I'm on a journey of deconstructing fundamentalism

    In lieu of an introductory blog post, I'm just going to jump right into blogging, and let you get to know me as we go along. Frankly, I may or not have ADHD, and writing in an organized fashion about anything other than what's specifically on my mind, like if I tried to write an introduction of myself, will simply not hold my attention and is not something I have the motivation for. I am starting this new anonymous blog to talk about books and breakdowns, like the blog name suggests. Today, we'll be talking about the breakdown side of things, in other words really just what's on my mind.

    I guess I said I wouldn't introduce myself, but there's a little background info you might need about my identity to understand what's going on. I'm a woman in my late 20s, and I work as a STEM education researcher, focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, so I'm trained to reflect on and acknowledge my positionality, which is probably why I feel the need to open up with this brief introduction. I was raised evangelical Christian by my mom and dad, whom I love and am very close to. The three of us have gone on similar paths of deconstructing our religious beliefs over the last few years, and it's been important and useful to me to have family support in that process. My older brother, whom I also love, recently moved to a European country with his wife and child as missionaries.

    There's a lot for me to unpack in this experience of simultaneously being in the midst of a journey of questioning my religious upbringing and coming to terms with my changing identity and beliefs while also watching my brother, sister-in-law, and perhaps most painfully, my young nephew move to a faraway country, but I'm going to focus on one small (but emblematic) piece of the story today. They send regular update emails to their mailing list of family and friends. I could write a book just about my thoughts on Christian-ese and how little I find their emails to tell me even though the emails have so many words, but I want to discuss one specific de-identified excerpt of the email I saw today.

    They wrote something along the lines of, "In this patriarchal society, it's cool that [husband] had the opportunity to elevate [wife] as a co-minister."

    On the one hand, that sentence made me think, "Yeah, cool, I'm glad they're acknowledging patriarchal systems, and consciously thinking about the ways they can and do push back."

    But, on the other hand, I felt weird about that sentence.

    My sister-in-law is a person in her own right (everyone is), and the wording of that sentence made me feel like the two of them (or whoever wrote the email really) were erasing, or at least minimizing, my sister-in-law's agency. The sentence frames my brother as basically opening the door for his wife to exist in the space. I do think it's very important for folks with privileged identities along some given dimension to use their privilege to improve access for those with minoritized identities in that dimension. However, I also think it's paternalistic to minimize or ignore the agency of minoritized folks who also can and do push back on systems and carve out space for themselves. Thinking down that line, I also think further, past just the issue of patriarchy or gendered systems. My brother and sister-in-law are white Christian Americans who moved to a majority non-Christian country as missionaries, with, I assume, the primary goal of converting people to Christianity, but also secondary goals of positively impacting the lives of people they interact with. You can see from their language the idea that they're interested in challenging the patriarchal system of the country they moved to. Of course, it's good to challenge inequitable systems, but I once again see a layer of ignoring or minimizing the agency of minoritized folks in this space. Not only is their sentence minimizing my sister-in-law's agency in doing her own challenging of the patriarchy, but it also minimizes the agency of the women already living in the country, doing their own work in their own space. My brother and sister-in-law may or may not be doing work aligned with the goals of the people already living in the country, but their email update sure makes it sound like they're not working with a diverse spread of the people already living there. In short, I've used a lot of words to say things that many have already said better than I, like, "Nothing about us without us", or just generally to critique evangelical Christian missionary work as paternalistic and colonialist.