How?

I am currently sitting in the dark, beneath an overhead fan at full blast. The summer heatwave has not lifted for a month, and I am 109 months pregnant. Today, though, is July 4th. A day that arrives each year where majority of us in the U.S. gather with a brat on our plate and pick corn out of our teeth later. But it is another year where it feels hard to celebrate an America bent on punishing the very people who live and love on its land.

I don’t often forget that I was once a staunch Republican. My brand was McCain/Palin, pro-war, anti-abortion, pro-Christian state/nation. It is when my thoughts are slow that I begin to reflect on how I was brought to that stage. I remember the Florida church where speaking in tongues, talking about Revelation and the hell to follow, the act of repentance, female modesty, and how God was a jealous God was normal. I can hear the blaring of Fox News in the background of my household each morning and evening; how even I took up the appetite to feed on it as I turned 17, 18, and 19. My mom and step-dad still feast. In 2016, they would fly to D.C. to attend his inauguration.

I know who I was then is not who I am now. I think that is many of us, really. I can recall late nights arguing with close friends about all sorts of -isms, and now see they seem to be a bit more where I am than where they were. I think living beneath an administration so boldly anti-human will do that … to some. It is “that some” that often bring me back to who I was, how I shed, and what I continue to become. It is “that some” that keep me returning to what I am learning about the humanity and its desire to eats its own.

Any of us who have entered the pocket of deconstructing and reconstructing our religious upbringing, and defining what religion means to us now, know this feeling of being awake at a cellular level. Nothing could have prepared us for what it was like to begin questioning all of it.

“Why is my safe place run more like a business than a church?”

“Why does the pastor arrive in a blacked out car, only right when he is about to go on?”

Distrust in the systems built by the people you give your time, effort, money, and mentality to, feels like walking into the woods without survival gear. Unless you have survived, it is so difficult to describe. Spirituality and religion are not inherently bad but I no longer trust a church to provide me what I can find by watching a bird dance at a feeder or feeling my feet sink into the sand as the tide rolls in. I do not trust church leadership because I have now seen how it helps feed the soul to believe it is dirty, wrong, and created bad, but then turns around and says they will heal you.

We have arrived at a time where many, not all, churchgoers – whether ardent or just your select Sunday few – walk in to make sure they remember they are bad but forgiven and that God is still good. All the while, a bill is being signed into action stripping the neighbor they ignore of food, health, and security. Surely, there are the few among the chairs or pews, praying for it to be better, for God to turn this ship around. We still need them. But what Benjamin Cremer posted sums up the sickness of Christian Nationalism.

Because I know what it’s like to attend a church, to call myself filthy, and feel full of spiritual fervor, but live and breathe the exact opposite, I find my judgement of hypocrisy is tainted with sincere sadness. Like Jesus said, “They don’t know what they do.”

Then … there is the cult (a word I do not use with a hint of hyperbole) of MAGA-ism that is very real, and perhaps its own religion. This group terrifies me the most. I have only ever known a hate like this in history books. Whether it was Nazi Germany, Japanese internment camps here in the US, or the anti-Civil Rights movement, I have longed believed in a world that can turn around. Because that is what the history books showed me. The movements did not close out with ellipses but rather how wars were won, protests worked, and good humans were eventually placed into power.

So what do we do when we feel like we are stuck in the middle of history?

Much like the deconstruction within church, movements like MAGA will undoubtedly have their own awakening. It is the inevitable outcome of such staunch beliefs; eventually, you find you’re eating your own hand. Reading how foundations like The Heritage Foundation and billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg are “abandoning humanity” because they’re above all of us drive this theory home.

They want us living in an economy for the dumb, sick, and dead. I do not wear a tinfoil hat as I write.

I have known this would be the outcome since 2016. What we could not be prepared for was the pain with the loss of friendships that have occurred over these years. Over conversations turned bitterly hateful or differing belief in vaccines, masks, and human rights. I have been left stunned to silence, angry, but mostly just deeply saddened.

How could this happen to us?

That is the question I keep asking. I know there are books out there that have explained the rise and fall of democracy, the way our younger generations are warped into a hyper-individualism, and what the outcomes are. I still can’t help but plead this question.

We are now living in a time where internment camps are televised and celebrated. Where a person with a certain shade of skin is thrown into a van, kidnapped, and disappeared.

Nothing about this is normal.

How could this happen to us? And who will make it right? Is it us? The clingers to a humanity that, though flawed, once really did flourish? Do we wait for everyone else to wake up?

I don’t have answers today, friends. May we cling to what is true and beautiful, what is left of humanity, and link arms there.

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namaste,

xo bre