Keri Lynn
hate faith
I was recently tagged on a very disturbing Facebook post by Dr. Mark Naison, Fordham University scholar in New York City. It was about a dear friend of his, Keri Lynn, a kindergarten teacher in Long Island, New York. She also happens to be a stage four cancer survivor, a mother, a wife, and a faithful Christian.
The post led me to Keri Lynn’s open letter to the leadership of the Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Aquebogue, New York, a religious space she has left, allegedly due to constant harassment, a reckless disregard for her health, and blatant sexism from the male-dominated leadership.
I shook with anger and sadness as I read Lynn’s letter, which felt like a final act of trying to make peace with what had become, as she described it, a war-like atmosphere. As a Christian myself, I am not surprised by what the letter said. I quite literally grew up in the church, as we say, and even as a very little boy I was terrified and traumatized, time and again, by many of the belief systems and human-created doctrines that seemed to govern our every move.
What I recall most about church is the constant and ugly judgment, the lengthy checklists to those who were doomed for the fiery pits of hell, and how we were told in one breath that God is all-loving and all-forgiving but in the other that he (always a he) is vengeful and prone to wreaking havoc.
So you can imagine how I felt as I read Lynn’s letter, of her struggles with chemotherapy, of how she was mocked for taking yoga and seeking other alternatives to deal with the physical, spiritual, and emotional devastation that is cancer. How it got so bad that Lynn simply stopped going to church.
It got so bad that Lynn simply stopped going to church. I understood why, because I also rejected organized religion for reasons like these.
I understood why, because I also rejected organized religion for reasons like these. During my college years, I watched people who called themselves Christian aggressively attack the very basic civil rights gains of the 1960s (as they still do to this day), blast women and their abortion rights (as they still do to this day), and routinely condemn LGBTQ+ folks to hell, simply for who they were, as they still do today.
The word “sin” is tossed around a lot by people Lynn rightfully refers to as “Bible Bullies” and, sure enough, the male-dominated leadership at her church sent Lynn a letter basically expelling her from membership.
This is the sad and cruel joke of organized religion on our planet. Again, I am a Christian, but I only came back many years after rejecting organized religions because I understood there was a huge difference between being spiritual and being religious. Spirituality is love. It is what this world needs. It honors and respects everyone for who they are, equally.
Religion, as often practiced now and through history, is a convenient partner of oppression, and can easily become what I call hate faith. In other words, if you do not agree with everything a Bible Bully believes is sin, then that Bible Bully will want nothing to do with you, and may even speak language filled with hate and violence—the opposite of what Jesus Christ was supposed to be about.
America is a nation of millions of people who claim to be Christian yet find it easy to hate or blame people who happen to be Jewish or Muslim or Black or immigrant or disabled or queer or poor. And, well, God forbid if you are a woman, even a woman with stage four cancer, like Keri Lynn. Words like compassion and love and kindness fly out of the window.
This is why I tell people I am spiritual, not religious. This is why I attend a super-progressive church in New York City, where I have lived for years. It is a place where all people are welcome, where women are the majority ministers and are treated as equals, and where the church actually does real service work in the community.
Much of my life, I have seen the opposite. Indeed, as a Black person I am very clear that my ancestors were kidnapped from Africa with two weapons: a gun and a Bible. My ancestors were told, through the use and manipulation of Bible scriptures over and over, that they were meant to be slaves, that they had to be obedient no matter what—just like the Bible has been used since to bring down hate on women, queer people, so others.
What Keri Lynn is really saying in her open letter to her former church is that this is actually about power, about the need to control people—how they think, how they behave. This mindset, which has been front-and-center since the Reagan years of the 1980s, has led to the toxic reality television show with the current occupant in the White House.
Bend and twist history, bend and twist the Bible, bend and twist logic, anything to stay in power, at the expense of people like Keri Lynn, as if her very courageous battle with cancer does not even matter. But it does, and she does.