A Note on Courage

Religion can make you feel safe and superior, frightened, or brave. Let's choose bravery.

Hi everyone. It’s been awhile. After a long hiatus from writing here, I’m back. You could say I’ve been away because of graduate school (yes, again—library sciences this time) on top of full-time work and a host of other activities and goings-on. And that would be partially correct. But the other honest reason is that, well, I didn’t have a lot to say about religion or spirituality or faith for many months there. I kept coming up with nothing. The well was dry—not in a negative way, per se. I just didn’t have anything to say.

For a person who got a master of divinity and taught religious studies for years and has many shelves of books related to theology and engages in spiritual practices fairly regularly, I get awfully sick of religion.

And in these last six months or so, we’ve seen a lot to make religion—specifically Christianity—pretty hard to stomach. We’ve seen ‘Christian’ views weaponized in the courts against Queer people. We’ve seen sex abuse scandal after scandal. We’ve seen ‘Christians’ advocate for the dismantling of the department of education, and an insurgency of conservatives promoting Christian nationalism under the chilling banner of ‘Project 2025.’ And we’ve seen our country choose this path, unequivocally—at least for now.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to simplify religion in this way, but I think religion has three main emotions attached to it: superiority, fear, and courage. The superiority and the fear go hand in hand—they’re two sides of the same coin. The courage is altogether separate, an entirely different inspiration. It’s always important to remember that religion itself can be value-neutral. Like writing or art or any human tool that helps us make sense of this baffling and gigantic experience that we call living, it’s about what you choose to do with your faith that makes all the difference.

That’s all religion is—an attempt to answer the “why” of whatever we’re all doing here, with our ears and noses and coup d’etats and breakfasts and subway commutes and moments of startling pain and fleeting joy and crushing fear. Religion is an outlet for this big mystery we find ourselves in.

For a lot of people, finding safety, a world of confinement and simple answers and being on the ‘right path’—to hell with the rest of them—is the whole name of the game. If they can find a way to paint within only the lines they call real, to keep their people in and the others out, to keep their money safe and their status secure, they’ll be more than okay. They’ll have it all. They won’t lose anything, ever—not even

their life, because their salvation is secured. So they spend every day until they die guarding everything they have from those who have chosen the darkness.

That’s the religion we’re seeing a lot of right now. We’re also seeing its sister, which is fear. When you have a bunch of people loudly proclaiming their superiority and safety and decrying all of the sins they allege of the rest of the world, it has an effect. It amplifies the fear. People with incredible impulses toward kindness and community, when confronted with these messages, can shrink and grow distracted with fear. Fear is such a relentlessly motivating force.

This is a time when liberals, Queer people, people of color, immigrants, people with disabilities, unhoused people, are supposed to be cowering in fear, at least according to the powers that be. We’re supposed to be stockpiling before the tariffs, fretting about prescriptions and the sanctity of Queer marriage licenses or green cards, combing through social media taking down any political speech, making backup plans and exit plans.

I won’t lie; this has been my impulse, too. Worry is a very natural state for me; ask anybody who knew me at age nine, and they’ll have a story of me fretting in a corner about some disastrous possibility I’d imagined. But in these weeks after the election, I’ve slowly come back around to what drew me to religion in the first place, what brings me back every time: its capacity to instill courage.

While in the other two cases religion is a force that closes you off from the rest of the world, using religion to make you courageous opens you up to the world. It makes you more alive, more likely to do loving things without shame, more open to possibilities even as the powers that be tell you to close ranks and obey. It lets you speak truth to power like the prophet Isaiah; journey hundreds of miles while pregnant and pursued by a despot, like Mary; love outcasts without fear of retribution like Jesus; speak beautiful things into being in a void like God.

A tide has turned for me. For a long time, I’ve been sick of speaking about the liberatory aspects of faith against a tide of hatred and contempt and power. But now I’m sick, once again, of letting others define religion for me. I’m back.

Tonight is the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe, an apparition of Mary who showed her face to a man who was afraid to use his voice and claim his story. Tomorrow is the feast of Saint Lucy, patron saint of light. I wish for you all the gifts of voice, light, and bravery. Let’s keep being brave together.