Part 1. Faith Under Fire: Bad Theology, Holy Repair

What happens when the place meant to heal you becomes the source of harm?

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation on spiritual trauma and the role of faith communities in social justice.

In this month's episode, five people of faith come together to unpack church hurt and what repair actually requires from communities that claim love.

While white Christian nationalism continues to weaponize faith to police belonging, justify exclusion, and reinforce supremacy culture, many people are still searching for spiritual community, accountability, and healing. This conversation goes deep into conversion therapy, queer faith journeys, liberation theology, forgiveness, and the difficult work of building spaces rooted in dignity, belonging, and becoming.

The message? Bad theology harms. But healing is still possible.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Adonis Lewis II is a Black/Mexican queer organizer, strategist, and movement leader whose work centers healing, justice, and collective liberation. With nearly two decades of experience supporting grassroots movements and historically marginalized communities, Adonis has led work spanning disaster recovery, restorative justice, digital equity, and queer and trans youth advocacy. He currently serves as Director of Strategy and Impact at the Reparations Stakeholder Authority of Asheville (RSAA), leading with radical empathy, accountability, and a deep commitment to collective freedom.

Rev. Claudia Jiménez is a Unitarian Universalist community minister based in Asheville, NC, whose work centers collective liberation, racial equity, immigration justice, and faith-rooted community building. A longtime educator, minister, and leader in faith formation, she is also part of the Racial Equity Collective, which organizes Racial Equity Institute trainings in Asheville. Claudia brings a deeply relational approach to justice work grounded in collaboration, belonging, and thriving for all.

Malachi Gasaway is a native of Asheville, NC, a Christian, and a queer man whose journey through faith and identity continues to shape his commitment to justice-centered spirituality and authentic belonging. He currently serves as a ruling elder at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church.

Rev. Sara Wilcox is the founding and sole pastor of Land of the Sky United Church of Christ in Asheville, NC, where she works to build faith communities rooted in justice, belonging, and abundant love. Grounded in progressive Christian theology and a deep commitment to collective liberation, Sara’s work bridges pastoral care, community organizing, sanctuary work, and faith-based justice movements. She believes deeply in the power of relationship, collaboration, and courageous community to transform both the church and the world.

Rev. Sean Hasker Palmer is Executive Director of the historic YMI Cultural Center in Asheville, NC, and a nationally recognized leader in Black cultural and educational spaces. An ordained minister, educator, and cultural strategist, Sean’s work weaves Black faith traditions, community leadership, activism, and collective liberation. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at NC A&T and working on a forthcoming book of poetry and preaching titled Black and Therefore Beautiful: Meditations for My People.

🎧 Press play to hear courageous faith in action.

We'll see you same time, same place next month. Until then, peace.

Transcript

Intro 0:03

We're profoundly, profoundly interconnected. We don't always live that way, we don't always acknowledge it. But if we're going to heal, we have to live it, experience it, and create institutions that celebrate it. Can we create a we when no one's on the outside of it?

Welcome & Disclaimer 0:20

Welcome to the UPLift with Tzedek, Real Talk for Real Change. Before we jump in, a quick reminder of why we're here and what we hope to achieve. We're here to build authentic community relationships and help fuel social transformation in Nashville, North Carolina. We believe collective liberation is not only possible but probable as we share, listen, and learn together. We're here for the process. However, the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.

Welcome, Intros & Faith Journey Overviews

Libby 0:49

All right. Welcome to the UPLift. Today we are in for a treat. We have five amazing people with us today, and we're going to talk a little bit about church hurt, repair, faith, and what is required in this moment for collective liberation. We're living in a time when faith is being used in very different ways. In some spaces, we're seeing the rise of what's often called Christian white nationalism, where religion is used as a tool to galvanize political power, define who belongs, and at times justify exclusion or harm. At the same time, we know faith has also been a source of deep healing injustice, especially in communities that have experienced oppression. So today, we want to hold that tension honestly. We're not here for surface-level answers. We're here to discuss harm, accountability, and what it really takes to build faith spaces rooted in belonging, dignity, and collective liberation. To begin, my beautiful people, please introduce yourselves, share in what faith tradition you were raised. When your faith stopped being abstract and became active, and how has your practice, your faith practice, changed? Let's start over here with Sarah.

Sara 2:06

Good afternoon. My name is Sarah Wilcox. I am the pastor of Land of the Sky United Church of Christ. My uh faith tradition that I was raised in is the Christian tradition, uh specifically in the Presbyterian Church. And then um, I would say it was in that um church in my uh childhood where my faith stopped being abstract and became active. There was a lot of um work that I would now call charity work that was hands-on and that was intended to um be the hands and feet of Christ and to serve people on margins. So it was always from a young age that I understood faith through that way. My faith practice has changed more in my theology than the practice of it. What I understand um as the foundations of it, um, what I'm willing to say I believe, the importance of belief versus um orthodoxy versus orthopraxy. I think that our um the practice of our faith is far more important than anything we can claim um to believe, that that's less important.

Sean 3:03

Uh good afternoon. My name is Sean Palmer. So I serve as the director of the YMI Cultural Center, but I am also uh recently um I was a pastor of a Presbyterian church, the oldest black Presbyterian church in the state of North Carolina, which is also uh held the families of the folks who were a part of 1898 and the massacre. So the Alex Manly and Sadgwar families were families that were historically tied to my church. My congregation was and still is a very old, um, elite black congregation. So a little bit on one side of the tradition of black churches. I grew up in the AME church. Um, my grandmother, great-great-grandmother, we can chart our family's history back to the start of the church. New Bethel AME in Lexington, South Carolina, and am licensed and ordained in the Baptist tradition. I always tell people that I'm Afro-Metha-Bapta- Presbyterian costile. So, like all of that goes into my faith. Um, even though I spent um most of my collegiate career in Methodist and Presbyterian spaces, you know, and so that is kind of how I look at that. I would say that my my faith was always rooted in community. I had a very good young experience in the black church specifically, but I understood that the black church was very different in the rural South than what was happening in my neighbors' churches. There was a very different way that we were practicing Christianity. At least I always felt like that. And then that was affirmed in my education, kind of learning from James Cohn's theology, a theological framework, um, and being influenced by Dolores Williams and many other amazing black scholars who really kind of helped to shape and frame. I'm a child of Anthony Penn and Diane Stewart. Both of them were my mentors and professors. And I am grateful for their teachings. And I would say that they really gave me really a lot of influence as I moved to Divinity School. And I would say that my practice has changed in one way is that I have learned to merge my activism and my political stances into my theological stances so that they are not what I would call at odds with each other.

Claudia 5:16

Hello, hola. My name is Claudia Jimenez. My pronouns are she/ella. I am transitioning from parish ministry to community ministry in the Unitarian Universalist faith. I was raised as a Catholic and spent a lot of my childhood in the church. And my faith became active when I went back to my native country, Colombia, and lived with my grandmother, who was a very engaged practicing Catholic who believed in liberation theology and really as a young kid exposed me to what it means to live into our faith. Unfortunately, during that time, I also experienced a lot of negativity. So I stopped being an active Catholic. And it wasn't until adulthood when I had children and I realized they needed spiritual guidance, and my bad experience would not suffice for them to be denied their spiritual education. And that's when I found Unitarian Universalism. And that is a face that has really moved me to a theology that centers love and really invites us to consider what it is that we do with the values and the theologies that we hold. How do we live into them and walk the talk, which is not always easy? So my practice has changed somewhat in the sense that my theology is not solely biblically based. It is based on diverse religious traditions with the emphasis on not appropriating what is not ours to appropriate, but really it's a theology grounded in love and values for justice and inclusion, as imperfect as we are.

Adonis 7:03

Good afternoon. My name is Adonis Lewis II. I um serve as the Director of Strategy and Impact for RSAA. Faith for me, I grew up, I'm the son of two pastors. My grandparents are also pastors on both sides. And church was church and faith and God was something that was very much a part of my upbringing, but it was what I can say, it was handed to me. It was um just handed down, and it was there was I was taught not to question it. It just was what it was. And I also honestly loved it. There was a lot of love and a lot of um activity. We enjoyed going to church. We were very active in church, my siblings and myself and my parents. There was a lot of just different aspects of ministry I learned about what it is to serve and to be a part of community through that. For me, my experience though shifted as I began to come into my identity and realize that I am a same gender-loving individual. And there was a big schism or shift in that realization because all of the doctrine and language that I received was literally that I wasn't allowed to love myself as I am. And um that set me on a journey through several attempts at conversion therapy, which was extremely damaging and traumatizing for me, um, if I'm honest, and for my family in general, as we look back. And so there was a long time that I stepped away from church, like not casually, very intentionally decided like I didn't want to be a part of a faith that was going to be about erasure or not allowing me to live in my wholeness, and was very adamantly like anti-God, anti-anything um religious for many years. Recently, in the past few years, I would say I've actually through a recovery journey, which taught me a lot of accountability and healing and restoration. I've been able to find my way back to a more beautiful and strong faith than I've ever had. I I tell people often I've never felt more whole or aligned or connected than I do today. And it's um God as I understand him, not in the way that he was handed to me as a child. It's on my own terms. And my ministry today is all about the power of restoration, the power of love, the ability to be restored and to carry that through self-liberation as a tool of collective liberation.

Malachi 9:11

Hi, uh, my name is Malachi Gasway. Um, I use he hem pronouns. I am an elder at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church here in Asheville. I I am a Christian. I grew up Southern Baptist, um, a little charismatic sprinkling in that church. And as I as I got older and I came out, I came out as trans. And obviously I couldn't really stay there. So um it led me through like a journey of a few different denominations. When I was in college, I was a part of a Methodist uh ministry that was affirming. But I kept I kept having difficulty finding community as like a queer person and as a Christian. For me, faith was never something I was able to really ever set aside because it is almost like being trans, that's like I I can't let go of this, you know? That it's like Jesus had something about him, was just like, well, I can't just put that aside. I need to be able to wrestle with this. I've been really fortunate to find a really great community. And I think in a lot of the shifts in my faith, um, I think I grew up very, very aware of justice being a part of my tradition. But I think the way I grew up, it was a lot more individualized and like you have to do this in this right way. And like, oh, part of that is like making sure people believe the right things. Uh, but as I grew older and started, you know, unlearning a lot of what I'd grown up with is almost in some of the same ways, those same values, but it's more involved in community, is like we're a part of this, we're a part of each other, and we care for each other. And in doing that, justice is involved.

Libby 11:00

Thank you all so much.

Defining Church Hurt

Libby 11:02

I want to kind of highlight something I heard coming from Adonis and Malachi, this idea of church hurt. And when we talk about church hurt, we're talking about pain and harm or trauma someone experiences in a religious or spiritual place, a place where you traditionally seek care, right? A place where you should feel some belonging and have guidance. So, what have been your experiences with church hurt and how do you hold love and compassion for people who demonstrate practices and theology that harms individuals?

Sean 11:35

I

On Activism & Blackness in Church Spaces

Sean 11:36

know I think it's a I think it's a difficult question because um I think anybody who has been in the church sincerely looking for faith to guide their um existence faces church hurt because so much of the institutional experience is flawed and has people who are intentionally charlatans. I heard a pastor say, either either you're crazy enough to believe or you know that you're selling something that isn't real. I have thought about that in terms of like what it was like to feel not a part of the church because my activist stances made it difficult because everything that we were taught was love, love, love, love, love. And when you start talking about injustice and wanting to hear folks preach and sing about injustice and having to give up or learning a tradition of I act that there is a real long activist tradition in the church, but you're not getting it because everybody wants to sing about, you know, Jesus making us white as snow, um, which I struggle with as somebody who has a master's in African studies and leads black communities. Like, I see toxicity across the church. And so that this quintessential question that I found in my African American studies classes when I was teaching in both millennials and Gen Zers was a very resonant question. Why still go to church if church isn't for black folks? And church denies blackness as a possible way of being. One of the things I see really happening for activists, even in black activists in our city, it is easy to find a church. It is not easy to find a church that values your own blackness and supports the cultural aesthetics and traditions that you come from. So it's very easy to find folks who have been in cults and church hurt because their value systems don't line up with what some churches are saying. Or you go to Sunday morning and no one's talking about the end of voter rights and you are freaking out about it. I know this isn't as intimate as a question around identity, around queerness or, you know, assault or any of those things. But I think when I gave up, there were moments when I gave up and I was like, I don't know if I can go back to church if they're justifying slavery. I don't think I can go back to a church that tells me to love someone who beats my tail. So there were moments like I had to take breaks from the church, if I'm being honest, in order to reconfigure what my practice would look like.

On Conversion Therapy & Finding Forgiveness

Adonis 14:16

Yeah, my family is a practice study in that for me. Church hurt was it was deep for me. I just loved the Lord so much and look and just grew up really engaged with everything that I was being taught. And when I didn't fit into it, wrestling with that juxtaposition of like the cause and the cure were both the same. As I was like battling deep trauma, the cure was supposed to be prayer or in all this, but church was what was causing me the harm. All of the language, all the doctrine. I mean, it the first time I went to conversion therapy, and I'll just be transparent. I was in college, I was between my freshman and sophomore year when my parents, you know, found out, you know, I was kind of outed. And um, the solution that was brought was, you know, deliverance was what what it's called. It's you know, conversion therapy is a more fancy term for it, or maybe technical, but that was the mode. And so I spent my summer, a large part of my summer between freshman and sophomore year of college in Central Texas at this ministry, if you will, that was, you know, going to save me. And it was a 45-day program. And there was an exit interview. I remember on my 42nd day, I'll never forget. And I was to go speak with the pastor, the leader of the group, to talk about how the transition was going to be, how I was gonna go back to Chapel Hill. And I needed to not engage with the folks that I had, you know, met or was friends with and just get involved in a ministry and do all these things was what we talked about in the beginning. But at the end, this gentleman proceeded to tell me that uh he could perform an act on me that would ultimately like, you know, get all the gayness out of me. A sexual act. And so I just remember I'm 18 and a half and freaking out. And I had really tried, I mean, it after like 30 days or so of something being ingrained, it was I thought it was maybe starting to work. And I was buying into it, this idea. And in that moment, everything shifted. I remember running away from the place I left in the middle of prayer and hitchhiked in central Texas, like where I knew no one. It was a crazy experience. I mean, that was just step one. And then I tried again. Um, at the end of college, before I got married, I I tried again. And that time I finished the program and I got married as an ultimate act of, I'm giving my all, this is all I can do. And I was married for a few years and that didn't work out. And I I just gave up after that. I like I said, I said, God, you know, if the cause is the church and the cure is the church, I don't I don't know how to be a part of it. The healing, to answer that part, the healing and the grace that comes came from, so my parents just love, all love. My mom or dad never preached a sermon of of hate or fire and brimstone. It wasn't that. And so when my mom would look at me, the the best way I could sum it up was she she never said, son, you're going to hell. It was more, I'm sad I'm not going to see you in heaven. But the healing has come in the fact that just forgiveness and grace for the fact that I know that they were doing their best. They literally were trying to love the hell out of me in their in their eyes. You know, they thought that we needed to fight for my salvation. We needed to do everything that we could to, you know, get this demon spirit or whatever this thing was off of me. And upon realizing the trauma that it caused, I battled substance use disorder. I battled suicide and a lot of different things as a result of trying to literally just change who I was. And after seeing that for a few years, we just we've we came back to a place where we just kind of agreed that ultimately none of us really know what's really there, what really will be there on judgment day. We've kind of like relegated to say, hey, I'll take responsibility for whatever I have to in that moment. And in the meantime, we're just gonna focus on love. We love each other. I forgave them because I know that they were really just loving me. And so when I show up with people that kind of preach that doctrine, I have grace in my heart because I I do understand that for a lot of folks, this is just at the foundation and the core of like who they are. It would be more shocking for me if my parents kind of changed who they were than if they did it, because all I know of them is is Christ. It allows me to show up with grace, it allowed my family to heal. Um, and for me to be able to reapproach faith and God um in this time of my life because I needed that. It's it's such an integral part of who I am that stepping away from it caused me to lose myself. And so, in order to be whole, I need that to be part of it. I just am able to understand today that the relationship with God for me is personal. It's not for anyone else. And that that's what's made it real. And that's what allows me to show up with grace and understanding. Yeah.

Libby 18:48

Thank you so much for that. And I I'm

Responding to Injustice

Libby 18:50

gonna just kind of pull out a couple of things that I'm hearing and this idea around faith and what it means to. I heard Claudia talk about being rooted in love. I just heard Adonis talk about even though what was happening was harmful, at the root of it, you knew your parents really loved you. I heard um Sean talk about the fact that how can you be a part of church when your blackness isn't being recognized and all those different pieces. A part of that is this whole concept around faith and love and how it is we express those things in justice spaces. So, how do you respond in a faith community when the spiritual practice, the religious practice, or whatever it is is upholding injustice?

On Adaptation & Inclusion

Sara 19:31

I'd say adapt. Um, we have books of worship, we have liturgies that we're expected to use, we have systems we're supposed to use, and you kind of have to choose to operate outside the system. You rewrite liturgy, you change hymn lyrics, you work on creating systems that are uh more rooted in the values you claim around non-hierarchy, uh around the importance of all voices at the table, the importance of um everyone having a voice, what real belonging means and how you create community. And it's also really hard. Um, and and when you do that, people have lots of opinions. And I I remember early in the life of our church, like we asked everyone to like put little um dots on pieces of paper for like the thing that was most important to them about like music. And and it was just it was um all colors, right? And I was like, see, none of you are happy, right? I love it. And I mean, the truth is like you then have to be in spaces where it's not all about you, and you have to realize that um and yield to it and and know that you are one of the most important people in the room, and so is every single person there, and so um that's gonna look messy and it's hard because that kind of um freedom uh to show up and to be who you are uh is complicated because your is-ness meets someone else's is-ness, and that business can be hard.

Claudia 21:01

And

On Courageous Truth-Telling

Claudia 21:02

and alongside that, it's that difficulty that we have with discomfort, the difficulty that we have with being courageous enough as spiritual leaders to to speak the truth and to say we have a problem of white supremacy culture here. We have a problem with hierarchy. You know, we see all of these characteristics of white supremacy culture in our congregations because we are a microcosm of the larger world. And so we have to be willing to take risks and hold people in love and hold people in care. But we have to remember that love is not abusive. And sometimes we confuse this idea of a love and everything is welcome. And it's like, you know, everyone is welcome. But if you are welcomed into this space and you are not grounded in love and you are racist. Or you are homophobic or transphobic, you can come in and be transformed. But if you're not transformed and you're gonna harm the community, then we have to say this and you, these behaviors are not welcome. You know, because I think sometimes we think it's a free-for-all, and it isn't because people will continue to be harmed if we mistake welcome for tolerating abusive love. And so that is uncomfortable for people and they push back against it. And we have to be grounded and say, beloveds, this these are the courageous conversations and sit with your discomfort. What is feeling? Where are you feeling it in your body? And let's talk about it as opposed to walking on eggshells because we we don't want the people upset. Because that's faith development, that's faith formation being challenged to live into it.

Belief & Behavior

Libby 22:56

I'm about to jump out of my seat because I felt all of that. Because in my mind, I'm thinking that's that question. Like, when does belief become behavior, right? This is what we say we believe. We say we are welcoming. So, how does our behavior respond when someone who says they want to be a part of our community comes in, but they're not rooted in love? Right?

On Accountability

Sean 23:15

I think you also get folks who are part of your community because they do believe in a God who can change and transition you, shape you, move you. And I think specifically right now about communities where addiction is real. When addiction is real, faith steps in to mediate addiction. And so the kind of faith, the kind of Pentecostalism or whatever faith tradition folks pick up is really holding them together. I've had to sit with what does it mean for a faith to hold a person together that actually breaks other people? And for me, that is the tricky part of this because again, living in a city where we know we have a lot of addiction issues, some people's faith is rooted in a very black and white tradition. And as a as somebody who's trained in, you know, who's a seminarian trainer, we get broken every day, and we got broke every day in our in our classes. And we kept going, like, do I really believe what I say I believe? Or is this, or are they making up stuff? Or am I making up stuff? Who made up all the stuff? I have had to have grace with folks who see me, who know that I'm a preacher, but who don't appreciate the progressive way in which I approach the text, including family who have said to me, I don't want to, like, I you like everybody. You and you embrace all the people. And it took me a while to get there, actually. I don't know if everybody has a responsibility to hold folks accountable for the ways in which they operate in phobia or whatever. But I do think we all have a responsibility to sit at the table with somebody. I can't undo the work of white supremacy out in the holler. I cannot. I'm not safe. It is not welcome. But I can hold my students accountable and my folks accountable on how we handle homophobia and transphobia in my office or in the spaces I serve in. And there is courageousness in that work, but also in the work of undoing colorism, also in the work of undoing, you know, some of those issues, like the kind of country club eliteness that we find in the church. I think there are ways in which we all have to figure out what it is that we're going to kind of undo and to support in the undoing. And remember that people's theology is flawed because it comes to them from very flawed, a very flawed system of theology. And this is a very new system. This isn't like the way in which we have tethered white supremacy, which is tied to homophobia and transphobia and all the other things, is a new-ish way. And as I think about the context of the states that we live in. But like it is not the oldest tradition in the church. It is not, liberation has been in the church. Jubilee has been a part of the church. We just don't go to those texts. We need more preachers to be courageous about bringing us to those texts that push us to be better. So we have fodder for when we go into the

On the Bad Theology of Supremacy

Sean 26:18

world.

Libby 26:18

But the reason we don't delve into those texts is very strategic because when you delve into those texts, you start to tear down those structures that exist with white supremacy. You start to tear down the patriarchy, you start to tear down what has traditionally created a power vacuum for certain people. Right.

Sara 26:39

Right. The other thing, I think, as a person who grew up in the Christian church and who, while I'm not a Unitarian universalist, also, when if someone asks me if I'm a Christian, I often say I'm a follower of Jesus. And part of the problem is supremacy culture, period, writ large. White supremacy, huge problem, of course. Right. But Christian supremacy is also a huge problem. The idea that you your faith has to be better than someone, or it's the only faith is the part that continues to be feeding the harm. Because the love is, I mean, you you're trying to love people to the thing you're afraid of, right? So it's all tied up in, well, bad theology, right? I mean, I think um, I don't know who said bad theology kills, but I often say bad theology kills. Your God talk actually harms people. And how we perceive of God, how we understand God, and how we proclaim other people's need for them to have that God is all a part of that harm. Everything that's coming out of the church through Christian nationalism comes through the the vein of Christian supremacy. It's why we have all of these trans laws. Um, it it is why um there's assaults on women. And it's not that there you can't find it in the text. No. You can find all that in the Bible. The other problem is that we have got our holy sacred text is indeed understood in a way that doesn't get to the complexity of its composition, how it came to be, um, how the how it was canonized, who wrote it, like didn't drop down from God despite everyone's um, you know, uh proclaiming of that. Oh no, I'm gonna say. And more people should say it, right? Um, it's just uh um that that supremacy culture is fed everywhere. And and you can look at it into like it feeds into our our general culture. Like, think about sports, it's domination systems. Take you back to Walter Wink and um the myth of redemptive violence, it is um it's an atonement theology. It is tough um because everything that has developed since within the Christian tradition since the time of Jesus is so very far from Jesus.

Adonis 28:52

So very right.

The Time is NOW!

Claudia 28:53

And at the same time, despite all of this hurt and this bad theology, right now, in this moment, when we have the phenomena of the nones, right, people are thirsty. People are looking for community, people want to have faith in God, faith in humanity. And this is the time for people who believe what Jesus taught, who Jesus was, for people who have values that embrace collective liberation. This is the time for these communities, for our communities to be visible, to be present, to be courageous, to have a prophetic voice because people are looking for it. Our churches are seeing so many visitors, so many families, so many people looking for community. We can push back against white Christian nationalism because there is a lot of doubt about the hatred that that's spewing. And we are positioned right now to be the places, to be the people, to be the leaders that are going to move forward with love and move forward for collective liberation. This is our time.