Dear Evangelical Martyrdom: I’m Not Your Girl Anymore

letters to the faith that raised me

Dear Evangelical Martyrdom,

When I was kid, I used to fall asleep imagining my funeral. Later in a life a therapist would tell me that’s called maladaptive daydreaming, but I just thought I was preparing for the inevitable. I was going to die for Jesus. That’s your fault.

No child is born wanting to die, but you sure did snake your way into a generation’s psyche and make us fantasize about all the ways we’d give our lives for God. In my most elaborate daydreams, my dad would stand up in front of the church that was standing room only because of how many people were impacted by the story of my death. He would tell funny stories about what a precocious child I was. “She was such a gift,” he would say. And then the mood would shift and he would lean forward on the pulpit and tell the room full of family, friends, and strangers, about my faith.

They’d have to move my casket to make room at the altar for the hundreds of people who would give their lives to Jesus, not because I lived, but because I died.

I died because I was brave. Because I didn’t flinch when faced with death. Because I said yes.

You told us that loving Jesus meant dying for him. You gave us stories of missionaries and martyrs, pages and pulpits full of pain and devotion. You handed us books like Jesus Freaks and told us this was the pinnacle of faith—to suffer, to bleed, and to bring people to Jesus through it. You presented us with the hardest way to be a follower of Jesus and we ate it right up.

I was only twelve years old when Columbine took over the sermons in our youth groups and church culture. Youth rallies were held across the country in baseball fields and football stadium. Preachers told us the stories of teenagers brave enough to say they believed in God, even though they knew it would cost them their lives.

The tragedy did what tragedies tend to do to Christian kids - it sent us running to altars with tear streaked cheeks. We were definitely, actually, afraid that God would ask that of us, but we masked that fear with resolve. We made pledges, we went on missions trips, we declared our loyalty to Christ and boldly proclaimed that we would die for him.

But for me, it didn’t just make me willing to die for Jesus. It made me want to die for him. I thought it was the only way to prove to the world that I loved him.

So I wrote goodbye letters and filled my journals with (what I considered to be) prolific words about faith. I practiced my martyrdom in front of the mirror every week, just in case. I thought that’s what it meant to love God: to hurt. To die. To suffer.

As the cultural obsession with martyrdom faded, I stopped fantasizing about dying, but the doctrine of death had already settled into my bones.

First, I thought I would die young. Not as a martyr, just in general, you know. Then I thought God might take one of my kids to bring people to him through my pain. The only version of God I believed in was one that could only be glorified in tragedy. It probably goes without saying that I developed crippling anxiety, depression, and rigid spiritual practices. I lived my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for God to do something awful.

I vowed that I would give my life for him. When would he come to collect that debt?

It took a few traumas for me to face the reality of how empty and incomplete my understanding of God was. My romanticization of suffering fell apart when I actually suffered because when my pain was so acute I couldn’t breathe, God was close to me.

He wasn’t standing outside of my grief basking in whatever light it might have cast on him. He was present in the darkness with me. I felt his grief alongside mine. His empathy and compassion for me in the moments when my world was falling apart is the reason that no matter how my faith stretches and shifts, the truth of his existence and his goodness stays steady.

You showed me a God that delighted in pain and death, but when my life collided with both, he grieved them with me. You never told me he would do that. That’s how I knew you were wrong about everything. You really did a number on a generation. Knowing what I know about God now, I imagine that grieved him—not just that you taught kids to devalue their lives in the name of devotion, but also how earnestly we believed it. You taught us to be ready to die, and we were. That’s not faith, that’s a tragedy.

The God I know now isn’t glorified by tragedy, He draws nearer to us in it. He doesn’t rejoice at our pain, he comforts it. He’s not impressed by suffering for suffering’s sake. He’s not the author of our destruction. He is, unequivocally, the healer of it.

You taught us how to die well. But you never showed us how to live free. You taught us fear and called it faith. You celebrated tragedy and called it a testimony.

I believed you. I really did. But I’m not your girl anymore.

The God I know is glorified in resurrection. In the living. In recovery. In the laughing. In a nervous system that finally exhales. And in the ordinary business of being alive.

Faith is not a eulogy or a diagnosis with a grim prognosis.
Faith is a garden. And I’m done putting tombstones in mine.

Thankfully still breathing,
Kristen

If you want to submit your own letter to the faith that raised you - you can do that here.

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I released a book last year about the unraveling of my theology around suffering. It’s called Even if He Doesn’t and you can get it here or anywhere you get your books.