By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his weekly Substack newsletter
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” – William Butler Yeats
When I was twenty-one, I tried to take all of Bill Tuttle’s history courses. He was a middle-aged white guy with bushy eyebrows and out-of-control curls who wore tie-dye t-shirts to class. He was warm, welcoming and had a passion for justice. I was enthralled by all his lectures on the Black Freedom Struggle.
What’s weird is that, at the time, I was a white Christian nationalist.
I was an undergrad at the University of Kansas and I was mastering the art of compartmentalizing. I read Dr. King’s speeches and studied the history of housing segregation. I was learning so much, and yet, I kept all that important information in books, in classrooms, in papers, and in the safe, secure corners of my head and heart.
I had compartments for other things too. I partied with my roommates on Friday and Saturday nights. A lot of beer was involved. My relationship with God was reserved for Sunday mornings at church and Wednesday afternoons at Campus Crusade for Christ meetings. A lot of bible was involved.
I was 1,500 miles from home, out on the Kansas prairie, discovering all sorts of new stuff and storing most of it away because it did not fit into my neat little white Christian nationalist puzzle.
I remember one night when my friend Joel from Owatonna, Minnesota invited me to come listen to gold medalist Greg Louganis speak at the student union. It was right after Louganis came out of the closet and told Barbara Walters that he was HIV positive.
Greg Louganis humanized sexuality in a way that scrutinized the hetero-patriarchy I learned in locker rooms, bars and bible studies.
Greg Louganis laid it all out on the table. He offered me a rare glimpse of what it looks like to de-compartmentalize and live congruently.
I remember being compelled by what Greg Louganis shared – and how he shared it. But I was not ready to integrate it into my life.
So I hid it away deep down inside of me on some shelf or nook or cabinet to quarantine it from my personal relationship with the white GOP Jesus.
Most of this was subconscious. I was coping.
Compartmentalizing kept me socially and financially safe.
Compartmentalizing also kept me spiritually and emotionally caged.
At that time, I was convinced that compartmentalizing all the contradictions of my life would not threaten the only thing that mattered: my salvation in heaven. I had memorized this verse from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans and it served as a shield from any uncertainty:
If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
My pastors taught me that it was faith – not works – that saved me for eternity. All I had to do was believe that Jesus was the Lord of my life and of the whole world. No matter how many contradictions I was accumulating inside of me.
Thirty years ago, Bill Tuttle was not the only older white man in my life. The director of Campus Crusade for Christ at KU was a guy named Scott who I really liked. He was nice, he was quick to laugh, and he loved sports just like I did.
Scott would consistently invite me to join him at the student union for lunch and, every time, he would open up the same evangelistic tract that had an image of a throne with a cross over it.
Step 1: The Christian Adventure | Cru
Scott would remind me that everyone has a throne, a kind of control center of life, where our intellect, emotions, and will intersect.
Scott would remind me that either self or Christ is on that throne.
Scott would ask me who was on my throne: self or Christ?
Scott would ask me who was in control of my life: self or Christ?
Scott and all the other white Christian nationalists in my life taught me to never trust my self. They said I was stained with sin from birth.
Scott and all the other white Christian nationalists in my life quoted the book of Isaiah where it says that we are all unclean and that even our good deeds are like “filthy rags.” They told me that this verse refers to a woman “on the rag” during her monthly period. They said that even our good deeds are disgusting to God.
The self-loathing was a sick set-up for the salvation pitch. My only hope for heaven was to be cleansed by the shed blood of Jesus.
I would walk home from those lunch meetings at the student union feeling totally different than I did after I listened to Greg Louganis tell his story. My shame was flaming because according to Scott’s framing, my self was definitely on the throne – which meant that I was supposed to be doing other things with my life.
If Christ was truly on the throne, I knew that I was supposed to reject the autobiography of Greg Louganis and dismiss the “secular” social justice of Bill Tuttle.
If Christ was truly on the throne, like Scott said it should be, then I knew that I was supposed to stop drinking beer, maintain perfect church attendance and start taking my roommates out to lunch to ask them who was on their throne.
A decade after our throne summits at the student union, I was teaching and coaching at a large public school in Southern California and volunteering in the high school ministry at Saddleback Church, but I could not shake that awful feeling I had walking home from campus after my sessions with Scott.
My soul was yearning for more truth, beauty, depth and meaning.
My soul also sensed that Scott’s framing was totally effed up.
So I went to seminary and studied other theologians and bible scholars who weren’t white Christian nationalists.
Eventually, I learned about the original context of Isaiah’s filthy rags. God was not disgusted by some sort of original sin. God was scandalized by ruling elites who built their society on exclusion and exploitation.
The filthy rags referred to those who boasted of their good deeds while never lifting a finger to dismantle the dirty system designed to benefit them.
The filthy rags reference came out of the hyper-patriarchal context of the ancient world that used feminine products to describe the disgusting things that men do.
Some things haven’t changed.
Eventually, I also circled back to that verse from Romans that said we must confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord. In my studies, I learned that, in the first century, there was only one Lord and Savior of the world: Caesar.
St. Paul was subversively saying that if Jesus was Lord, then Caesar was not.
As it turns out, Jesus came to save people from empire. Read the Gospels and it’s easy to see that Jesus’ “heavenly reign” was diametrically opposed to all of Caesar’s sweaty jock-strap supremacy stories that scripted a human hierarchy of value, placing Caesar himself at the apex. Everyone knew their place, from wealthy landowners, soldiers, compradors and other colonized sell-outs, all the way down to women, children, those with disabilities, debt-obligated servants and crucified criminals.
In these sacred texts, the real lord and savior of the world does not sit on a throne, but hangs from a cross. In one episode, it says that this crucified lord rises up to incarnate all the hungry, thirsty, sick, naked, unhoused and incarcerated people of the world – and that the only way to worship this Love supreme is to live in ruthless solidarity with them.
In the first century, if you confessed with your mouth that Jesus is the lord, you would be publicly proclaiming that Something Else was greater than Caesar. Your subversive lifestyle of love – pledging allegiance to colonized people at the bottom of the rung – would speak even louder than these words. You would be considered a traitor. It might even get you crucified.
White Christian nationalism compartmentalizes all this essential anti-imperial stuff out of the Christ story. This crusader theology was invented to sustain the supremacist status quo. It pivots on a universalized notion of “sin” that obsesses over gender and represses sexuality in order to avoid grappling with what MLK called empire’s “giant triplets of evil:” racism, materialism and militarism.
However, one of the big problems that I have with liberal Christianity is that it has a strong tendency to compartmentalize all the anti-imperial stuff out of the Christ story too. The sincere commitment to reclaim gender and sexuality from the crusaders is crucial and commendable, but, too often, in my own experience, liberal framings of Christian faith are also completely quarantined from confronting Caesar’s human hierarchy of value.
It’s one thing to deconstruct crusader theology.
It’s another thing to decompartmentalize everything else.
We can tear down the old conservative structure, but somehow, there are still little nooks and crannies and crevices that conceal soul-atrophying supremacy stories from our process.
Zionism is a great example.
Before October 7, 2023, why wasn’t I screaming from the rooftops to protest Israel’s violent occupation, settlement expansion and segregation policies pulverizing Palestinians?
Because, for decades, Zionism had been hiding in closets, cloaking itself in the fake fur of protecting and saving Jewish people – all while Palestinians were being abducted and locked away in cold prison cells carved out of stolen land.
Zionism, like all of Caesar’s supremacy stories, does not do its dirty work by sitting on the throne, but by hiding in the unswept corners of our hearts and minds.
I do not believe that personal healing and collective liberation will come about by dethroning like the crusaders.
I do not believe that personal healing and collective liberation will come about by deconstructing like the liberals either.
This is about Something Else.
I believe that personal healing and collective liberation will come when we commit to decompartmentalizing like an addict in recovery.
We take inventory of every hidden thing. We lay it all out on the table. We scrutinize it under the light of a Love supreme.
This is a long process of integration that requires large doses of compassionate curiosity and a few comrades courageous enough to dig down into the dark corners of the soul.
This process will not make us perfect.
But it will make us free.
Radical Discipleship 