Grand Rapids is a weird place to call home. Today it’s all breweries and hipsters and weed dispensaries and overpriced apartments. But growing up, it was Bland Rapids. A place so boring and unimaginative that corporations would come to town to trial new products. If the straight-laced, God-fearing people of Grand Rapids, Michigan, will buy it, anyone will!
But it wasn’t just a boring place to live, it was the buckle of the state’s Bible belt. The sort of place where you would overhear people debating theological points in line for your latte and where it was perfectly acceptable to ask strangers what church they attended.
And I was a part of it.
I wasn’t just trying to get along. I bought into it. I took up the practice of reading through the Bible every year (I successfully completed it twice). I went to Bible studies and prayer groups and Christian music concerts. Having read all the Left Behind books and watched the movies, I read Tim LaHaye’s Mind Siege, which prophesied America’s undoing through secularization and preached the message of Christian oppression. I even went to an event at a church where they had a bunch of pre-teens pretend to get “tortured” as part of some apocalyptic underground church.
I was a part of it until I wasn’t.
That door opened unexpectedly, one late summer morning. Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast in one of the country’s worst natural disasters, claiming somewhere around 1,800 lives.
Our government teacher thought it was important that we get a bit of news directly from the hose. Bleary eyed in the first class of the day, we watched CNN reporting from the Superdome in New Orleans, where thousands of Americans had been left in absolute squalor, abandoned by the government, left to cry on cable news hoping for Superman.
You probably already know it: The overwhelming majority were Black and working class.
A reporter spoke with one woman who was in tears, begging for help. She described feeling unsafe due to the presence of “rapermen” in the Superdome.
My classmates laughed.
They laughed at this woman.
And you know what? My teacher, a white man with a comb-over and a brown suit that would’ve sold for a twenty dollar bill at a secondhand shop, laughed, too.
It’s not my point here to litigate the media’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina or whether or not reports of crime in the aftermath were overblown. Instead, it’s to call into question the reaction from my classmates—almost entirely white and comfortably middle class. A set of Americans all but guaranteed to never have a CNN microphone shoved in their face as they beg the nation for help.
When I shared this with a friend who attended the same school (but wasn’t present in the classroom), he had a different take. His suggestion was that when people are uncomfortable, they need a way to deal with that tension—and one coping mechanism is laughter. I accept the earnestness of his suggestion, but in a community that’s so monochromatic, any difference gets boiled down to one of two things: a threat, or a joke.
Whose Christianity was this? Jesus said that any deed committed toward “the least of these,” we did unto him. And here they were. Laughing.
In high school, our Bible class teachers were constantly training us to become warriors for God, ready to defend against the big questions: Where is God in moments of disaster? Why does God allow bad things to happen? In this moment, I wasn’t wondering where God was or why they allowed bad things to happen. I was wondering about the values of my fellow Christians, laughing, debating whether or not Katrina was a punishment for the perceived wickedness of New Orleans.
It was settled. I wanted something different. A different version of Christianity, a different political outlook. By the time Barack Obama shot into the spotlight in 2007, I was ready—desperate for a kinder, more optimistic and inclusive vision of who we could be as a nation.
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