Tonight you and I are in a minister’s office, somewhere in Texas. We’re chatting before I go out to speak to the waiting crowd. You don’t like these steepled, echoing rooms. You come with me anyway. You sit in the front pew and listen to me talk about God and the hunches I have about her.

You think I’m wrong to believe there’s a God. But it’s what you love and need me for. You borrow my faith like we borrow our next-door neighbor’s Wi-Fi.

This minister said something that made you feel safe. You looked down at your hands. You said, “I don’t feel comfortable in churches. When I was little, I knew I was gay. I had to choose church, my mom, and God. Or myself. I chose myself.”

“Damn right,” the minister said. She cleared her throat. I smiled at her. But “Damn right” wasn’t exactly it.

I turned to you. Touched your hand. I said, “Babe, wait. Yes. When you were little, your heart turned away from the church in order to protect itself. You remained whole instead of letting them dismember you. You held on to who you were born to be instead of contorting yourself into who they told you to be. You stayed true to yourself instead of abandoning yourself.

“When you shut down your heart to that church, you did it to protect God in you. You did it to keep your wild. You thought that decision made you bad. But that decision made you holy.

“Abby, what I’m trying to say is that when you were very little you did not choose yourself instead of God and church. You chose yourself and God, instead of church. When you chose yourself, you chose God. When you walked away from church, you took God with you. God is in you.

“And tonight—you, me, and God—we’re just visiting church. We three came back for a visit, to offer the folks here hope by telling stories about brave people like you who fight their whole lives to stay as whole and free as God made them. When we’re done tonight, you and I will go, and God will go with us.”

I thought you’d looked at me every way possible. But now. The way you look at me, in this minister’s office, is new. Eyes wide. Watery and red. The minister disappeared when you looked at me like that. Just you, me, and God there.

“Wow,” you said.

Like that time your “G” necklace got a knot in it.

You stood there, by the bed, grumbling.

Threatening to throw it away.

I asked you for the chain. Held it in my hand,

Almost invisible—delicate white gold, impossible.

You left.

I kept at it for a while.

Impressing myself with my patience.

And then—one tug in the right place—it all came undone.

You walked back into our room,

I held it up, proud.

“Wow,” you said.

You bent down, and I clasped it back around you.

I kissed your cheek.

May we lay more elegant ideas around our children’s necks.

When I was a young mother, exhausted, isolated, and dripping with children, I got a postcard from a local church offering free babysitting during the service. My then husband and I attended the following Sunday and found coffee, breakfast, music, a nursery, inspiring speakers, and welcoming couples everywhere. This church had identified every challenge in a young family’s life and fixed them all for an hour. It felt like heaven. At first.

Then one Sunday, the preacher started discussing the “sins” of homosexuality and abortion as if they were the pillars upon which this church was built. My insides caught fire. After the service, I contacted the preacher and set up a meeting. I asked him, “Why—if your church is based on the Jesus who spoke incessantly about orphans and widows, demilitarization, immigrants, the sick, the outcast, and the poor—are you choosing abortion and gayness to hang your hat upon?”

After many circular arguments, he looked at me, sighed, and smiled. He said, “You are a smart woman. What you say makes sense—in the ways of the world. But God’s ways are not our ways. You must not lean on your own understanding. You seem to have a good heart; but the heart is fickle. Faith is about trusting.”

Do not think. Do not feel. Do not know. Mistrust your own heart and mind, and trust us. That is faith.

He wanted me to believe that trusting him was trusting God. But he was not my connection to God. My heart and mind were my connections to God. If I shut those down, I’d be trusting the men who led this church instead of trusting God. I’d be relying on their understanding.

The thing that gets me thinking and questioning most deeply is a leader who warns me not to think or question. I won’t passively outsource my faith and my children’s faith to others. I am a mother, and I have responsibilities. To all children, not just my own.

When hate or division is being spread in our religious institutions, we have three choices:

1. Remain quiet, which means we agree.

2. Loudly challenge power, and work like hell to make change.

3. Take our families and leave.

But there is no more silently disagreeing while poison is being pumped from pulpits and seeping beneath our children’s skin.

So many parents have come to me and said, “My kid just told me she’s gay. We’ve been sitting in this church for a decade. How must she have felt hearing what our leaders thought of her and assuming her mother agreed? How do I undo what she heard there? How do I convince her that I never really agreed with any of it, and that she’s perfect just the way she is?”

The God memos we get as kids are carved into our hearts. They are hard as hell to buff out.

Everybody owes it to herself, to her people, to the world, to examine what she’s been taught to believe, especially if she’s going to choose beliefs that condemn others. She has to ask herself questions like “Who benefits from me believing this?”

After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time.

They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan—who, as governor of California had signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country—began using the language from the new memo. Evangelicals threw their weight behind him, and voted in a bloc for the first time to elect President Reagan. The Religious Right was born. The face of the movement was the “pro-life and pro-family values” stance of millions, but the blood running through the movement’s veins was the racism and greed of a few.

That is how white evangelicals became the most powerful and influential voting bloc in the United States and the fuel of the American white supremacy engine. That’s how evangelical leaders get away with the stunning hypocrisy of keeping their money, racism, misogyny, classism, nationalism, weapons, war, and corruption while purporting to lead in the name of a man who dedicated his life to ending war, serving orphans and widows, healing the sick, welcoming immigrants, valuing women and children, and giving power and money away to the poor. That is also why all a political candidate must do to earn evangelical allegiance is claim to be antiabortion and antigay—even if the candidate is a man who hates and abuses women, who stockpiles money and rejects immigrants, who incites racism and bigotry, who lives in every way antithetical to Jesus’s teachings. Jesus, the cross, and the identity “pro-life” are just shiny decals evangelical leaders slap on top of their own interests. They just keep pushing the memo: “Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t know. Just be against abortion and gays and keep on voting. That’s how to live like Jesus.” All the devil has to do to win is convince you he’s God.

My evangelical friends insist to me that their opposition to abortion and queerness was born in them. They are sincere and convinced. But I wonder. We all believe our religious beliefs were written on our hearts and in the stars. We never stop to consider that most of the memos we live by were actually written by highly motivated men.

I don’t know if I call myself a Christian anymore. That label suggests certainty, and I have none. It suggests the desire to convert others, and that’s the last thing I want to do. It suggests exclusive belonging, and I’m not sure I belong anywhere anymore. Part of me wants to peel that label off, set it down, and try to meet each person soul to soul, without any layers between us.

But I find myself unable to let go fully, because to wash my hands of the Jesus story is to abandon something beautiful to money-hungry hijackers. It would be like surrendering the concept of beauty to the fashion industry or the magic of sexuality to internet porn dealers. I want beauty, I want sex, I want faith. I just don’t want the hijackers’ commodified, poisonous versions. Nor do I want to identify myself with hijackers.

So I will say this: I remain compelled by the Jesus story. Not as history meant to reveal what happened long ago, but as poetry meant to illuminate a revolutionary idea powerful enough to heal and free humanity now.

There was a time on Earth—like every other time on Earth—when humanity had turned against itself. A few hoarded unspeakable riches while children starved. People raped and robbed and enslaved one another and waged wars against one another for power and money.

There were a few (there are always a few) wise enough to see this order of things as unjust, untrue, and unbeautiful. They saw that killing one another for money is absurd because what lies within each person is more valuable than gold. They saw that slavery and hierarchy are evil because no one is born more worthy of freedom and power than another. They saw that violence and greed destroy the powerful just as they destroy their victims: because to dishonor another’s humanity is to bury one’s own.

They saw that humanity’s only hope for salvation was a truer, more beautiful order of things.

They asked themselves:

What kind of story might help people see beyond the lie they’ve been taught that some are worth less and others more?

What kind of story might return people to their wild—to what they knew of love before they were trained to fear one another?

What kind of story might inspire people to revolt against and live beyond the religiously dominated hierarchical machine that was killing them?

Here was their idea:

Let’s rethink the stories we’ve been telling about God. Let’s dare to imagine that God is less like the powerful men who run the world. Let’s imagine God is actually like the person those rulers just killed. Let’s imagine that God is a vulnerable baby, born to a poor single mother, among the group most despised by the religious and political elite. He was the least of these back then. They pointed to him. God is in him, they said.

Had these wise storytellers lived in modern America, they might point to a poor, black transgender woman or an asylum-seeking toddler alone in a detainment center and say: God is in this one.

This one—the one on the outermost ring of the rankings we’ve made up about who matters. This one—the one farthest from whom we have centered.

This one is made of our same flesh, blood, and spirit.

When we hurt her, we hurt our own kin.

This one is One of us.

This one is Us.

So let us protect her. Let us bring her gifts and kneel in front of her. Let us fight for her and her family to have every good thing we want for ourselves and our families. Let us love this one as we love ourselves.

The point of this story was never that This One is more God than the rest. The point is that if we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we begin to heal.

The Jesus idea is that justice casts the widest net possible so that every last one of us is inside. Then there are no others—there is only Us. Inside one net we are free from our cages of fear and hate and, instead, bound to one another. The revolutionary idea that every last one of us is both held and free: That is our salvation.