The Selective Outrage of Trumpers & Healing in Real Time

The fundamentalists' moral code is inconsistent

Healing takes place in real time. It’s not off to the side, conveniently packed into a compartment of the Bento Box that comprises our days. We might encounter healing in a structured therapy appointment—and I’ve had several breakthroughs on the couch in those dimly lit rooms—but the testing ground is in relationships, in conflict, in the kitchens, bedrooms, and highways of our lives. We can’t wait to heal; putting it off is active degeneration or scar tissue buildup. And, we can’t cross it off our list and call it done, because to heal is to grow, and to stop growing is to begin dying.

“Time and tide wait for no man.” — Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Healing is something I think about often, more than trauma or its sources, and more than the ongoing onslaught of stress. This is my habit and deliberate priority, the heartbeat of my next book (which was called The Soul of Healing but will be published under a different, yet-to-be-announced title) and my fiercest survival response. Because, as much as I talk about deconstruction and the past, the purpose is to course-correct for a better future. I want a healed life, growing, healthy, and whole.

A healing-in-real-time situation happened in my kitchen this morning. To my point, what happened in the kitchen was the testing ground for years of work that had come before it, as well as a curated life that nurtures an environment for active healing, and the ripped scab of the wound that has haunted me from early childhood: unless you believe like them, they will not love or keep you.

This belief was indoctrinated, ingrained, and reinforced through reminders of hellfire and eternal separation, but also through real people who said they loved me and would keep me, who then left me when I no longer believed like them. This is the ravine of neural connection my nervous system trusts.

A + B = C. Change your mind + let them know = they’ll leave. Or, maybe they don’t leave (yet) but they’re about to lose their shit on you. They’ll discuss you. You’re in trouble. They’re about to eat you alive for some other infraction, so you’d better be perfect, little girl. You’d better not make a mistake or screw up. And, if I stand my ground on what I think or feel, I do so prepared to be abandoned, usually by everyone I love.

It’s taken my whole heart and soul to build a life that contradicts that messaging. It’s meant loving different kinds of people—better, more inclusive and healthier people who love with boundaries and without manipulation. It’s meant retraining my mind on what love truly is; how it celebrates your expansion, and allows you room to grow and evolve. And, it’s meant to hold the discomfort when I realize there’s a gap between what my mind expects to happen and what’s actually happening in my life now.

Here’s the context (evangelical selective outrage) and scene (regeneration and safety in my kitchen).

Selective outrage happens when someone focuses their extreme anger and disgust at a single, particular issue while simultaneously ignoring parallel situations and harm. The application of their moral principles is inconsistent. They allow the ends to justify the means, excusing hypocrisy and tactics that contradict their desired outcome, even when the means move the goal post of that desired end altogether.

Examples include indignant fundamentalists who are disgusted by threats to the purity of their ideology. They’re locked into an idea, rigid and inflexible, but the further down the narrowing path they go, the less reason, logic, balance, or nuance there is. That’s intentional: they don’t want those reason, logic, balance, or nuance to weaken their stance. Instead, they hyper-focus and wall up. Suggestions that they’re wrong, extreme, or misguided are entirely unwelcome.

Selective outrage is not unique to evangelical Christians, but evangelical Christians are increasingly characterized by it. Their narrow worldview and itemized outrage define “single issue voting,” such as the pro-life mindset that will elect someone like Trump to change abortion laws while also cutting programs that sustain life, like food, healthcare, and thriving societies.

Here’s an example:

• Evangelical goal: End abortion

• Chosen means: Appoint judges who undo Roe v Wade. Elect Republicans who outlaw choice

• Unintended means: Women die. Women lose healthcare and fertility. Dead women become incubators. Contraception ends. Families have less social support and weaken. Daughters have fewer rights than their grandmothers. Poverty rises.

• Evangelical goal: End abortion (and don’t look at the consequences of their choices so far.) End abortion (and don’t look at stats that show white evangelical Christians get abortions when they need them). End abortion (and blame someone else for these direct consequences.)

The end is never achieved, because the end is an ideal.

Science + research + lived experience + testimony + history all demonstrate how reality tempers idealism. But allowing that information in threatens control, and in my experience, evangelical Christians, with mentalities built on ideology, can barely tolerate any loss of control. The deeper into their doctrines and theology they go, the less tolerance they have. They can’t share. That’s why fundamentalist thinkers cut off anyone who doesn’t believe like them; scarcity is all they know.

Still, sometimes they make an effort. I know many genuine evangelical Christians who attempt to explain themselves and their reasoning, in hopes others will hear the sincerity in their hearts and see how they could choose something as reviling as supporting Trump’s reign of chaos and harm. Their choice makes sense to them, and where we hear mental gymnastics, they hear holy reason. Because their end goal speaks louder to them than any means or consequence ever could, they assume (if they just say it the right way) that they can convince you of this, too.

I know because I was this way, surrounded by and trained by others who are this way. Some of them are still in my life. They can’t understand why I’ve softened on the end goal. I can’t accept how they could harden against all that’s going on. Our impasse is familiar in families all over America.

Into all this comes the selective outrage of evangelicals upset over human trafficking.

Setting aside the diviseness of abortion, which we don’t agree on, they go for an issue we all do: child sex trafficking. Surely, the position goes, liberals with a conscience will understand our vote for Trump when we say it’s about the border, Biden, and trafficked children. And then, when liberals with a conscience not only don’t understand, but refuse to condone any justification for this evil regime, the accusation flies that we don’t care about trafficked children passing through an “open” border.

Some of these embers are from a film popular with evangelical Trumpers called The Sound of Freedom. Packed with Q-Anon conspiracy theories and fact-checked to no avail, evangelicals flocked to this movie, taking the fictionalized, barely-based-on-a-true-story account as fact.

Many of the missions Operation Underground Railroad describes are hard to verify or contain significant misrepresentations, according to extensive reporting by Tim Marchman and Anna Merlan of Vice News.

"They're not whole cloth falsehoods, but they reassemble things that are true or close to being true into stories that are just wildly and completely different from what actually happened," Marchman said. - as told to Shannon Bond for NPR

“Wildly and completely different from what actually happened” describes most of what we’re experiencing now, as different sides see different versions of the news. But here we are, two years after The Sound of Freedom, and evangelical Trumpers believe Biden’s border is a loosey-goosey mess that turns a blind eye to the horrors of child trafficking, and that Trump is somehow an acceptable answer, no matter what else happens on this ride.

When I see evangelicals making an effort, I try to respond to the effort itself, more than the content of their claim, which is almost always convoluted or twisted in theory or scripture. I don’t engage in argument. When words fail, I walk away. So, last night, when I checked my phone, I saw an effort I couldn’t validate, in too much horror (at their selective outrage) and too much pain (at thier admission) for words.

The short version of what made this personal and led to the kitchen moment: