Protest as a Way of Life
An essay in pictures of a late-in-life protestor
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. One element of being a late-diagnosed autistic person is that I now have more information with which to evaluate my past. My undiagnosed and unsupported autism intersects with my devotion to the religious framework I was born into—which turned out to be more about politics than Christianity. If you appreciate my work, please consider liking, sharing, subscribing or supporting!
Over at STRONGWILLED, I have been writing about how the protests that erupted in 1968 across college campuses in the US sparked a reactionary movement known as white evangelicalism.1 I’ve written in this newsletter about how the Jesus Movement took off around this time period, and how it served to usher the radical Jesus-loving hippies into a staunchly conservative Christian patriarchal world.2 My parents both fall into this category of hippies-turned-Jesus Freaks (although to my knowledge, they never protested US foreign policy or any racist policies). By the time I was born (the third out of four children) they loved Dr. Dobson and other Christian experts that came from a white supremacist “positive eugenics” movement. In our home and in the churches where my dad preached, they focused on growing the white Christian patriarchal family through strict discipline and keeping your children out of the hands of liberals.
But to me, they just seemed like Jesus people. That’s what they said, and they re-iterated this to me over and over again, even as I heard the voice of Rush Limbaugh and end-times conspiracy “prophets” much more than I ever heard a reading from any of the gospels. I believed them and all the other evangelical Christians around me that following Jesus was the most important thing until the cognitive dissonance simply became too much. In the past decade have had to do the work to study the history to pinpoint what exactly I was born into: a white reactionary political movement that abuses children in order to promote its political aims.
But being little ol’ autistic me, for many years I took my parents and all the other evangelical Christians at their word that loving and following Jesus was the most important thing to them (and therefore, to me). I even went to Bible college and I studied the words of Jesus. And guess what? I loved him so much. He was so intense, and he was so mad at so many people for being hypocrites.3 He loved the poor. He had only unkind and rather terrifying things to say to the rich. He wanted everyone to love their neighbor, and this idea more than anything felt like a lightning bolt to my chest. That’s what I wanted too! The older I got the more I started to see how awful capitalism and evangelicalism was for people who weren’t just like me. And I felt like the world would be a better place if more people tried to follow Jesus and his ethics.
When I first started protesting my own government, I did it because I was so committed to taking the words of Jesus seriously. When we lived in Minneapolis, Krispin had joined a few Trayvon Martin protests but I had always stayed home with our toddler. We moved back to Portland in 2016, and once Trump was elected it seemed like there was SO much to be upset about, and very little we could actually do. So, I started protesting, mostly in my neighborhood.
Because I wanted to take the words of Jesus seriously, I had been living and working in refugee communities across the US for many years. Trump began targeting immigrants and Muslim refugees in particular almost immediately. I felt SO personally attacked by this, in part because I knew that 81% of white evangelicals had voted for Trump. My people were the ones behind this! So whenever I protested unjust laws that targeted immigrants and refugees, I invoked my personal faith, thinking it would reach its intended audience.
I loved protesting. I loved how physical it felt.4 Instead of just hopelessly reading endless news stories about Trump and whatever deranged thing he had said or promised to do, I could go out into the world, march and shout and hold my signs. I could gather with other folks and not feel so terrified and lonely. I could make my message heard. I could make a difference. Another world was possible, and it always felt like it was just within my reach. It was powerful, and it encouraged me to fight harder for what I believed in.
I loved putting Scriptures on protest signs—and there were a lot of really good ones to choose from! In my mind, as someone raised to be a biblical literalist, this was the absolute best case I could make for getting white evangelicals to care about their marginalized neighbors.
I started to realize my parents didn’t seem particularly happy about my involvement in protests. Like many evangelical parents, they were very involved in policing my activities and even as an adult they let me know when they weren’t happy with me and my “public witness.” But it was all rather confusing to me. I couldn’t quite figure it out—they had raised me to care about Jesus, and Jesus cared about justice! Also I was a grown-ass adult with kids of my own so I didn’t think too much about it . . . while at the same time I thought my parents couldn’t truly have a problem with me and my activism if I was literally only using Bible verses. Christianity was the most important thing to them, right? Jesus—the poor homeless Palestinian refugee—was the most important thing, right?
Right?
My parents worried constantly that I was indoctrinating my kids into my ever more liberal-leaning politics. But it didn’t feel like I was indoctrinating them. I simply explained my signs and how following Jesus led me to advocate for our neighbors. From what I could tell, my kids enjoyed the neighborhood protests we joined—they also liked the singing and chanting and marching and stomping. It could be overstimulating, but it also gave us tangible ways to release our big emotions. I always checked in with them and I left whenever they wanted to leave. They always had the option to go or not, and I explained things to them in very simple terms. Since almost everyone my kids knew was a Muslim refugee at that point, they got pretty into it. We marched for refugees, for immigrants, against developers who were overrunning our neighborhood and taking over precious green spaces. We supported the local teachers when they went on strike and came and held up signs. It was a normal part of our lives during the Trump years, until COVID-19 happened.
Protesting with my kids meant I had to explain the names we were chanting and how they died at the hands of the police. Protesting with my kids meant I had to be honest about capitalism and the impacts of gentrification in our neighborhood. Protesting with my kids meant I had to explain why their teachers were on strike. All conversations that I would have liked to put off until some amorphous later date, but I couldn’t since these issues all greatly impacted people we loved.
Ramona got really into making their own signs. Ransom was pretty tiny and usually just enjoyed holding whatever sign I made until they could write the letters BLM :)
Krispin also got involved in various protests and was always down to wear whatever intense shirts I made or bought.
More than just signs, I tried to turn my body into a place where I could protest the status quo. I have ALWAYS loved making or wearing intense shirts myself. Here are just I few I wore around everywhere (my neighborhood, in airports when I flew a lot, wherever there were crowds of people—even Disneyland!).
Whenever I learned about another horrible thing in our world (usually tied to white supremacy and capitalism) I felt like I just HAD to share about it by any means necessary. For me, as a freelance writer and author in the Christian publishing world, that meant I used my freelance articles, my social media, my books, and even my own body as a means of getting my messages out into the world. I think I was also trying to “find my people” in my own way—waving my little freak flags everywhere.
But usually, I ended up making a lot of people uncomfortable. Which again, in my autistic mind, didn’t make sense. What was I saying that was wrong? Inequality was, in fact, by design! Jesus literally experienced conditions that would classify him as a refugee under modern terms! Evangelical Christians were not, actually, doing anything that even remotely resembled loving their marginalized neighbors!
I also really bought into this idea that Christians have always been at the forefront of social justice movements. Now that is a conversation for another day—I do not believe white patriarchal fundamentalist Christians fit this category at all, but I recognize there are a variety of movements and strains of Christianity that have been involved in liberation work (and it’s not lost on me that most of them come from non-white and non-male theologians and movements). But my parents taught me that we were the good guys! So I tried to make that narrative work, even as I was being given so much evidence to the contrary.
My faith was propelling me to protest, but ever since 2016, at protests I would run into people who ALSO claimed to be Christians—and who were there to intimidate and harass the folks who were protesting Trump’s policies. I slowly started to shift and see my role as one of antagonizing the counter-protesters, and trying to help create safety for folks at protests. I thought I could use my white, socialized-as-female body in a way that neutralized the anger at people who were simply asking for a better world.
As Patriot Prayer / the Proud Boys heated up in Portland, I took a perverse sort of pleasure at trying to interrupt their livestreams. I would make signs like “Christian mom for BLM” and just try and hover by the loudest folks screaming into their phones. It was pretty devastating to me, however, to see how many folks were carrying guns and weapons and bear mace and proudly wearing Christian clothing and cross necklaces. Worse still, was many of these protests were in my neighborhood, so I knew that many of these people screaming about antifa were my actual neighbors. I started to internalize this reality, with no real avenues for processing except to KEEP TRYING HARDER.
When the Black Lives Matter protests really heated up in downtown Portland in the summer of 2020, I joined the wall of moms movement with some people from our prayer meeting. Since I was writing my book on Dorothy Day that summer, my signs got a little more Catholic-y than evangelical :).
This picture is precious to me in a way. I didn’t know I was autistic. I didn’t know that my own government could (and would!) use tear gas, force, and more against unarmed citizens who were simply chanting Black Lives Matter and holding up hand-made signs. I didn’t know that these authoritarian policing methods would become the norm for handling protests in the US. But that summer I, and a whole lot of other privileged folks, experienced first-hand the violence of a police state.5 I ended up going downtown twice, and Krispin did too. It was really traumatic, but eye-opening in a very necessary way as well. As much as I found the tear gas, smoke bombs, and rubber bullets to be traumatizing, guess what I also found? Anarchist medics, young folks committed to a different world, hippies and moms and dads who all banded together to help each other in the aftermath of federal and state violence. I felt hope that another world was possible, and that the young and the anti-authoritarians were leading the way.
During this time in Portland, my dad’s evangelical church was hosting a ministry for police officers. Usually they provided coffee and snacks, but during the summer of 2020 they upped their ministry and started cooking entire meals to support the police officers. Perhaps some of the officers who hurt me and others were “ministered” to by my own parents. That same summer my parents constantly tried to talk to my children about how good the police were. I didn’t know this until my 10 year old told me: “Mimi keeps trying to talk to me about good police officers. Until I told her, ‘Mimi, there are no good cops in a racist system.’”
I felt so conflicted when I heard this story. I tried to squash down my disappointment and grief with my own parents, and instead I wondered if I was indoctrinating my kids somehow (as my parents believed). But when I thought about my kids and their involvement in the life of our neighborhood, I realized that in many ways my children were leading me. My oldest child in particular has a pretty keen sense of justice, and I finally realized I didn’t want to try and talk them out of their beliefs about how the world should be. Should Black people be constantly killed at the hands of the police? No. Should the refugee resettlement program be dismantled? No. Should real estate developers and greedy landlords be allowed to take up all the resources in our neighborhood? No. With both of my kids, I realized that I had no interest in being someone who tries to calm down their anger at the world they and their peers were inheriting.
But maybe I could show them all the weird and powerful ways people can protest a system that runs on the exploitation and dehumanization of others.
The last protest I went to as a Christian was when Sean Feucht came to Portland during the BLM protests. So I and a little crew of other protesters (led once again by young, BIPOC folks) went down to highlight the actual issues happening in Portland. I will never forget being spat at, screamed at, prayed over, and the worship songs sung in my face. I watched the worship pastor of my church get up on stage and sing with Sean. My own mother was texting me, extremely put out by the fact I was protesting a worship (that she herself had been planning to go to).
I wrote about this experience for RNS. But this is the summer I decided to lay down the burden of making Christianity good. I had met so many beautiful souls who desired justice, and they did not need a faith tradition or a sacred text to care about basic human rights. I started to see that I could care, without having to uphold a religious system. I started to see that no matter how many verses I put on my signs, I would never make my parents proud of me.
After decades of conversations, I finally laid my burden down. The good news I had been told about my whole life was a lie. I was such a disappointment to my parents not just because of my progressive views but because I dared to protest in the streets. I dared to be strong-willed. I dared to resist authoritarianism. I dared to not obey the “god-ordained” authority of the police, or my parents, or the Republican president.
And this, it turns out, was what they had been hoping to avoid this entire time.
Why am I writing all of this down today? Why am I re-thinking my 8 years of public protest and how it ended up causing such a rift between me and my parents? Well, because I think as an American millennial, I am in an interesting generation when it comes to protesting and resisting authoritarianism. People my age (along with Gen Xers and some Gen Zers) slowly learned the ropes of protesting under Trump’s administration, all while experiencing a lot of conflict with our (Boomer) parents, churches, friends, and coworkers. We absorbed the ire and vitriol of our elders with our bodies and our brains as we slowly started to resist authoritarianism in the streets and on our social media.
And many of us have also been busy raising the next generation and supporting them in their desire for a world that doesn’t run on war and violence and the rich getting richer. Now we see Gen Z and even Gen Alpha ready to go and making world news with both their protests and with the extremely authoritarian (and dare I say, overtly fascist) response to their protests. And I don’t think we are ever going backwards from this. There is no silencing this generation. They will not be drafted into endless wars. They will not silently watch their elders explain why children deserve to die so weapons manufacturers can get richer. And most importantly—they will not respect the older generation unless that generation has been proven worthy of it. Which of course, is enraging to authoritarians!
In a few years, my own kids will be college-aged. And they are rightly furious about the racism, sexism, imperialism, homophobia, transphobia, ablism, and more that they are inheriting. Will my own kids join a protest movement in a few years? I don’t know—that will be their choice to make. But no matter what, they will know that both of their parents are listening to the young people of the US,6 and that we affirm their righteous anger and will do what we can to support and protect it.
Historically, the student-led protests in the US have always been for human rights, and in later decades they have been praised and valorized. But while they are happening? The demonization, discrediting, and belittling of the youth are always rampant. Now is a really important time for folks like myself—middle aged, white, socialized as female—to interrupt the discrediting of the college protests however we can.
And maybe we can flex our muscles of being disobedient. Of letting our strong wills show. And supporting the young and their hopes for a better world. They are watching us, wondering if they can trust us to do the work to accept the gravity of our current situation. If we can divest from toxic, exploitative, and deadly systems and religions. If we can do the hard work to stand up to the authoritarians in our lives and in our families.
I hope we can. For the sake of the future of humanity, and for all of our children.
Now, what kind of protest sign are you making? Let us know in the comments :)
If I had the time / money / brain space to go back to college and NOT major in the Bible but study history, I would study the Jesus Movement in Southern California and how it helped neutralize the protests of the 1960s and turned scores of young people into patriarchal conservatives that then spread throughout the country.
When I first read Catcher in the Rye I thought Holden sounded a lot like Jesus, because he was rambly and always pointing out how so many people were phonies.
I truly believe protests—the chants, the marches, the shouts—are a somatic practice for releasing anger, rage, and grief collectively. And I think they are really important as a regulating practice!
It goes without saying that people from marginalized communities already intimately understand the role of the police—which is to protect the private property of the rich and the white—which is why it makes sense that protest movements tend to be led by BIPOC people.
The current protests on college campuses are locked in and are learning from global movements. Solidarity forever!
I giddily laughed upon reading Ramona’s retort to her grandma, the caption for the first picture (of you protesting the fact no one was coming to your yard sale), and the caption for the fourth one (Ransom wearing a “Black Lives Matter to God” shirt). I aspire to be as spunky and iconoclastic as you and your children.
I’ve been looking into the literature about moral injury to name and make sense of the shame, guilt, fatigue, and social isolation caused by being a member of an extended family profiting from the military industrial complex. My in-laws bought the house I currently reside in with money from my father-in-law’s last job at Northrop Grumman, working on their B-21 Raider, and my partner, an AV systems integrator, now works for a simulation installation company contracting with companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and directly with the U.S Navy. When my partner and I got together, we were dirt-poor missionaries with YWAM and his dad wasn’t allowed to talk about his job at an experimental airport. But ten years has brought drastic changes, such that I find myself on the other side of deconstruction and a major move across country to an area of Florida economically fueled by the military industrial complex and the space industry. Dreams of divestment and reparation, and anxiety over the fact that I’ve never felt safe or been able to express how my loved ones’ lived values are diametrically opposed to mine keep me up at night. And with every passing day that Israel with the backing of the U.S (and Canada my home country) keeps bombing and starving Palestinian children, I fear I’m one day closer to erupting like a thousand-year dormant volcano and causing some major relational rift.
I would love to make my voice heard, join a local anti-war or pro-Palestine protest, meet and organize with like-minded folks. And there is a muzzling silence around me in Brevard county that is suffocating. Fascism is real; the way it menaces people into not voicing their dissent is something I’m experiencing in real time. And I want to believe I’m not the only one who would like to place their body on the line for communal liberation (and a free Palestine), democracy, and thriving pluralistic world but who feel disqualified and isolated by their association with those benefiting from systems of harm.
I don’t have a clear sense of what it takes to break that silence, but I do know that online spaces like this Substack community nurture hope and courage.
It's really trippy for me to read about your progression through deconstruction/deconversion because of how similarly it lines up with my own experience.
I used to put tape over the name brand logos on my clothes in high school and I've been to many protests with bible verse signs.
The last big, march style protest I went to was in the summer of 2020 and I left that summer feeling really disillusioned by I guess protest culture. It seemed to me like protests and marches were great places to let off steam and have big emotional experiences with like minded people but that they weren't good at converting folks into taking more meaningful action afterwards.
These days I'm canvassing for tenants rights and working to unionize an apartment complex down the street from my house. Canvassing strangers isn't as exciting as marching on city hall, but I feel like I'm planting seeds of revolution and that feels more productive. More fruitful.