Communion

Do we lighten the pack or abandon the path when the journey feels wrong?

I am taking a break from the current series (using the book “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to a Happily Even After” by Katherine Woodward Thomas to stimulate conversation about academic careers) to share a longer, stand-alone essay. Next week, we’ll tackle Step 1: find emotional freedom.

Sitting in a hard plastic seat in a curtained-off portion of the University of Denver hockey arena, I turn to the woman next to me. Her eyes spangle with tears as she describes her disorientation upon leaving an Evangelical church after the 2016 election. Earlier that day, my lunch companion had talked about his “deconstruction”, a 5-year process of questioning everything he’d ever been taught as a member of a religiously conservative community. He still wakes up at night, he said, paralyzed with fear that he is sending his four foster kids to hell.

These conversations affect me deeply, though their story is not, at least on the surface, mine.

It is October 2019 and we are at Evolving Faith, a conference founded the previous year by the progressive Christian writers and personalities Sarah Bessey and Rachel Held Evans. Jeff Chu was subsequently brought on. The audience is mostly white, mostly affluent, and mostly in great pain.

As the conference goes on, I begin to picture these post-Evangelical “wanderers and misfits” as long-distance hikers. In my imagination, they carry heavy backpacks loaded with homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, racism, and sexual abuse. They carry the purity movement and the prosperity gospel. They carry denial of science, the message that who they are in their deepest selves simply isn’t right, and fear of both their bodies and their minds. Their packs are spilling over with so, so many rules about how to be a good and valuable person.

They are desperate to lighten their heavy packs, but it’s difficult. They are here for help as they make agonizing decisions about what to keep and what to discard from their faith, a process made even more painful because it involves disagreeing with, angering, and losing friends, partners, and family members. Faith deconstruction on this scale is nothing less than the dismantling of an entire world view. Still, they are doing the work. Many at the conference seem to be wondering if there is anything at all in that backpack worth holding onto.

At least the speakers seem to think so. Danielle Shroyer describes her revolutionary interpretation of Genesis, where Adam and Eve weren’t banished for a sin, but were sent off to have an adventure, like kids going to college. We discuss how to stop centering straight white rich Western men in a religion that was started by a poor man of color from the Middle East. Austen Hardke teaches us about non-binary representations in the Bible.

I’m fascinated, but sustain an awareness that I don’t really belong here. As the daughter of an agnostic and a Presbyterian, I thought I’d left religion behind when I went to college and began a career as an academic scientist. I’d recently surprised myself, however, by joining a progressive Presbyterian church in St. Louis. That re-entry to a religious life never felt consciously chosen, more like something I was compelled to do.

I was still facing serious doubts. To put it baldly, the Christian church has been, and continues to be, an instrument of torture, slavery, and colonization. The Bible is used to justify racism, to remove native peoples from their land and their culture, and to deny women power and agency over their own bodies. Why in the world would I want to pick up what these pilgrims are setting down? Maybe I can just see what they chose to hold onto.

I feel another, more subtle connection to the other attendees of Evolving Faith. Lately, I’ve been grappling with the culture of academic science. I’ve begun to see how sexism, racial discrimination, and colonialism are baked into many educational and research granting programs. It’s becoming clear how the system benefits, promotes, and propagates the power and wealth of those who already have more resources than they know how to use responsibly. And if I’m honest, I find myself complicit in this consecration of influence. My awareness of these issues, and of my own role in perpetuating them, is absolutely crushing my life-long love of science and academia.

So, like these Exvangelicals, as they call themselves, I am beginning to wonder if I should unpack my own backpack. What would it mean to step outside the academic structure I’d always known?  If I lighten my load to protect myself and others, will there be anything left to sustain me for the journey? Will I even have a pathway to follow?

These are truly terrifying thoughts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don’t come away with any clear answers. Not right away at least; my decision to leave academia is years ahead of me. But still, I gather some sustenance from the experience.

On the last day of the conference, there is a communion service. The speakers and organizers gather at the front of the stage, then walk to the top of the arena carrying plates of pita bread and goblets of wine. The band plays some hymns I recognize and others I do not. As I stand in the long line going up the stairs, I look down at a sea of faces, all turned towards the communion table above like so many flowers seeking the sun. On every face is pain, trauma, and sorrow; also reverence and hope. We just can’t help ourselves, still taking a bit of leavened wheat and a sip of fermented grape, still hoping we can turn them into something more than just food.