It was January 20, 2001, and I was at George W. Bush's inaugural ball. I had spent months campaigning for him, and it had not been easy. After the Florida electoral debacle complete with "hanging chads," Katherine Harris (and her 15 minutes of shame), and ultimately the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision, I was finally enjoying the fruits of my labor as I celebrated the new president that I worked to get elected.
Sure, my role in the campaign wasn't glamorous, but I was a 20-year-old political science, religious studies double major who saw this election as the beginning of my work for the Right. I had recently appeared on MTV's reality show, Road Rules, where I represented the worldview of conservative evangelicals in all its virginal, Christian glory in a very public way. Now I wanted to turn my moment in the spotlight into something meaningful.
During the campaign, I attended Young Republican meetings, drove Bush's trusted advisors, Andrew Card and Karen Hughes, in the motorcade when they came to town, and now I was working the inaugural ball as the celebrity handler for special guest, Drew Carey. During the evening, he admitted that he wasn't actually a Republican, but a libertarian.
"Good enough," I thought to myself, "As long as he isn't one of 'those liberals.'"
I believed my involvement in the campaign was just the beginning of my efforts to promote the conservative movement and perhaps my own career as well.
Growing up immersed in the evangelical community, I was so familiar with the Christian rhetoric and worldview that it never occurred to me that they might be getting it all wrong. During the late eighties and throughout the nineties, evangelicalism hit its stride in terms of communicating and promoting a very specific message that amounted to a chorus of sound bites about "family values," militarism, and the pro-life movement. The group's unified theological positioning inspired the mobilization of American evangelical voters and influenced countless election results.
"The very thing that inspired my conservatism, would now be the thing that caused it to topple: my faith."
As I stood there in my purple satin, floor-length gown and then-in-style white eye shadow watching the new President dance with his First Lady, I was inspired by what I thought was a going to be a move toward increased personal responsibility, a shift from the distracting Clinton/Lewinsky circus, and a return to the philosophy of the patron saint of right-wing politics, Ronald Reagan. What I didn't realize was that I soon would become one of "those liberals," and that the very thing that inspired my conservatism, would now be the thing that caused it to topple: my faith.
I was more than just your garden variety Christian; I attended church several times a week, sought guidance from my pastor in private meetings, and after my reality TV stardom, spoke to church youth groups about how to stay "pure" in this "sinful" world. As I began studying religion at the University of Pittsburgh, people in the church warned me about what could happen under the influence of the liberal intelligentsia.
The bias of "godless liberals" teaching at universities was reason enough to avoid traditional education. I believed them when they said academia skewed to the left, but surely a faith as strong as mine could stand up to academic scrutiny.
What happened, however, wasn't an abandonment of my faith, but a shift in my understanding of Scripture. While I had always read the Bible and knew large portions of it by memory, I had relied on the expertise of my religious mentors (some of whom were simply laypeople teaching Sunday School or Christian education classes) to help guide me through its interpretation.
The more I read the text through unfiltered eyes and the more I learned about scholarly investigation, the less sense their point of view made. Their old Jesus looked nothing like my new Jesus.
I could no longer reconcile Jesus's calls for non-judgment, loving your enemies, and taking up your cross with many of the Religious Right's positions on social services, women's rights and the LGBT community. Even though I felt alone in my theological shift, I was not.
My journey from Young Republican to less young Democrat did not come from a crisis of faith, it came from finding inspiration in the life of Jesus. Once I removed the dogmatic lens that had informed my biblical interpretations, I found a figure that defended a prostitute and ate with the poor. The life of Jesus simply didn't reflect the agenda of the political right, so now neither could I.
More: Why I Left the Right: How Studying Religion Made Me a Liberal - By Susie Meister, PhD in Religious Studies, Host of The Brain Candy Podcast
This is a good article that also reflects my personal observations growing up around many others from the religious right.
