Marching and loving

I joined my diverse sisters and brothers in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Saturday for our local Women’s March. I recognized so many familiar faces, people I knew well because we have been protesting for health care expansion, religious freedom, and Black Lives Matter for years. We have held signs, chanted slogans, and sung endless choruses of “We Shall Overcome.” As I looked around, I smiled as the protest grew beyond our usual vigil attendees. Thousands poured onto the park, with signs opposing white supremacy, sexual assault, and income inequality.

We began to march, and our numbers kept swelling, as people joined us from neighboring apartment buildings. The organizers had hoped for five hundred—they could have never predicted the thousands who joined. We could no longer fit on the sidewalk, so we moved to the streets and onto the bridge where cars normally travelled. As our voices soared, we sang for our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters. My heart swelled with love for my neighbors, and I longed to keep this lens that the march had lent to me. The tint and hue of the view was so much different from the one with which I had been raised.

As a white conservative Christian, growing up in the religious right and prosperity gospel movements, I had been taught that no one was good unless they went to the same sort of church, adhered to the same doctrines, held the same political convictions, and read the Bible the same way that I did. If they did not, I could not love them. To love them would mean that I could be seduced by their thought, and that they would surely lure me into corruption.