This was a fascinating read. I definitely enjoyed the memoir parts more, but I liked how she wove together memoir and her experiences as a journalist in Middle America. I am a lifelong, albeit rural, East Coaster, and the Midwest just seems so different to me. Although I for sure can relate to the rural community/mentality. My experiences in the church were similar. I attended the same church from age 5 until about 22 (sporadically in college), and it was a community and a home, until it wasn’t, and my family decided to leave. The heartbreak and separation period and “new normal” is very real. I do not attend any church and haven’t for years, but still seek a spiritual community. I might go back to church eventually, but it will have to align with my liberal values and morals.

A couple quotes really stood out to me:

“And also, it isn’t just about church; it is about community and family…Losing a church is like losing a family. It’s losing a foundation. Walking away for some is a slow leaving - a gradual sloughing of self. For others, it’s a rip that leaves you bleeding, a wound that never fully heals. Why did I stay in churches I didn’t like for so long? Why did any of us? Because we loved the people there, and we had been taught God was big enough for all of us and we had the audacity to take those lessons at their word.” P 72-73

“Love is political when it is radical. Faith is political when it believes in something better. Hope is political when it looks for something more.” P 94

“I guess I could have stayed—at my church and in my marriage—if I was willing to be silent. If I was willing to sit in the pew, hold my thoughts close to my chest, and never even gently nudge over a table. I’m ashamed that Charlottesville was my tipping point. White privilege is a hell of a drug.” P 118

“But in this workshop, I hear Patrice’s words and wonder if Christians who insist that flesh is sinful have got it all wrong. If we believe our bodies are God-made, then binding them, restricting them, forcing them into molds that we struggle against, that’s not scripture, that’s repression. Faith in America as it exists and now it is practiced in the heartland is more about control than it is about freedom.” P 133

“Once, while I was lamenting the loss of politically neutral space in the wake of the 2016 election, a friend kindly told me that for people who are queer, or trans, or people of color, no space has been politically neutral. I was just privileged enough to not see it for a while. The point, he said, was not to beat myself up about this but to ask myself what I was going to do. America’s broken divide. America’s complicated Christianity. These deep wounds I’ve been probing have always been bleeding.” P 134