These Evangelical Women Are Abandoning Trump and the Church

https://gen.medium.com/these-evangelical-women-are-abandoning-trump-and-the-church-ee8899837fe

Katie Loveland, 37 and a mother of two, was raised evangelical in Wyoming in the 1980s and ’90s. Her parents weren’t political, but they steeped her in Christian pop culture, like kids’ music by the Donut Man and Psalty the singing Bible, as well as media from the fundamentalist organization Focus on the Family. When she was 25, Loveland moved to Helena, Montana, to raise her own family and began attending the small congregation at the Christian Missionary and Alliance Church. In 2016, one morning after she taught adult Sunday School, an usher in his sixties followed her into the church kitchen. He was tall and blocked the exit, looking Loveland up and down. “Do you have a twin?” he said. “Because I’d sure like to have that.”

Loveland wrote the man a letter — he’d been bothering other women, too — and reported the incident to her pastor, but the man continued serving communion. “It wasn’t this big, horrible thing,” she told me late last year, but it made Loveland begin to reevaluate the treatment of women within her church.

Around the same time, her church’s all-male board “decided what was needed in our church was someone to walk around on Sundays and carry a gun.” Loveland, who works in public health, was helping out in the church nursery, where older kids would wander in and out to play with the babies. The board’s decision made Loveland contemplate the risk of harm posed by an unlicensed, armed person in the church, primed to shoot.

*snip*