every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening in someone’s living room. What it was like to stand up and give testimony there every week from the age of eight, to get baptized in a cow pond at fifteen, to sit in the back of dimly lit halls and translate hour-long eschatological sermons into Spanish for some poor Guatemalan migrants. I wanted to write about the horrible, awkward dates I forced myself to go on with nice redheaded boys from Calgary and Idaho Falls. My first kiss which I white-knuckle-willed into existence at age twenty-four after downing two glasses of champagne because I was so anxious it had taken me so long and so fearful that there was something wrong with me. All the faux-pas I thought I made, the grotesque gatherings with all the young people I had nothing in common with, the reality of the tradwives and the terror and respect I felt around all those silly, pompous men.

I wanted to write about subtle evil. I wanted to write about the evil people didn’t notice, or the evil they turned a blind eye to. The most insidious evil I felt was the stuff people hid behind polite words and nice-looking faces and righteous behavior, things that made me so angry I wanted to scream and throw a huge embarrassing fit. I wanted to shake everyone around me, I wanted to provoke them, and I wanted them to know what I saw in them. I remember reading Flannery O’Connor at a young age, feeling like someone had crawled into my brain and scooped out that inner red rot and gore and painted it onto the outside of the whited sepulchers. I wanted to write like that. I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because the most passive aggressive people I knew were my fellow churchgoers, and I could never betray them.

I wanted to write about what it felt like to maneuver layers all the time. I want to write about that right now. What that does to your ability to relate to people. To know profound unity and fellowship, to be told you can only experience it within this community, to be discouraged from mingling with the world, to move through the world anyway, feeling reserved apart. To develop a form of callousness in this separation so ebullient in form it reads as confidence. I guess it was a form of confidence, since it was grounded in the knowledge that I had this deeper thing to fall back on, this stability and identity and divine ordination. My community was a secret knit so closely into my heart that it kept me from depending on anyone. Another feeling grew over time, creeping in like mold over and under my heart’s protection, always present and pressing in from every angle, holding me back even more from unfurling my life. I knew always that things weren’t right yet. Under my confidence and in spite of that deepest unity, I knew there was no place where I could be held as I was, no place where I could rest, except in despair in my bed calling out to Christ alone. But that was all fine too, for a time. Life is struggle. So is faith. Nothing good ever comes easy.

I want to write about what happens when all that disappears. When the net and the blinders and the walls are wrenched away. The exact way your muscles remember to flinch to protect you, what it feels like to see the void you suspected might have been there all along, good destroyed, fear realized, lying in bed with the guardrails down, forced now to acknowledge for the first time in all honesty that there is no one to save you but Christ alone.

I wonder if any of it is worth writing about now. Even this essay feels frivolous: an exercise meant to unburden myself and spin my wheels even more than I already have. It’s all mundane. We weren’t the only exclusive fundamentalist sect in America, not by a long shot. We weren’t even that bad, as exclusive fundamentalist sects go. We certainly weren’t the only community filled with self-righteous do-gooders and busybodies and passive men and overbearing women and massive amounts of sex offenders. It also just isn’t constructive to keep picking at a wound as it heals. How much “deconstruction” can a person do before nothing is left?

I wish I could I write more about things I don’t understand yet, like what exactly I should do next, or God’s intention for the generations that spent their whole lives under the vice grip of this church, or the lives of the little old ladies who are still in it, or the feeling I used to get when I sang hymns, and the feeling I get when I try to sing them now, or my intense, intense, insatiable social hunger.

“How did you hold onto your faith after everything?” People ask me all the time. I want to write about that.