We need each other.
On Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and everything else.
Almost a week ago, I started a draft of this newsletter that I had titled “Remember: All of this is what 80% of white evangelicals voted for. 3 times. (In which my dormant anger and grief finds some expression.)” Here’s what I wrote but didn’t send then:
I’m typing most of this out on my lunch break on April 9, a few days into the meaningless, utterly avoidable economic downturn (which will likely turn into a recession or worse) we are being dragged into by Trump by this tariff nonsense that no one except his most spineless yes-men defend.
Against the general economic backdrop, we have people being detained off the streets, while others are being wrongfully deported for a variety of reasons (and SCOTUS is temporarily pausing attempts to return at least one person) children dying from measles, the foreign aid funding freeze leading to millions of women losing access to contraception, cutting food aid, and children dying in South Sudan because local health facilities were forced to close.
Now, I’ve been on the beat of covering white evangelicalism and amplifying the stories of exvangelicals and others who have left for almost a decade. One of the most common critiques of exvies is that we are just a bunch of extremely-online ragebaited posters with nothing to offer. And sure, that caricature holds some water—because to whatever degree an algorithm feeds you things, it’s going to feed you things based on what elicits a reaction. And what elicits a reaction faster than anger?
Yet that’s not enough to dismiss the fact that this anger (and the related emotions of frustration and grief) is valid. We live in a crueler world made possible by the consistent political decisions of white evangelicals.
This anger doesn’t supersede other valid angers. That’s not the point of anger—to compete with others to see whomst is full of the most righteous wroth.
I didn’t hit send on that draft for a number of reasons: first, by the time I returned to it, the facts on the ground had changed and Trump had suspended most of the tariffs; second, I got pulled back into work (I work in advocacy communications and things have been hectic ever since this administration started); third, I had to pack for a short trip.
I’m sharing it now because, even though it’s half-baked and outdated, it’s illustrative of how quickly things continue to devolve in the United States. Unless your full-time job is to keep tabs on and comment on everything that’s happening, it is functionally impossible to do so.
But the latest developments surrounding the Trump administration’s refusal to return the wrongfully deported father of three Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling is such an affront to the rule of law that it cannot go without comment.
With every day that passes this administration demonstrates the degree of cruelty and indifference with which they see the American people, not as citizens with rights but as subjects to whom they feel they are owed unquestioning allegiance. They are not kings. They are not chosen by God. They were chosen by people, and it is the people to whom they must answer.
I do not think that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a solitary or unique case or that other people and groups are not suffering. What the Trump administration is doing—or rather, not doing—in response to the demands of the court is what is at issue here. It is consistent with their other illegal and unconstitutional actions in which they have ignored the judiciary, or frozen funds, or refused to unfreeze funds.
And yes, I remain angry and aggrieved, and utterly disappointed that the faith that formed me is complicit in all this. But I also have hope that we can resist the temptation to sort ourselves into clusters and forge meaningful alliances that can fight back against the authoritarianism, autocracy, and fascism.
I say “I have hope,” but I think I mean “I have to have hope.” Because I don’t know if there’s any other way through this. But we have to resist the temptation to retreat into our own fiefdoms. Allow me to explain.
In my slice of the world, I’ve watched as commentators and activists and advocates sort themselves into various camps over the last several years: post-evangelical elites who talk primarily to progressive Christians, exvangelicals who want nothing to do with religion, queer and BIPOC creators who prioritize their own communities out of the necessity, surival, and the pursuit of their own joy.1
All of these things are valuable in their own right, and they serve different needs. My particular brand of ambivalent agnosticism and pointed critique of white American Christianity won’t reach a strong progressive Christian as well as some author who’s heart is still stirred by Jesus and wants to reform a faith community from within. That’s ok.
People talk and write a lot about “bridge building,” as if that obligates everyone to be “all things to all people” like Paul tried to be (Paul sucked at that, btw). But that misunderstands what bridges are and do. A bridge connects two places, not all places. If you wanted to connect all people to one way, you’d be building a hub, not a bridge. You’re centering one way. And that’s what got us into this mess.
I am not a bridge-builder to conservative evangelicals; that’s someone else’s work. (Maybe it’s yours, reading this.) My bridge leads away from evangelicalism, not towards it. But I do need to know the people doing that work, and find ways to work with them if our goals align. They can cross their own bridges, and reach others that I can’t, across a dispersed literal and metaphorical geography.
In these examples, we don’t all need the same spiritual thing, but we all do need and deserve the same rights.
And we are all threatened by the developments we see playing out in front of all of us. Trump is speaking openly on a hot mic about sending “home-grown” criminals to these El Salvadoran prisons.
They have allies. We need allies, too.
And I’m not talking about just allies in flame wars online. Things are a lot more complicated and dire than that. We can’t afford to retreat to our own islands.
In times like this I have a hard time distilling what I want to write or say to a single thing. In times like this, I think of McLuhan’s axiom that “electric man lives mythically and all at once.” McLuhan wrote in the 1960s about “all-at-once-ness” and he never lived through a single day of Trump’s chaotic tariff policy announcements. We all have only so much bandwidth, so much to offer, so much capital, so much we can do in a day. There’s systemic issues tied to personal issues and I see it all in my head and feel it all in my heart but I can’t make it make sense on the page in a way that’s both concise and accurate, so I must resort to mythical and metaphorical thinking and hope that you’ll get the gist. I tried to do so in my book, when I wrote about the need for new metaphors:
“I believe that for those of us who were shaped by evangelicalism—which is so many of us, including those who were not raised within it but have been subject to its influence on politics and culture—it is time to look for new metaphors. In our current environment, the primary constant is change, and the pace of change is accelerating. To hold fast to unchanging belief makes us brittle and hollows us out. As Sophie Strand writes in The Flowering Wand, “Myths that stay the same don’t survive. Or worse, they make sure we won’t survive by reinforcing extractive behavior no longer tailored to our ecosystems. They don’t adapt to changing climate and shifting social conditions.”[2]”
No single post is gonna solve a single thing. But goddammit, we need each other more than ever. I need you. You need me. The people and students being abducted without due process deserve better. The people who struggle to make ends meet and literally cannot afford to stop deserve better. The trans community being vilified deserves better. We all deserve better.
We need each other. And we need to find our way through this dark time to a time of mutual flourishing. We won’t do that if we stay isolated.
I know there are exceptions to these broad trends, so please resist the reply-guy whataboutisms and umactuallys. The broad trends are still there.