In Conversation with Jeanna Kadlec

This week, we have an interview with writer, astrologer, former lingerie boutique owner, and recovering academic, Jeanna Kadlec, whose memoir, Heretic: A Queer Revolt Against Evangelicalism, Empire, and the Lies We Are Sold, is out in paperback this week. Kadlec’s memoir chronicles her decision to leave not only the evangelical church in which she was raised but also her conservative marriage to come out as queer. Along the way, she charts how conservative Christianity has shaped and continued to influence the direction of American politics. I talked to Jeanna about Exvangelical identity, the insidious relationship between evangelical Christian history and today’s American Right, and whether Evangelicals really hate women (short answer: yes, big time). As someone with a thoroughly secular upbringing, I was scared to realize how much I didn’t know. —Natalie Adler

NATALIE ADLER I’m so excited to talk to you about the paperback release for Heretic. Give us your book spiel.

JEANNA KADLEC My short pitch is this is guaranteed to piss off your MAGA relatives. It is a hybrid memoir by a queer author who grew up in the far right — the religious right specifically — in rural Iowa, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And that was really the onset of a lot of evangelical political power in this country. The book is my reckoning with my upbringing and with the religion that I was a very devout believer in through my mid 20s. 

I didn’t know I was queer growing up. I married a man very young. Coming out meant leaving the church. It meant leaving my family. It meant leaving my marriage; it was kind of a dark night of the soul. You have to walk away and lose everything in order to gain something on the other side, which I think is an experience that a lot of people have had in relation to coming out. It may be related to leaving a high control religion or a really conservative family. But I think that that dark night of the soul experience is something that is just part of the human experience regardless of who you are.

NA In the beginning, you talk about your personal experience with the Church, with your mother as the faith leader in the family until your father’s conversion experience. And then you quickly move on to a political history of evangelical Christianity in this country. As you say early on: Christianity was your framework for understanding the world. 

JK I didn’t have this word at the time, but the word that is all over TikTok and such now is  “deconstructing” — a common word used in ex-evangelical circles to describe how you take apart the faith. And from that worldview, my “deconstruction” was absolutely built on historical research. After I left, I just wanted to understand: How was I in this for so long? How didn’t I know that I was gay? How can my parents say they love me but also not like that I’m gay? I was in a PhD program at the time, so I ended up doing a lot of historical research and theory reading to try to come to terms with and understand how evangelicalism had come to be. What I even had believed, you know? 

NA You make the point that, unlike Catholicism, this religious history is not taught in the evangelical equivalent of Sunday school. You also make the case that part of the evangelical anti-intellectual bent is at odds with rigorous reading and discussing and thinking through scripture.

JK On the one hand, you know, yeah, I was good in English class. Close reading came very easily to me. But that’s because that’s all you’re doing in Sunday school. That’s all you’re doing in church, what pastors call scriptural exegesis. But that is absolutely contrasted with the fact that most pastors in evangelical churches are not actually teaching. Like, they’re not teaching theologians. It’s giving the word of God from the pulpit. This is not an interpretation that they learned from reading X, Y, and Z scholars in the field. Pastors usually have learned this, but they aren’t making that background knowledge legible to the congregation.

This is also how we get to the idea of constitutional originalism, which is so unique to the United States. Across the world, there are republics that have constitutions, but the American way of interpreting it — the idea that the text just says what it says in that silo, which is ostensibly apolitical — is an evangelical reading informed by exegesis practices within evangelical churches.

NA That’s something that I did not know, that it’s a Christian understanding of what the truth of a text means. What do you wish the feminist left knew about the threat that evangelical Christianity poses? Not just to our bodily autonomy, but to our lives?

JK Especially when Trump was first elected, when he first started appointed judges, I was trying to stress to people how much this isn’t just about abortion. This is actually stemming from a worldview which Charlie Kirk, for example, upheld: That women are inherently subordinate to men. The idea that women and birthing people should not have bodily autonomy comes from the idea that we should not be making decisions on our own. That’s the underlying piece that I think is missing, which I’m seeing more now that Roe has fallen. States are starting to come for birth control, for example. 

Ten years ago when I was talking to people about this — media people, literary people, academics and ex academics in New York City,  a particular subset — they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, we live in the 21st century, even with Trump elected, most people don’t think that.” And it’s like, no, actually, a fuck ton of people do think that! Like it is that basic. It’s not that deep. Every bad assumption you have about patriarchy is true in evangelical Christianity. They do hate women. They don’t think that we are capable of making decisions. They do think that we should be married barefooted in the kitchen. None of that is an exaggeration. And they think it because they interpret the Bible in a way that supports it. 

NA I didn’t know, until I read your book, about how the Christian right pivoted from segregationist to anti-abortion rhetoric. Can you give us the quick and dirty spiel of how that came to be?

JK The short version is that in the 1960s, we had courts that were not only upholding the Civil Rights Act, but courts that were also making decisions against Christian private schools — because the segregationists’ solution to the outlawing of segregation  was like, “oh, well, we’ll just start these private Christian schools and send our kids there.” And then there were lawsuits brought against those schools, which were struck down by the courts because we still had a judicial system that was somewhat functional. 

So then political strategists — and this is on record, this is on tv, this is in books — looked for a new issue that would galvanize especially southern white evangelicals, because this was a group that was tremendously organized and motivated. They could be organized to vote around specific issues. They identified that very, very early. And they tested a bunch of different issues before finally landing on abortion. 

If you look at polls from the 1970s, in the early seventies, the vast majority of Southern Baptist pastors are on record as supporting abortion. And then by the end of the decade, that number has plummeted. So how did they pivot? It was a political and strategic choice. And this is also why Protestants and Catholics in the United States have a kind of unholy alliance, even though plenty of Protestants do not think Catholics are Christian. 

NA So in the book you talk a little bit about January 6th, the Daniel Boone cosplay, and how a lot of people who didn’t know better were like, “but this seems very un-Christian to me, and you were saying like, oh, actually this is exactly the Christianity I know. When people say that evangelicalism is like a death cult, or that America is a death cult, what exactly does it mean? 

JK When people call it a death cult, I wholeheartedly agree. I think a lot of folks who did not grow up in or were only very casually adjacent to the church might imagine a Jesus who is a leftist, brown, Palestinian revolt leader who said to love your neighbor. And I’m like: “Oh, boy, do I have news for you!”

I was taught from the time I was a toddler that I was an inherently sinful being and that I was going to hell if I did not believe in Jesus. And that everyone I loved who did not believe in Jesus, no matter how “good” they were, would also go to hell. Hell was just a concentration camp for people who disagreed with you. But the good news was that when you died, you could also go to heaven. And so there’s an active embracing of death. The apocalyptic dream of evangelicals is Jesus returning, gathering believers, and literally killing everyone else. That is the dream. Like, there’s this active desire for death in some ways. 

I do talk about this in the book, but those of us who are elder millennials are also the Columbine generation. In youth group, youth pastors were using school shootings to make us willing to be martyrs. I can’t count the number of times I have been asked: “If a shooter asked you, if you believe in Jesus and had a gun to your head, would you say yes?”Like, would you be willing to die for your faith? Would you be willing to be a martyr?

NA The other topic I want to ask you about is the rise of metaphysical and occult interests: Astrology, tarot, spellcraft, etc. It really felt like it hit a fever pitch around 2016, around the election. What do you think about our renewed interest in alternate ways of explaining phenomena?

JK It’s really funny because I have been getting a version of this question since 2018, like every single year. I’ve been a working astrologer for almost a decade and every year it’s like, is the bubble gonna pop? And on the one hand, I think we’ll likely see a certain amount of trend dissipation. But I do also think that the questions of who we are, why we’re here, what life is for — those are just core philosophical questions.

NA Right? I’m thinking of the trad wife as sort of the inverse of the witch, the shadow of the witch. Your book is kind of about that: you leave your husband and dye your hair red and run screaming through through the forest. You became a witch. 

JK Yes, the Lillith stuff. To me, I know the term “trad wife” as “biblical womanhood,” which is not even that old. It was a term coined by John Piper, who’s a very prominent evangelical theologian and pastor, in 1987. Even though the patriarchal ideas underneath it are very old, the term is actually quite both new and very much an outgrowth of the rightward swing we get in the ‘80s. 

I see the trad wife stuff now as that just rebranded, kind of like how the eighties are back in a lot of ways. I’m like, cool, biblical womanhood has found a new term. I think that interpreting it as the inverse of the witch is very smart, and I will heartedly agree with that. Because the trad wife thing isn’t a kink. It’s a worldview that understands women as subservient. You cannot safe word your way out of being a trad wife.It’s this idea in which consent does not exist as a woman, and it especially ceases to exist within marriage. And the witch is a woman who has agency and who does consent or does not consent and is not subservient. It’s not only the opposite of tradwifery and biblical womanhood — it’s the biggest threat.