Let me be angry.

Trigger Warning for abuse and rape: 

I’ve been tired of fighting. Been feeling like nothing is coming through. Been terrified of being dismissed as an angry feminist. But being too filled with words–bursting at the seams with them. All the words I’ve held back because of fear and good ol’ Christian niceties.

All those words can’t be contained anymore.

Because things are wrong.

Things are unfair.

People are hurting.

How can you just stand there?

And there I go again. I guess I am just an angry feminist. But how can you not be? How can you hear the abusive words that church leaders say, how can you hear about the rape and the abuse and the churches that cover it up and not be angry? 

It breaks my heart when people tell me that I don’t care about unity because I will not embrace abusive theology or those who preach it.

It breaks my heart when people say that I am mean or unChristlike because I cannot have a polite discussion about men like the man who raped me and hit me and called me a whore as he threw me against his car.

It breaks my heart that my voice and the voices of those I love are seen as a “digital grenades” when we speak out against the words of abusive pastors. The words of men that lead women to stay with abusive husbands—words that can literally kill–are not seen as the problem, and that breaks my heart.

It breaks my heart that Christians say we are all members of one body, and therefore must embrace the cancerous cells that threaten us with hell, tell us to take responsibility for being raped, compare sex to a man “conquering and colonizing…”

It breaks my heart that someone will be more upset that I compared these men to cancer cells–even though they are eating away at everything that is good and healthy in the body of Christ–than they are about the fact that people are hurting in the church.

People are hurting so badly.

I’m hurting.

Maybe you’re hurting too.

So let me flip over tables, because you shouldn’t have to hurt.

Let me use the words that are my modern-day equivalent of “brood of vipers,” because I shouldn’t have to hurt either.

Let me throw those digital grenades and let me make abusive pastors my business, and let me get riled up. Because no one should ever have to hurt.

Don’t tell me to be nice because being nice about abuse is like trying to treat a cavity with sugar.

Don’t tell me to leave it in God’s hands, because maybe God’s been doing a terrible job. Or because maybe God works through boring, ordinary, people like me. I don’t know which anymore.

Let me be angry. That’s all I ask.