🔫 TREE 626: In which Jeff Gill turns into a limp-wristed lilly-livered milquetoast-sucking pacifist

Yesterday’s poll question is going to have a big impact on what I write starting in September. If you haven’t yet, please take 15 seconds give your answer.

FFOREST is not about politics or religion. But I’m telling you the story of how I got to where I am today. The journey I took was through a lot of politics and religion, thus today’s episode. Sorry.

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9/11 started for our family when my preschooler son’s favourite show The Tweenies was interrupted by an aeroplane crashing into the World Trade Center. Christine called me downstairs from my work. I didn’t do any more design that day.

First there were the horrendous attacks using planes as weapons.

Then there was the incredible heroism and the solidarity.

Then a few days later George W. Bush said the thing Americans needed to do in response was go shopping.

Then the United States took revenge on Afghanistan. I understood that. It’s what countries do.

Then Bush’s government decided that America needed to go to war with Iraq, because neoconservatism. Tony Blair got on board with the idea. Tony lied to Parliament. Colin lied to the UN. And off we went, shredding the Geneva Convention along the way.

I sat in my little house in Conwy, North Wales thinking, What the actual hell?! Is this all we have!?! Shopping and war?!?! I looked across the ocean at the American evangelical church, my tribe, the people who taught me love and self-sacrifice, as they cheered on the consumerism and violence and said nothing against the Islamophobia, and my heart broke.

I felt abandoned. I hoped that someone, anyone inside the evangelical world would stand up for the values I learned as a child. I wanted someone who talked about the Jesus who emptied himself, who gave up his life for all people. Thanks to Google, I found Greg Boyd. He presented a robust theological framework for a nonviolent Christianity not as a nice fluffy thought but as a way of living with a long history, intellectual rigour and real-life practicality.

So I embraced it.

To give you an idea of how big of change with was for me, I was such a big fan of Gulf War 1 that I actually bought the T-shirt.

Looking back, I can see that there were always two Jesuses in the church, the kind simple one who taught you to love God and your neighbour and the violent sophisticated one who got behind your wars. My ‘failure’, and the source of my feelings of abandonment, was that I wasn’t able to juggle the two Jesuses.

I love this version of Summertime.

Grow slowly, even if you grow in the ‘wrong’ direction.
Jeff