Pious

Sweat gathered behind my knees and pooled in my elbow creases while I slumped in my favorite blue chair, writing the email I’d been dreading the whole summer. Since childhood, I’d believed church leaders had access to a greater understanding of what is true and good and holy. Their advice was to be sought in difficult situations and they were to be revered. Always. Yet there I was, drafting an email I feared would unleash the full fury of the Anglican clergy.

It was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend in the first year of the pandemic. I thought the holiday would give me at least two or three days, and that my email would fall to the bottom of an overflowing queue. The pastors were notorious for leaving emails unanswered for weeks, or even months. In the past, I had found this endearing, if annoying, but this time I was desperate for it to work to my advantage. Maybe I could leave quietly, perhaps unnoticed, sharing my decision with them while escaping any conflict.

I wrote the first draft to the head pastor, edited it, walked away, came back, hyperventilated, and made more edits. I felt guilty for what I was about to do, and guilty for putting it off this long. Over the years, church had been a constant in my life, not just because I attended one every Sunday with my family since birth. At age twelve, while touring a European cathedral with my family, I felt so overwhelmed by the beauty of the place that I fell to my knees at the altar as a sense of warmth and what I assumed had to be the Holy Spirit filled me. That feeling of love, combined with messages about forgiveness, justice, caring for the poor and oppressed, and promises of hope and renewal defined church for me, drawing me back after the inevitable rebellious phases.

Throughout my young adulthood, church was where I found community and connected with a sense of purpose. I left my home in the Chicago suburbs to attend college in Texas, moved to Washington, D.C. (the first time), attended grad school in London, and then settled back in D.C. Even with so much transition, being a church person meant I never worried about finding friends. I had also shaped my life around church teachings, believing they were right and true.

The Anglican church I joined in D.C. valued science and reason, made space for a variety of political viewpoints and didn’t make me feel like an outcast for being a Democrat and career-motivated woman with a master’s degree. I had felt so grateful to find it. And sure, as any thoughtful person might, I occasionally questioned the existence of God and some of the teachings of the church, but I understood obedience amid doubt as holy, and church membership as a covenant relationship, like a marriage. You stuck with it, even when it hurt.

On a warm golden evening in May 2019, more than a year before my email-induced anxiety attack, I walked under a stone archway into the sanctuary on what was meant to be a day of celebration. One of the assistant pastors was officially being ordained into the priesthood. A priesthood that, in this case, was male, bearded, and white.

As the service got underway, my spirit grew as stiff as my back, both pressed into the hard wood of the pew where I sat. Hazy late-afternoon light streamed through the dark stained-glass windows, disconnecting me from time and space. Incense rose to meet my nostrils.

What came next clashed with the reserve I’d come to expect from leaders who joked about Anglicans being a part of the “frozen chosen.” The crew of white male leaders in the church whooped and hollered as they marched to the front of the sanctuary in a display that reminded me of the frat parties I’d made every effort to avoid in college. But instead of beer held overhead, it was the Bible. And instead of polos and sunglasses, these men wore white robes and holy shawls. As these clergymen stood tall with their chests puffed out, I shrank. I wished I could melt into the pew beneath me.

I remembered how just one year before, the head pastor had sent out an email about a decision to ordain a woman—as a deacon, not to the pastoral leadership. A deacon who would play a supporting role, somewhere halfway between a layperson and a pastor. A middle ground. In my time as a member of this church, I’d seen women in operations, children’s ministry, and volunteer roles, but never preaching.

Regarding her preaching, the pastor wrote, “It is important for [her] growth as a deacon and for our congregation that it be carefully discerned whether or not this is a role for which she is gifted by the Holy Spirit.” He explained that she would need to demonstrate gifts of preaching and teaching—that she would not get special treatment “because of her gender.” She taught one of the church membership classes, but then she and her family moved away. I don’t remember her being given the chance to preach.

I had never seen an email disclaimer about any man’s ordination into a teaching or preaching role. The fact that men would teach and preach was never publicly questioned. Yet I—and the rest of the congregation—had listened patiently as male pastors and deacons delivered their share of wandering, incoherent sermons when they first started out.

One of the most common scripture verses churches use to keep women out of leadership or speaking roles comes from 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul writes: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” I heard this while attending an evangelical church during my college years in Texas, and across other evangelical churches in other parts of the country. But the Presbyterian church I grew up in had a female pastor, so I always assumed there would be room for change in other denominations. To me, it was clear that passages like the one from 1 Timothy were from specific letters written to specific churches about specific circumstances. They were not universal truths.

I couldn’t understand why this ordination day in May 2019 gripped me more than other moments like it. But as the crew of male deacons, pastors, and other leaders from the diocese strutted at the front of the church, the scene was a tipping point in a series of events that seemed to say that people like me—female, passionate about justice and equality, with a desire to see change in the church—would never really belong, at least not in this diocese. As I reflected on the verse in 1 Timothy, I began to wonder what other passages were being exploited, and what else had been lost in translation or pulled out of context.

Still, I stayed.

In my email to church leadership, I didn’t detail the concerns I had about a lack of women in preaching roles. I didn’t write about how something in me shifted during that ordination service that might have been shifting for a while. I didn’t share my doubts about how the Bible was being interpreted to uphold a certain set of power structures I wasn’t sure it was ever meant to sustain. How I wondered whether the “Biblical worldview” I believed I was supposed to build my life around was rooted in patriarchy, paternalism, and imperialism rather than seeking to love our neighbors, as Jesus demonstrated. The entire foundation of my belief in western Christian institutions had begun to shake, even as I’d seen other churches practice a radical form of love that fought for equality, justice, and freedom. And I didn’t think what I was looking for could exist under these pastors’ leadership. I didn’t write any of that.

Instead, I settled on self-protection: “I hope you’re all doing well. I’m reaching out to share some news that might come as a surprise, but that I hope will be received with respect and grace.” I expressed gratitude for the church. Then I got to the point: “After lots of prayer and discernment, I believe it is time for me to move on to a church that is further along in its journey toward a transformational form of Gospel-centered justice.”

I added some placations and acknowledgments about the justice-oriented steps they had taken, like organizing a discussion group about race. I shrouded the wrenching internal upheaval I felt in a spiritual lingo some call “Christianese” (words like “prayer and discernment”). I wrote that I felt the “Spirit leading me in another direction.” These things weren’t untrue, they just weren’t the full truth. And besides, how could they argue with the Holy Spirit? Better to be seen as a misguided bleeding-heart liberal Christian than a heretic or apostate.

Despite my doubts over the years, I had made meaningful friendships in this church. In the teaching, I appreciated the consistent calls to serve others as fully human image-bearers of God and to examine myself humbly and honestly. I loved that the pastors reminded us regularly that our worth did not come from achievement. I valued the practices of contemplation and the structure of liturgies in The Book of Common Prayer, which felt like a connection to something greater than a single church. For these reasons, I was slow to leave. I had already invested so much. I knew if I left, some who stayed might consider me less of a Christian. Less able to power through. Less committed. Less than.

I hit “send.” Immediately, pains stretched into my chest. Was God already punishing me?

Then I realized I had just been holding my breath. I closed my laptop and went for a walk while reminding my body to perform its most basic functions. As I stepped over cracked sidewalks, I was convinced no members of this church would ever want to see or speak to me again.

In the fall of 2015, I entered the church office to speak with one of the pastors as part of my membership interview. I had just completed several weeks of classes about the core beliefs of the church and this was the last step in the process. After attending a variety of churches and denominations throughout my life, Anglicanism, with its long view of history, intellectual interrogation of scripture, and emphasis on liturgy felt like a denomination I could find a home in. I was also already co-leading a weekly small group, although technically I wasn’t supposed to as a non-member. If I failed the membership process, I’d have to step down from that. With all this at stake, I worried my answers wouldn’t be Christian enough and my periods of doubt would bubble to the surface and I’d be “found out,” as if I were the only person in the history of the world who had doubted parts of their faith.

The office was small with tall windows on one side of the room and an overflowing bookshelf lining the opposite wall. The floorboards creaked under the carpet as I walked to one of the chairs in the room. The assistant pastor sat opposite me, leaning back, smiling to put me at ease.

He asked me to describe my beliefs about Christianity. I stumbled over my answers, trying to remember the correct phrasing and terminology I’d learned over the years. Strangely, in the moment I don’t remember feeling like it was a place where I could be fully honest. I felt like I had to “get it right.” He nodded and smiled, then told me about the Anglican focus on the via media, or the middle way. He explained it as a way of understanding theology that looks across a range of historical theologies and chooses the middle path. It seemed to be a method to ensure Anglican theology didn’t move too far to the right or the left, implying that the middle way was the truer way.

It sounded beautiful at the time, but a couple of years in, I began to notice how the via media also shaped social and political viewpoints. How maybe it created a middling sense of right and wrong. The pastors criticized social and political views on both sides of the aisle, pointing always to moderation.

Once, during a sermon, the head pastor denounced churches that ignored the existence of societal, systemic challenges. In the next breath, he suggested social justice and equality-oriented churches risked losing sight of the gospel.

“True social equality…it’s a byproduct of the renewing power of the gospel in the human heart,” he declared. Later in the sermon, he said, “The primary focus of the church should not be social equality, it should be gospel ministry…. we can’t make the mistake of offering political solutions to spiritual problems.”

But this contradicted what I saw when I read the Bible. The Jesus I saw cared as much about people’s physical circumstances as he did about their spiritual well-being. He moved through the world in ways that challenged people in power. While I believed in the importance of individual renewal, healing, and redemption, haven’t the “spiritual problems” the pastor spoke about often been enshrined in law, codified, and then further justified through religious and moral rhetoric? Doesn’t our history of enslavement, eugenics, colonialism and the ongoing struggle for civil rights demonstrate that? Haven’t white Christians often been some of the staunchest resistors to equality? And don’t the political and economic systems we shape, in turn, shape us?

But still, I stayed.

Maybe I assumed this church was open to change because the theology was packaged in thoughtful intellectual musings, or because other Anglican churches did ordain women. Maybe I stayed because I had seen glimpses of hope when church leadership brought in Black pastors to preach Biblical conversations about race. Or maybe I had just gotten too good at spinning problematic things the pastors said into more palatable interpretations. There were the offhand comments about how social justice-oriented folks are usually motivated by guilt, that anyone going through a period of religious deconstruction was probably only doing so because they wanted to sin freely, and so on.

While these types of remarks didn’t happen every Sunday, the pastors and some lay leaders made them often enough that I had to wrestle my indignation into the ground with thoughts like, Okay, this thing he said sounded wrong/sexist/racist, but I think what he actually meant to say was…

Less than 48 hours after I sent my email, the head pastor’s response popped into my inbox. My heart beat faster than a hummingbird’s wings. I thought I’d have more time before the chastisement began, but at least now I could stop the handwringing. “Thank you for your email letting us know of your decision,” he began. He said I had his respect, but also wrote that I should have sought pastoral help in the “discernment process,” and that if the Holy Spirit was really leading me in a different direction, God would have made this clear to the pastors as well.

He wrote, “at some point you will have to decide if you are willing to commit yourself in a costly and long-term way to an imperfect church that will regularly frustrate you,” as if I had not already spent five years doing just that. As if it wasn’t costing me to leave.

After I read his response, I again found myself having a hard time performing the basic bodily function of breathing. I had to get out. But in a pandemic, with no car, I couldn’t go very far. So I roamed the leafy uneven sidewalks of my neighborhood on foot, sweating, holding back tears, and wondering if I had made a mistake. Was I abandoning them? Was I abandoning responsibility? Should I have done the hard work of, as the pastor wrote, “staying put and working toward change from the inside of the church where God has planted (me)”? But had God really “planted” me there? Yes, I was a member, had served in volunteer leadership positions, and had dedicated countless hours of time to the community, but it’s not like I had no say in the matter. Was this divine direction, or had I found my way to this church simply because other college-educated white folks in their 20s and 30s recommended it?

The pastor wrote about “working toward change from the inside.” But was there even room for change in a church whose leadership had criticized social justice-oriented churches from the pulpit? Who shut down one of my friend’s attempts to lead a discussion group about a book written by a prominent Christian author who affirmed the LGBTQ+ community? Or whose diocese had so far not let women preach? Could a denomination whose theology was shaped over hundreds of years mostly by white men truly allow for anything beyond a white patriarchal version of Christianity?

I read the pastor’s response over, and over, and over until one sentence caught my attention. In it, he described how it is common to want to find a church that is further along its justice journey to find relief: “It’s the easiest way to feel like you are ‘doing something,’ when much of what we need to be doing involves self-reflection, lament, and repentance.”

That line brought me back to the first time I read “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. —the moment when I realized, in horror, that I was the white moderate King warned about: the kind of person who agreed with the goal of racial justice, but disagreed with the timeline and methods. I remembered how it was a starting point that taught me that it is the luxury of whiteness that allows us to focus on the inner, spiritual life while disregarding the physical, material concerns of those who are marching for liberation.

After George Floyd was murdered and protests swept the country, I dove even deeper into anti-racist books and podcasts. I learned more about the history that portrayed whiteness as akin to holiness, ideas echoing much of the teaching I had heard in my more than 30 years of attending mostly white churches in America. Blinders I didn’t know I had on, slipped, and eventually fluttered to the ground.

In my email, I hadn’t written about all this. I hadn’t detailed the long, arduous explorations into history and perspectives from people on the margins of Christianity that led me to my breaking point. I didn’t write about how I longed for the church to put into action the kind of love Jesus emanated in the gospels: standing up for the oppressed, advocating for women and minorities, calling out systems that dehumanized people. How instead, the only calls I heard from the pulpit were ones to turn inward. How I saw piety and contemplation elevated above a need for action to repair tangible communal harms. How, despite these things, I stayed.

After I left, a series of unfortunate events occurred: I was laid off from my nonprofit job, my grandfather died, then I sprained my ankle so severely I couldn’t walk on it for months. Intellectually, I knew these events were unrelated to my departure from the Anglican church. But underneath it all, a real fear lingered: was God punishing me for leaving?

The following spring, I attended a Sunday picnic with a new church whose online services I had occasionally attended during the pandemic, even as I wrestled with what church meant to me and would mean going forward. It was a warm, sunny, hope-filled day for many reasons. It was the first time in over a year this many congregants were gathered in person. Most people were at least partially vaccinated and on their way to full vaccination. The once-hazy idea of regular in-person gatherings was growing clearer and brighter. And, of course, it was Easter.

Most Christians celebrate Easter with jubilation. It’s a day of renewal. A reminder that “sin” doesn’t have power over humanity anymore. The day speaks to a promise for redemption.

It used to be like that for me, too. But that day, I showed up with a darker understanding of the same theology. Penal substitutionary atonement, or the idea that Jesus’s death on the cross was a substitute for what we humans deserve, had been the gold standard of the theology I was taught. But after my recent unblinding to history, and after being scolded by a leader I had held in such high esteem, that theology no longer felt hopeful or redemptive. It now seemed less about love and forgiveness and more about control.

On that breezy Easter Sunday, the female co-pastors (who were married to each other), welcomed us with socially distant open arms. They turned the punitive narrative about Easter I’d been taught into one about justice for the marginalized and oppressed. Faces I’d seen on Zoom became three-dimensional human beings. Here, at this in-person picnic, when I hinted at how I’d been reckoning with white supremacy, patriarchy, and homophobia in the church, I received knowing nods. I sensed this was a place full of people who had also been ready to give up on church until they found each other, until they found a new expression of faith that didn’t claim superiority. This church provided sanctuary for immigrants. It gave food and water to protestors in the sweltering heat of summer. It advocated for more affordable housing. It celebrated and ordained women and the LGBTQ+ community. It brought Black, Latinx, Asian American, and white folks together.

It’s a wonderful place, yet I’ve barely been back since that picnic. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how to be a part of a church unless I’m overcommitted and overextended. Or maybe it’s that I’m still learning and unlearning, still pulling out the threads of hope and truth from the tapestry of pain and misrepresentations. I still struggle to remember the things I loved about the Church—the love, grace, humility, healing, and forgiveness. I’m embracing the idea that maybe God/the Universe/ the Divine is bigger than I was taught—bigger than a single religion.

Sometimes I miss the certainty and assurance I felt before the foundations of everything I once believed crumbled. I’m grateful that my closest friends from that church have stuck by my side. Some have even shared their own doubts and frustrations with me and have also left. Still, even as I lean into the chance to build something new, I am mourning. I have felt unmoored. Listless. Hopeful. And wide awake.

“It’s Complicated,” 9x12, Ink and Gold Leaf on Paper, 2022

“In Grief” is a series created to honor the sacred places of loss, trauma, and grief in our lives. As a primarily representational painter, I felt that abstraction was the needed deviation for this sensitive project. In these pieces the black ink seems to take on a life of its own as it spreads and stains the paper. This process reminded me of grieving. We are uncomfortable by the unruliness of our grief. We would like grief to follow rules and reduce its flow and spread. But grief is not like that, it’s complicated, and does not follow a neat linear path.

“Neural Kintsugi no. IV,” 9x12, Ink and Gold Leaf on Paper, 2022