slippery slope
wheeeeeeeeee!
NOTE:
this one has a lot of footnotes because I love them and they’re especially useful in this post. But unfortunately substack makes it so god damn difficult to read them alongside the primary text! i thinkkkk that reading this in a browser window or the app instead of your inbox makes it easier? or maybe on a computer and not a phone? i’m not sure! i’m sorry. do as you must but i’d encourage you to read these footnotes.1 thanks for reading. carry on.
When I was about seven2 years old, I got an answer ‘wrong’ on my Sunday School quiz.3 The question was “How many of each animal did Noah bring on the ark?” and I answered “seven pairs of clean animals and one pair of unclean”. So, the correct answer according to Genesis 7.4 5 But my ‘teacher’ said the answer was two, one male and one female of each species. Filled with a holy rage at this injustice, I showed my father my marked up quiz along with the Bible verse. When he saw I was right, he went with me to the teacher to amend this grievous wrong. I remember them chuckling —probably because I was very cute in my insistence that the right answer was what the Bible said not whatever the teacher decided it was— which only added to my outrage. All seven years of my life had revolved around what the Bible said and they were laughing about me taking it seriously!? Apparently I was supposed to just listen to whatever my Sunday School teacher said and regurgitate it back.
This may be where it began.
Or maybe it really began in high school as I listened at doors while the adult missionaries at my school murmured about a church split. Or perhaps it didn’t really start until I learned some, heretofore unknown to me but actually quite crucial, details about the creation of the Protestant Bible. Its writing, editing6, translating7 and canonizing process was convoluted, murky and filled with legends and information that had never been taught to me in the 21 years I had spent either in a church, in a church school or in a church camp. I’m not entirely sure if that kicked it off, but something was definitely triggered at a post college Bible study when a young woman attendee I admired declared that too many Christians idolized the Bible. I remember feeling affronted, bothered. How could a Christian idolize the Bible!? The Bible was basically God!8
So after moving to Seattle9 thirteen years ago, I was well on my way down a slippery slope (or so I was told many times). But I couldn’t help but notice that the “liberals”, “leftists” and the LGBTQ community I had been taught were the enemy actually seemed to embody ‘Christlike’ characteristics more than many of the petty, cliquey, judgy, dogmatic and fearful churchgoers I had grown up with and witnessed in the wider fundamentalist landscape. These “la la liberals” treated ‘love’ as a verb10, deeply respected the humanity of people, sided with their neighbors11, the poor, the stranger, the foreigner, the victim while I watched rich, patriarchal opportunistic religious leaders get into bed with the state. Participating in an exposé that called out my childhood church for their handling of child sexual abuse, and reading the subsequent 180 page GRACE report12 which detailed the uncaring incompetency of its leadership was yet another sign that I was on an important path so, lost yet persistent, I traveled on. Witnessing white American evangelicals, the group that formed my childhood and teen years13, gleefully leap into the dark depths of Christian Nationalism14 in an attempt to create a Christofascist state that celebrates war15 and dehumanizes as easily as breathing had me speeding down my slippery slope to get as far away from that abhorrent agenda as I could.
As you may have noticed, today’s shelf is a little different16. Instead of three books around a theme, I’m retracing the steps of my slippery slope over the last decade+ and revisiting the books17 that helped me along my way. Because “looking backwards might be the only way to move forward” and, though this is an extremely personal post, it may be that one of these books catches your attention too. Maybe a title or topic has you feeling affronted, bothered, curious, angry, defensive or wondering. If so, I urge you to listen to that feeling and follow it a little ways. It could be a stumbling block meant to divert you from uncritical, rote complacency. See where it leads you. It could start you on a slippery slope of your own.
A quick note here! Though I’ve been scolded too many times to count for going down a slippery slope, I want to challenge this term. I’m sorry that I didn’t keep track to properly credit them, but I recently came across a note written by one of the exvangelical thinkers I follow critiquing the label “slippery slope” and I was like “duh!” That phrase implies that the accusers are all high on the mountaintop, safe and self righteous as the accused jumps and flails their way down, down, down18 far away from the one place of rightness. It also annoyingly blurs away personal agency and choice, creating a narrative of total fear that one tiny toe out of the party line equals total exile. Well, I reject the idea that more knowledge, a wider understanding and the valuing of internal authority is at the bottom or ‘bad’ and the judgmental creeps who are stagnant, aloof, uncritical and performatively pious19 are at the top, oozing ‘good’. But, I’m cheeky and angry, so for the sake of this shelf I’m going to lean into the slippery slope metaphor.20
As we enter Holy Week, take a detour away from white American evangelicalism and begin to exorcise your demons with one of these.
BOOKS
Contrary to what the ‘slippery slope’ imagery alludes to, there were many stops, starts and stumbles along the way. My path was/is more of a meandering wander. As Sue Monk Kidd says in Dance of the Dissident Daughter, it is a search that asks “what continents are beyond the horizon?” rather than an immediate toe off the side that had me free falling down to… well that’s the thing. I never know where this scary slope I’m being warned about is supposed to lead me to! Whenever I’ve been accused of traveling it and inquire where they are afraid I’ll end up, I don’t get an answer. I’ve asked multiple times and have yet to receive an answer more than just ‘a look’. But ‘a look’ didn’t do anything to help my deep sense of betrayal that morphed into anger and resentment because I was instructed that nothing was more important than to take these teachings seriously. And when I did, I was apparently taking them seriously in the wrong way. Not the right way, not the unthinking, obedient way. When I would bring up questions, inconsistencies, frustrations or noted hypocrisies I was warned repeatedly that I was wrong to do so and if I continued, I’d be lost to the slippery slope. But eventually I found that I could no longer respect the ‘wisdom’ or authority of the people who said this; some of them had proven themselves to be either intellectually or morally wanting and so I began to follow my curiosity and my conscience.
First up was Searching for Sunday21, a memoir by Rachel Held Evans22 , which I read in 2018 as I stumbled over the same damaging dogma that she had wrestled with years before. Her disillusionment with the church and modern American Christianity coexisted with her deep love of the gospel and her hope for what it could look like, if the Church ever decided to ask WWJD and put people over ideology. I found myself in Evan’s frustration, confusion and anger but not as much in her hope, as much as I wish I could have. Her books and blog were lovingly written with deep care, humor and intelligence and I was deeply saddened by her sudden death in 2019.
Though for few years I attended a Lutheran/Episcopal church in La La Liberal Land Seattle that helpfully widened my experience of what else was out there— a church could ordain a woman, march in the Pride parade, protest family separation, put its focus on the congregation instead of its lead pastor, include liturgy, saints, art, music, and play in its services — I couldn’t shake my bafflement and rage at white evangelicals. I read memoirs that called out the damage these churches did like What is a Girl Worth by Rachel Denhollander, The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon and The Missionary Kids by Holly Berkley Fletcher. Because I still so hoped to find hope in Christianity, I also found stories of the beautifully welcoming, upside down spaces churches created when they actually served ‘the least of these’ in books like Pastrix and Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Weber and City of God by Sara Miles.
These books revealed differences of opinion, faith and understanding about many of the doctrines that I was taught, practically from birth, were irrefutable. An example. As a kid I’d grow cold with fear whenever The Rapture was mentioned, which wasn’t infrequent in my church.23 I got permission to opt out of the Sunday School viewing of whatever terrifying Rapture movie they were showing children and, probably as a way to take some control over my fear, I eventually read all of the Left Behind series24. But, further into adulthood than I’m comfortable with, I learned from a podcast episode that the whole idea of The Rapture came from a guy falling off his horse25 in the 1800s. This dude had a head injury(!) and while recovering workshopped an end times eschatology/fanfic mashup that American evangelical churches decided to run with. Needing to read a book about this to counter all that LaHaye and Jenkins idiocy, I found Zach Hunt’s Unraptured.
Now realizing that there could be more to learn about about the formations of my formative years, I read Inspired where Evans called out how supremacist and frankly stupid it is to label something ‘the Biblical view on xyz’ (marriage, war, sex, women, you get it). Like the Bible was an infallible, simple to understand checklist instead of a collection of stories written in many different genres, by many different authors, with any number of editors and translators who had any number of biases and agendas and contained some deeply problematic texts. Take hell for instance. Not ever being a big fan of eternal, conscious torment for untold numbers of humanity, I found Hell Bent by Brian Recker to be a helpful resource to break down all that nonsense. As my current church often mentioned mystics and saints, a topic never touched on in my youth, I found inspiration and a weird sense of comfort in The Mystics Would Like a Word by Shannon K. Evans. This book highlighted a few weird and wonderful medieval women’s mystical connections to the divine which looked nothing like an evangelical worship service. I became intrigued by the expansive, inclusive nature of this type of Christianity and was increasingly depressed and repulsed by the one I grew up with.
Now for the sexy part. The phrase ‘No Touch Love’ was a constant in my old church26, and you can imagine what that command meant, so I had much to unpack about purity culture. I turned to Shameless by Nadia Bolz Weber and Pure by Linda Kay Klein who tackled that immensely harmful topic in loving, helpful and personal ways. Because churches love to police the sex lives of their congregations (but not of their leadership) I appreciated Jeff Chu’s earnest, vulnerable memoir about being a gay Christian, Does God Really Love Me?. During all of this exploring I attended my first ordination of a woman27. A few years before, this event would have been impossible for me to imagine. I was so moved that I wanted to know more about why women weren’t allowed to be full participants in evangelical churches, but they could in many other denominations. This growing concern, and its constant companion simmering outrage, led me to The Making of Biblical Womanhood and Becoming the Pastor’s Wife by Beth Allison Barr which were powerful, insightful and maddening works of history and personal experience.
Speaking of anger! Kristen Kobes du Mez’s meticulously researched Jesus and John Wayne was crucial to my understanding that Trump/MAGA is a feature not a bug of white American evangelicalism28. It remains one of my most recommended books. It was like NOS, turbo charging my slippery slope journey away away away. Enlightened by the power obsessed landscape du Mez unveiled for me, I read a few more politically leaning books like Resist and Persist by Erin Wathen, The Myth of the American Dream by DL Mayfield and, one of the most rage inducing books I’ve ever read, Money, Lies and God29 by Katherine Steward. Too late for my liking, the summer of 2020 directed my attention to the abysmal racial foundations of the modern evangelical church, first with another podcast episode detailing how segregation motivated evangelicals politically and then by reading Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise and Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism. My husband and I spent a somber Route 66 road trip listening to the undeniably powerful The Cross and The Lynching Tree by James H. Cone.30
By now, you can imagine that I was pretty much over and done with the whole thing. But, I still craved personal stories of people who had been through something similar and come out the other side. I suppose I was well trained to look for authority outside of myself, so I looked for accounts that could give me a little clue, a roadmap or a form of permission for me to turn the last page on this story. So I absorbed accounts of people suffering, waking, wrestling and leaving religious spaces— from Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor31 to many memoirs of women realizing they could not hide their light under a bushel anymore32 such as A Well Trained Wife by Tia Levings or Jedidiah Jenkins’ account of riding a bike across continents in search for reconciliation in To Shake the Sleeping Self.33
Now we come to now. The bottom of the slope? The top of another? Nah, I’m sticking with Kidd’s “what continents are beyond the horizon?” analogy. The latest stop on my tour abroad is searching for the feminine aspect of the Divine, so I was enthralled by The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd and found A Religion of One’s Own by Thomas Moore to have an energizing and self-empowering approach to spirituality and the sacred. If I choose to follow that trajectory. We’ll see.
Of course I’m me so I’ve got more books waiting in the wings, though it is starting to feel like beating a dead horse so we’ll see when/if I’m ever up for them. Books like The Culting of America by Daniella Mestyanek Young and Amy Reed, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is taking over America by Talia Lavin, Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta, Embracing the Old Witch in the Woods: Liberating Feminine Wisdom From Christian Patriarchy by Angela J. Herrington, Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became An American Evangelical Crisis by Jared Stacy and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. I know I’m definitely on board the Mystic Train so I won’t forget to read more from and about female mystics like St. Teresa of Ávila and Julian of Norwich. Where they’ll lead me next I don’t know, but I am ready for the ride.
in addition to telling you what to read, i also edit podcasts and fiction. got a project?
extra credit.
Many of the books that populated my path have led me to other works by their authors and, in turn, the writers they follow. Their work continues to pull me along, from DL34 and Krispin Mayfield’s detailed and ambitious project STRONGWILLED (which tackles the immense harm of James Dobson’s35 teachings) to Beth Allison Barr’s podcast All the Buried Women (which ‘uncovers stories from women that were hidden in the SBC archives’), from Stephanie Jo Warren —a similar searcher— who asks ‘why’ in her newsletter A Crack in the Stained Glass to previous pastors like Brian Recker and current historians like Kristen Kobes du Mez who use their respective expertise to explain behind the scenes insights for others. Then there are the few American clergy36 who keep me interested in something like the Christian tradition37, who aren’t in bed with the state and instead actively condemn its actions— like Bishop Mariann Budde, the Pope, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops38 and those arrested in Minneapolis protests.
While this was a helpful exorcism exercise, I realize it may be less than interesting to most of you.39 So, if you stuck with here, thank you for reading this shelf and thank you for reading the rolling ladder. Next week I will be back to my regular shelving format but, do note that the sass level will remain the same.
if you enjoyed this shelf in particular, let me know!
leave a comment, ‘heart’ the post or send me a tip
have you traveled a slippery slope? to where?
what books would you add to this shelf?
this is a footnote dad!!
why the hell was my sunday school class giving out quizzes? was this going to be on my official sunday school transcripts!?
7 The Lord said to Noah, “Go into the ark with your whole household, because among this generation I’ve seen that you are a moral man. 2 From every clean animal, take seven pairs, a male and his mate; and from every unclean animal, take one pair, a male and his mate; 3 and from the birds in the sky as well, take seven pairs, male and female, so that their offspring will survive throughout the earth.
though in verse 8 it changes to two pairs, which is not seven nor one.
8 From the clean and unclean animals, from the birds and everything crawling on the ground, 9 two of each, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, just as God commanded Noah. 1
From Diana Butler Bass’ sermon “Mary the Tower”
She went through the whole manuscript of John 11 and John 12, and lo and behold, that editor had gone in at every single place and changed every moment that you read Martha in English, it originally said, "Mary."… The editor changed it all.
I didn’t wonder where that idea came from as the church cult of my youth was called “The Bible Speaks”.
a place my father calls “La La Liberal Land”
“Why Minneapolis Matters more than Iran for America’s Future”
Many surely got to know one another, though, because they were all propelled by a verb I’d never heard before: “neighboring,” as in, Today I will be neighboring — going out to protect the good people next door or down the block.
you can read that report HERE. I especially appreciated page 157 “Incorporate Diverse Leadership and Perspectives”. They won’t actually change this, but damn if i didn’t feel validated when reading it.
Witness testimony reveals a deeply patriarchal "boys club" culture that systematically devalues the voices and experiences of women, leaving girls and young women uniquely vulnerable to abuse. The church's emphasis on "spiritual fathers" with no equivalent "spiritual mothers," combined with a purity culture that blames female victims, creates a dangerous dynamic that abusers have actively exploited. To remedy this, GRACE recommends that GGWO intentionally elevate female voices in leadership. This is a matter of basic safety.
see: Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection:
Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism relies on the mythological founding of the United States as a “Christian nation,” singled out for God’s providence in order to fulfill God’s purposes on earth. Christian nationalism demands a privileged place for Christianity in public life, buttressed by the active support of government at all levels.
from David Bentley Hart’s recent newsletter
“There are rumors, as implausible as they may seem, that the uniquely American religion of white Evangelicalism was originally derived from some species of Christianity. It sounds ridiculous, I acknowledge, but history is an unending tumult of contingencies, after all, and cultural lineages are far more obscure and tangled than those of biological genealogy. The evidences are slender, but suggestive even so. White Evangelicalism is, of course, a religion of war, as we have been forcibly reminded in recent days. As such, its governing ethos is one scrupulously suspicious of charity and hostile to every kind of compassion and concern for those outside the circle of its mysteries. …
True, the ‘Jesus’ of white Evangelicalism—a ferocious and patriotic American with fair northern European features, armed with a semiautomatic long gun, his iconography almost invariably including an unfurled Old Glory, a champion of border walls, jealous of his race, implacably hostile to social services, protector of private wealth, scourge of the undeserving poor, lover of the death penalty, and so forth—is clearly a tribal god at some level, as well as the tutelary genius of the American nation and empire. He certainly bears no resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in the gospels or proclaimed by Christian tradition. But one can still see how the theory of white Evangelicalism’s Christian antecedents might have gained a hold at the margins of the scholarly world. For myself, the theory seems too exotic to credit.”
back to regular programming next week
of course my slippery slope was aided by many non-religious texts, but this shelf just holds the evangelical/christian-ey titles
to hell maybe? i don’t actually know where. just down.
hard.
I played my role as the good Christian girl and spared everyone the drama of an argument. But that decision to remain silent split me in two. It convinced me that I could never really be myself in church. That I had to check my heart and mind at the door.
at church camp we’d ‘prank’ other cabins by laying out whole outfits on our beds? to look like we’d been taken away? and the other kids who found these bodiless clothes were supposed to be afraid that they’d been left behind? what.
for more on this series, check out last year’s april fool’s day shelf solid as a rock!
ABDELFATAH: This idea was another innovation of John Nelson Darby.
BALMER: I call this sometimes a theology of despair because it says there’s nothing we can do to make this world a better place. The only thing we can do is get our own house in order, try to bring as many others as possible into our circles - that is to convert them or to evangelize them - and then wait for Jesus to come and make everything all better.
ironic
hi K.G!
Evangelicals hadn’t betrayed their values. Donald Trump was the culmination of their half-century-long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity. He was the reincarnation of John Wayne, sitting tall in the saddle, a man who wasn’t afraid to resort to violence to bring order, who protected those deemed worthy of protection, who wouldn’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what had to be said or the norms of democratic society keep him from doing what needed to be done. Unencumbered by traditional Christian virtue, he was a warrior in the tradition (if not the actual physical form) of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace. He was a hero for God-and-country Christians in the line of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Oliver North, one suited for Duck Dynasty Americans and American Christians. He was the latest and greatest high priest of the evangelical cult of masculinity.
The desired end state of Christian nationalism today is neither to win a majority nor to secure a seat at the table in a pluralistic democracy but to entrench minority rule under the facade of democracy.
The lynching tree—so strikingly similar to the cross on Golgotha—should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death. But it does not. In fact, the lynching tree has no place in American theological reflections about Jesus’ cross or in the proclamation of Christian churches about his Passion. The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.
or get spanked by their husbands anymore (!?)
unlike me, my husband doesn’t usually react aloud as he reads but the one time he guffawed out loud at a book was while reading Jenkins’ packing approach to his cross continent bike trip. apparently it was a ridiculous amount of things to carry on one’s back.
Why clergy should risk assault to protest ICE
Dressed in a clerical collar and posing no threat, I was shot in the leg with a pepper ball by Illinois State Police while protesting outside the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, on Nov. 1.
For me at least, these protests are also an expression of my most deeply held religious beliefs. Throughout Scripture, we are instructed to care for the immigrants in our midst. Leviticus 19:33-34 even says, “When a foreigner resides among you, do not mistreat them. The foreigner living among you must be treated as one of your own people and you must love them as you love yourself, because you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” It’s hard to get clearer than that.
Weak Violence, Strong Peace: Who We Are in This Crisis by Rebecca Solnit
A striking thing all through 2025 was the presence of clergy in the demonstrations and protests to protect immigrants and refugees and their rights.
Priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, nuns and monks have spoken up and shown up as part of the resistance, and across the country churches have hosted meetings and trainings for resistance and solidarity.
U.S. Bishops Issue a “Special Message” on Immigration
Despite obstacles and prejudices, generations of immigrants have made enormous contributions to the well-being of our nation. We as Catholic bishops love our country and pray for its peace and prosperity. For this very reason, we feel compelled now in this environment to raise our voices in defense of God-given human dignity.
my family probably stopped reading paragraphs ago!
Absolutely loved this read. We have definitely held similar journeys on this slippery slope, so I’m excited to add a few of the books you mentioned that I’ve missed to my list! This was such a well-sourced, methodical walkthrough. Thanks for taking the time to do so. Footnote 26 was my favorite.
The slope is nowhere near as scary as I thought it would be. In fact it's quite a bit less scary down here. And much of that is thanks to many of the authors you mentioned.