bible – Susan Feathers

I am old enough to witness and experience the deleterious impact of religious oppression on the lives of individuals, communities and a nation.

In 1961 my family moved back to east Tennessee after 16 years in the U.S. Air Force. We had lived in Texas, California, Hawai’i Michigan, New York, Kansas, Virginia, and Tennessee.

I was 16 when we returned to Johnson City, Tennessee near the Appalachian mountains and birthplace of my father and me. My paternal grandparents lived just outside of town in the small rural community of Watauga. Their hilltop home and farm were my personal touchstones in an otherwise migratory life.

At the base of the hill was a little white church at which Grandad was custodian and carpenter of pews, altar pieces and other furniture made in his shop in the old red barn.

I remember as a child a kind of freedom in worship. My parents, both raised in Christian faiths, explored many faiths as a practice, learning something from each to form what I learned was my responsibility: to form my own values based on my experience growing up in a democracy. To test them against the moral laws of the country as a guide and bulwark against tyranny.

These dear memories stand in contrast to what life in a small southern town was like for a teenager, for a woman. The church exerted a controlling influence espousing different freedoms for men than for women. From behavior to choice of avocation to personal freedom, there was a code for women much more circumscribed than for men. I never went to church without gloves, hose, garter, and garter belt, without behavior in deference to men. This is the white male hegemony that current MAGA leaders seek to reestablish. Repression of women, Black individuals, and immigrants is concurrent with building back an imagined past.

While the Bible teaches tolerance, the South practiced racism, while women are revered by Jesus, Southern men used vulgarities when referring to women’s bodies while requiring them to be virgins at the same time. It was common for young women to be touched inappropriately by relatives or strange men. A girl thus treated could not speak out about it without being tagged a slut.

Our early founders dealt with much greater religious domination. Having personally witnessed and experienced religious oppression by a state religion, our founders and early Americans of the Revolutionary times, wisely chose to keep religious preference in the personal realm. At the founding, there was a diversity of religious beliefs and diversity of people from Native Americans to far eastern, European, African and Islander living together in the British colonies. Diversity is the seedbed of our Creed: E pluribus unam, from many, one.

In 2025, a Christian nationalist cabal has seized control of the American government, a democracy founded on laws. This Christmas, it chose to impose Christian religious symbols and religious language on a nation founded on religious freedom and separation of church and state.

I abhor and reject this regime’s imposition of a particular faith on all, declaring it a state religion. IT IS NOT. Christianity is a personal religious choice. but not exclusive of any other religious tradition including the right not to embrace a religious faith.

Make no mistake. Trump et al intend to destroy the United States of America and install a king and minions in the name of Christ. Just as we helped Europe rid itself of a demagogue, we must ourselves rid the country of Maga ideology and ideologues before they take what is ours.

We are a nation of many faiths including Christianity. About 60% of Americans embrace Christianity. But it is not, nor was it ever a state religion. Nor are we a white nation. We are a nation of many peoples and beliefs and that is the great strength of our democracy and the hope of the world.

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~ Aldo Leopold

When I was 13, my family moved to Plattsburg, New York. We rented a model home built at the edge of the forest surrounding St. Bellarmine College and Noviate. It was housed in what had been the 2nd Hotel Champlain and surrounding grounds with trails winding down to Lake Champlain.

When I left our home, I walked on the monastery trails toward the lake with our family beagle who loved exploring the grounds with nose and long velvet ears with which he breathed in the fragrances of the woods and touched the rocks and trails sensing creatures who had passed by.

I was pensive on this day. Military families, as we were, suffer trauma through moving which separates children and youth from new found friends and causes stress in parents through absense of the father or mother, and often living in less than ideal housing and circumstances. I longed to belong somewhere.

It was fall in the Adirondacks and the woods were aflame in nature’s palette of red, gold, purple, orange and yellow. I stopped in a spot ablaze with autumn leaves which appeared as a mosaic. As I stared into its palette, I became aware that I was becoming a part of the wholeness of it. At that moment “I” no longer existed. I was lifted out of body.

This realization of the oneness of life in varying forms, colors and beingness profoundly changed me. At 13 I realized there is no separation between the “natural world” and me nor any other life form. We are part of a living mosaic moving through space on a spinning planet.

After that seminal day, I have felt that I belonged, wherever I may be; I draw no distinction between myself and the mosaic of life around me. And now, wherever I live, I belong. This has brought me great peace and satisfaction. Desert, mountains, grasslands, tropical zones – I’ve lived in each one loving it and learning from the people and the land, waters, and all the life there.