Where Goodness Still Grows

Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy

Amy Peterson

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780785225737
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Declining church attendance. A growing feeling of betrayal. For Christians who have begun to feel set adrift and disillusioned by their churches, Where Goodness Still Grows grounds us in a new view of virtue deeply rooted in a return to Jesus Christ’s life and ministry.

The evangelical church in America has reached a crossroads. Social media and recent political events have exposed the fault lines that exist within our country and our spiritual communities. Millennials are leaving the church, citing hypocrisy, partisanship, and unkindness as reasons they can’t stay. In this book Amy Peterson explores the corruption and blind spots of the evangelical church and the departure of so many from the faith - but she refuses to give up hope, believing that rescue is on the way.

Where Goodness Still Grows:

• Dissects the moral code of American evangelicalism
• Reimagines virtue as a tool, not a weapon
• Explores the Biblical meaning of specific virtues like kindness, purity, and modesty
• Provides comfort, hope, and a path towards spiritual restoration

Amy writes as someone intimately familiar with, fond of, and deeply critical of the world of conservative evangelicalism. She writes as a woman and a mother, as someone invested in the future of humanity, and as someone who just needs to know how to teach her kids what it means to be good. Amy finds that if we listen harder and farther, we will find the places where goodness still grows.

Praise for Where Goodness Still Grows:

“In this poignant, honest book, Amy Peterson confronts her disappointment with the evangelical leaders who handed her The Book of Virtues then happily ignored them for the sake of political power. But instead of just walking away, Peterson rewrites the script, giving us an alternative book of virtues needed in this moment. And it’s no mistake that it ends with hope.”
— James K. A. Smith, author of You Are What You Love

CHAPTER 1

LAMENT

AT THE CLIFTON HERITAGE PARK ON NASSAU, WE ARE STANDING ON A CLIFF overlooking the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. It’s January, but hot. We are sturdy American tourists in baseball caps and backpacks, shading our eyes and gazing off in a dozen different directions. The cliff is edged with wispy Australian pines, non-native invasive plants that cause soil erosion, and a green chain-link fence, no longer upright.

Just yards away from us, behind the chain-link fence, stone steps built into the land lead down to the water. Some call them the slave steps, our tour guide tells us, and others call them the pirates’ steps. Recent hurricane damage has made them inaccessible, but our guide waves in their direction as she teaches us about the history of slavery in the Bahamas. We stand on dusty ground covered more by pebbles than by grass or sand—white and gray, a little tired, a little parched, a little sun bleached. Off the cliffs, the water glints sapphire, and oil tankers anchored not far from shore bob like rusty tin cans cut in half and set afloat. In a little while we’ll go snorkeling a half mile from here. We’ll see a dozen kinds of fish, rays, and a coral reef, and we’ll come out spotted with crude oil, wondering how much of it we may have ingested and whether the stains will come out of our swimsuits, horrified by what is happening to the natural beauty of this area.

I watch the undergraduate students I’m chaperoning. They are honors students at the Christian college where I teach, bright and inquisitive and sheltered and devout; most of them have not yet found any need in their lives for lament. Now they gaze at the screens of their iPhones, snapping photos. They stand shoulder to shoulder with the cedar statues also on this cliff, looking out to sea. Carved from the trunks of cedar trees planted by Ponce de León, these women lean toward the water; they have been watching the coast for decades. Their faces are black and their bodies dry gray wood. Faded blue scarves wrap their heads. One’s hip juts to the south. One’s shoulders hunch with grief. One wraps her arms around her chest, as if to hold her heart in place. Each is scarred with rough parallel lines sawn slanting down her sides, marks of the slave captain’s whip.

“They are looking toward Africa,” our tour guide tells us, “their homeland.” Our tour guide is a stocky Bahamian grandmother in a beret and khaki pants. “But they are not sure which direction Africa is in, so you see they are all looking different ways. Or maybe they are looking for their children. Families of slaves were often separated and taken to different islands.”

I lift my own phone and photograph the cedar woman closest to me. She seems, more than anything else, to be looking toward the sky, as if she knows both her homeland and her children are gone and will not return, and she will not stop asking God why.

Women have a lot of painful questions for God, perhaps more than men have. At least that’s what I have seen in art as I’ve traveled with undergraduates for the past few years, helping expose them to new ideas and cultures. These cedar trees remind me of a sculpture I saw two years ago outside the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. When the Japanese occupied Nanjing in 1937, they slaughtered more than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians and raped twenty thousand women. They raped children, the elderly, and nuns. Often soldiers would go door-to-door, searching for a girl to gang-rape. When they were finished, they would pierce her through the vagina with a bayonet or a stick of bamboo. Outside the memorial hall, a giant bronze woman holds her dead child loosely in hands falling to the ground. Her legs are heavy, weighted, her back beginning to arch, her eyes blank toward the sky, her mouth a silent O.

They remind me, too, of what I saw in Italy, Mary after Mary after Mary cradling the baby who would die.

At some point I stopped attending chapel. Three times a week, nearly two thousand gather on the university campus to sing together and to hear someone talk about God. Chapel isn’t mandatory for either students or faculty—there are no attendance checkers—but it is expected that we all attend as regularly as we are able, and most do. But at some point I found I couldn’t attend without crying. Maybe it was September 2014, and no one had mentioned the death of Michael Brown or the protests in Ferguson from stage. Or maybe it was September 2016, the week after Hurricane Matthew devastated the Bahamas, home to many students at our school, and everyone was singing, without a second thought, the contemporary worship song about resting in God’s embrace “when oceans rise.” Or maybe it was September 2018, after the shooting in San Bernardino, and the shooting in Cincinnati, and the shooting in Bakersfield, and the shootings in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Maryland. It could have been any month, any year; at some point I couldn’t do it anymore.

The music didn’t move me the way it used to—the thrumming bass lines or the snatches of cello. I felt disconnected and invisible as the relentlessly optimistic, victorious anthems played, as hands raised, eyes closed, and the Spirit moved, it seemed, in everyone but me. Did we have to be happy all the time? Was that what it meant to be good? The music of faith seemed all upbeat and major keys. What I needed was some acknowledgment of the shattered nature of things—some acknowledgment that lasted longer than a minor bridge or half a prayer before eliding into hope and glory. I probably wasn’t alone, but no one else seemed sad.

For most of my life, I was the one with hands raised. From seventh grade on, you would have found me in the front row at youth group, standing as the Spirit moved me, singing with sincerity. Nothing made me happier as a teenager than singing praise choruses in candlelit rooms after midnight. But in those songs, and in most of our gatherings, we drew from a limited emotional register when we approached God, a limited vocabulary; we avoided the book of Lamentations and the sad psalms and camped out in “Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of any kind,” and “Give thanks in everything.” This worked out okay for me in my sheltered adolescent life, but in my early twenties, when I experienced my first heartbreak, I didn’t know what to do with my very real grief. It wouldn’t go away, and I didn’t have words for it.

Eventually I turned to the Anglican tradition, finding in set liturgical prayers containers for the emotions I couldn’t contain, forms I could use to hold my formless, shape-shifting grief. This helped. But over time I realized the Anglican tradition, too, had limitations when it came to acknowledging grief: while those Anglicans who pray the Daily Office do engage with all the psalms, many psalms of lament are omitted from the Sunday morning lectionary readings—the readings we hear most often¹.

In the last few years I’ve needed more space for grief. I think often of those cedar women on the coast, unwilling to give up their lament until they get a reply. When Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, his body left in the sun for hours before being carted away in the back of a Suburban, Black activists on Twitter taught me to see what was happening. With those eyes I saw Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, and so many others. Tamir Rice was twelve; Cleveland police mistook his toy gun for a real weapon. There are twelve-year-olds across the ocean mining the minerals that go into making iPhones like mine and working in the garment factories pulsing out the clothes my children and others wear. I’m caught in cycles of consumption, dependent on fossil fuels, and the earth’s temperature is rising, species are dying, coastlines are eroding, hurricanes are intensifying. Puerto Rico went without power for months; Flint has gone without safe water for years. The Dakota Access Pipeline brought violence against Native American people and property yet again. Children escaped violence in Syria only to die at sea; children escaped violence in Honduras only to be torn from their families and placed in cells at our border. Inequality between the rich and the poor spiked. We elected a president who has a long history of seeing women as—in his words—pieces of ass.

And while all this news pummeled me, I watched the friends, writers, activists, reporters, and politicians I followed on Twitter express their grief and their opinions and their hopes. They didn’t all respond to every story, and their emotions and solutions varied, but they responded. Meanwhile, the evangelical leaders I followed on Twitter kept tweeting about abortion and gay marriage. One week—near the beginning of September 2017—floods were ravaging Houston, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Charlottesville was recovering from white supremacists and Nazis marching through its streets the week prior. President Trump had just pardoned an openly racist sheriff and was beginning his attempts to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an action that—if successful—would have significant and violent repercussions for immigrant families. I drank my coffee and scrolled through Twitter, absorbing the images of rising water in the streets of Houston, until I saw what white evangelical leaders were tweeting about that day: their newly released “Nashville Statement,” which they saw as a historic and courageous statement in support of traditional marriage. In that moment it became clear to me: my people were not grieving the same things I was grieving. Instead, they seemed to remain willfully blind to them.

I am trying to remain in community with my evangelical brothers and sisters, but it’s hard. I’m not sure I can keep going to chapel until I know the people in the seats next to me believe these things are lamentable. I can’t go to chapel again until we find some way to sing dirges together, to let sadness be a regular part of our common life.

I didn’t grow up with the practice of lament. In the past few years, when grief has overwhelmed me, I haven’t had any idea what to do with it. Frankly, emotions frighten me—I always prefer ideas and books—and so when my friend Kelley suggested I look at the ways the writers of Scripture practiced lament, it felt like the right way to begin. Trying to figure out what to do with my grief sent me to the library and to the Bible, and I wrestled there until I could begin to understand it².

Here’s what I am beginning to understand: lament is the practice of mourning what is wrong in the world and calling on God to repair it. We lament the sins for which we are responsible, the sins for which we are only indirectly responsible, and, perhaps especially, the sins for which we are not remotely responsible. We lament the things that are broken, whether or not we broke them. Lament, then, is part of repentance—of grieving personal sins and turning away from them. But it’s also part of grieving the large-scale injustices for which we may be only indirectly complicit, and those losses that have no evident moral failure or culpability attached to them, but which result from living in a fractured world. In other words, lament is a practice that is appropriate whether I am repenting of the lustful thoughts I’ve been nurturing yet again, or whether I am grieving the death of Michael Brown and the structural injustices that have historically privileged white people in America, or whether I am mourning the death of a friend to cancer. Lament is a fitting response in any of these situations.

But becoming aware of my need for lament and figuring out how to define it hasn’t made practicing it easy. Repenting of my sins doesn’t come naturally to me because I am prideful and often willfully blind to my own sins. I don’t want to change or be changed. Lamenting the larger infractions in our world doesn’t come naturally to me either because I don’t feel I need to take responsibility for them and because many of them don’t directly affect my life. Most of the time I live comfortably cushioned against disease and poverty and hunger and violence. And when I’m sad, even for good reasons, I tend to activate my British genes and get very chin-up and stiff-upper-lip about everything. Stop wallowing, I say to myself. Wallowing doesn’t help anyone. It’s not useful to lie in bed crying all day. Be stoic and resolute and uncomplaining and persevering; be good.

Exactly because lament doesn’t come naturally to me, I need the church to help me practice it. But for most of my life, the church has encouraged my natural tendency to avoid or repress negative emotions and to shrug off systemic injustices as out of my hands, not my responsibility. I learned in church to repent of my sins, but this practice was brief, and I could turn immediately to the truth about forgiveness and grace. Once or twice I was led in prayers repenting of vague national sins—repenting that our nation had “turned away from God,” for example—but without any real acknowledgment of the sin inherent in the structures that shape our daily lives. And when I was sad or angry, mourning the natural losses of living in a broken world, my emotions were usually discredited by other Christians. Weeping may endure for a night, they’d say, italics in their voices, implication clear: allowing grief to continue is selfish. My sadness indicated a lack of faith or was labeled “complaining.” I even heard lament identified as an Old Testament practice, one that was no longer valid in our postresurrection reality.

Why have we been so unwilling to practice lament?

---

It’s not the lamenters who are without faith; it’s those who have given up lamenting.

---

Maybe we don’t lament because we don’t truly hope. We have given up believing that change—real, radical change—is possible, and so we have learned to be content with less, with injustice, with the status quo. We don’t cry out because we think there’s no point to it—there’s no one listening, there’s no one with the power to change what is lamentable, no...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword by Lauren F. Winner
• Introduction: Virtues for the Apocalypse
• Chapter 1: Lament
• Chapter 2: Kindness
• Chapter 3: Hospitality
• Chapter 4: Purity
• Chapter 5: Modesty
• Chapter 6: Authenticity
• Chapter 7: Love
• Chapter 8: Discernment
• Chapter 9: Hope
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author