The far side of the creek

On leaving church, leaving journalism, and never leaving home

“The mushroom gatherers,” Jane Sutherland, c. 1895

“And after lunch you asked me if I still believed

In a spirit that would never come to me

You asked me what it was like on the far side of the creek

I told the truth, sometimes it gets lonely”

- “Prodigal” by Andrew Bryant, 2023

On weekday mornings the coffee shop is clustered with pods of the men. The men are holding forth — loudly — about the virtues of intermittent fasting, the meaning of the Egyptian plagues, and the Bible’s clear teaching on matters of human sexuality.

I used to be part of the pods, but now I sit alone. I eavesdrop. Some days when I listen to them reading from their Bible commentaries I hear an encouraging word, and I miss the feeling of spiritual fellowship. Most days I hear nonsense and remember why I’m in no hurry to return to church.

Last year the great Mississippi songwriter Andrew Bryant released one of my favorite albums, Prodigal, building on the theme that he’s “like the prodigal who never left at all.” He still lives in Mississippi; I still live in South Carolina. When he sings about living on the far side of the creek from the faith community that raised him, I understand him to mean it’s a walkable distance, a permeable barrier. I find myself similarly situated.

I’ve left two churches in my adult life, a theologically conservative one by choice and a theologically progressive one because its leaders left and the congregation ceased meeting. I still see people from both churches often. My family and I never intend to leave our town, so this will likely be the case for the rest of our lives.

***

I crossed a less substantial creek when I took a job in public relations last summer. I was a newspaper reporter in my 20s, and we in the newsroom used to smirk at colleagues who took PR jobs for better pay and saner hours. I’ve lost my credibility as an ink-stained wretch forever.

I console myself with the fact that I believe profoundly in the mission of my employer. At my day job we fight for things like free speech, juvenile justice reform, voting rights, fair landlord-tenant laws, and freedom from book bans propagated by the dull McCarthyites who dominate our politics. I am told I’m the first communications director in the history of the ACLU’s South Carolina affiliate. I consider it an honor and privilege to do this for a living.

This week I found myself looking back across the narrow divide to my past. On Monday I gave three TV news interviews about a proposed ban on 160 books in the school district where I grew up. That evening I walked into the district office with my friends and my parents and my parents’ friends and my middle school science teacher and I gave the school board a stern talking-to about the First Amendment. Adding to the surreality of the evening, the district office is housed in the same century-old brick building where I attended middle school.¹

I spoke about the humanist sci-fi anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the 10th grade English teacher who assigned it to me, and why it would be a loss for young Christian conservatives like High School Paul if they banned it. (I also wrote an essay on the topic for work; it’s the most Brutal South piece of writing I’ve done in months.) Then a series of retirees with no children in the district stood up to denounce certain books as the work of Satan, and people like me as great deceivers and corrupters of innocence. One pastor said we ought to have millstones tied around our necks and be thrown in the sea, quoting the Good Book of course (Matthew 18:6). I tried making eye contact with one of the men as he returned to sit four chairs away from me, but he stared straight ahead the rest of the night. So I find myself in league with the devil.

I felt the same distance from my neighbors on Tuesday when I sat in a packed South Carolina Board of Education meeting where the state superintendent, a graduate of a Christian fundamentalist university, sought a policy banning books with descriptions of sexual conduct from all public grade schools. The superintendent claimed that my colleagues and I had somehow “misled” the students who had come to rally against censorship, and various preachers and biblical scholars rose to the microphone and said much the same. I had never met most of the students, but I thought they did a more eloquent job rebuking the superintendent than I could have.

Wednesday was both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, a jumble of signifiers I won’t try to untangle. The focus of the day was a bill, already passed in the House, that would ban medically necessary care for transgender youth. Like most Southern legislatures controlled by Christians, South Carolina’s General Assembly is obsessed with making life difficult for my trans and gender-nonconforming friends.

During a subcommittee hearing on the proposed trans healthcare ban, I saw proponents of the bill citing recent proclamations issued by the South Carolina Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in America. These are both denominations where I spent a good portion of my life; I am certain I know people who voted to affirm both of these statements.

I used to live in Christian communities that sought for trans people’s existence to be made illegal, for same-sex couples to be denied the right to marry, and for women to serve in either a subordinate or a “complementarian” role to men. These are the doctrines I upheld, despite my feeble protestations in those coffee-shop Bible studies. I feel ashamed that it took me so long to leave. I still love and miss those siblings in Christ.

Earlier on Ash Wednesday I found myself hauling a cart of audio equipment half a mile up a hill in Columbia so we could accommodate overflow testimony, assuming (correctly, it turns out) that the lawmakers would cut off opponents of the bill before we all had a chance to speak for 2 minutes apiece. I had happy flashbacks to quiet mornings in church, whole years of Sundays, when I would arrive early and set up sound systems in makeshift sanctuaries to amplify preaching and songs of praise. (I didn’t have to do it alone this time — if you’re reading this, Ivy and Kenya, thank you for making the magic happen.)

After a brutal hearing, we gathered on the Statehouse steps and took turns at the microphone, speaking for the better part of an hour about the dangers of this cruel and unconstitutional bill. Doctors, therapists, parents, and pastors kept speaking even after the news media moved on. I spoke near the end, sharing the story of a trans teenager and his family who hosted me as a guest in their living room last month. They were worried about the future under our state’s laws, but proud and affirming of their son. On the long drive home from Columbia Wednesday I wept for joy thinking about the love of the boy’s tough-minded father, raised conservative and Catholic, who learned to fully embrace his son’s identity.

As a holdover practice from my journalism days I tread carefully when telling stories of other people’s suffering. I try to convey their moments of joy and triumph too. Joy was hard to find this week.

***

I don’t have Christian fellowship anymore, but I do have solidarity. They’re not the same thing.

It would be fair for you to ask if I still believe in God at all. I do, though I would no longer try to convince you one way or the other. I find myself in the position the writer John Jeremiah Sullivan described once: “My problem is not that I dream I'm in hell … It isn't that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn't even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It's that I love Jesus Christ.”

I do love Jesus, and I love the people I know who follow him. Lately I’ve seen Christians with the ash of mortification on their foreheads giving benedictions to the frightened families of trans kids; pledging to fight our Christian governor’s labor union-bashing tactics to the gates of hell; and speaking out against the death penalty — our modern crucifixion — even for people who murdered their family members.

Nietzsche called the way of Jesus “slave morality” and he wasn’t completely wrong, but I think he misread the faith of enslaved people. If the gospel narrative is true then I want to be on the side of Jesus and not the Roman empire, of Moses and not Pharaoh, of Harriet Tubman and not Robert E. Lee. I want to walk justly and love my enemies and fight for liberation always. I’m with the crucified people, as Ignacio Ellacuría put it. There are nonreligious people following this path just as well as the faithful, but for better or worse I will always have a religious impulse in me. A part of me will always seek the Spirit even if it never comes.

This coming Friday I’ll speak at an event hosted by faith leaders in Greenville, focused on how we can carry out the sacred work of hospitality by fighting for housing justice. We pursue this work in the heart of so-called Trump Country, in the shadow of the Moral Majority, amid the ferment of white Christian nationalism and even Christian fascism. We walk as believers, against other believers, ostensibly praying to the same god.

***

“Prodigal” is available to stream or purchase via Andrew Bryant’s Bandcamp page.

1. To further set the scene, the board members were seated on the stage of what was once my middle school’s auditorium, where I remember dressing as an elf and doing a choreographed line dance to “It’s Raining Men” for a holiday theater show.