Welcome to Unchurched

Reflections after reading the news

I spent pockets of free time yesterday reading through Katherine Stewart’s long form piece, published in the New Republic, on Project 25 and how the Claremont Institute is preparing for a second Trump presidency. Jemar Tisby offers a helpful summary in Footnotes, and D.L. Mayfield included it in a well-resourced piece on fascism and the Christian right.  

After my daughter and husband had gone to bed, I was greeted by a familiar specter. Other people’s fears were written, like virus code, onto my nervous system. I couldn’t settle into body, as I like to do before bed. The threads of emotion that I usually follow to a deep, inviolable inner landscape, tapered off, leaving me ashamed that I ever thought I might have a voice. 

I picked up my pen and journal and began to write. When I’m unable to settle into my body, I invite an old crone into my journalling practice. Tonight, I shared with her how I know nothing, nothing about the world. How could I possibly have a voice, when I know absolutely nothing? 

“Nothing?” she raised her eyebrows and leaned in. 

I flashed back to my teenage body, slouched in a cushioned church chair, while the men at church pulled me into the labyrinth of their knowing: the murderous conspiracies lurking behind democratic policies, the whisper of actually coming through the text of history, the undecipherable enigma of the mind of god. Sunday mornings were a weekly reminder that what I thought I knew could not be trusted. Even filtered through the critical lens of Stewart, the rumored conspiracies in her Claremont piece unmoored me.

“Go rest outside,” the crone prompted, “under the trees.”

The trees, in my inner landscape, represent my knowing. My nervous system has received seeds of information since the day I was born. It has been nourished by both love and cruelty, and survived torrents of sensory input that left me underwater for weeks. There are forests and forests of old growth. Every tree, every leaf represents what I know, and the faintest breeze prompts their collective sigh. I know things I am not allowed to know. Like the quiet noise of my own desire. 

Or the clap of rage that pulls me upright and reminds me I'm a stranger. 

For most of my life I tied my quest for belonging to the agenda of these men. It wasn't the loftiness of their theories or the greatness of their god that enticed me. It was a table, strangely set. I was a boring, useless teenager in their churches. Their words could never waft right through me. They stopped with a thud at my hardened heart, and I would look at them, perplexed. Other teenagers showed leadership potential. I could barely hold a friendship. But at some point, I must have picked up a discarded thread, followed an unnoticed path through the labyrinth, and found at its center a table. 

The table was a symbol of everything I desired. A coming together, not through the usual pathways of prejudices and intimacies, but by some sort of miracle. Only the death of god (“my blood, shed”) could make this gathering possible. No one would moralize about who sat where, or dipped their bread with whom. There would be no measuring of the self or other to determine whether to continue the conversation. God himself had been condemned (“my body, broken”), and those gathered could lay down their measuring rods and gaze at one another clear-eyed, with nothing to gain or lose. 

This table was the idealization of my social longings. Its language stood close enough to the language of my church, that I could move seamlessly into adulthood without crisis of faith, inwardly adjusting the public word to follow the thread to its center.

When my ability to hold together the thread of my desire with the cruelty of the church finally broke, I had a quiet, clarifying realization. My longing for the table was never sourced in a clever deciphering of god’s will, but in a desperate loneliness. I was a stranger to myself and to everyone I knew, and if I could only hope that the Christian church was journeying toward an elusive miracle table, my loneliness would be survivable. The table struck me as no miracle at all, no divine chimera, but a simple, ordinary desire. And do you know what you can do when you learn what you desire? You can walk out your front door and pursue it. 

In this newsletter I will be finding language for my pursuit of a grounded spirituality. I will be seeking out pathways of belonging that I have not found in established institutions. Millions of Americans have left the church in the past decade, and our stories are incredibly diverse. My hope is that a handful of us who are seeking to process our grief, anger, and healing in community can find a home here.

Some matters of business…

I hope to put together an Unchurched manifesto within the next year, with more explicit claims about this community. In the meantime, I think it would be helpful to make a few things explicit.

1. This is an LGBTQIA+ affirming space. How you experience yourself in your body matters, and you do not have to dissociate to belong.

2. This space welcomes atheists, agnostics, Christians, nones, and other religious affiliations. Where you land on the question of god is sacred to your healing journey and not the determinant of your belonging.

3. This seeks to be an antiracist space, building spiritual resilience to resist white supremacy and christofascism.

At this stage in the newsletter I am still feeling out how writing fits into the rhythms of my life. I hope to publish twice a month or more. All features are currently available to free subscribers, but you may update to paid at any time if you would like to support this work. Thank you for being here!

Share With Us

I’d love to hear from you on any thoughts this piece prompted! Or on any of the following questions. Do you have practices to regulate your nervous system after reading the news? or for recovering your voice during/after destabilizing conversations? Where have you found belonging online or IRL? If you have not found belonging IRL do you have practices to daily make space for yourself?