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I never thought I would be critical of the evangelical church.
Even now, I have to fight this urge to defend an institution where I was treated horribly at times.
Some of that tension is fighting deeply embedded indoctrination, but the rest is because it’s complicated.
Every abuser in the evangelical church is a victim themselves.
When you believe at your core that you’re literally doing what the Creator of the entire universe wants you to do, you do it with conviction, even when you’re wrong.
I have done harm, thinking I was doing the right thing.
Individually, I don’t think I’ve ever met more selfless, goodhearted, and generous people than evangelicals - though I will say, Indians have them beat in terms of sheer hospitality.
But I also have never been stabbed in the back so viciously as I have been by individual evangelicals, and their ability to justify their actions and rally others around them in their wrongdoing is honestly terrifying.
I promise I’ll get into that more as we go.
But first, some background, because it matters . . .
According to my mom, I was in an evangelical church the Sunday after I was born.
In order to miss church growing up, we had to have a fever or be throwing up. Even then, we got a little side-eye.
I attended youth group, played guitar on the worship team, and learned how to deliver sermons.
I’ve taught children, led worship services in prisons, and visited the sick and elderly in their time of need.
I was bought in, dyed in the wool, a true believer.
The first time I remember being “called” to ministry was in early elementary, maybe first grade.
Our senior pastor, David, commanded the attention of several hundred people every Sunday morning.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that David shares a similar poetic flare to Martin Luther King, Jr.
He used to raise his voice while preaching, reaching the volume of shouting but never out of anger. His sermons sounded liked a wife pleading for her husband to step back from the ledge of a tall building - urgent, passionate, full of desperate love.
I wanted to be like him.
Part of me still does.
David is not a villain in my story. I have never known him to be anything other than good.
I was a senior in high school when ten highjackers flew two planes into the World Trade Center buildings.
On the week of 9/11, when most Americans banded together in our greatest display of unity since World War II, some white Americans showed that they cannot tell the difference between Saudi Arabians, Indians, and Mexicans on spec.
I can’t remember if it was the night of 9/11 or one shortly thereafter, my dad, a darker-skinned Indian American man, was accosted on his way home by some white a******s in a truck.
They drove recklessly, leaning out their windows and shouting at my dad to “go back where you came from.”
Dad circled the main streets around our neighborhood until they stopped pursuing him so they wouldn’t know where we lived.
I only remember seeing my dad visibly shaken twice in my life.
The first was when he received the news that his mother in India had died, and he would never see her again.
The second was that night.
Any black person in this country will tell you about “the talk.” It’s the one where your parents sit you down and shatter any remaining illusion you have as a person of color about your equality in this land of the free.
They tell you that you have to be more careful than your white friends. They tell you that you must never mouth off to a police officer. They tell you that you’ll be considered a threat like an adult, even while you’re still a child.
Though we’re not black, my brother and I got the talk that night.
At our home church, there were two special services following 9/11. One was a Wednesday night prayer service. The other was a Sunday morning service where a special offering would be taken up and donated to a Christian organization providing relief in New York City.
My dad was, and is, a practicing Hindu, but the breadth of his polytheistic faith allowed him to attend church with us on occasion. Between the trauma of the previous week and the special occasion of raising money for New York, Dad joined us in the pews that Sunday.
David preached with his usual tender passion, a master healer and conciliator. Our small church of three hundred or so people raised over $10,000 that day, a record high for our congregation.
As soon as the service was over, David descended from the pulpit, walked to the back row where my family was sitting, and hugged my dad - a sixty-year-old white man from southern Missouri embraced my brown immigrant father in front of hundreds of white people while the rubble still smoldered at Ground Zero.
David is not a villain in my story.
But his path could not be my path, for more reasons than either of us appreciated.
I felt called to ministry again at Camp of the Risen Son in second or third grade.
And I felt it again at a high school youth conference the summer before my junior year.
That is when I finally answered.
Despite scoring in the top 99% of all students on my ACTs - which would have basically paid for any degree in the University of Nebraska system, I only shopped for small, private evangelical Bible colleges that would train me to be a pastor.
And that was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made.
Suicide Squeeze
I’d never really been like other boys.
Besides the obvious differences in Nebraska - my dad didn’t drive a Husker-red Ford F-150, I had never been fishing or camping, and my only real interest in sports began and ended with Michael Jordan - I was also a rather serious boy.
In seventh grade, my English teacher described my writing as that of a “romantic soul.”
While other boys were salivating over Britney Spears’ naughty schoolgirl schtick, I preferred Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “girl next door” vibe.
That to say: I always wanted to grow up to be a husband and a father.
In high school, I became madly infatuated with a girl from our church youth group.
She was cute but not ostentatious about it, and she had this wry, impish quality that made her a little unpredictable.
For my anxious little soul, she seemed both conservative enough to marry and bold enough to add some spice to life.
We were both the type to dream about moving away. She talked about the Peace Corps a lot.
I imagined that if my call to ministry ever led us overseas for missionary work, she would’ve been down for it - exactly the kind of girl I was looking for.
But there was a problem.
Well, two, actually.
First, she didn’t like me like that. Content to play the slow game, I didn’t mind. We still had six years until college graduation, which would be the ideal time to marry, so we wouldn’t really have to start dating for at least five years. I figured I could win her over in that time.
Secondly, she was made up.
Not really. She was very much a real girl. I danced with her at my junior prom, in front of plenty of witnesses, and there is photographic evidence of her existence.
Rather, I had created an image of her in my mind that wasn’t entirely real.
My crush was on who I wanted her to be, not on who she actually was.
In real life, she liked salsa dancing and cheerleading.
In my mind, she liked reading books and going for quiet walks.
Either way, her life almost ended during her senior year.
She had been struggling with depression - something that didn’t fit into my idealized picture of her.
What I had perceived as flashes of quirkiness - flaking out on coffee dates and not keeping commitments to worship team rehearsals - were actually symptoms of her depression.
One night, she had had too much, and attempted suicide.
Thankfully, it wasn’t completed, and she got the help she needed.
But I was ashamed, and then I was furious.
I was ashamed that I had spent so much time thinking and caring about a version of this girl that wasn’t real.
I could have been a much better friend to her if I hadn’t been planning our wedding that she had no idea about. Maybe I could have even encouraged her to get the help she needed.
I was also furious, furious at a faith community that could celebrate this girl as the model of young virtue - a volunteer in the children’s ministry, a smiling face and sweet voice in the church band, and the first to sign up for youth group trips - all while she was dying inside.
For seventeen years, I had been told that Jesus was the wellspring of life. I had been told that he came to make all things new, that he would wipe away every tear.
Every week, hundreds of people gathered in a red brick building with red pews and a steeple that reached toward the sky to sing the praises of a Creator who conquered death, and yet it lurked among us.
I’m old enough now to know that depression hides itself well, and even the girl’s own parents weren’t aware of the depth of her despair, but still, there is a serious rift between a community that claims to bring hope to the darkest places and our utter impotence to save the life of one of our most promising young women.
At seventeen, I faced an existential crisis.
I felt called to be a pastor. I knew this as true as I knew the color of my hair or the feeling of the ground beneath my feet.
But I couldn’t believe that the congregants of our little suburban church were so happy to play religion, to dress up in khaki pants and sing light rock hymns, to hear a Bible story from an eloquent orator, and to be completely unchanged by it all.
We were so closed off. No one talked about anything real. Even if she had wanted to tell someone, most people scurried off to lunch at Olive Garden before the last notes of Sunday services stopped resonating.
If church - the place where we were supposed to find the meaning of life, to experience everlasting joy, to commune with the savior of our mortal souls - couldn’t be a place where one of our best and brightest could find hope that would save her life . . .
. . . then what the f**k were we doing?
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