Giving a Name to the Pain
Six years is not a long time. I've now lived in Columbus for six years, and it seems like a blink of an eye since I was living out on the West Coast. But not all blocks of six years are created equal. Six years in your thirties, as the last six years have been for me, is not the same thing as six years when you are younger. Context and timing matter.
From August 1990 to August 1996, I lived in Jacksonville, Florida. That period of six years corresponded with my two years of middle school and my four years of high school. I was 12 at the beginning of that period and 18 when it ended. There is an argument to be made that this is the most significant six year period in any person's life, and I am coming to the conclusion that it is the most significant period of my life, by far. And it was spent entirely in a strange place called Jacksonville, Florida.
If you have never been to Jacksonville, you probably have certain associations with "Florida" that you assume can be carried over to Jacksonville. You might think of Miami, with its tropical Latin American feel. Or you might think of Orlando, a hub of vacationers from all over the world. If you look really hard you can see a little of those things in Jacksonville, but those associations are mostly misleading. Instead, mentally replace the associations who have with "Florida" with those of "Alabama" or "Mississippi," and you will be closer to the mark. Jacksonville is and always will be part of the Deep South, part of the so-called "Bible Belt." It is, as they say, a God-haunted place, dominated thoroughly by the culture of Evangelical Protestantism.
My family and I came to Jacksonville as strangers in what seemed to be a strange land. It was a little less strange because we had a short stop in Virginia Beach, Virginia, prior to Jacksonville, but we were fundamentally products of the Northeastern United States dropped into the Deep South. We were different from the majority of people around us, and that difference was palpable. We spoke differently, we thought differently, and we went to a different sort of church. I felt that difference.
In the face of difference, there are two basic reactions. You can be ashamed of the difference, and try to do as much as possible to become like the dominant culture. Or you can lean in to the difference and celebrate it. Neither is a perfect solution--"assimilation" often turns into a kind of desperate aping of the dominant model, while emphasizing difference leads to a negative caricature of the dominant culture. Be that as it may, I (and by and large the entirety of my family) when the route of resistance. We were not Southerners, we would never be Southerners, and that's just fine with us.
Part of that Resistance, at least for me, took the form of religious resistance. In high school, I began to dig into the intellectual portion of the Catholic faith, and I really liked what I found. Or, perhaps more accurately, I became interested in what I believed it not to be. I came to love the Roman Catholic Church in large measure because I believed it to be the antithesis of the evangelical Protestant majority that I saw all around me in the South. Evangelical Protestantism was a religion of extremism, while Catholicism was a religion of balance. Evangelical Protestantism rejected the life of the mind, while Catholicism embraced it. Evangelical Protestantism was narrow and sectarian, while Catholicism was broad and diverse.
I staked myself to that identity--the idea that Catholicism was not-Evangelicalism. I believed it to be true, but perhaps more importantly I wanted it to be true, I needed it to be true. But it wasn't true, at least not in the way I wanted and needed it to be. The truth of the matter is that both of the absolute, Manichean caricatures that I had created were wrong. Evangelical Protestantism contains (and contained) thoughtful, balanced, articulate, loving people. Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, the Inglorious Pasterds guys--these people have greatly enriched my faith life, and all of them are either current or former Evangelicals.
But the bigger assault on the dualistic identity I had created was the slow but persistent realization that many of the things that I reacted so strongly against in the Evangelical world were equally present inside Catholicism. Catholicism could, and can, be just as extremist, just as anti-intellectual, just as narrow and sectarian. This realization was very painful for me, diluted only by the fact that it was a slow bleed (as chronicled, in large measure, in this space). It is very hard to come to admit that the thing that you have placed so much focus on and invested so much emotional energy in is and was not the thing you thought it was.
That's very hard. You feel like you have been lied to. You feel stupid; you feel that you are a fool and a mark for believing so hard in something that seems so obviously not true with the benefit of hindsight. You feel like you are adrift, not sure who you are or what you are about anymore. It can be a kind of death, really.
This feeling is not unique to me--especially these days. I've notice two groups of people who are experiencing this pain in the context of their religious lives. The first group that has gotten much press recently are "Catholic converts," more specifically the conservative Catholic converts. One can find a slew of takes about Catholic converts, and how they are the worst thing ever, they need to shut up and stop criticizing Pope Francis, or how they are the future, or all of the above (here is a decent summary).
Many of these converts have been foils for this blog--Douthat and Longenecker especially. While I disagree deeply and profoundly with their view of the Christian faith, I have deep sympathy for these people on a very real level. If you listen to the stories of all of these people, there is a very consistent through-line--they came to Catholicism because they believed that Catholicism provided them an anchor, something that would not change while everything else was changing around them. That was what they were looking for, and that was what they were promised by the conservative Catholics who were bringing them in.
Pope Francis drives these folks crazy not just because he calls for changing things (albeit a few, relatively minor things), but also because he is so casually dismissive of the idea that change is a fraught category or that anyone was ever promised that no changes would ever take place. He all but laughs in the face of people like Douthat and Longenecker, and he calls them a series of condescending names ("Pelagians," "Pharisees," "rigid,"--even sotto voce pushing on that most sensitive of pressure points by implying that only the gays like the old-fashioned stuff). And he absolutely goes out of his way to troll the Latin Mass crowd. I don't think I am reading into anything or exaggerating by concluding that Pope Francis thinks that the Douthats and Longeneckers of the world are basically losers who need to get over themselves. Pope Francis is both trying to take away their anchor (the thing that brought them into the Catholic Church in the first place) and making fun of them for ever seeking an anchor in the first place.
The thing is, this notion that the Catholic Church is this unchanging anchor in the storm of change is not something that the Douthats and Longeneckers of the world made up out of whole cloth. Catholicism was sold to these people on precisely this basis, very often by people who were both in a position to be trusted and who should have known better. Popes John Paul II and Benedict in many ways operated on the principle that if we pretend that the period from 1965 to 1978 never happened, we can make it go away. They sold a sanitized, flattened vision of the Catholic Church in which change wasn't really change if you looked at it through the right prism, and in any event the really important things aren't ever going to change and are not up for debate. In a very real way, the JPII/Benedict crew lied to people like Douthat and Longenecker, promising them something that it couldn't deliver and wasn't true. Or, that at the very least, they covered up the fact that the thing they were selling was a kind of wish-fulfillment--if we all agree that this is the only way and that nothing will change, then maybe nothing will actually change and we will build this immovable anchor in the tides of history.
People like Longenecker and Douthat feel betrayed. I understand and sympathize with that feeling, even if I think the thing they want is impossible and stupid and bad. As impossible and stupid and bad as this idea of an unchanging Catholic Church is, they were promised it and they relied on that promise. I get why they are so disillusioned.
The second group, perhaps more directly comparable to my own experience, are Evangelicals who are becoming increasingly disgusted with Evangelical support for Trump. One of the best articulations of that pain that I have seen comes from Beth Moore. I should say that I am not familiar with any of Pastor Moore's previous work--her stuff was re-tweeted to me, which is how I found it. My sense is that she was until recently comfortably within the Evangelical mainstream, or at least as within the Evangelical mainstream as a woman pastor can be.
Pastor Moore's piece is careful not to name names, but the message is pretty transparent--she is shocked and dismayed by her fellow Evangelicals and their behavior of late, especially with regard to President Donald Trump. As she lays it out, she had been willing to go along to get along, secure in the notion that all of this was going to work out and that everyone was ultimately on the same page and that they were at the end of the day the good guys. And then something happens where you expect the people that you think are all on the same page to do Thing X, and they turn around and do Thing -X and your world is shattered.
If I can be so bold as to project a bit onto and speculate about Pastor Moore's experience, one of the things that hurts about this is to realize that some of the people who criticized the church, and criticized you, were actually right. I can only imagine that she has gotten a ton of "how can you defend a bigoted, misogynistic institution like Evangelical Christianity?" questions over the years, and I suspect that she defended Evangelical Christianity on the basis of her conviction that it was not, in fact, a bigoted misogynistic institution. That moment in which you see that the people you have spent so much time defending are in fact pretty much exactly what their critics say they are is like getting an anvil dropped on your head. Pride may not be a virtue, but it is real, and it hurts to have it take a blow like this.
And, unlike the Douthat and Longenecker examples, there are very few people to blame other than yourself. You were not drafted into this fight--you enlisted, willingly, ready to take up the shield for people who were all-to-willing to accept you aid but not live to up the values you projected on to them. Moore talks about losing her naivety, the simple and comfortable belief that the institution of the Church is Team Good and everything will be fine as long as we keep plugging along.
I know that feeling. I remember how much I felt that, and perhaps more importantly how much I once wanted that to be true, that I was part of an uncomplicated Team Good. I, too, have lost that naivety. My loss came long before Trump (though I still held out hope that Trump would shake Catholicism out of its stupor), but I remember what it felt like. I remember specifically how dumb I felt, how foolish all my efforts to defend the shield seemed once the veil of naivety came off. And, like Pastor Moore alludes to in her piece, how I felt a sense of guilt that I had defended things that I knew deep down were wrong, but that I felt I needed to stand up for as part of "defending the shield."
Perhaps I am completely wrong about Pastor Moore, and if so I apologize for using her as a prop for this piece. But I don't think I am. It is tough to go through what she, and hundreds of thousands of other similarly situated folks, are going through. It helps, I think, to give a name to that pain. Once you give it a name, you can work through it. The same name can be applied to the Catholic converts' pain, even if it manifests itself in what might seem like the opposite way.
It hurts to have the thing you believed in turn out to not be what you thought it was. It's a pain. It's worth talking about.
From August 1990 to August 1996, I lived in Jacksonville, Florida. That period of six years corresponded with my two years of middle school and my four years of high school. I was 12 at the beginning of that period and 18 when it ended. There is an argument to be made that this is the most significant six year period in any person's life, and I am coming to the conclusion that it is the most significant period of my life, by far. And it was spent entirely in a strange place called Jacksonville, Florida.
If you have never been to Jacksonville, you probably have certain associations with "Florida" that you assume can be carried over to Jacksonville. You might think of Miami, with its tropical Latin American feel. Or you might think of Orlando, a hub of vacationers from all over the world. If you look really hard you can see a little of those things in Jacksonville, but those associations are mostly misleading. Instead, mentally replace the associations who have with "Florida" with those of "Alabama" or "Mississippi," and you will be closer to the mark. Jacksonville is and always will be part of the Deep South, part of the so-called "Bible Belt." It is, as they say, a God-haunted place, dominated thoroughly by the culture of Evangelical Protestantism.
My family and I came to Jacksonville as strangers in what seemed to be a strange land. It was a little less strange because we had a short stop in Virginia Beach, Virginia, prior to Jacksonville, but we were fundamentally products of the Northeastern United States dropped into the Deep South. We were different from the majority of people around us, and that difference was palpable. We spoke differently, we thought differently, and we went to a different sort of church. I felt that difference.
In the face of difference, there are two basic reactions. You can be ashamed of the difference, and try to do as much as possible to become like the dominant culture. Or you can lean in to the difference and celebrate it. Neither is a perfect solution--"assimilation" often turns into a kind of desperate aping of the dominant model, while emphasizing difference leads to a negative caricature of the dominant culture. Be that as it may, I (and by and large the entirety of my family) when the route of resistance. We were not Southerners, we would never be Southerners, and that's just fine with us.
Part of that Resistance, at least for me, took the form of religious resistance. In high school, I began to dig into the intellectual portion of the Catholic faith, and I really liked what I found. Or, perhaps more accurately, I became interested in what I believed it not to be. I came to love the Roman Catholic Church in large measure because I believed it to be the antithesis of the evangelical Protestant majority that I saw all around me in the South. Evangelical Protestantism was a religion of extremism, while Catholicism was a religion of balance. Evangelical Protestantism rejected the life of the mind, while Catholicism embraced it. Evangelical Protestantism was narrow and sectarian, while Catholicism was broad and diverse.
I staked myself to that identity--the idea that Catholicism was not-Evangelicalism. I believed it to be true, but perhaps more importantly I wanted it to be true, I needed it to be true. But it wasn't true, at least not in the way I wanted and needed it to be. The truth of the matter is that both of the absolute, Manichean caricatures that I had created were wrong. Evangelical Protestantism contains (and contained) thoughtful, balanced, articulate, loving people. Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, the Inglorious Pasterds guys--these people have greatly enriched my faith life, and all of them are either current or former Evangelicals.
But the bigger assault on the dualistic identity I had created was the slow but persistent realization that many of the things that I reacted so strongly against in the Evangelical world were equally present inside Catholicism. Catholicism could, and can, be just as extremist, just as anti-intellectual, just as narrow and sectarian. This realization was very painful for me, diluted only by the fact that it was a slow bleed (as chronicled, in large measure, in this space). It is very hard to come to admit that the thing that you have placed so much focus on and invested so much emotional energy in is and was not the thing you thought it was.
That's very hard. You feel like you have been lied to. You feel stupid; you feel that you are a fool and a mark for believing so hard in something that seems so obviously not true with the benefit of hindsight. You feel like you are adrift, not sure who you are or what you are about anymore. It can be a kind of death, really.
This feeling is not unique to me--especially these days. I've notice two groups of people who are experiencing this pain in the context of their religious lives. The first group that has gotten much press recently are "Catholic converts," more specifically the conservative Catholic converts. One can find a slew of takes about Catholic converts, and how they are the worst thing ever, they need to shut up and stop criticizing Pope Francis, or how they are the future, or all of the above (here is a decent summary).
Many of these converts have been foils for this blog--Douthat and Longenecker especially. While I disagree deeply and profoundly with their view of the Christian faith, I have deep sympathy for these people on a very real level. If you listen to the stories of all of these people, there is a very consistent through-line--they came to Catholicism because they believed that Catholicism provided them an anchor, something that would not change while everything else was changing around them. That was what they were looking for, and that was what they were promised by the conservative Catholics who were bringing them in.
Pope Francis drives these folks crazy not just because he calls for changing things (albeit a few, relatively minor things), but also because he is so casually dismissive of the idea that change is a fraught category or that anyone was ever promised that no changes would ever take place. He all but laughs in the face of people like Douthat and Longenecker, and he calls them a series of condescending names ("Pelagians," "Pharisees," "rigid,"--even sotto voce pushing on that most sensitive of pressure points by implying that only the gays like the old-fashioned stuff). And he absolutely goes out of his way to troll the Latin Mass crowd. I don't think I am reading into anything or exaggerating by concluding that Pope Francis thinks that the Douthats and Longeneckers of the world are basically losers who need to get over themselves. Pope Francis is both trying to take away their anchor (the thing that brought them into the Catholic Church in the first place) and making fun of them for ever seeking an anchor in the first place.
The thing is, this notion that the Catholic Church is this unchanging anchor in the storm of change is not something that the Douthats and Longeneckers of the world made up out of whole cloth. Catholicism was sold to these people on precisely this basis, very often by people who were both in a position to be trusted and who should have known better. Popes John Paul II and Benedict in many ways operated on the principle that if we pretend that the period from 1965 to 1978 never happened, we can make it go away. They sold a sanitized, flattened vision of the Catholic Church in which change wasn't really change if you looked at it through the right prism, and in any event the really important things aren't ever going to change and are not up for debate. In a very real way, the JPII/Benedict crew lied to people like Douthat and Longenecker, promising them something that it couldn't deliver and wasn't true. Or, that at the very least, they covered up the fact that the thing they were selling was a kind of wish-fulfillment--if we all agree that this is the only way and that nothing will change, then maybe nothing will actually change and we will build this immovable anchor in the tides of history.
People like Longenecker and Douthat feel betrayed. I understand and sympathize with that feeling, even if I think the thing they want is impossible and stupid and bad. As impossible and stupid and bad as this idea of an unchanging Catholic Church is, they were promised it and they relied on that promise. I get why they are so disillusioned.
The second group, perhaps more directly comparable to my own experience, are Evangelicals who are becoming increasingly disgusted with Evangelical support for Trump. One of the best articulations of that pain that I have seen comes from Beth Moore. I should say that I am not familiar with any of Pastor Moore's previous work--her stuff was re-tweeted to me, which is how I found it. My sense is that she was until recently comfortably within the Evangelical mainstream, or at least as within the Evangelical mainstream as a woman pastor can be.
Pastor Moore's piece is careful not to name names, but the message is pretty transparent--she is shocked and dismayed by her fellow Evangelicals and their behavior of late, especially with regard to President Donald Trump. As she lays it out, she had been willing to go along to get along, secure in the notion that all of this was going to work out and that everyone was ultimately on the same page and that they were at the end of the day the good guys. And then something happens where you expect the people that you think are all on the same page to do Thing X, and they turn around and do Thing -X and your world is shattered.
If I can be so bold as to project a bit onto and speculate about Pastor Moore's experience, one of the things that hurts about this is to realize that some of the people who criticized the church, and criticized you, were actually right. I can only imagine that she has gotten a ton of "how can you defend a bigoted, misogynistic institution like Evangelical Christianity?" questions over the years, and I suspect that she defended Evangelical Christianity on the basis of her conviction that it was not, in fact, a bigoted misogynistic institution. That moment in which you see that the people you have spent so much time defending are in fact pretty much exactly what their critics say they are is like getting an anvil dropped on your head. Pride may not be a virtue, but it is real, and it hurts to have it take a blow like this.
And, unlike the Douthat and Longenecker examples, there are very few people to blame other than yourself. You were not drafted into this fight--you enlisted, willingly, ready to take up the shield for people who were all-to-willing to accept you aid but not live to up the values you projected on to them. Moore talks about losing her naivety, the simple and comfortable belief that the institution of the Church is Team Good and everything will be fine as long as we keep plugging along.
I know that feeling. I remember how much I felt that, and perhaps more importantly how much I once wanted that to be true, that I was part of an uncomplicated Team Good. I, too, have lost that naivety. My loss came long before Trump (though I still held out hope that Trump would shake Catholicism out of its stupor), but I remember what it felt like. I remember specifically how dumb I felt, how foolish all my efforts to defend the shield seemed once the veil of naivety came off. And, like Pastor Moore alludes to in her piece, how I felt a sense of guilt that I had defended things that I knew deep down were wrong, but that I felt I needed to stand up for as part of "defending the shield."
Perhaps I am completely wrong about Pastor Moore, and if so I apologize for using her as a prop for this piece. But I don't think I am. It is tough to go through what she, and hundreds of thousands of other similarly situated folks, are going through. It helps, I think, to give a name to that pain. Once you give it a name, you can work through it. The same name can be applied to the Catholic converts' pain, even if it manifests itself in what might seem like the opposite way.
It hurts to have the thing you believed in turn out to not be what you thought it was. It's a pain. It's worth talking about.
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