Consider Me Woke

I saw it coming with Bush—though I couldn’t have told you exactly what I was seeing. Just that it felt familiar. Not because I understood politics all that well, but because I knew the feeling of being told one thing while something entirely different unfolded behind the curtain. A hunch disguised as discernment. A gut-check that spoke in quiet dread.

The Iraq War was the first time national policy felt like personal betrayal. I was still going to church then. Still trying to be a good Christian. Still believing that conservative politics and Christian living were two hands joined in prayer. But the seams had started to show, and I could no longer pretend they were ornamental.

I converted to Christianity as a young adult—a late arrival by church standards, already hauling more questions than certainty. I wasn’t trying to be saved from hell so much as saved from my life. I wanted stability. Something noble to belong to. What I inherited instead was a party line dressed in scripture, a doctrine of obedience more concerned with order than with justice. I didn’t know it yet, but I had stepped into a war of ideas centuries old—just in time to be told to keep quiet and wear a skirt.

It started small. Little discomforts, hardly worth mentioning. Sermons that praised submission but ignored suffering. Women’s groups that spoke in porcelain tones of virtue, but never of survival. And then the quiet click of clarity: it wasn’t just what they said—it was what they left out. Children. Not the unborn ones they marched for, but the born ones I worked with every day—the ones who came to the ER hungry, bruised, and already fluent in apology.

You can only hear "God provides" so many times before you start asking: Who, exactly, is He providing for? Because it wasn’t the women I knew. Not the girls who flinched when you lifted your hand to wave. Not the boys already aged beyond their years, trailing their mothers like little shadows in threadbare shoes.

I left church first. Then politics.

Not in a blaze of rebellion. Just a slow, silent stepping back. Like wading out of a fog and realizing the stillness isn’t peace—it’s the absence of witness. I came to see that I could not be a whole and decent person while tethered to an ideology that treated someone else’s sincerely held belief as a mandate for how all lives should unfold. Especially when those beliefs demanded certainty while life only offered questions.

Back then, I hadn’t yet studied the biology of pregnancy. I hadn’t cracked open the thick, dust-scented volumes of history that would later show me what women endured in hospital wards, root cellars, and alleyway procedures. But even in my ignorance, I knew something was wrong. If you had to scream to be heard by your own people, they weren’t your people.

The shift didn’t begin with knowledge. It began with exhaustion. With hope deferred—the sickness of heart the Bible itself warns about. I remember praying to a God I feared was either impotent or indifferent. First quietly. Then out loud.

That fear sharpened over time. Became suspicion. What if He wasn’t indifferent? What if He was not only allowing evil, but partnering with it? What if He was invested in the perpetuation of the worst human instincts—the basest appetites wrapped in righteousness and baked into the laws?

Because what I saw wasn’t holiness. It was hierarchy. It was men playing god and calling it faith.

A child should not have to beg for safety. But they do. Every single day. And if the God we worshipped didn’t care about that—really care, not just in bumper stickers and Bible apps—then what kind of god was He?

I remembered the signs I used to hold at rallies: “Choose Life.” And I did. But I chose it with a full sentence: the life of the mother, the life of the child after birth, the life of the underfed and overlooked. The life of women like my mother. Like me. Like the women I met every day in triage, carrying burdens they never chose but were required to frame as blessings.

I realized the god I was marching for seemed more invested in birth than in life. He loved potential. Not actual. He adored the idea of a soul but ignored the flesh it arrived in. He cared deeply for zygotes but went radio silent when formula ran out. He had no use for the long, slow, unsung labor of keeping the born ones alive.

And isn’t that the great irony? We call it labor when a woman gives birth. We called it labor when people were enslaved. And in both cases, the product is ownership. In one, a child you must raise for God and country. In the other, a body forced to build the country and serve its gods. In both, you are told you must be grateful.

Labor. Always labor. And never your own.

That’s when I began to untangle two words I’d been taught were the same: sexuality and identity. They are not. One is what you do. The other is who you are. Once I saw the difference, I couldn’t unsee it. And once I realized the church denied even this smallest allowance for complexity, I knew: their god did not love you. He tolerated you—if you kept quiet.

He was the god of the binary. Light and dark. Man and woman. Saved and lost. Pink and blue. And how easily the blue happens—the left hand taints the right, the clean glove of love soiled by questions. Imagine, if you will, the story you must tell about God to erase the full spectrum. To deny every hue, every flicker of spectrum. To explain away the peacock in its glory—just to protect the illusion that the world fits neatly into halves.

That is not holiness. That is fear wearing vestments. That kind of god cannot survive nuance. He fears diversity because it costs him control. He fears ambiguity because it threatens the narrative.

I know now that all of American history returns to the same place: the false binary of enslaved and free. And how conveniently those in power have always confused labor with love.

I saw it early, though I didn’t understand it at the time. In middle school, I read about Francis Marion—the “Swamp Fox,” Revolutionary War hero. But some versions blurred him with a man who fought for the Confederacy and died in Atlanta. Two men. Two centuries. Same valor, same myth. And even then, I understood: the blur is the point. Glory and brutality are often handed down together, like heirlooms nobody wants but everyone defends.

The fragmentation was always there. In our stories. In our textbooks. In our churches. American mythology cannot hold because it refuses to reckon with its seed: the theology of ownership. It was never just about land or labor. It was about who belongs, and who does not.

So I left the church. Then I left conservative politics. Not out of rebellion. Out of survival. I could no longer live with the duplicity of confessing Christians who condemned the world while indulging its worst appetites—who slapped a cross on cruelty and called it grace.

In church, I learned that a pedophile could be forgiven before the child finished speaking. That abusers were welcomed to the altar while victims were offered silence. That redemption was reserved for the one who caused harm—not the one who bore it. Because the god of power requires power restored—not justice done.

They called it mercy. But it wasn’t. It was erasure. It was gaslighting. A theology that made the wound holy but left the wounded alone.

I didn’t get here quickly. It took decades. Books. Rage. Silence. Distance. It took walking away from people who thought they knew better. It took a body tired from cleaning up the messes made by men who never doubted themselves.

I did the work. I read. I studied. I traced laws back to their roots. I learned how reproductive control has always been tied to economics, race, and religion. I found out the Catholic Church once damned midwives as witches—not because they were dangerous, but because they gave women control. And control is the enemy of obedience.

I saw that the modern pro-life movement was never about life. It was about labor. And obedience. And as always, it was dressed in gratitude.

Grateful to suffer. Grateful to submit. Grateful to carry the weight of someone else’s mistake and call it a gift.

I am not grateful. I am awake. A society that demands gratitude from those it has abandoned is not just hypocritical—it is criminal and cruel. It creates the very desperation it later pities, then parades its charity as virtue while refusing to dismantle the systems that made that charity necessary. Gratitude becomes a muzzle, a currency extracted from the wounded to soothe the conscience of the comfortable. There is no justice in a world where the same hands that close doors demand thanks for cracking a window.

And now I write it down. Because someone has to say it plain: the God they gave us is a tool of power. The sacred thing is our capacity to see beyond what we were taught. To reach back and forward at once. To stand in the broken places and say: No more.

They can keep their redemption. I’m not trading justice for it.

Consider me woke. Not the brand they mock. The kind you earn. Woke like a woman jolted upright in a house on fire, coughing truth through the smoke. Woke like someone who’s seen the machine from the inside and decided she will no longer be its oil. Woke because I’ve lived in the story long enough to know it was never written for me. Woke because sleep was a privilege I was never afforded—and now, finally, I see it for what it is: silence. And I am done being quiet.

I’m in the Adam Grant game now—the pattern-seekers, the dot-connectors, the ones who care more about people than rockets to Mars. The ones who ask, Who is this helping? The ones who build bridges instead of climbing ladders. The ones who shield the vulnerable—not the powerful.

As Adam Grant said, “The hallmark of expertise is not in having all the answers, but in knowing where to find them.” That’s who I want to be with. The people who never pretend certainty. Who refuse to weaponize faith, or data, or doctrine for control. The ones humble enough to learn, loud enough to speak, and brave enough to care anyway.

Because if your faith doesn’t include the things Jesus actually said—feed the hungry, shelter the stranger, care for the sick, visit the prisoner—then you’re not practicing Christianity. You’re practicing control.

So take the music of your clanging gong somewhere else. I have heard enough hollow noise dressed as truth—dressed as good intentions, indifferent to outcomes. Consider me woke. If the alternative is a golden calf in an oversized, overpriced suit and tie.