Cracks Begin to Form

While the questions had always been there, there were some things I could no longer ignore

Photo from Pexels from pixabay on Canva Pro

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In 2008 I did something I had never done before.

I voted for a Democrat.

I liked McCain just fine, but after years of war, I believed Barack Obama was the man who would get us out of two wars and potentially bring us back to peace. I was ready for change. My baby bump barely showed when I walked into the booth and made my presidential choice, forever disrupting the way I would approach all of politics.

I was elated when the news announced he had won. I honestly would have been fine with either man as president, but I was excited that my baby would grow up in a world where white men were not the only individuals who could be president of the United States.

The bubble burst when I returned to work the next day. While I had been raised in a conservative household and had been taught to believe a “pro-life” vote was the only correct vote I could make as a Christian, I had never fully seen the connection between my faith and the only acceptable way to see politics. After all, my academic adviser at my Lutheran college was a die-hard Clinton fan. My favorite history professors could not be put into a political box. I had seen the best of academic curiosity at the highest level of Lutheran education. I believed some of the same curiosity ran through the veins of those closest to me.

I had colleagues who were worried about what an Obama presidency would mean. I had students repeating jokes they had heard from home, convinced Barack Obama would eventually be assassinated. When the Affordable Care Act was passed, the concerns coming from co-workers and even friends made it sound like a portal to hell had been opened and our country would never recover.

The questions that had been scratching at the back of my mind began to reveal cracks, letting in questions and ideas that had my head and heart spinning.

And I began to see those cracks had been under the surface for years.

Maybe it started when my school in Illinois removed a student for being pregnant. Or maybe when one of the visiting pastors (the parent of two of my students) suggested that the tsunami that killed over 200,000 people living along the Indian Ocean might have been caused by people turning away from God. Then there was the Indianapolis colleague who complained that we kept the word “damn” from the script in our production of Godspell, even though we had carefully thought through its use and were intentional with the whole show, even staging an unscripted resurrection scene at the end.

My faith didn’t change, but the way I saw my faith community was changing in disorienting ways.

It extended beyond just simple politics.

After our spring production of Crazy for You, I started getting more curious questions about one of my leads. A talented junior with a bright future in front of him, more and more people started to wonder if he was gay. For so many reasons, it shouldn’t have mattered. He wasn’t dating anyone. He actively supported the athletic program. And he was eventually voted Homecoming King during his senior year. When one of my colleagues asked if I thought he was gay, the only response I could think of was, “I don’t know, but I’ll love him no matter what.”

Then, while I was sitting in the hospital after the birth of our daughter, my principal and his wife came to visit Jeff and me. While they were there, my principal told me there would be staffing changes over the next school year. Our enrollment had dropped and they needed to accommodate for the change in class sizes and staffing needs.

“How would you feel about teaching a couple of theology classes next year?”

I stumbled over my response. I had just had a baby. It was April and I didn’t want to think about returning to school yet. “I mean, I’m qualified. I guess I can do it if I have help with the material.”

And that was the end of the conversation until I returned to school during the summer months to start planning for the next school year.

In addition to the English classes I would be teaching, I was initially going to work with one of my colleagues to teach the Old Testament classes. I was comfortable with that, mostly because I could just use his materials. I wasn’t nervous about the situation because I was a woman being put into a position of teaching theology at a Lutheran school. I was nervous because I had no idea how to effectively teach the foundations of faith. I just knew what my faith was and how to live it, effectively integrating that into my English lesson plans for years.

But as we got closer to the start of the school year, I learned I wouldn’t be teaching the much simpler Old Testament class. I would be teaching one semester of Christian Ethics and a semester of some kind of apologetics. Neither of these was my area of expertise, and to make matters worse, I had no curriculum to work off of.

When I asked the theology department head what I should teach in Christian Ethics, he responded, “Christian Ethics.”

“Yes, but what does that mean?”

“You are teaching what it means to follow Christian Ethics.”

For a person whose politics were becoming gradually more progressive and who was starting to struggle with the LCMS stances on many things related to life issues and sexual ethics, this was not the answer I needed to hear. What if I accidentally taught something heretical? What if I pissed off a parent with something I said in class? How could I teach concepts that I myself was struggling with? Was my job now on the line?