It’s been twenty years since I left your classroom—the two years I spent working for A’s, memorizing Bible verses, perfecting an impenetrable worldview. Friday mornings, some of us would show up before class, coffee in hand, for conversations about faith and politics.

I’ve thought of you. Have you thought of me? 

I think you must’ve known, when I put up my hand in class to tell you I thought you were wrong. I didn’t think that all gay people went to hell. You must’ve known there were queer students in your class. That I was one of them.

I have this memory of the way that you looked away from me when you rejected my challenge. I think it’s a tic you have. When you think about something a little complicated, you look away while you say it. The hunter’s ruse: appearing distracted to better corner your words of prey. I do that, too. Memory is fickle and I might misremember, but the way I recall it, you couldn’t look me in the face when you told me I was going to hell. 

But I remember so much more.

I remember the mock presidential election we held in 2004, when 93% of students in our high school voted for George W. Bush. Most of the rest voted third-party, because even in a Baptist high school, there’s a healthy spirit of contrarianism. 

I remember the superintendent on Election Day hearing that voter was down.

“That’s good for our side,” he said, unflinching. 

Our side. God’s side. Christian soldiers marching into war.

But I remember that even in the red-as-the-blood-of-Christ Kent County, there were rumblings of doubt in our crusading leader’s war in Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Enough that you felt compelled to address it in class one day. Certainly, the doubt was small and creeping. But it’s best to root out the weed before it spreads. 

Do you remember when the star player of the varsity tennis team wrote a Xanga post about how Jesus was a Jew? How he questioned the wisdom of a religion built on a leader who never considered himself to be a Christian? 

That was a four-alarm fire.

But back to our classroom. It must’ve been 2005. 

To the few doubters in our midst, I remember you said, “Well, if you look at the map, what’s between Iraq and Afghanistan? Iran. What happens if we plant the seeds of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq? It’s only a matter of time before democracy takes hold across the region and the ayatollah falls.” 

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to you, not a drop of doubt in your mind. A simple math equation of imperial dimensions. Maybe you didn’t even look away as you said it.

Careful observers might take a moment to step back and wonder why America’s neo-imperialist projects were a hot topic in a Bible classroom. The long-form answer could fill a book. But here’s the short version: 

American Evangelicals think that God has uniquely blessed the United States. They interpret this blessing as God’s favour, and in turn, often believe that God’s favour gives them certain rights and obligations to direct events according to their perception of God’s will—not just in the United States, but around the world.

Yes, the same people who couldn’t find Iraq on a map think they have an obligation to alleviate the world of its ignorance.

I take no grim glee in remembering, but you were wrong. And I think it’s important to remember when men are wrong—especially men who stand at lecterns, whether it’s in front of a classroom or the nation. Especially men who tell teenagers they’re hell-bound. 

I thought about you back in 2018 when Brandi Carlile wrote an open letter to the pastor who refused to baptise her. I thought about writing my own letter then, too. But this isn’t that letter. I’m not withholding it, but this isn’t about forgiveness. This isn’t about the time you said I was going to hell in front of all my peers. 

Do you remember when George Bush came to town? 

This was way before Grand Rapids was cool. Bland Rapids. 

It was after the election in the spring of 2005. He gave the commencement address at Calvin College as a thank you for the support in the 2004 re-election campaign. A slightly odd choice since he lost Michigan by three-and-a-half points. But not good ol’ Kent County. No sir. Won it by 20. 

Now that I think of it, that’s why I wanted to go to Calvin. Not because Dubya gave the commencement address, but because students and faculty took out an ad in the Grand Rapids Press to protest his appearance. And me? I wanted a relationship with God that didn’t feel like a political cult.

Boy, look where we are now. 

I worry that, in light of the days that we’re living in, people forget what Dubya did. That behind Texas’ answer to Mister Magoo, behind the aww, shucks man-of-God appeal to Middle America, we’re forgetting that a war he launched resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. That we spent $2 trillion-with-a-T to replace the Taliban with … the Taliban. That the chaos led to the rise of ISIS.

But, in a way, those were more innocent days, weren’t they? At least the president had the decency to make an appeal to the international community. At least he bothered to send Colin Powell to the UN. At least there was a pretense that this was about democracy and international order.

I was still in your classroom in 2005. I don’t remember what anyone had to say about the protests at Calvin College, but I’m sure it wasn’t good. Calvin was on that slippery slope of institutions that had gotten a little too close and cuddly with the world. Not enough hating the sin, too much loving the sinner; not enough deference to men, too much room for women to have an opinion. 

Me? I was still perfecting my worldview. Attentively taking notes about how to rebuff Marxist ideology and environmental extremism. Learning the talking points of what to say when people demanded to know where God might be hiding in a crisis. 

It strikes me that, in so many small and petty ways, we, too, were trying to be like God. A compartmentalizing Christianity, ordering the world around us into neat, oversimplified ideologies—boiling everything down into sides and teams. 

Entitlement, instead of wonder. Pride, rather than humility. Condemnation in place of compassion.

We learned how the godlessness of the French revolution doomed it to extremism—without confronting slavery and genocide at the heart of Manifest Destiny. We learned how to rush into a crisis—not with empathy, but armed with weaponised beliefs and pristine worldviews. And we learned that Christianity is fundamentally a political project to be upheld by suited men in boardrooms who live by a different set of rules than the rest of us. 

Twenty years on, I’m still broken-hearted by the-community-that-could-have-been and wasn’t. 

In all the years that have trickled past, I haven’t once pulled out my notes when a Marxist has handed me a pamphlet, or gone back to my bulleted talking points when someone questioned God’s existence or goodness in a crisis. 

But I have been astounded by the silence. 

Because whatever I may or may not believe about God today, I think our only way of knowing their love is through community—as a species, taking our place alongside the other creatures made by God’s hand, as a people alongside the diverse tapestry of humanity with whom we share this planet, and as individuals alongside the family and friends, neighbours and strangers on our corner. And I think that when we are silent, God is silent. 

I appreciate the hesitation to open one’s mouth for fear of getting things wrong. I certainly get things wrong a lot—and I may look back on this in an hour or two or a week’s time and think, “Well, I should’ve said that a bit different.” 

I’ll tell you one thing I still believe: When you have some sort of agency, you must use it for the good. Isn’t that the message in the parable of the talents? The man buries them for safe-keeping only to be rebuked. Why did you hide them away? You could have at least invested them at the bank to collect the interest.

So this is my talent, this is my voice. Trembling. Halting and hesitant, eager and enraged. 

I was going to conclude by telling you that I don’t stop to wonder where God is in any of this, this chaos we see from half-darkened windows. That instead I wonder where you are. But I don’t like the sort of implication that I’m going for a rhetorical flourish to close a courtroom argument, or that I’m trying to score points for “my side,” or launch an inquisition.

My heart is genuinely in pieces as the world falls apart, angered that so many of the people I grew up with—so many there in that classroom with me twenty years ago—think that God is their plaything and the world their playground. 

This isn’t an accusation. It’s a lament.

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