S8E06: How to Navigate the Tension Between Advocacy and Healing, with Sally Gary and Karen Keen of Centerpeace

For many Exvangelicals, there's an enormous pressure to move into spaces of advocacy for civil rights, especially two weeks before the 2024 Presidential Election. However, advocacy can easily replicate systems of criticism, moral superiority, and shaming, especially when there's un- or under-addressed fear, trauma, anger.

We're thrilled to have Sally Gary and Karen Keen from Centerpeace to talk with us about how to navigate the tension between advocacy and healing part of our series How to Practice Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass. Centerpeace is a supportive space for LGBTQ+ folks who desire a continued relationship with the church and Christianity. 

We talk with Sally and Karen about:

• Classic Therapists (4:00): Jeremiah kicks us off, “I think becoming a therapist was a way of bypassing personal healing. Classic therapists. Now, obviously I didn't recognize that at the time. I was 23. I had very little reason that the idea that I wanted to do relationship therapy was because of my own family of origin.”

• Evangelism (6:00): Julia notes, “Karen discusses how the true root of evangelism is the sharing of good news. However, in fundamentalist spaces, evangelism has become a form of coercion and control, and those who don't conform receive criticism and rejection. If we're not careful when we move out of those harmful religious spaces, we might be prone to enacting those same communication strategies.”

• Infighting (11:00): Julia describes, “So you're ultimately describing how folks within the same field of study with different specialties use infighting to criticize each other when ultimately we could be working together. Advancing sexual health as a whole through education, through counseling, through therapy, but we're too stuck in our own superiority to get above that or get through that.”

• Evangelical Families (19:00): Karen shares, “I don't see myself as against the evangelical family that has raised me. I see myself in conversation with, wrestling with that family. And in terms of the difference between healing and advocacy, I think one way to tell whether we need to focus on healing or on advocacy is what comes up in us emotionally, what's in our chest, what's in our gut and our stomach. And if we are feeling a pit in the stomach, if we are feeling a bitterness, a rage, then probably I'm going to want to look at how can I heal, which is going to be more with a supportive restorative community versus advocacy.” 

• Advocacy v. Healing (21:00): Sally says, “For me, the difference is about a personal space versus a public space. Healing space is very personal and any advocacy that I might be a part of needs to arise out of that healing. And, I know in my own life there had to be a lot of healing before I could take on any kind of advocacy role.”

• Food for Thought (25:00): Julia asks, “What's the difference in advocacy when we are looking at systems that can be particularly harmful? And then what does that look like when we're having conversations with the people that we love, who we share our holidays and our houses with? I'm sure that we'll probably talk about that a little bit later, but that's good food for thought.”

• Obligation to Advocate (28:00): Karen says, “One of the ways that I can see, okay, I need to maybe step back, is if that resentment is coming up, and if I'm feeling like I'm operating out of pressure, rather than choice, sometimes I start to feel like, oh, I don't have a choice, I just have to do this, and I start to feel this pit in my stomach, and it feels like obligation.”

• Reclaiming Evangelism (31:00): Karen states, “I want to reclaim the word evangelism because it's good news …  Where it went wrong is when it wasn't, ‘I’m so excited about this. Let me tell you what I'm excited about.’ It was, ‘let me coerce you. Let me manipulate. Let me assert my dogma indoctrination on you and my moral superiority.’ Which is not evangelism. Evangelism is a way of life. It's a lived embodied way that I am.”

• Listening First (35:00): Sally discusses, “Jesus said the most important things were to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself …  I care more about learning that and listening to your story and getting to know you and what is really important to you, than I do cramming what I think down your throat.”

• Relationships (42:00): Jeremiah notes, “I'm also reminded that Julia, the work that you and I do in relationship therapy is ultimately about navigating differences. How can two people be clear about what they align on, but not necessarily have the expectation that they align on everything, which, I think at their worse, conservative evangelical communities can encourage, and how can we encourage folks in a relationship to navigate even to celebrate some of the differences that they have. And we talk about that on a dyadic level.”

• Centerpeace Conference (44:00): Sally discusses, “There is a specific call to respect other people's views and to listen to those views that we're not there to argue. We're not there to express  those disagreements in that context. This is a space for LGBTQ plus Christians to come who have been wounded by those kinds of arguments, who have literally been removed from family, from churches and are still longing. And that's the theme of our conference is  the fact that we are still desirous of relationship with God, relationship with the church, to find a faith community to be a part of. That's what those 500 people are coming to look for.”

• Groundwork from Minute 1 (45:00): Jeremiah highlights, “I love the intentionality about saying that. Not just night one, but also like minute one. These are the ground rules in therapy. We call this the battle for structure. These are the ground rules. We're going to be nice. Disrespect is not going to be tolerated. I really appreciate that as a starting space for how you navigate differences in large groups of people.”

• Supporting LGBTQ+ College Students (54:00): Sally shares, “It was for LGBTQ students on campus. They met once a week at my home in the evening, and it was absolutely beautiful, and I learned so much from those students. I began listening to their stories, and I realized, okay, if I'm going to really understand this, the number one thing to say is tell me more. Tell me more about who you are and how you got where you are. And I began to listen and I realized very early on that this is not as simplistic as I was led to believe. The cookie cutter answers I had been given in the 90s from Christian sources that were again, best motives trying to help, but we're, yeah, but were not helpful at all.”

• Thank God We All Grow (1:00:00): Julia shares, “I remember listening to an interview with Hillary Clinton and, and the interviewer was really asking what I thought were poor questions about stances that she had previously had on gay marriage. And of course, Hillary Clinton supports gay marriage, but she didn't at one point in the 90s.Of course, I don't want to minimize or invalidate the history of folks who have not had civil rights, and at one point in the interview, you could tell that Hillary Clinton was getting frustrated, and she said some version of, Thank God we all can grow and evolve.”

• Need for Growth (1:03:00): Karen says, “Because it took me a long time to where I am to get to an affirming place and there are things that I said that were not good, they were harmful. I thought I was doing good, but was keeping people  trapped and I had to see that I was trapped too to be able to stop using my own words to trap others. But I think that there's some of the stridency I can see on the left or the right, the frustration that there needs to be growth is really a remnant of that conservative fundamentalism”

• Advocacy in Relationship (1:08:00): Karen notes, “When you add on to that, the stress of advocacy work, the stress of the confrontations, the emotional, spiritual abuse that comes at you, the holding and listening to pain day after day after day of people who are maybe suicidal or who have been pushed out and trying to be a space. That I think we're still sorting out how to care well for that trauma that comes from advocacy work in order to protect our marriage to not, because I think it's very easy if we don't recognize that if we don't recognize the triggers and the traumas that are going on, we can turn against each other.”

• Reflecting (1:15:00): Jeremiah ends us off, “That was a really, really special experience to reflect on, some of the things that I missed. when I was 20 and,  and getting to grieve that a little bit, but also getting to celebrate with Sally and to see just the beautiful work that she and Karen are doing with Centerpeace. It was a big honor.”