How do we find ourselves in a world that was never allowed to be ours?
How do we respect a humanity we were taught needed to change?
We listen to their stories.
And we let ourselves linger with the personhood represented.
Learning to see people
Coming out of evangelicalism can be a strange and lonely place because everything we were taught to fear, we now want to take at face value. And honestly, we often come out of this feeling like we really want to lean into our own natural kindness. I had believed I was in the environment that was the most loving and genuine possible. We don’t just not know how to trust ourselves. We have been taught to distrust ourselves.
I have found, over a decade of deconstruction, that learning to see people had to be a choice against the way I had been taught for my entire life. There were moments when stories or ordinary encounters let me glimpse a kindness I hadn’t been taught to expect. But I was told those moments were deceptive. So I learned to push them down. My own observations of humanity. The quiet realization that I kept seeing goodness that surpassed the kind I had been told could only exist among us.
Linger with them
I sometimes spent my time alone in my room watching movies or TV shows and just lingering with the characters. Not to escape the world. To understand it better. And I kept finding humans who were gentle, earnest, beautiful, and trying. Even when they were behaving wrongly. They weren’t caricatures. They were people. Sometimes they held beliefs I didn’t. Sometimes they weren’t professing a Christian worldview at all. But the more time I spent with them, the harder it became to believe that kindness belonged to only one corner of humanity.
I couldn’t always linger with the humans in my life in the same way. There was a mandate, a time-sensitive one, to proselytize. But when I could just watch them in stories, it allowed me to see remarkable complexities and inner coherence. Their choices, fears, loves, contradictions, and hopes belonged to whole people. It let me consider humanity as more vast than I had been taught.
Compassion expands with attention
But I have found that compassion expands with attention. We’ve stayed with characters for seasons of a show, wondering about them. Their worlds, their loves, their experiences. We remembered what had happened to them and kept their context in mind. Became excited for them, worried about them, curious about what they would do next. Sometimes we cleared an hour from our day because we wanted to spend that hour learning more about them. We weren’t just following a story. We were getting to know a person.
Before ministry school, I sat with Bones. I watched Brennan and Booth argue about religion together. I knew Brennan was a foster kid, and I watched that history travel with her. She processed painful betrayals, heartbreaking losses, and gentle, astonishing love with that history. I watched her fall in love with Booth, discover that her parents had stolen people’s identities, and choose to raise her own child. She brought that life with her wherever she went, into every case and every tiny little moment.
The answers came first
When I went to ministry school, I believed I was going somewhere important, beautiful, true.
I had uprooted my life to go there. It was my university, my internship, and my church all at once, and I was training to become a leader in an 8,000-person megachurch. I asked questions. I wanted to understand. But everything I was taught was presented as preestablished truth. I wasn’t discovering new information so much as learning how to understand everything through what was already known to be true. The answers came before the questions.
For the first few months, I lived in an easy, ignorant bliss. Then I started asking the questions I was not permitted.
Around this time, my school was tending toward Calvinism. Predestination was becoming part of the air around me. Who are the pots to tell the potter which can decorate his home and which will be thrown into the fire?
If I agreed, I was learning the truth. If I disagreed, Satan was manipulating me.
There was no room for “I don’t know yet.”
I could see the absurdity of what I was being taught within three months. I left after six.
But leaving wasn’t the end of the questions. It was when I started looking.
Starting to look again
During ministry school, I watched Regina lose the love of her life and become the Evil Queen. But I had actually encountered her before ministry school, and at first I couldn’t bear to watch. I stopped for several Sundays because I perceived her as callously evil. She could hold hearts in her hands and crush them to dust, and to me it felt like Paganism grasping at the world. It made me feel sick to my stomach.
But I returned to watch her.
And I saw her pain when she lost the man she loved, experienced her mother’s manipulation, and then, after the curse, Regina’s desperation for a child. And she expanded into a human being. Hurting, frustrated, dangerous, hopeful. And watching people she had once threatened with death, whose minds she had once erased, choose to love her and believe in her, I believed in her too.
I watched The New Directions, Glee’s music club sing Imagine by John Lennon alongside deaf students from another school who were signing, joining them in ASL.
I watched Quinn become her own person after everyone around her had decided what her pregnancy meant. I watched Kurt learn whether he could trust his father with the truth about himself. I watched Santana love Brittany and struggle to tell her abuela who she was. I watched her find out that being loved did not guarantee being accepted. These people stayed with me.
Everyone around me distrusted it. They said Glee glorified the wrong things. These were the same people who genuinely believed Satan was attacking them through unexpected bleach in their laundry, and that I shouldn’t touch horror DVDs when rifling through a Walmart clearance bin because demons could attach themselves to things.
I remember learning that Cory Monteith had died. I didn’t experience his death contemporaneously, but I knew it had happened before I reached the point in Glee where the show had to allow Finn to die too. I remember how heartbreaking that was. I had spent so much time with these people that I could feel the weight of an absence I had never personally experienced.
I used to sing alone because I could, but also because I physically couldn’t not. I felt like I would burst if I didn’t start expressing things, feeling everything.
Sometimes, when I was alone in our internship house, I would sing Let It Go or Defying Gravity into the tremendous acoustics of the wood-floored rooms.
Sometimes I went out to the football field the church owned beside the internship house and sang secular songs into the night sky while I sobbed. I was still singing them at God. But I was beginning to realize that the world I lived in had become a weight on me. I was beginning to trust myself in a world that had taught me that was the most dangerous thing I could do.
Certainty has been the thing that trapped me for decades. Consideration has been the thing that freed me.
Something to carry with you
What story gave you a way to imagine yourself outside a world you thought you had to remain inside?
Was there a character who made something you had been taught to dismiss impossible to ignore?
What do you let yourself love now that you once believed you had to reject?
#RepresentationSavesLives #LetThemEatCrow #Exvangelical #Deconstruction #Representation #Empathy #Humanity #Attention #CharacterAnalysis #MediaAnalysis #CriticalThinking
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