Cover Story
Illustration by Robert Carter
FOR A FEW months last winter, I did something that still feels too rare in my Christian life: I attended a local Bible study group in American Sign Language.
Every month or so, a half-dozen of us gathered in someone’s apartment, caught up over dinner, and then hashed out theology together. We often stayed late into the night.
Unlike other Bible studies, no one spoke. Half of the people there were deaf, the other half were hearing — but everyone knew how to sign. This Bible study in Boston was highly informal. It wasn’t attached to any particular ministry — especially since none of the deaf people there, including me, attended a local church regularly. Sitting together, far removed from any institutional church, we planted the seeds of community.
Each time I drove home, I felt vital glimmers of encouragement. I’d lived in Boston for more than three years and still hadn’t found a church of my own. I only attended Sunday services sporadically. None of this was by choice. Though my faith is important to me, most churches are not accessible to deaf worshippers.
During my time in Boston, I wound up “church-hopping,” attending one service here, another there, depending on when ASL interpreting was available. Denominational preference is a luxury deaf churchgoers don’t have: Over the years, I’ve visited everything from evangelical and nondenominational to Presbyterian, Anglican, Episcopal, and Catholic churches. My years in Boston felt similarly fragmented, even though I learned a lot about how different Christian traditions approach worship.
Even when I found Sunday services to attend, deeper church participation felt impossible for me. Church events are rarely ASL-interpreted, and I’d given up on trying to show up at speaking-and-hearing Bible studies, potlucks, and weekend retreats. (I occasionally went to local church gatherings when my signing hearing friend Tim Loh could “friendterpret.”) I’d grown up in the church, watching my hearing parents attend weeknight church events, then later watching many hearing Christian friends share about their “church families” in adulthood. But I couldn’t figure out how to grasp such a life for myself.
Illustration by Jody Hewgill
BARBARA BROWN TAYLOR was supposed to be a poet or a short story writer. She accrued a respectable stack of rejection letters to show she tried. Instead, she became an Episcopal priest. One day, someone asked for a transcript of her sermon, and Taylor realized she had published her first story.
She went on to publish several collections of sermons or what she likes to call “spiritual meditations.” Ranked by Baylor University as “one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world,” Taylor left parish ministry in 1997 and taught religion from 1998 until her retirement in 2017. She is the author of 15 books, including Leaving Church, An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Holy Envy, and Always a Guest. She now devotes most of her attention to the farm she shares with her husband, Ed Taylor, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in north Georgia, where they have lived since 1992. But she still writes. She is working on Coming Down to Earth, a book about reverence, and she shares short reflections on the beauty of life on her email newsletter with the same title.
Sojourners associate editor Josina Guess lives on a small farm in Georgia, not far from Taylor, and the two spoke in January over Zoom about caring for animals, finding balance, loving neighbors, and the power of resurrection.
Illustration by Aldo Jarillo
Many of us have made homes in religious traditions where we have found collective love, care, community-building, and resilience. But so much of what passes as spiritual in the United States — churches who only see their work as therapeutic, prosperity gospel proponents, white evangelical nationalists, New Age movements — is commodification by other means. John warns us against false prophets who, through quick fixes and distorted spiritual comforts, foster division and confusion in the service of lucrative self-aggrandizement.
I am an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and I work as a movement chaplain in Los Angeles. I was trained as a spiritual director, and I have been doing ministry with faith-rooted activists since 2016. My work is informed by my primary training as a medical anthropologist and community researcher. I know that Jesus said that we humans are of more value than many sparrows, but I’ve found that we are a lot like them. We need refuge and sustenance. We need shelter. We need to nest somewhere. But with whom shall we do this for the short and long haul? And where shall we build our nests?
Illustration by Mark Harris
IN NOVEMBER, THE United States joined Argentina (Javier Milei), India (Narendra Modi), and Hungary (Viktor Orbán), among other countries, when it elected an authoritarian as its chief executive. In the case of Donald J. Trump, examples of these far-right tendencies include plans for mass deportations, promises to replace nonpartisan government employees with loyalists, and threats to put political critics on trial.
How did we get here? And what do we need to know to mitigate harm, save what and who we can, and work toward a more free and equitable future? Some of us may feel weary and defeated, but journalist Katherine Stewart, who has investigated the authoritarian movement for more than 15 years, encourages curiosity: “We can’t address our problems unless we know what they are.” Those problems include “decades of investment in a larger anti-democratic movement that would not have dissolved even if they had been defeated at the ballot box in this election cycle.”
In her forthcoming book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, Stewart explores a network of strange bedfellows who drive a broad authoritarian movement both in the United States and abroad. The players in this network have different motivations: Ultra-rich funders aim to destroy the regulatory state to gain even more wealth, funneling resources to groups that further their aims. “New Right” academics and proto-academics pursue the ascendance of their pet ideologies. Veteran political operatives find new partners in the hunt for power.
Though many of the funders and power players within this movement are not Christian or even religious, Christian symbols, pastors, and churches have played a key role. Christian leaders — white evangelicals, but also conservative Catholics, Pentecostals, and others — and the warped theologies they peddle have helped convince voters that we are in a state of emergency. As evidence, these Christians baptize anxieties about sexuality and gender, the economy, and shifting demographics as evidence that America has lost its way and needs to be saved by a strongman.
Stewart’s other books include The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children (2012) and The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020), which was the basis for the 2024 documentary God & Country. Stewart spoke with Sojourners editor Julie Polter before and after the November 2024 U.S. election. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Illustration by Thiago Limón
A LOT OF BEGGING happens at Christmas. There are pleas in the toy aisle and hints left open on laptops. But no one begs to be in labor. Not even a woman who is pregnant. Unless, of course, she is at the bitter end of her pregnancy.
In the language of King James, Luke tells us that Mary is not just pregnant, but she is “great with child” (Luke 2:5). She is on the cusp of birthing, of being the first one to slide her hands up under the armpits of the warm, slippery flesh of God. No one before or after will have God in quite this way.
In Mary, the Word became flesh and was born in the most mundane, most primal human act. This flesh must count for something. The extremely pregnant body of Mary — great with child — reveals the nature of our waiting for Christ and what it might mean to cry out for Jesus’ coming.
As a midwife, I have delivered more than 1,300 babies, and I have given birth three times myself. But you don’t need a midwife or someone who has had a baby to tell you about the discomforts of pregnancy. Nausea, headaches, food aversions, and swelling are common enough knowledge. As unpleasant as these symptoms are, they aren’t enough to make anyone beg for labor. For most of a pregnancy, the woman is largely herself and retains her sense of self.
So, if I told someone who’s 32 weeks pregnant that she had to go into labor tomorrow she would be utterly unwilling. That her baby would easily survive the labor does not change this fact. You don’t need a midwife to tell you why she might not want to labor. No one wants the searing pain of contractions, pushing, or tearing. To be in labor is to be completely beyond yourself, given over wholly to another, and the pain of its outworking.
We know, or suspect that we know, the gravity of the transformation a pregnant woman is about to endure. And we want to help her, we do. We want to come alongside her and acknowledge and aid her work. But our culture fails us. “Birthing classes,” though helpful, are as inadequate as “dying classes” would be — there is no way to simulate or teach the courage required of a soul in extremis. The closest thing we have to a rite of passage for initiating a woman into motherhood is the baby shower. Onesies and party games do not prepare someone for the maelstrom of birthing and raising a child.
People converse through the iron border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico. Crosses were placed in memory of migrants who died attempting to cross the border. / Photo Beto / iStock
IT'S A GRAY, mid-May morning in Panteón Municipal #1, a city cemetery in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood. Alberto, the gatekeeper, saunters down a rocky pathway lined with palms, jacaranda, and gravestones to a prominent, red brick chapel, built over the tomb of one Juan Castillo Morales.
The shrine is covered wall-to-wall with candles, flowers, and plaques with names and messages of thanks to “Juan Soldado” (Juan the Soldier), as Castillo is known. Amid the array sits a stylized bust of a young soldier, resplendent in military attire, this morning bearing a black rosary and a blue-and-white Los Angeles Dodgers snapback hat.
The shrine is one of many unofficial memorials where loved ones remember lives of immigrants lost along the U.S.-Mexico border. From chapels erected around the graves of unofficial saints such as Castillo to digital memorials people carry with them into the desert to the crosses, flowers, and other mementos left along the border boundary itself, these monuments not only pay tribute to the individuals lost but bear witness to the ubiquity of death — and faith — in America’s southwestern borderlands.
Rosalba Ruiz-Hernández, a 46-year-old mother of five, stands in the shrine. Ruiz-Hernández, originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was deported back to Tijuana after her own failed attempt to start a new life in the U.S. Two of her grown children still live in Long Beach, Calif., near her former husband. They are undocumented, she said, but they make a living. Two others are in Tijuana with her. Matías, her middle son, died in the desert on his way north to join his siblings in Southern California.
Illustrations by Ben Jones
WEAPONIZED CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM seeks a “Christian” government that would erode civil rights and undercut election integrity and democratic principles. It endorses the use of violence to obtain or maintain power; embraces white supremacy; and distorts Christian language, symbols, and identity into tools for political manipulation and gain.
At the same time, beliefs about “God and country” exist on a wide spectrum. White Christian nationalism is sometimes supported by people who are not white. And stifling all participation by people of faith in public life is not a suitable alternative to nationalism.
In other words: It’s complicated. You’re not alone if you are confused, concerned, or dismayed by these topics. But hopeful action is possible. The following short essays by scholars, pastors, and activists offer insights on Christian nationalism and how to dismantle it. —The Editors
Prophetic Faith
by William J. Barber III
IF FAITH WERE not powerful, people in power would not invest so much to manipulate it for their own interests. When we oppose Christian nationalism, we must begin with a recognition of the power of faith.
Faith has the power to bring us together and build up a democracy where everyone can thrive. Every movement toward a more perfect union in our nation’s past has been powered and sustained by deep faith traditions. We need to learn from the faith of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Lloyd Garrison; Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Ella Baker. This rich theological heritage helps us guard against the forces that distort Christianity to justify extremism. But it also prepares us to practice prophetic faith in our own lives and ministries.
“Woe unto you who legislate evil and rob the poor of their right,” the prophet Isaiah declares. In his first sermon, recorded in Luke 4, Jesus takes up Isaiah’s scroll to proclaim “good news to the poor.” Any alternative to the religious nationalism that calls itself “Christian” must embody this prophetic proclamation for the 135 million Americans who are poor or low-income today. As the divide between the super-rich and the poor has grown wider in the U.S. over the past half century, poor communities have been offered divisive culture wars and the false hope of an individualistic prosperity gospel.
In a time of extreme inequality, Ezekiel says God looked for someone to stand in the gap but found none. Several chapters later, though, God sends Ezekiel to prophesy to a valley of dry bones. There Ezekiel witnesses the power the rejected have when they come together and rise up as a nonviolent army.
Poor people in the United States today are the largest swing vote in national elections. If they unite around an agenda, they have the power to reconstruct American democracy. God has seen fit to ordain those who have been rejected in this world to lead the revival of love, justice, and mercy that we so desperately need. We embody an alternative to religious nationalism when we join God in this work.
Illustrations by Kalima Alain
I LIVE IN Rwanda, a beautiful East African country also called the Land of a Thousand Hills. We have a saying here: “When you are well, you belong to yourself, but when you are sick, you belong to your family.” But my first trip to the United States taught me that culture matters, particularly in the context of end-of-life care.
In a palliative care education and practice course at Harvard Medical School, I learned the principle of patient autonomy — that individuals have the ultimate authority to make decisions about their own health care. Patients are “in control.” But while shadowing my mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital, I noticed photos of family members in patients’ rooms. I remember asking, “Where are the people who are shown in the photographs?” I now know that this may be an attempt to recreate a family or to provide a last chance to reconnect with life, but all the people I saw in the pictures were alive — why were people trying to create an illusion of family when the family exists?
I asked my mentor, “How can we bring back those people from the photos to the room?”
Of course, I came with my bias and an African perspective on end-of-life care. Here, decision-making is based on patient autonomy and community responsibility, because one aspect does not exclude the other. There is synergy between them.
In Rwanda, there are no photos in the patient’s room. Instead, there are people.
Illustrations by Michael George Haddad
In 2012 I was a U.S. State Department officer deployed to Turkey to work with the Syrian opposition. It was an opportunity to support Syrian activists waging a remarkable popular struggle against an authoritarian government that had responded to peaceful protest with bullets and torture. For nearly a year, Syrian Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druze, Alawites, and others used demonstrations, sit-ins, resistance music, colorful graffiti, consumer boycotts, and dozens of other nonviolent tactics to challenge the Bashar al-Assad administration. But the nonviolent movement was unable to remain resilient in the face of brutality, external support for civil resistance was weak, and finally Syrians took up arms. This played into Assad’s hand. Death, displacement, and destruction skyrocketed. Extremists exploited the chaos. The Syrian nonviolent pro-democracy forces were inspired and courageous but lacked organization and adequate support to prepare them for the long haul. This haunts me to this day.
I’ve worked around the world with scholars, activists, policy makers, and faith communities to design effective support for nonviolent struggles to defend and advance freedom and dignity. I’ve been mentored by leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement, the greatest pro-democracy movement in our history, whose strategic campaigns to dismantle racial authoritarianism hold great relevance today.
As we head into the 2024 election, the risks to freedom and democracy are higher than they’ve been for decades. Religious communities who understand that democracy is the best modern governing system for protecting religious freedom and advancing shared values have a critical role to play as partisans for democracy.
Illustration by Nico Ortega
IN JULY 2014, the Russian state-owned television network Channel One aired a news story that sickened many Russians.
Speaking from a refugee camp near Rostov, a woman named Galina Pyshnyak claimed to have seen Ukrainian soldiers in the contested Donbas region torture a child while his mother watched. Pyshnyak said, “They took a 3-year-old child, a small boy in panties, in a T-shirt, and nailed him as Jesus to an advertisement board.”
The story, which independent journalists were unable to verify, was quickly called out by international watchdogs as Russian propaganda: a way for the Kremlin to rally support for its occupation of Crimea and — in time — plant the seeds for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a whole. The “crucified boy” story served as a call to arms, as cases were reported of Russians who volunteered to fight against those Ukrainians who crucify little children. Subsequent investigations showed that a version of the story had first appeared on the Facebook page of Alexander Dugin, one of the most successful propagandists of the Russkiy Mir (“Russian World”) ideology. Channel One retracted the story in December 2014.
To Netherlands-based theologian Katya Tolstaya, however, the explicit Christian imagery of Pyshnyak’s “eyewitness” account and the visceral responses it elicited throughout Russia represented something else: In Putin’s world, religion and politics were becoming narrowly intertwined.
Over the years, experts have produced various explanations for Russia’s return to totalitarianism and who should be held responsible. Some argue the development stems from the ambition and personality of Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, while others point the finger at a broader Russian culture. Assorted studies focus on the political or the historic, the economic or the religious roots of totalitarianism. Tolstaya, for her part, sees religion as both a problem and a solution. Divorcing Russian Orthodoxy from the Kremlin’s imperialist agenda, she argues, can help Russians come to terms with a dark past that they have yet to process.
Illustrations by Simone Noronha
IT WAS DARK. Totally dark and empty. Andrea Smith felt a familiar hopelessness. “Of course I’m all alone,” she thought. “It’s my greatest fear.”
Smith, a pastor in the United Methodist Church, was at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research in Baltimore, in the first moments of a psilocybin trip designed for clergy.
“I didn’t know crap about psychedelics leading into it,” Smith told Sojourners. Through work with the center before her 2019 experiment with psilocybin (a psychoactive ingredient found in some mushrooms), she was prepared to possibly meet her greatest fears — some participants even reported seeing their own death. At first, that’s exactly what happened.
Smith’s profound childhood trauma — her mother suffered a fatal aneurysm in front of her at age 9 — had instilled an existential fear of being alone, she realized, which had led her to the brink of self-destruction. Burnt out in ministry, avoiding the truth about her husband’s infidelity, and grieving the death of her father, Smith entered the Johns Hopkins study in a fog of depression. She was considering returning to the antidepressants she’d stopped years before. “I was broken,” Smith said. “I was just exhausted and spent.”
During Smith’s psilocybin treatment, something shifted. She described moving “in and through” increasingly abstract and light-filled imagery that led her on what was ultimately, she said, a journey of redemption and forgiveness. She never got back on antidepressants, because the depressive fog lifted almost immediately after her psilocybin treatments. Smith credits the psilocybin experience with her ability to make major life changes.
The scientists at Johns Hopkins paved the way for contemporary research into the unique pharmacological properties of organic and synthetic compounds known collectively as “psychedelics.” In 2000, the Johns Hopkins team obtained the first regulatory approval in the U.S. to restart research into psychedelic use with healthy voluntary subjects. In 2006, the team published the first wave of results on the “safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin,” which helped catalyze a worldwide resurgence of psychedelics research.
WEEDS GROW THROUGH a rusted wash pail in a thicket beside the University of Georgia’s West Parking Deck in Athens, Ga. Littered with the detritus of college life — beer cans, a condom wrapper, Styrofoam containers — this area, unlike the otherwise pristine campus, is neglected and uninviting. Walk in anyway. Look under brambles to find a bent scrap of aluminum roofing, a green Coca-Cola bottle, a cooking pot, and a plastic toy rifle. These objects, buried under vines and rotting logs, form the understory of what used to be a working-class African American neighborhood called Linnentown. Children would swing from grapevines to get across the creek. Now college students, high-rise dorms, and cars swirl above the 22 acres of the erased community. This patch of land, mostly buried under concrete and steel, was stolen from the Cherokee and Creek people first, but the people who remember the second forced removal are still alive. They can’t get their land back, but there is a growing movement for redress for communities like Linnentown.
From 1962 to 1966, the city of Athens used eminent domain under the Urban Renewal Act to force Linnentown residents out of their homes so that the University of Georgia could build three dormitories and a parking lot for their growing, mostly white, student body.
The children of Linnentown are in their 70s and 80s now. As a child, Hattie Thomas Whitehead ran from yard to yard with her playmates and sometimes snatched pears from Ms. Susie Ray’s tree. Christine Davis Johnson enjoyed pears, apples, and pomegranates from the trees in her own yard. They both remember the bulldozers running in the middle of the night, the intentional fires, and the sense of outrage when their parents and neighbors were forced to accept a pittance for their homes and land.
“It was a warm place to live,” remembered Johnson, who was 20 in 1963 when she and her newly widowed mother had to move. Johnson bore double grief that year from her father’s death and the loss of her childhood home. “No hate. My mother didn’t teach me hate,” Johnson said, as she thought about how her tight-knit community was torn asunder. “It’s gone, it’s over, don’t go back,” her mother would say to her. Against her mother’s advice, Johnson would sometimes drive through what used to be her neighborhood, just to remember.
From left, quarterback Frederick Douglass "Fritz" Pollard; Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos; Sprinter Allyson Felix; NBA great LeBron James. / Illustrations by Tyler Upchurch
EVEN SIX YEARS later, it reverberates as one of the most striking segments on cable television in recent memory. Near the conclusion of her show on Feb. 15, 2018, Fox television personality Laura Ingraham chose to upbraid NBA stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant for their political commentary. She framed her comments as a “jumb dock alert” about the athletes’ “barely intelligible” and “ungrammatical” observations on how then-President Donald Trump was fanning the flames of racism.
“Must they run their mouths like that?” Ingraham asked rhetorically. “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball.” Protesting that “millions” voted for Trump to be “their coach,” she continued, “so keep the political commentary to yourself, or as someone said, ‘Shut up and dribble.’”
The segment was remarkable for many reasons, not least because Ingraham later praised NFL quarterback Drew Brees for stating that he “will never agree with anyone disrespecting” the United States flag, a reference to Colin Kaepernick and other athletes who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Ingraham’s full-throated defense of Brees in the face of criticism? “He’s allowed to have his view about what kneeling and the flag means to him,” she declared. “He’s a person.”
The obvious inference is that neither LeBron James nor Kevin Durant is a person. And when we pause to remind ourselves that Brees is white and James and Durant are African Americans, we plunge once again into the cauldron of sports, race, society, and politics.
Aside from the inherently racist nature of Ingraham’s remarks — she later denied any such intent — the segment is remarkable for the simple fact that a television personality who typically traffics in conspiracy theories and ideological rants devoted an entire segment to sports figures. That attention speaks to the cultural capital of athletes in our society, some of whom have assumed the role that religious figures once played in American life, that of moral conscience.
Illustration by Kael Abello
A CORE PRINCIPLE of nonviolence is recognizing the humanity of your opponent. In time of war, that principle does not become irrelevant or obsolete — it becomes more difficult, and essential. In the wake of Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack, as Israel’s retributory assault was gearing up, Ali Abu Awwad, a nonviolence activist who lives in the West Bank, wrote: “Now more than ever, we all must refuse to use violence to justify more violence. We should not allow our pain to blind us to what is most needed: mutually guaranteed sovereignty, security, and dignity for both Israelis and Palestinians.”
At a time when even calling for a cease-fire is seen by some as an unforgivable choosing of sides, Awwad and other peacemakers insist that the “side” we’re called to support isn’t exclusively pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, it’s “pro-solution.” Awwad is clear that there is no military answer to that question: “The best way to support Israel,” he writes, “is to protect both Palestinian lives and Jewish lives.”
He’s not alone in recognizing the humanity of all involved. For instance, some Israelis who suffered terrible loss in the Hamas attacks have been among the strongest proponents of peace. Noy Katzman’s brother, Haim, was killed on Oct. 7. In her eulogy, Noy called for the end of the killing of innocents. “I call on the government and all of us not to use our death and pain to cause death and pain of other people or other families,” Noy said. “I demand to stop the cycle of pain, and understand that the only way is freedom and equal rights.” Israeli peace activist Maoz Inon, whose parents were killed by Hamas, implored Israel to stop its war on Gaza. “Revenge is not going to bring my parents back to life,” Inon wrote on Aljazeera.com. “It is not going to bring back other Israelis and Palestinians killed either. It is going to do the opposite. It is going to cause more casualties. It is going to bring more death. We must break the cycle.”
Awwad has also been the victim of violence. As a teenager, he was imprisoned for four years for participating in the protests of the first intifada. Years later, he was shot by an Israeli settler while changing a tire in the West Bank; soon thereafter he learned that his brother, Yusef, had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint. But Awwad did not succumb to the temptation to seek violent revenge. Instead, he began working with Israeli families who lost loved ones to violence, starting him down a path that led, in 2016, to the co-founding of a Palestinian nonviolence movement called Taghyeer, the Arabic word for “change.”
Awwad spoke with Sojourners senior editor Jim Rice while visiting Washington, D.C., last summer. After the Israel-Hamas war started, Stephen R. Stern, director of the U.S.-based Friends of Taghyeer Movement, decried the “unspeakable crimes and terror” committed against Israelis and told Sojourners, “The Israeli military response takes the Holy Land deeper” into an “uncharted abyss built on years of conflict ... on a precipice that might reach the truly unimaginable.” — The Editors
THE FERVOR AT church during the Advent season is a remarkable sight. Both clergy and laity work like the shepherds, tending to their flocks late into the night. And many move like the wise men, traveling to foreign places and spending extensive resources to celebrate Christ’s arrival with family.
This time of heightened activity makes sense given the story of scripture and the story of our current world. The shepherds could not help but tell others once they learned of the Savior’s birth. And as we now await his return, we shouldwork hard to share the riches of the nativity with a world that is a little more open to matters of faith at this time of year.
But if increased activity is the only melody we pick up from the nativity story told in Matthew and Luke, we neglect a needful counterpoint: the importance of rest. The nativity story is replete with theological, familial, and political lessons about rest that quietly proclaim God’s goodness to this weary world. With exhaustion rampant in the church — perhaps especially so at Christmastime — we would do well to hear notes of rest sounding from the manger.
1. Listen to your sleep
God uses sleep as a vehicle for saving Joseph’s family (Matthew 1:18-25). God instructs Joseph to honor his marriage to Mary because her pregnancy was not a sign of infidelity. To the contrary, it was a sign of immense devotion to God. Furthermore, this miracle child would save all his people, including his parents, from their actual sins, as opposed to their alleged ones. In obedience, Joseph listened to the message heard in his sleep and thus participated in God’s saving of his family.
Illustration by Alberto Miranda
EVERY MONTH, TERRY KELLY sends a “rent” check to the Duwamish Tribe on behalf of Quest Church in Seattle, where Kelly serves as senior director of finance.
The church owns the property where it holds services. But the congregation’s monthly payment acknowledges and honors the Duwamish people and other original inhabitants of the land the church occupies, people who have never been “justly compensated for their land, resources, and livelihood,” as the Duwamish “real rent” program puts it.
Members of Quest Church are among the many people of faith who are reimagining the narrative of money in our world today.
The early Christian church was clear in its teachings that money was intended to be used for the benefit of the broader community, not for individual enrichment. But for centuries, and particularly since the Protestant Reformation, the institutional church has more often contributed to ideologies and illusions that reinforce the American form of hypercapitalism. And while money remains a highly visible reality in our everyday existence, our lived stories around money often go uninterrogated.
In America, our views about money tend to be very individualized. We ask questions such as: How is my money going to work for me? Will I have enough to pay bills or retire comfortably? What is my purchasing power? Even the story churches tell is often limited in scope, reduced to teaching about tithes, offerings, building funds, and missions giving. In some instances, we might see positive moves around personal budgeting and reducing debt. But church conversations about money are often left in the realm of personal finance.
Illustration by Ryan McQuade
THE FIRST TIME I became conscious that I was carrying the effects of religious trauma, I had just moved to Seattle and was sitting in a church, sweating.
My heart was beating fast; I couldn’t understand what was happening. This church, one I had chosen expressly because of its progressive, LGBTQ+ affirming stance, was supposed to be safe for someone like me, a queer person who deeply valued my faith. But I didn’t feel safe. I looked at the faces in the room with suspicion, searching for any indication of a bait-and-switch, and left the building quickly once the service was over.
Despite what I knew about the church — they welcomed LGBTQ+ people at any level of leadership, were committed to anti-racism work, and weren’t afraid of doubt or theological exploration — my body told me another story. As I sat in the cold folding chair, I tried to reason with myself, repeating these facts to calm down. But I didn’t feel calmer; I felt worse. I sat on my hands, legs shaking, as I waited for the service to end.
Because I had moved to Seattle to work on a master’s degree in counseling psychology from an institution that specialized in trauma, I soon learned what had happened: In that moment, my body had experienced the effects of trauma. Even though I cognitively knew the church was supposed to be safe, my body couldn’t discern this church from all the churches I had been in before — churches filled with people who weren’t afraid to tell me I needed to become straight for God to save me from hell. My body was sending warning signs: Be careful, environments like this aren’t safe. Despite the years of work I had done to detach myself from the rigid belief system of my youth, despite the ways I had fought to find a more life-giving approach to theology, I was beginning to reckon with the reality that changing my beliefs didn’t mean I had healed from the environments in which I was raised.
Now, years later, I see more people waking up to the realities of lingering religious trauma. When I scroll through my streaming apps, I see documentaries such as Shiny Happy People, Pray Away, and Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed that detail different forms of religious harm. I think this growing awareness of religious trauma is part of the driving force behind “deconstruction,” a buzzword that describes the process of reevaluating, changing, and sometimes abandoning one’s beliefs. But what I don’t see as often on Netflix — or on podcasts or on social media or at church — is honest talk about the process of healing. And as someone who now works as a therapist helping survivors of religious harm find healing, I know there is a lot more to say.
CSA-Printstock / iStock
MATTHEW DESMOND, a Princeton sociologist and author, has grown tired of calls to reduce poverty — because he knows we can abolish it. In his new book, Poverty, by America, Desmond explores not the lives and struggles of people who are poor — but poverty, and the conditions that cause it. And Desmond contends that the lives the rest of us live are often connected to the conditions that cause poverty.
“To understand the causes of poverty, we must look beyond the poor. Those of us living lives of privilege and plenty must examine ourselves,” Desmond writes. “Are we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college educated, the protected, the lucky — connected to all this needless suffering?”
Desmond is the son of a pastor, and his work is rich with spiritual metaphor and flare while grounded in the material realities of poverty and the conditions that cause it. He dedicates a chapter of his book to refuting the idea that “neoliberal” cuts in welfare spending are to blame for poverty. “There is no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time. The opposite is true,” he writes. Instead, the problem is “a fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them.” Sojo.net associate news editor Mitchell Atencio spoke with Desmond about his new book, community building, and capitalism. —The Editors
Sojourners: Theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez defines poverty as “premature and unjust death,” saying that “the poor person is someone who is treated as a non-person, someone who is considered insignificant from an economic, political, and cultural point of view.” Is that a good way to describe poverty?
Matthew Desmond: I think that’s a factual way to describe what poverty is. Between 2001 and 2014, the richest women in America gained three years of life and the poorest women gained 15 days. So, poverty is death. There was a study that came out very recently that showed that one of the leading causes of death in the United States is poverty. I think that when we deny people access to basic needs, and we deny them basic economic security in this rich land, we do deny them life and happiness itself.
The other part of the quote about insignificance is very interesting because it does seem that in our popular culture — our TV shows, our movies, our children’s books — there are often no portrayals of real poverty in those media, and so it’s kind of amazing how seamlessly the poor can be erased from everything we’re reading and watching and reading to our kids.
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, the absurdist sci-fi cinematic romp through the multiverse by a Chinese American laundromat owner in the L.A. mega sprawl, garnered seven Oscars this year, including for Best Picture. I’ve seen Everything Everywhere eight times. I’ve introduced it to friends. I did not think my favorite film could do anything wrong. What could be better than to be wrapped up in the spectacle created by directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and their amazing cast?
The directors’ over-the-top approach embraces the “too muchness” of its title. Laundromat owner Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) lives with her husband, daughter, and recently-arrived-from-China elderly father in a small apartment above the family business. Their dining room is cluttered with the American dream — workout equipment, inspirational business books, beeping electronic kitchen gadgets, a TV droning in the background, and a live security feed to the washers and dryers downstairs. “The Daniels,” as the directors are known, wrote in the original script, “It is a still life of chaos.”
Evelyn and her family are slowly spinning apart, and now the IRS is auditing the Wangs and their business. The forces of chaos are spreading beyond their little apartment. Later, while Evelyn is explaining to an IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) why her receipts are not in order, she gets a message from her husband (well, an alternative version of him) that she may be in grave danger and that she may hold the key to saving not only her own world but also the worlds in multiple universes and parallel time frames.
Despite its zany premise and on-screen absurdities (from anthropomorphic racoons and talking rocks to people with hot dogs for hands), Everything Everywhere never lets the spectacle eclipse the emotional story at its center: Evelyn is learning to find contentment in her own universe with her real family, even if she has the power to be elsewhere all at once.
Illustration by Mark Pernice
IN 2011, I took a course at my Christian college about the personality type system known as the Enneagram.
The Enneagram is a system built around nine personality types, with each type providing a unique perspective on how we navigate our relationships, emotions, and the world around us. The Enneagram draws on both spirituality and psychology, which distinguishes it from many other personality indicators.
A primary question that emerged for me from that college class: Does the inner work that the Enneagram encourages manifest itself in the outer world through justice work, or is the Enneagram primarily a tool meant to encourage people to focus on individual healing, career, and spirituality?
Throughout history, questions about how and why each human has a unique set of behaviors, motivations, emotions, and cognitions have preoccupied philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, religious thinkers, and Buzzfeed quiz creators alike. Indeed, in the 21st century, “know thyself” is less of a thought-provoking ancient Greek aphorism and more of a cultural imperative lauded by the self-help industrial complex and career coaches. We are assured that by unlocking our “true selves,” we will ultimately be unlocking our true potential, which will drastically improve our fortunes.
But the Enneagram was never meant to simply measure our potential or provide a definitive answer to the question of human personality. This is contrary to some of the most popular personality indicators such as Myers-Briggs or CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder), which became popular because they promised to help employers tap into human potential and productivity. The Enneagram originated as a tool for contemplation but has come to emphasize how self-growth and inner work prepare us for the outer work of building community.
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In their book The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, Catholic priest Richard Rohr and Lutheran minister Andreas Ebert point to a 4th-century Christian Desert Father, Evagrius Ponticus, as the first to use, loosely, the nine-pointed symbol to highlight vices that he believed interrupted one’s inner peace and relationship with God. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, inspired by a theory originated by Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo, used modern psychology to develop a theory of nine distinct personalities — or “enneatypes” — that highlighted the vices, virtues, and core motivations of each type.
The Enneagram is sometimes treated as just another personality test that can help us purchase the things that “match” our personalities, find romance, or unlock our “true potential” so we can make more money — part of our culture’s obsessive focus on self-improvement. But at its best, the Enneagram not only emphasizes making peace with yourself and a higher power, it also offers tools for learning how to be in community and build a more just society.
To help me sort through my questions, I interviewed three Enneagram experts: Chichi Agorom, an associate faculty member with The Narrative Enneagram and author of The Enneagram for Black Liberation; Jessica Denise Dickson, a life empowerment coach and Enneagram guide who uses the Enneagram in anti-racist workshops; and Abi Robins, a queer, trans Enneagram teacher, coach, and author of The Conscious Enneagram. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity. — Josiah R. Daniels