I saw your face all over social media the other day, Glenda from Florida, because you (and lots of others) were selling Alligator Alcatraz t-shirts through your Etsy shop. Your image appeared not because people were promoting your products, thankfully. Instead, someone had found your Etsy page, and the shirts, and then your social media profiles, then hounded you for the callous disregard your products showed toward other human beings. You were profiting off the pain and suffering of people through your presumably whimsical shirts (though maybe you don’t see immigrants as people, and their suffering is therefore worth a few laughs).
By the day’s end, you’d closed your Etsy shop, and shut down all your social media platforms. But the screen shots had been taken, of your shop, your picture, your Facebook profile and posts about church and prayer. The accounts themselves are locked down, and I suppose some folks would say you’d been cancelled. A few folks might even want to decry a “cancel culture” that goes after grandmas in Ocala, Florida, just trying to make a few extra bucks.
Your photo has lingered with me, though, perhaps because you look so much like another older woman with whom I attended church at one time, back before our congregation split because some people couldn’t fathom that queer folks might also reflect God’s image. (I’m guessing the church you attend, listed on your Facebook profile, also loves the sin and hates the sinner; it’s just a hunch I have, given what I know about churches like yours, where Christian nationalism has found a comfortable home.)
Of course, I don’t know if you are a Christian nationalist. That’s also a hunch, though the evidence is right there: In your willingness to hawk t-shirts celebrating an internment camp for black and brown immigrants who have come to the United States seeking safety and security for their families. And also, in the Christian rhetoric you use on social media, asking your followers how you can pray for them, but showing no self-awareness in gleefully mocking immigrants.
Like other Christian nationalists, you glorify God and country, the Bible in one hand and a flag in the other. But then you act as if though you don’t fully believe the Bible—and the flag, for that matter—and what it says about love, and empathy, and the idea that we are all fearfully, wonderfully made, image-bearers of our creator.
If you did believe this, you wouldn’t be promoting a camp that promises to imprison and potentially kill those image-bearers.
Maybe you didn’t think this all the way through. Maybe you also are desperate, in need of money to sustain your retirement (and now more than ever, given the Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to Medicaid and an eroding economy). Maybe you didn’t know about the long, racist history of brown and black bodies being used as alligator bait.
Maybe you’ve never heard a different gospel message, one where Jesus challenges us to love our neighbors, and it turns out he means not just Betty Lou next door, the one who is also white, also a Christian nationalist.
So, I’m praying for you, Glenda. That this will be an inflection point in your life. That you will begin to question what you’ve heard about Jesus, about immigrants, about the poor. That you will use this moment to turn away from the dehumanization that has blinded you. That you will learn to speak truth to power, and flee the path of destruction you are on, one that sees selling Alligator Alcatraz merch as bringing Glory to God.
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