Deep down, even when I was in the throes of my evangelical faith, I had a hard time emotionally understanding the way people in my churches used the word “agree.”
One time, an evangelical roommate told me that her brother was gay.
“I made it clear that I don’t agree with it,” she said.
This felt harsh, like a verbal slap in the face—like the tables had been, somehow, unfairly turned against him. “How did he feel about that?” I asked.
“Well, he couldn’t argue with it. I was telling him my opinion.”
Her opinion, I thought. She was, essentially, telling him she thought his sexuality was a slight against the creator of the universe, but was calling it her opinion.
Another time, a year after leaving the faith system myself, I sat across from an evangelical friend over dinner. I had just been broken up with by my first secular boyfriend, and I was crying about it.
She listened as I went down the laundry list of depressing circumstances that had led to the end of this relationship, and then she folded her hands on the table in front of us.
“You know I didn’t agree with this relationship,” she said. “Or the fact that you had sex with him.”
Agree. What was there to agree with? It was my relationship, I thought, my life. The synapses went haywire in my brain as they tried to categorize where her agreeing fell into the equation.
To be fair, I was deeply familiar with this concept in both circumstances, and had been coached by evangelical mentors to recite the same thing to other people. If someone told me they were gay, I was supposed to say that I didn’t “agree” with their lifestyle. If someone moved in with their partner pre-marriage, I was supposed to say I didn’t “agree” with their choice. If someone was living their life in any way different than the church told us to, using the word “agree” to express displeasure over their actions was the natural response.
It was a soft way of telling someone they were living in sin, to get the fact that we didn’t “condone” certain behaviors off our chests. It was a way to minimize the gravity of what we were actually saying: I think that God hates what you’re doing, and I don’t think you should be allowed to do it.
As an evangelical, I dreaded the idea of another believer telling me that they didn’t “agree” with something I was doing. It was a humiliating thought—that a person who knew Jesus could be in disagreement with me! I would have to evaluate the decision in question, find Biblical support for it, go to the pastors for analyzation and come out with an answer. If that answer was sin, then I had to repent. Stop what I was doing immediately, change my mindset, refocus.
I did everything by the book that had been drilled into my head, followed by the rules that the pastors preached perfectly, because I was so afraid that someone would come along and not agree with me—and where would I be then? There was, in my mind, no greater shame.
But in that moment, sitting over dinner, when my friend extended her hands and beckoned me to hold them, I felt something different. I felt invisible, like she couldn’t see me, like I had ceased to be a person to her, and perhaps never was.
*
When an evangelical says they don’t agree with something, it’s an attempt to maintain their presence in the conversation. It’s a way of saying I’m bigoted without getting kicked out of the room, a way of exposing their problematic views and keeping a seat at the table.
My evangelical friends used it to justify their access to my life, even when they had lost complete respect for the way I was living it.
I don’t agree with you, no big deal. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. We don’t agree, that’s all. Let’s just agree to disagree.
By presenting it as mere matter of disagreement, it minimizes the offense of their viewpoint. It makes people feel like they have to put up with it—even if the viewpoint is, ultimately, dehumanizing.
I don’t know who used the tactic first—evangelicals or Republicans—but this minimization of dehumanization on the basis of opinion is currently running rampant as our government falls further into the hands of fundamentalists. It’s used by the Republican party every time Donald Trump tweets, every time another mass shooting (or two) is announced on news outlets.
It’s not racism. It’s just politics. Why can’t we all just agree to disagree?
Thoughts and prayers to the victims of this senseless, unexplainable act that’s root cause is highly debatable.
Fundamentalism thrives through confusion and minimization. It wants us to believe that the most obvious infractions are all a dubious matter of opinion, because then it can take our rights way without us even knowing it.
Trust me, I know. The evangelical movement told me that my rights belonged to Jesus, and now I know that their opinion is bent on stripping this country of autonomy.
*
I left my evangelical friends behind because of the way they talked about “agreeing” with my life. I stopped wanting to make room for people who saw me as less than and tried to equate their debasing views with a difference in ice cream preference.
I didn’t want to fight to have my life be seen as legitimate by the people I was spending it with.
And in the future, if I hear another evangelical tell me that they don’t agree with my lifestyle, I’d like to tell them to save their disagreements for preferences in cookie flavors and condiments. I’d like to tell them to cut the shit and say what they really mean, because the words coming out of their mouths are not as innocuous as an opinion. They’re the building blocks of a theocratic dictatorship.
There is nothing to agree about when it comes to someone’s identity. Never was, never will be. Contrary to evangelical beliefs, it’s not for them to decide.