From Far Right to Far Left

Stories are what drew me out of the far right, Christian Nationalist cult I grew up in.

Until recently, only my close friends knew about my upbringing—and certainly this is the first time I’ve written about it on the internet. My parents met in a nondenominational Christian church born out of the post-hippie revival movement in the 80s. My church believed in prophecy, speaking in tongue, raising the dead, fighting demons, and, of course, praying away the gay, women should stay in the kitchen and not go to college, shotgun marriages—I could go on.

 And here’s what will always haunt me—I believed it, too. Yes, I was a child in an emotionally abusive church situation and homeschooled on top of that. It would be hard for anyone to escape, but, to paraphrase Ursula K. Le Guin, I was slow to see it. I deeply wanted that world to be real.

 What pulled me out of that world were stories. My parents banned plenty of books from my home—and I self-banned lots of books because I was a good Christian—, but my dad loved The Lord of the Rings. My parents encouraged reading anything by Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, and I read or listened to The Lord of the Rings over and over. Tolkien’s depictions of the Old Forest and Fangorn Forest felt correct to me in a way that contradicted conservation ethics and ideas of mankind’s dominion over the world I’d been raised with. The hobbits kicking out the industrial overlords at the end of The Return of the King felt right in ways I couldn’t understand even as I cheered for Romney and then voted for McCain and Palin.

 One visceral moment stands out to me from my college days that shifted my worldview. While I’d been raised to believe that people would try to turn me away from God in college, no professor ever did that. They simply handed me books to read. In a literature survey course, I read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In high school, I’d read an excerpt of the book as part of my homeschool curriculum. The excerpt was about Douglass’ mother having to walk a long distance to visit him as a child because she was enslaved on a different plantation.

 When I read the short book in its entirety, I realized the curriculum had chosen the least damning excerpt from the whole narrative to teach. I realized I’d been lied to, that the excerpt had been meant to undermine how torturous slavery was. To some, this moment might seem small, but I still have the visceral, sinking feeling of realizing why I’d only been taught that excerpt in high school as I read the rest of Douglass’s book.

One reason I believe in the power of storytelling to shape our current moment is because I experienced how the far right narrative tried to shape me—and how counternarratives pulled me out of it. That Christian nationalist narrative shaped so much of my life up until my early twenties that I am constantly working against it and questioning my impulses as a human and as a storyteller—from the individualistic hero’s journey to the consistent impact of the Bible on American literature.

 In his book The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, Thomas King makes it sound so simple: “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story.” To support this idea, he analyzes a Native creation story about Sky Woman and the Genesis creation story. I know the opening of Genesis intimately, was an ardent defender of young earth creation and the literal interpretation of the Bible to the point I read Ken Hamm’s books for fun, watched his “debate” with Bill Nye (who I also grew up watching), and visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky (sadly, pre-ark, which I would love to see in person).

None of what is happening nationally surprises me because I watched it formulate from the time I was born. I believed in the mythic origin story of the U.S. as a nation special to God. I read Zionist propaganda as part of my homeschool curriculum. I believed I might have to die for Jesus because of Christian persecution. These stories worked on me, but, conversely, so did the stories that told a different ethic. I still remember my first time reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed in my early twenties, which fundamentally changed my life.

I’m starting this series for two reasons. I truly believe in the power of narrative to change minds—to create that alternate ethic. I’ve worked to practice this in my own writing, through my work as an editor in the solarpunk genre, and in my work as a teacher to present alternative stories/ethics to my students.

 To do that, though, is a greater betrayal of the narratives we are trained on as writers than I think I realized. When I talk about solarpunk, I always ask: How can we tell the story of the climate crisis, environmental justice, or social justice with the craft tools we are taught to use because those same tools created the narratives of toxic individualism, consumption, and capitalism that landed us here in the first place.

In this series, I will explore how narratives shaped me in hopes that it might help others—but more importantly, I’ll give craft exercises to help us think beyond our current craft culture. Use them as you will.

 Craft Exercise 1: Mythic Origins

 Several origin myths are common in the U.S. For those of us raised Christian, it’s Genesis, but regardless of your religious beliefs, three others come to mind: Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492, “Thanksgiving,” and the Boston Tea Party. As Jason Stanley points out in How Fascism Works, “Fascist politicians justify their ideas by breaking down a common sense of history in creating a mythic past to support their vision for the present.” While these types of stories might be easy enough to dismiss for many of us, they are a powerful tool for fascist propaganda. Thomas King analyzes this power when comparing and contrasting the story of Genesis with an Indigenous creation story. He points out how so many of our values can be witnessed in the Genesis story and are at odds with the values in the story of Sky Woman, such as dominion over the animals versus cooperation with nonhuman beings.

 I have two craft exercises for this idea:

First, write an origin story for something in your current work-in-progress (WIP). Make sure it doesn’t follow the origin stories we are so familiar with—work at opposing our current cultural values (you’d be surprised how sneaky these values can be—they are worked into the very craft of writing we are taught). To help create a story of the opposite, consider narrowing it down—perhaps your myth focuses on a sliver of culture: how someone enters a home; greets a child or elder; experiences a spiritual day. How does this origin story impact the values of your characters?

 Option two, choose a historical moment from your WIP. Write the factual version; now write the mythic version (for example, the common, incorrect version of Thanksgiving in the U.S.). What details change? What cultural values does this demonstrate? Which version do your characters align with?