[music]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I'm Ngofeen Mputubwele. I produce stories on this show about how we all use language and music and theology, and even law to order the world we live in. I read a memoir this year by a woman named, Jeanna Kadlec. She and I aren't from the same place, I'm from Tennessee, and she's from the Midwest, but we grew up in the same corner of what we call the Capital C Church. When I went to interview her, our shared background came up very quickly. Before we get started, I just want to sing something. [laughs]

Jeanna Kadlec: Yes, a benediction of the last thing.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: [laughs] I don't if it's a benediction. It's more like, I want to sing something and then see if you can join in. [laughs] Do you know this one?

Father Abraham had many sons

Many sons had Father Abraham

I am one of them and so are you

So let's just praise the Lord

Right arm

[laughter]

Jeanna Kadlec: Because you did that, I'm going to sing something to you in turn that you may also well know for you.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Yes.

Jeanna Kadlec:

I am C

I am C H

I am C H R I S T I A N

And I have C H R I S T

In my H E A R T

And I will L I V E E T E R N A L L Y

I am C--

Ngofeen Mputubwele: For sure. For sure. Oh, wow. That is the right one. That's the right one. Oh my God.

Jeanna Kadlec: I love the Es with which we both pulled that out of our bodies and did not need to think.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: For Jeanna, some of the associations that come with evangelicalism are very, very warm.

Jeanna Kadlec: To me, it really goes back to being in my mom's red station wagon, on the gravel country road to church in rural Iowa, and listening to contemporary Christian music at the time, listening to children's worship tapes like that. My mom, she made sure that we were surrounded by it.

[music]

Ngofeen Mputubwele: The signs that Jeanna rubbed up against the stories she was raised in came really early.

Jeanna Kadlec: It was just everywhere. Eve is sinful and so are you. You are one of Eve's daughters like, "Do not tempt your brothers to sin." I couldn't tell you the first times I heard those. I definitely had early experiences of it starting in sixth grade was the first time I started getting pulled aside by church ladies for purportedly dressing inappropriately, which the thing is I could never cover up to anyone's satisfaction.

It happened in public sometimes, but my parents were never brought in for these conversations, were never informed that they'd happened.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Jeanna Kadlec's memoir is called Heretic. Just a note to listeners, this conversation touches on suicide.

Jeanna Kadlec: Kyle was seasick on the whale-watching tour during our honeymoon. He didn't take Dramamine because I didn't have any, I don't get seasick, and I didn't know he was prone to seasickness. We had never been on that kind of boat together. "How do you not have any?'" He asked me. His voice is slow from the nausea. "My mom always has it." I had no response to that.

I leaned over the rail watching the whale leap in and out of the Atlantic, which stretched out as far as the eye could see. The vast expanse fell endless, breathless like if I closed my eyes, it would carry me away. The breeze rucked my dress up around me, threatening a Marilyn moment, but for the first time in my life, I could have cared less. I was in my body, present, unself-conscious in a new way, in a way that was foreign to me, and finally, comfortable.

I didn't have to be on guard about being overly modest. I didn't have to be on guard about men and their desires. I had a husband. I was claimed. I was married. I was safe. Marriage in the church means safety, like churches are organized around relationships, and married couples in the hierarchy are at the top, and single women are suspect. If I was married, I was safe, and if I was married to a guy like this, I was especially safe.

I could be as intellectual and smart and academic and career-driven as I wanted, and because this man had signed off on my decisions, no one could say shit to me.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: What were the early signs to you that marriage wasn't going to be the thing that you thought it was going to be?

Jeanna Kadlec: The sense of internal pressure that I felt to perform domesticity, to make sure that he was okay at all times. It felt like it was on me to make sure that the house was okay, that everything was taken care of, that we had groceries, that the bills were paid, and then I also was having to be performing in the bedroom.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Jeanna writes about that time in her book and the passages are heavy, but as her marriage is falling apart and she's doubting her place in church, something else is happening. She's falling in love with a friend who's a woman and discovering that she's queer. You have this real struggle that's like, "I can't leave this." Not just, "I can't leave a marriage because leaving a marriage is bad."

It seems like part of it is you being like, "If I believe what I believe, if I believe who the Lord is, and I believe the promises he's made, and I've committed my life to him, then what does it mean if I break this vow? What am I saying about God? Nothing bad is "happening". What's my problem?"

Jeanna Kadlec: Basically, what you just said articulated one of the worst years/the worst year of my life because it felt like such a breaking point in my faith. Even in all of my years of faith and hearing so many people I knew in college be like, "Why does God let war happen? If God exists, why do bad things happen in the world?" Those kinds of questions never trip me up.

I always had an answer. I always had some dense theology for them, but this question of why His plan would be for me to marry this guy if I was a lesbian? Also, why that would be His plan for my husband? My husband's just this really devout, solid dude. Why would that be his plan for him? I just kept getting tripped up on that, how could this happen? Meanwhile, my mental health is rapidly disintegrating. I was in a really dark place where I just ultimately became really convinced that it would be better for me to end my life than to stay married because I was convinced that ending my life would be more God-honoring than getting a divorce would be because I could, at least, die still in this marriage.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Not having broken vow.

Jeanna Kadlec: Not having broken it and not having broken that vow to my husband, not having broken that vow to God. It's me and Jesus, and then me and my husband, and then everybody else.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: I feel like someone might think that the issue is, "Okay, so you made this vow to God and you don't want to break that because breaking that is against the rules, and that's what's hard." It strikes me as like, that's not the problem.

Jeanna Kadlec: Something I didn't realize until I left my relationship with Jesus. I say left the church as a shorthand and what I really mean is that I broke up with God because that sounds, I think, a little bit extreme for people, but believers know what that means. One of the things that still struck me was, I don't even know how to think without God as an intermediary. I don't even know how to articulate what I want without checking in. I felt so stripped down and just raw.

Who can't articulate any single thing that they want? I felt like I was starting over from total scratch, just crying on the floor because I didn't feel like I could pray. I don't know how to live without God. I don't know how to live without Jesus. I don't know how to live without this way of life informing my every day. Who am I without this?

Ngofeen Mputubwele: You leave the marriage and you describe experiencing exile from the church.

Jeanna Kadlec: Yes. I was cut off and ghosted, basically, to varying degrees, by almost everyone. That's the other thing, is that very few people-- I actually don't think anyone really had the guts to say it to my face. If someone was going to cut me off, have the guts to stab me in the front, don't stab me in the back. These are women who I loved and who I trusted and who I wanted to process things with and talk things through and have that space to work things out, do life with, as the saying goes.

They just never responded, which was a message in and of itself. The church is broken. It cannot be fixed from the inside. Evangelicalism is rotten, shot through to the core with infectious hatred that cannot be undone one person at a time. The institution is designed to work against women, against queers, against anyone who isn't white, against anyone who wakes up while still plugged in. It's designed to press on us until we are crushed within it, unrecognizable to ourselves.

Leave it behind, turn it down, go build something new.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: You decided to leave your faith completely behind. Why?

Jeanna Kadlec: It was partly a choice, and it was partly-- I will say it was partly not a choice because there wasn't space to exist as a divorced queer woman in the churches that I was in. Then, it was absolutely a choice for me to leave as fully as I did and for me to leave Christianity as fully as I did. Like I do talk about in the book, trying to go to I guess what we would call more liberal and more accepting churches that affirm women in leadership and women's ordination and that affirm racial justice and that affirm LGBTQ ordination and gay marriage and things like that.

I tried those churches and I just couldn't really allow myself that spaciousness. I really had to make a clean break in order to heal. These days, I don't pray to any Christian God, but it took me many, many years to start praying again. I am praying again.

Ngofeen Mputubwele: Jeanna Kadlec's memoir is called Heretic, and the passage she read referring to her ex-husband as Kyle, that's a pseudonym.

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