Tending Ties
On faith and old friendships
I had a pretty amazing video chat with an old college friend on the other side of the planet today. I am generally pretty lousy at keeping up with long-distance relationships, and I hadn’t been in touch with this person in over 20-years. I’ve lost touch with many of my college friends because we graduated into a world without social media, and some of them never jumped on the bandwagon.
But I also haven’t kept up because I’ve changed so much. I ran with the evangelical Christian crowd back then, and I don’t claim any firm religious identity now. For that reason I was a little bit nervous going into our conversation. Did she still hold to the same faith we shared when we were students? How would she react at the ways I’ve changed? Was she going to try to convert me back, turning what might have been a warm reunion into something awkward or contentious?
It helped that I had positive memories of my friend as someone decidedly not an asshole. She’d always been a thoughtful, humble, and compassionate person, even as we both were part of a faith tradition whose reputation is decidedly not, at least to outsiders. I was more curious about how she was doing and what her life was like than I was afraid of what the conversation might become. And in a time of unmasked fascism and collapse, I hear the wisdom of holding onto any communal ties we can, even across ideological difference, to counteract the centrifugal forces that drive us apart, isolate us, and leave us all more vulnerable.
The conversation did inevitably turn towards faith, but mainly because that is what our common ground had once been. She’d reached out because she’s examining her own life and trying to gain clarity on what’s most important to her by reflecting it off the people who’ve known her over the years. We still found common ground. We both long to be connected to land, and we both feel the need to stay grounded in community in the face of the disruptive, isolating ravages of capitalism. She asked curious questions that challenged me to verbalize my journey, own the decisions I’ve made along the way, and come to my own clarity about my faith, politics, identity, and sense of belonging. She honored all of it. I guess she’s still an evangelical, because she still wanted to know about my relationship with Jesus.
I blamed Jesus for turning me into an anarchist. I said I’m still inspired and challenged by his reckless love and riotous behavior. I talked about how I don’t know whether Jesus would agree with my rejection of nonviolence, since it was in Jesus’ name that I called myself a pacifist for so many years. I talked about how I’ve found kindred spirits in traditions and belief systems outside of Christianity. I was honest about the beef I have with the Christian tradition (and my own Puritan ancestors) and its complicity in perpetuating empire and colonialism and genocide. I told her how, as a descendant of genocidal settlers, I hold my own belonging on the land as something contingent, and my spiritual identity as open-ended, in process, still-to-be-invented through the choices I make to respect and defend the land and co-create traditions in community with others.
I told her that I had to go outside the church to learn what it takes to truly threaten oppressive systems. Our terminal descent into fascism reveals how even the left wing of the American church seems hopelessly captive to the empire as a loyal opposition, its horizons still bounded by America, its aspirations still capitalist and colonial. It is a church that harbors hope in the possibilities of a democracy that rains bombs on Jesus’ homeland, threatening to erase the world’s oldest Christian communities. And so it is the ones I once called “sinners” as a young evangelical - the queers, the criminalized, the colonized, those outside the bounds of respectability and polite society, whose resistance refuses our rules - who are standing in the gap for life itself, who will save all of us. They are my teachers. They are the ones who inspire me.
I told my friend that you can’t cleave to a faith tradition as long as I did without it leaving an indelible mark. My faith is still a part of me, perhaps dormant in a cocoon, undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. What it will be remains to be seen, but somewhere along the way I came to a point where I trusted that it ultimately isn’t about me or my personal beliefs, or how well or often I prayed, or about any statement of faith, or the words of some spiritual authority figure. Whatever it will be, it will be shaped by my relationship to land, to a collective, to practices of resistance, to the work of lovingly building a new world.
Whether that faith bears any relationship to the Christian tradition may depend on how the church shows up to meet the unfolding crisis. Christians still claim me. My family and I are still members of a church. So I call on them to help care for a houseless neighbor down the block, or to pay for legal fees, or to loan me equipment to fight the pipeline up in the mountains, and they’ve come through.
I respect those who stay in the pews and contend for the space, because we should never cede ground to fascists. Those who can, should maintain ties, keep opening onramps, keep making demands of your siblings in faith. Challenge them to be their best selves. Too much organizing has been about slotting ourselves into enclaves of the ideologically or politically pure, and the resulting fragmentation weakens us. Leftists do themselves no favors by being anti-religious, especially since most of those we claim solidarity with are believers of one stripe or another.
The sacred is upside-down bass-ackwards, disreputable and degenerate. Go and be likewise.
But if you have to leave your faith behind to live, then find your people elsewhere. Faith communities can be sites of tremendous harm and abuse, and my family has been among the victims. Go where you can be your best self. I realized a long time ago that if there is a God, and if Jesus reveals anything about God, then God’s love must be stronger than death itself. Whether I believe in God or not, or whether I stick to my tradition or not, isn’t that relevant if there is no place where God is not. And if Jesus reveals anything about what is sacred, it is that as a rule, there are no rules. The sacred is upside-down bass-ackwards, disreputable and degenerate. Go and be likewise.