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I Pastored Them. They Support Trump. I Failed Them.

To the White People I Pastored,

Ever since the 2016 Presidential campaign, I’ve felt like I’ve needed to somehow apologize to those of you in my former churches who voted for and/or still support this President—as if I had to earn your respect back or defend my bluntness or placate you in the wake of my resistance.

I have no desire to do that anymore.

However I do have one apology: I’m sorry for failing you. 

If you’re still sanctioning this President’s reprehensible words and his toxic behavior, either loudly or with your silence—I obviously didn’t get through to you.

If you’re still finding futile excuses or generating desperate whataboutisms or doing wild theological gymnastics to somehow justify any of the filth he daily disseminates—you never really got what I’d hoped you’d have gotten about following Jesus from our time together. You couldn’t have.

I was responsible with helping you cultivate a heart that echoed Christ’s kind, loving, generous heart—and it appears I’ve failed. 

I failed to help you find a compassion for more than the people you see as “your own;” an empathy that transcended party or country or pigmentation. I assumed you cared more than you did about people whose story of America or the Church or law enforcement or freedom is different than yours has been.

I failed to properly strip the whitewash from the lenses through which you view the Gospels, or you’d have had no hesitation in saying that black lives matter. It wouldn’t have felt like an unmerited attack on your whiteness, but a clear recognition of the racist history of our nation and our faith tradition.

I failed to confront our shared privilege directly enough, so that you’d realize that most people don’t have the seat at the table that we do; that this privilege is unearned currency we should be generously spending on behalf of vulnerable people.

I failed to wake you up to the truth that Jesus of the Scriptures was a dark-skinned Middle Eastern Jewish rabbi whose family fled genocide just after his birth—so that you could now see his face in the very people you now condemn and fear and send away with great celebration.

I failed in all those emotionally intoxicating mission trips we took together to foreign places filled with staggeringly beautiful people, to show you your connectedness to them enough, so that you were properly outraged when this President called their homelands “shithole countries” and locked up their children and branded them as terrorists and criminals.

I failed to clearly call out the misogyny and sexism the Church has been and is still cultivating, or you’d have been far less quick to vilify survivors, attack accusers, defend predators, and vote for bad men. You’d have not derided the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, but embraced them because your faith compelled you to.

I failed to step in and directly address the casual racism that reared its head during offhand remarks in worship service rehearsals or to more explicitly challenge the lazy homophobic jokes exchanged on service projects—otherwise you might not be settling for the vile bastardization of Christianity that you seem to be right now.

I failed to help you experience the open-handed generosity of Jesus, or you wouldn’t be so tight-fisted with America or health insurance or opportunity in these moments. Life wouldn’t be a zero sum game where someone else’s winning equaled your losing.

I failed to help you imagine a God who was fittingly big enough, or you wouldn’t be settling with the tiny, vengeful, terrified savior that Republicans are asking you to bow down to—and who you seem content to oblige. 

I failed to cut through your effusive, hand-raised, tear-filled Sunday morning service histrionics, and to ask you whether you really believed any of the stuff you were singing—about a big world that a loving God made and was calling you to love too. Otherwise, your world wouldn’t have become as small as America or The GOP or other white people.

I failed to fix your eyes clearly enough on the kindhearted humility of Jesus, or you wouldn’t have fallen for every vile word, every malignant lie from this President. You would have so easily bowed in adoration to the arrogant antithesis of the poor, itinerant street preacher who called people who care for one another.

Most of all I failed to encourage you (that is to say, to give you courage) or you wouldn’t be quiet in these moments and you wouldn’t have feet of clay. You’d be calling out and condemning bigotry instead of harboring it. You’d be shouting down the supremacist coffee shop rants of other white people, you’d be demanding racists cops be brought to justice, you’d be speaking truth to the zenophobic Billy Grahams of the world.

If I hadn’t failed you, you’d be resisting all of this too.

You may think I’m letting you down right now by calling out this President and this Administration and a complicit Evangelical church that is undoing the very work Jesus was doing while he walked the planet, but I’m not.

I already let you down—because you’re not doing these same things now too.

I’m sorry.

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