This week I'm doing some big-picture planning, so here's an essay I wrote a couple of years ago. It's a little heavier than I might make it, were I writing it from scratch now. Nice to know that the deconstruction process is, indeed, an evolution in the direction of hope! xoxo

Often I feel fundamentally bewildered, gobsmacked by what I'm learning about injustice and aghast at what I don’t know. That bewilderment takes a range of shapes, but the one that plagues me most, that keeps me awake at night, the one that I now consider an essential condition of white American evangelicalism, is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance: perceiving, holding, trying to maintain and live out two mutually exclusive thoughts or actions, simultaneously. This is not paradox, not beautifully generative mystery: it’s gaslighting, it’s immobility, it’s “say this but do that.” It’s “the world is good!” and also “the world is evil! Good luck!” It’s a state of suspended animation, feet never touching the ground. It keeps us from resting, and it keeps us from moving.

Here’s how it looked for me, growing up:

We recited “blessed are the peacemakers,” and then we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” and prepared for war.

We read, “God so loved the world!” and then we read the Hebrew scriptures’ stories of ethnic cleansing. “If the Bible teaches that God is love, and love can look like genocide and violence and rape,” writes Rachel Held Evans, “then love can look like…anything.”

We read Berenstain Bears books chiding us to share, we did fraction story-problems assuming that perfect equality was not just mathematically but morally right, our parents drilled us about fairness (you divide the cookie, she chooses a piece), and then we walked straight past the woman holding a “HOMELESS, ANYTHING HELPS” sign, and our parents voted against the public school millage.

We sang, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world,” and then we watched some visiting missionary’s slideshow of babies with distended bellies and tired eyes, whose mothers carried them for miles in search of a doctor or food, and then we sang again, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world,” and then we went home.

We remembered the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, the graphic anatomical details that pastors dutifully dragged out every Good Friday, and then we cocked our heads in confusion: our country was still executing people? Yes, our parents nodded solemnly; it’s justice.

We learned and repeated the mantra of Personal Responsibility: for our actions, for their consequences, for our financial situation, for our relationship with God. Then a teenager got pregnant (“got pregnant”) and was made to leave the church—one teenager, just one half of the personal responsibility equation. Just her.

We grieved for that unfortunate episode in our good country’s history, when a few bad apples enslaved a few Black people, and we rejoiced that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks had ended all that, that we were now Equal and could exercise Personal Responsibility. And then we booked a “missions trip” to Chicago’s South Side, where, we guessed, an entire city’s worth of people had neglected to Be Responsible?

That’s how it looked in our childhood. But then! We started learning, waking up. We realized that there was more to the world than the stories evangelicalism had told us.

And in the middle of our awakening, after we’d rejected oblivion—after we’d begun reading Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Audre Lorde and James Baldwin and Howard Thurman—after we’d begun to resolve some of that childhood cognitive dissonance by realizing that “I’m Proud to Be an American” wasn’t, you know, Christian, that the way of Jesus and the way of the Republican party weren’t identical—after we’d really started doing the work, and were looking around and thinking, look at us, together, we young American Christians; we’re trying! We’re doing the work! We’re prioritizing justice!—after that, in the midst of all of that—

80% of our people voted for Trump,

twice,

and the whole cognitive-dissonance machine raged back into motion.

It turns out: no matter how much we learn, how much we undo, we’ll still need to contend with a white American evangelical system that thrives on confusion. So, despite the relief of some cognitive dissonance resolved, despite a deeper, stronger, more nuanced moral compass than I’ve ever had, I still feel constantly unsettled, disoriented, and it keeps me from acting. It’s like standing in the kitchen while packing for a trip, feet firmly planted on the floor, body turning first this way (oh, grab the cooler) and then that (nope, switch the laundry first) and then back again (ack, sunscreen, before you forget): not moving, just glitching, glitching, glitching.

Here’s the thing. Our bewildered dissonance is one of the mental habits actually cultivated in us, sometimes as a side effect and sometimes purposely, by some of our white American evangelical forebears. I think we can trace it, a throughline in our history. I think we can identify the ancestors who benefitted in creating our confusion. And: once we’ve detangled the roots of our bewilderment a bit, I think we can set it aside and move forward. (And then we can keep repeating that cycle, becoming stronger each time, for the foreseeable future.) We can reject oblivion for ourselves and our children; we can commit to learning and nuanced clarity, and we can be freed to act, to stop (you know, for the most part) glitching and instead use our brains, voices, bodies, money for the justice that we’ve wished for since we were little girls, the justice that God loves and love demands.

Cognitive dissonance is an essential characteristic of white American evangelicalism, but it needn’t, any longer, be an essential characteristic of ours. We can notice it every time it rears its head. We can find its roots. We can not let up—with each other’s help, with God’s help, with our ancestors’ guidance—until we resolve it with our feet on the ground and our bodies moving toward justice.