They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.
Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan—who, as governor of California had signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country—began using the language from the new memo. Evangelicals threw their weight behind him, and voted in a bloc for the first time to elect President Reagan. The Religious Right was born. The face of the movement was the “pro-life and pro-family values” stance of millions, but the blood running through the movement’s veins was the racism and greed of a few.
That is how white evangelicals became the most powerful and influential voting bloc in the United States and the fuel of the American white supremacy engine. That’s how evangelical leaders get away with the stunning hypocrisy of keeping their money, racism, misogyny, classism, nationalism, weapons, war, and corruption while purporting to lead in the name of a man who dedicated his life to ending war, serving orphans and widows, healing the sick, welcoming immigrants, valuing women and children, and giving power and money away to the poor. That is also why all a political candidate must do to earn evangelical allegiance is claim to be antiabortion and antigay—even if the candidate is a man who hates and abuses women, who stockpiles money and rejects immigrants, who incites racism and bigotry, who lives in every way antithetical to Jesus’s teachings. Jesus, the cross, and the identity “pro-life” are just shiny decals evangelical leaders slap on top of their own interests. They just keep pushing the memo: “Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t know. Just be against abortion and gays and keep on voting. That’s how to live like Jesus.” All the devil has to do to win is convince you he’s God.
My evangelical friends insist to me that their opposition to abortion and queerness was born in them. They are sincere and convinced. But I wonder. We all believe our religious beliefs were written on our hearts and in the stars. We never stop to consider that most of the memos we live by were actually written by highly motivated men.
I don’t know if I call myself a Christian anymore. That label suggests certainty, and I have none. It suggests the desire to convert others, and that’s the last thing I want to do. It suggests exclusive belonging, and I’m not sure I belong anywhere anymore. Part of me wants to peel that label off, set it down, and try to meet each person soul to soul, without any layers between us.
But I find myself unable to let go fully, because to wash my hands of the Jesus story is to abandon something beautiful to money-hungry hijackers. It would be like surrendering the concept of beauty to the fashion industry or the magic of sexuality to internet porn dealers. I want beauty, I want sex, I want faith. I just don’t want the hijackers’ commodified, poisonous versions. Nor do I want to identify myself with hijackers.
So I will say this: I remain compelled by the Jesus story. Not as history meant to reveal what happened long ago, but as poetry meant to illuminate a revolutionary idea powerful enough to heal and free humanity now.
There was a time on Earth—like every other time on Earth—when humanity had turned against itself. A few hoarded unspeakable riches while children starved. People raped and robbed and enslaved one another and waged wars against one another for power and money.
There were a few (there are always a few) wise enough to see this order of things as unjust, untrue, and unbeautiful. They saw that killing one another for money is absurd because what lies within each person is more valuable than gold. They saw that slavery and hierarchy are evil because no one is born more worthy of freedom and power than another. They saw that violence and greed destroy the powerful just as they destroy their victims: because to dishonor another’s humanity is to bury one’s own.
They saw that humanity’s only hope for salvation was a truer, more beautiful order of things.
They asked themselves:
What kind of story might help people see beyond the lie they’ve been taught that some are worth less and others more?
What kind of story might return people to their wild—to what they knew of love before they were trained to fear one another?
What kind of story might inspire people to revolt against and live beyond the religiously dominated hierarchical machine that was killing them?
Here was their idea:
Let’s rethink the stories we’ve been telling about God. Let’s dare to imagine that God is less like the powerful men who run the world. Let’s imagine God is actually like the person those rulers just killed. Let’s imagine that God is a vulnerable baby, born to a poor single mother, among the group most despised by the religious and political elite. He was the least of these back then. They pointed to him. God is in him, they said.
Had these wise storytellers lived in modern America, they might point to a poor, black transgender woman or an asylum-seeking toddler alone in a detainment center and say: God is in this one.
This one—the one on the outermost ring of the rankings we’ve made up about who matters. This one—the one farthest from whom we have centered.
This one is made of our same flesh, blood, and spirit.
When we hurt her, we hurt our own kin.
This one is One of us.
This one is Us.
So let us protect her. Let us bring her gifts and kneel in front of her. Let us fight for her and her family to have every good thing we want for ourselves and our families. Let us love this one as we love ourselves.
The point of this story was never that This One is more God than the rest. The point is that if we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we begin to heal.
The Jesus idea is that justice casts the widest net possible so that every last one of us is inside. Then there are no others—there is only Us. Inside one net we are free from our cages of fear and hate and, instead, bound to one another. The revolutionary idea that every last one of us is both held and free: That is our salvation.