No Love in War: a story of Christian nationalism

"No matter when a woman leaves, she’s left too early, she’s left too late, after all this time, you’re leaving now? Perhaps things weren’t as bad as you said. You could’ve left but you didn’t. Now you’ve left, you should’ve instead stayed, at least a little longer. Look what you’ve left behind. Look at the manner of your leaving. Look who you’ve deserted. All this leaving is on my mind."...

"To be let go is not the same as leaving." This episode contains Part 1 of the Epilogue, the final chapter of No Love in War .

"There is so much more I could say about all this, but then again, it was nothing but more of the same bombardment. Dominion-seeking man sees woman. Man wants woman. Man moves between controlling, belittling and love-bombing woman until she feels sufficiently lowly enough to submit to his will." This episode contains Chapter 33 of No Love in War , the final chapter in Section 4.

"What even was love from all these men I knew but special dispensation to treat one woman more cruelly than any other, mere proof of their worthiness in the church’s masculine mission?" This episode contains Chapter 32 of No Love in War .

"Purity culture was in full swing in conservative evangelical Christian churches, schools and campuses across the United States. None of this was new to me, of course it wasn’t. All this was typical. It was casual. It was mundane." This episode contains Chapter 31 of No Love in War .

"In 1998, our church magazine set forth the “rich heritage of Southern Presbyterianism,” lamenting the progressing decline of the Presbyterian Church in America, most particularly its seminary president’s willingness to accept broader interpretations of the creation narrative in Genesis 1." This episode contains Chapter 30 of No Love in War .

"Over several long sessions, our professor spoke about the joys of the hetero-marital union, then veered into his true passions, the danger of women’s domination, the importance of home-cooked meals on the table every evening—the family that eats together, lives at peace together—the necessity of children, he argued vehemently against oral contraception, what he called women’s desire to “pois...

"For while Christian leaders on the national stages quarrelled and set their sights on the reclamation of land they considered theirs by divine right, the men in my life carried on seeking more immediate dominion over me. And not just me, of course not. Close to 800,000 men of the Promise Keepers movement gathered in a mass spectacle in 1997 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to freeze-...

"Within the first few months of my freshman year at Christian university, one of my fellow incomers left the campus permanently after hitting his girlfriend." This episode contains Chapter 27 of No Love in War .

"My high school graduation marked the start of the summer when our pastor stepped into the role of State Chairman for Howard Phillips’s U.S. Taxpayer’s Party, later renamed the Constitution Party." This episode is the first in the final section, Fire, of No Love in War.

"This was a time when a lot of we girls were reading Christian historical romance novels, stories of young and virginal Puritan women, pioneers or Victorians, all whose beauty and unparalleled modesty and chastity eventually shamed and tamed some rogue of a man, all set against the golden backdrop of a more noble era when men and women, masters and slaves, all knew their place." This epi...

"Our pastor, on the other hand, a true believer, was in it to win it. In 1993, speaking at the Biblical Worldview and Christian Education Conference, he disparaged democracy as “mob rule,” lauded the ideal dictatorship of a Christian state and declared religious pluralism a fantasy." This episode contains Chapter 24 of No Love in War .

"“She wouldn’t have done it that way if she really wanted to die.” I understood every ounce of her meaning, I watched as it bared its fangs, it bit me, it sank into my flesh, it drained me of all my blood." This episode contains Chapter 23 of No Love in War .

"My church was part of a network of churches across the country that held up men like Larry McDonald, like Rousas Rushdoony, like Greg Bahnsen, as demigods in the war to reinstate God’s law in the United States." This episode contains Chapter 22 of No Love in War .

"And then there is Rousas’s 1984 journal entry which refers to Arda’s “extensive fornication after the divorce,” a collection of words which I’ve lost no small amount of sleep over, reflecting on all the meaning they carry, all this focus on the physical, on women’s bodies and what we do with them, the constant objects of the male gaze." This episode contains Chapter 21 of No Love in War...

"In December, 1995, Reconstructionist Greg Bahnsen died at the age of 47, five years after his divorce was finalized, his wife having left him for the church youth minister." This episode contains Chapter 20 of No Love in War .

"Almost everything I know about the place of my birth I’ve found online, though I strongly suspect my brother and I were separated from our parents not long after being born." This episode, the first in Section 3, contains Chapter 19 of No Love in War .

"Only now, some final line had been crossed, some internal alarm set off, some awareness achieved that this is not just what people do." This episode contains Chapter 18, the final Chapter in Section 2 of No Love in War .

"This is the slavemaster's gospel." This episode contains Chapter 17 of No Love in War .

"Violence shaded all my church-school days, each moment in between was merely time spent in a holding pen." This episode contains Chapter 16 of No Love in War .

"To break any of these rules risked revealing that most important and carefully guarded of all secrets: the existence of female desire." This episode contains Chapter 15 of No Love in War .

"At some point, I was identified by Mrs. Pastor’s Wife as a potential model of ladylike subordination in our multi-level misogynist marketing scheme." This episode contains Chapter 14 of No Love in War .

"In and amongst so much vicious noise, as I sank into the pit of myself, I early on began to look around for other neglected and unknown things." This episode contains Chapter 13 of No Love in War .

"In this cruel community of my childhood, there seemed to be no rest between episodes of conflict. To be sure, we were no different than any other school in many respects—in our drug use, sexual assault, teenage pregnancy, abuse of alcohol—yet the additional spiritual burden we carried, our façade of sacred exceptionalism, this was something else." This episode contains Chapter 12* of No...

"Some of us were somehow selected as those who would bide our time in chastity, wait in the wings, hands folded patiently like carefully preserved meat. Bodies trussed for the taking." This episode contains Chapter 11 of No Love in War.