election.
This time, 20 years ago, I was nursing my wounds. My right forearm was black and blue, swollen and scabbed over from a night that haunted me before it had even ended. I had just spent eight hours pounding my body against a gymnasium floor in hopes “God” would win.
At nineteen, I dropped out of college at the University of Northern Colorado and ran away to the San Juan mountains, to join a religious Christian group called “Youth With A Mission,” aka, YWAM. Miles up a winding dirt road I spent my weeks at a “base” where about twenty of us, teens and young adults, were indoctrinated with a potent brand of religious conservatism. We believed in election, that God had chosen us to know the truth and to share it with all the nations. We spent months in training at the base, all to be followed with an outreach trip, where we would take this message of truth to the shores of other countries to try and save them from an eternity in hell. I now know the proper name for this: religious colonialism. But we called it mission work. We called it good news. We called it God’s grace.
It’s the place where I learned how to fake fitting in. Where I was told my dietary allergic reaction was a manifestation of unconfessed sin. Where base leaders knelt by my bedside as I vomited, refusing to leave until I confessed something that seemed big enough to wretch my body in this way. The base is where a local “prophetess” from down the mountain came to teach us how to speak in tongues and exercise the gift of prophecy to be “saved,” even if some of us had to play pretend. It’s where I gathered confirming evidence for all the freight the conservative church had burdened me with; that my body, my essence, my being, was bad and that fear and submissive compliance were the only way forward.
That November we traveled almost 400 miles from our base to the YMCA of the Rockies for a YWAM retreat summit. Hundreds of kids like me gathered in a gymnasium the day of the 2000 presidential election. The leaders stood at the head of the room, where a huge projector was set up, to display election results as they came in that night. “We are God’s warriors,” they said, “and the Bible tells us to plead and pray, without stopping, to get God to move on behalf of our nation! Now is the time for us to pound the ground. Now is the time to turn the ear of God to our cries on behalf of a Christian leader!”
They were talking about Jericho. We Christians had a song about it. In the old, felt flannel graph of church Sunday school rooms, the town of Jericho is placed in the center, sandy-colored wall hemming it in, and the people of God, or the Israelites, are placed outside the city walls. As the story goes, God’s people marched and stomped around the walls of Jericho for seven days and, on the seventh day, blew loud trumpets and the walls “came a-tumblin’ down.” God told them it would happen this way and, because of their faith, it did. None of our grown ups ever told us that the story was never confirmed, but rather discredited when the ruins of the city were found later. None of our grown ups left a lot of room for questions on issues like these. Truth was truth. Get in line or pay for it in the after life.
How we got from the walls of Jericho to George W. Bush is too long and too bitter a political tale for me to tell here. But on November 7, 2000, the leaders of YWAM at the Colorado YMCA of the Rockies were convinced that Bush was God’s man and that we youth were the ones to “march” him into the Oval Office. I wish we could have just marched. But instead, they came up with the idea of pounding. Someone had prophesied, the voice telling them that God would be moved if we got down on the ground and pounded it with our fists, without stopping, until we got our answer from God.
My stomach rolls and hollows itself out from shame and disgust each time I remember it. I remember the hours upon hours spent on my knees. I remember the hard, unyielding gymnasium floor. I remember the high ceilings with round yellow lights where I glanced, as if looking for some kind of rescuer in the room. I remember the thudding echoes of hundreds of fists, like horse hoofs tromping together in a drumbeat of religious extremist desperation. I remember the first skin breaking, the haunting glances of my peers, the internal terror that all of this, all of it, felt oh so wrong. I remember the news projected on that big white screen and I remember the voices of the leaders booming on the loudspeaker each time another state turned red, the callout of “another victory in God’s name!” As if that state had been drenched in the salvific blood of Christ.
The funny thing is, in the least hilarious sense, we didn’t even vote. All of us were far from home, counties and even several state lines away from the places we were registered in. And that’s just for those who were registered to vote, although many weren’t. There was no mention in the weeks leading up to the election of absentee ballots. There was no warning in the days leading up to the “retreat” that we would be spending daylight til dawn breaking our bodies for a White, Texas Republican man named Jesus. The night turned to morning with conflicting news reports, states being called for Gore, more pounding, and then a sudden shift to Bush. The entire place would erupt. I just kept looking at those ceiling lights wishing I were anywhere but there. We fell into the cars and church vans at the end of that retreat dead-eyed, weary, and unsure if our efforts had produced what we thought they would.
A few weeks later, as the Supreme Court decided that 537 Florida votes made George Bush the next President of the United States, I packed up all of my things, got in the car with my boyfriend-turned-fiance, and drove away from that base for the last time. It took me fifteen years to finally talk about that night, to begin dismantling the corrupt and cult-like religious systems that had formed my worldview around God, politics, my neighbor who was different from me, and my own worth.
This morning we woke up and still don’t officially know who the next president will be. My husband, that guy who drove me down the mountain for the last time, told me there are people literally kneeling outside of the buildings where ballots are being counted, Red MAGA hats on their heads, bodies swaying in that familiar mantis way, as they pronounce God’s just judgment on this nation, and a win for President Trump, their version of “God’s man.” And it all flooded back into my body; the cold hard gymnasium, the way my fists and forearms purpled and ached in the days after election night, the horrors of the Iraq war, millions of innocent lives lost under the direction of the president I pounded the ground for. I thought of the atrocities enacted against minorities, Black lives, and members of the LGBTQIA community, some of whom I would come to know and love intimately, and even parent. I thought of the way my body and psyche have worked tirelessly to metabolize that religious trauma and the ongoing work I do each day to reform the world of my being so I can actually live at peace with myself and others.
I guess in a way, I am still counting ballots. Still counting moments of fear-based chaos and trauma, still counting fallacies and moments of terror, still parsing out the fake news of religious fundamentalism and how it dehumanized me to the point of being a cog in a wheel, capable of untold harms, to others and to myself. Twenty years later, I am still nursing my wounds while someone out there is pounding the ground.
