The thing I miss *least* about white evangelical spaces are the constant binary “questions for the debate”: free will or predestination, free markets or government control, etc.

People would “debate” for hours at my Christian college cafeteria about these questions.

When I first got to college, I would engage heavily in these debates. Part of that was me performing to feel like I belonged. But in the back of my mind during each debate this little voice would keep repeating “this literally doesn’t matter.”

It took me a while to analyze what that voice was saying: namely that for me, I wanted to know how these debates effected the material conditions of the community that raised me and many of these debates were of no consequence. They were intellectual performances.

It took me longer to trust that voice in the back of my head. But to trust that voice would be to fundamentally break from evangelicalism. Because the moment I said free will/predestination was an inconsequential debate, the theological foundations of evangelicalism crumbled.

My community didn’t have the privilege, time and economy/material safety to be debating the after life and “theologies of salvation.” We knew death well because the systems of this world made us intimate partners. So my questions were about why salvation mattered materially, now.

And once I realized these performative debates would not get me closer to the questions my heart was asking—how do I ease suffering, and push against systems of death in the here and now, materially, systemically—free will/predestination became inconsequential.

So I stopped debating. But I also had to leave the fold of white evangelicalism.

I’m still haunted by it occasionally, though I have been through enough therapy to rarely be triggered by the hauntings. Yet this is also my story.