It started out as a joke ... Part III - Finale

The dystopian world created by white Christian boys in church, an excerpt from DWJ

Hi Readers,

As promised, over the last three Tuesdays in July, I’ve been sharing with you an excerpt from Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood. This is Part III, the finale.

If you missed Part I, you can read it here. Part II is here.

I first heard this story from the Midwestern pastor who told it to me the summer before I started researching and writing Disciples. In fact, it was this story, and the conversation we shared, that helped to convince me of the importance of writing this very book.

It’s a painful and powerful story, one that’s hard to read. But it’s also one that in its telling, I believe, can help us write a new and kinder future for white, Christian boys and men - and importantly, for us all.

Here’s Part III of the excerpt, the finale:

One of the boys cleared his throat.

“Are we like the KKK or something?”

“Yeah, well, or the Nazis,” the pastor affirmed, a lump in their throat.

The pastor took a deep breath and dived in, realizing that that night’s planned lesson would never be taught, because this was the moment, the moment when hatred and love diverged in the truth, and God was almost traded in for a cynical, violent bully. It wasn’t too late for these boys. The pastor loved these boys.

The pastor held their swelling tears at bay, kept a stoic face, asked the boys: “Do you really believe these things? Are you really racist? Sexist? Anti-Semitic?”

The pastor had been teaching them about the Bible for three years. “I was just heartbroken. Shocked,” the pastor told me. “It started out joking. Some of it came from a real place.”

The pastor pointed out to the boys that while they banned white individuals, they were quick to exclude entire groups of people who weren’t white. The boys, just teenagers, trusted the pastor enough that they kept going with the conversation. They stared at themselves in the mirror the pastor held up to them.

“They were able to name that it was racist. We talked about the KKK and the Nazis and about how these ideas were the same ones they have. And about how those groups (and so many others) acted on those hatreds. And what it did to the world.”

The boys stared down at their hands, hardworking hands, hands that held their mommies’ hands when they were dropped off at Kindergarten for the very first time, looking through eyes flocked by long, still-boyish eyelashes, eyes that held tears and sensitivities that—in this time in their lives—they were trying so desperately to hide away. They painted over their pain and love and emotions with the easily accessible white male hatred, asserting themselves at the top of the social order. Because the vulnerability required to do otherwise was impossible, now that they were becoming men. Someone would call

them a “pussy.”

There were other influences, too, though. Dads and grandpas and pastors and moms and uncles and aunts and older kids. People who were gentle and kind no matter their gender. A church that had taught them of a God who loved first, who turned the other cheek.

They beseeched one another, admitting their culpability, grasping for their humanity, desperate for God to be God, for the relief of not having to make themselves into little white male demigods of guns and violence.

The pastor took a deep breath.

“The ultimate conclusion was that they were super glad that God was God. And God had done the creating, and not them,” the pastor told me, their eyes far-off again, remembering that day. “They were glad that they hadn’t done the creating, because they would have created something bad.”

The pastor first told me this story months before I began working in earnest on this book. But it never entirely left my mind, because it said so much in a single anecdote. These were the boys we didn’t think we had to worry about. It turned out that the hatred was latent in them, too. The creation story, fallen and thwarted and perverted by white men thirsty for power. Of course, the story didn’t end in that place, not this time. The story kept going, and I have to wonder if those boys didn’t think of it from time to time today while they raised their own sons. That group of Confirmation students allowed what could have been a devastation, a declaration of war and rage, to be a turning point, perhaps. It was a time to step back, to see and lament the ugliness within, offer it to God, and change.

Thanks for reading,

Angela

P.S. …

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