Dear Prudence,
I am an evangelical (recovering evangelical) who grew up in a very conservative church—we once had an album burning in the parking lot to torch “satanic” music like Boyz II Men and Ace of Base. I eventually got out, and spent years deconstructing the truly messed-up things I was taught. I am now hard left, and happily so.
My mom, however, is another story. She has remained committed to evangelicalism, and her political views have only gotten more right-wing as the years have passed. She was the president of the Republican club in our small Midwestern town. She has all sorts of Trump merchandise. She still has Trump 2024 signs in her yard, a year and a half after the election. She is, in short, part of two cults: the cult of hard-right religious views, and the national cult that cheers for this horrifying administration. That also means she is someone who is happy about the war in Iran, because she believes it’s the first step to finally bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus.
Up until now, it was hard enough trying to maintain a distant-at-best relationship when it was “just” the homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism that’s baked into evangelical beliefs, but now with her support of ICE, enthusiastic support for the war, and an unshakable belief that Trump was chosen by God and can therefore do no wrong, it feels completely impossible. I know she yearns for a closer relationship, but honestly even a bland phone call where we both actively avoid any of those hot-button topics is excruciating for me. And also: She’s 82 years old. My dad died a couple years ago, and Mom’s relationship with my one sibling that lives in town is toxic and codependent as hell. She’s got her church friends, but Mom has always been so family-focused that I know these relationships will never fill the empty space left by me and my other siblings who keep their distance. I also know that her loneliness isn’t my responsibility.
And yet, I can’t bring myself to grant her grace. The war is terrifying to me on a primal level, because I know most evangelicals would be elated to nuke Iran off the planet because Jesus told them to, and that they’re on the verge of establishing the Christofascist society they’ve been praying for. I just can’t reconcile all of this in my head: the ache of missing my mom (more likely, the version of her that I wished she were, not who she actually is), the fury at all of her horrible beliefs, the terror I have on a visceral level about the war because of the lies I was brainwashed to believe, and the sadness I feel when I think about her loneliness. She is, at the core, a genuinely kind person whose view of the world has been completely corrupted by religion and Trumpism—exactly the kind of stuff that happens when a person’s deep in a cult. I guess it comes down to my grieving a relationship that could’ve been, in theory, but is not realistic. Is there any way to navigate this?