Identity boxes make me wriggle. Don’t they want data on centrist sellouts or on liberal Christians trying to prove they’re not oxymorons? I would rather abstain from the intoxicating pronouns and group acronyms than overdose on the gender/race Kool Aid.
Many won’t agree that my newfound openness to conservative views makes me more of a classic liberal than I was as a bog standard member of the liberal elite. Over the years, I’ve followed my Gen X dreams all the way to a gay divorce. I notched up five degrees in religion, art history, and feminism, worked in publishing and design in New York and the UK, and co-founded an eco-project in South Africa—only to end in DEI obsolescence.
Sixty marches for Black Lives Matter led me to delve into the intolerance of so much activism. The unflinching paradigm of oppressor vs. oppressed that dominates our work, culture, and education is a result of academics who have consistently dumped reason and refused to critique their own constructs. Shame on me for seeing that, but my mind can’t unsee it.
MISERERE MEI/THEM is a cry for mercy in an age of illiberal ideologies. I might have written and illustrated a children’s Bible series that included Women’s March signage, dreadlocked angels, and an ambiguously afroed Jesus; but when it came to a novel I wrote about love transcending demographic lines, the publishing world reminded me that difference, not empathy, is king.
MISERERE MEI/THEM will come as a surprise to friends who haven’t seen much of me since my BLM posts. I hope they’ll be open to learning where I’ve landed and not conclude that I’ve lost my moral compass. I’m doing it because my education taught me to interrogate everything, my parents told me to seek God in the world, and my resulting search reminded me to serve love not theory.