Growing up evangelical required a preoccupation with external behaviors and moral performance, or what I now understand as sin management. The more you controlled, hid, or projected your external behaviors onto others, the closer you were to God. Leaving evangelicalism meant finding deeper streams of spiritual wisdom. Instead of this hyper-fixation on what I was doing, inner Christianity helped me recognize God’s eternal presence at the core of my being.

Following the example of other authoritarians, Donald Trump wants us to burn cars. He wants us to throw rocks. He wants images of chaos — especially violence against police or National Guard troops — to flood the evening news. These are precisely the results he wants: to manufacture chaos as a means of justifying repression. We can’t give him what he wants.

I realize that a lot of our episodes lean toward the scholarly and the erudite, but this is not one of those. This conversation is personal, real, and raw. In fact, this is our 90th episode on Holy Heretics, and it may just be our most candid, open, and vulnerable conversation to date as we discuss how to heal and find peace with yourself post-evangelicalism.

If the United States is to survive the MAGA cult, it will be through the embodied actions, wisdom, spirituality, and lived experience of Black women who understand what it takes to resist, regroup, and offer the world an alternative community of justice.