Frustration, fear, and anger are often the product of a lack of understanding. I was feeling a lot of frustration, fear, and anger about the world that seemed to be developing before my eyes. Having grown up in rural Kansas I would have said that my upbringing to an extent was conservative Christian. The speech and actions of professing Christians around the nation in the recent past are antithetical to the Jesus that I know and loved. This is when I took a deep dive into the prominent views being thrown about in society today: Christian Nationalism, White Christian Nationalism, Christian Right, Evangelicalism and Christianity as a whole. What I learned reinforced the fact that we need to define our words. What conservatism meant to me is not what conservatism means to Christian Nationalists, White Christian Nationalists (yes, apparently there is a slight difference to some), Christian Right, Evangelicalism and mainstream Western Christianity. Apparently, I am a liberal. I had no idea. But the liberals say I am a conservative. The moderates say I am conservative and liberal. At the end of the day, I belong to no political group save God’s.
My past had given me some insight into Western Christianity as a Religion versus a way of life as a true disciple of Jesus our Messiah. My first confrontation with the dynamics of mainstream Western Christianity came as an undergraduate in religious studies at Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, Kansas in the mid 1980’s. Having just returned to the States from serving in Japan as a missionary with OMS teaching English, I enrolled as a Religion major and soon was babysitting the Head of the Religion Department’s children and even teaching some of the religion classes. Then the confrontation occurred that was beginning of the end of my time at Kansas Wesleyan. Dr. K, the head of the Religion Department, was teaching the flood story and comparing it to the Epic of Gilgamesh. He asked which came first the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh and I raised my hand along with many others. Dr. K called on me to answer. I replied that the flood story was the definitive narration to which he explained that no, the Epic of Gilgamesh was. I said that he could not prove that it was, but neither could I prove that the Bible was, and I believed in my heart that the Bible is the narrative that should be the one we put prominence on. Dr. K responded by calling me an ignorant protestant girl from a small town. Subsequently he ordered everyone in the department to freeze me out. Which they did. For two weeks no one would speak to me. A month later I left college. But that was not the end of my interaction with Dr. K. Since he was my advisor, he had to sign a piece of paper stating that I could terminate my classes. When I presented the paper for him to sign, he yelled “No” and hit me in the upper arm. Thankfully my mother had come with me, and she stepped into the room at that time. When he saw her, he became very pleasant and signed the paper. Less than a year later he was asked to leave.