Photo by Matthew Hintz
Lyz Lenz
Lyz Lenz is going to hell. Or at least a large portion of the God-fearing people of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, seem to believe so.
Cedar Rapids is where the journalist and author has lived most of her adult life—long before she became an author and journalist. She moved there from Minnesota with her husband to start his career and then to raise two kids. Cedar Rapids is where they faithfully attended Evangelical churches. And it’s the place they opened one of their own.
Cedar Rapids is where Lyz Lenz, who was raised in a conservative Christian household, finally got fed up with what she saw as a patriarchal, often bigoted orthodoxy, and started pushing back.
Cedar Rapids is where Lyz Lenz invented herself as a writer, humbly at first, churning out listicles for sites like Mashable, which led to parenting articles for everybody from HuffPost to Literary Mama. Her byline these days is most likely to appear in the weightier Columbia Journalism Review, attached to masterful takedowns/profiles of people like FOX News instigator Tucker Carlson.
Cedar Rapids is also where she finally left her Evangelical church and, ultimately, left her husband, who she says would not leave that orthodoxy alongside her. All of these experiences led to her first book, God Land, which chronicles (and challenges) the changing role of fundamentalist Christianity in the life and politics of the Midwest.
With God Land hitting stores, we met Lyz Lenz for lunch, not in Cedar Rapids, but in Minneapolis. For Lenz, a stop in Minneapolis is always a bit of a homecoming. She moved here from Vermillion, South Dakota, in high school and graduated from Eden Prairie. Here she also attended her first megachurch, Wooddale, before earning her undergrad at Gustavus. For a spell, she returned to the Cities for a job at a Billy Graham field office in Loring Park. And her brother, Zach, is here.
She was in town in early June not to visit Zach (though he did show up at the end of our interview), but to catch a flight to Maine, where she would be holing up to write her second book, Belabored, about tearing down the global patriarchy. Over fried seafood and beers at Sea Salt, the Minnehaha Falls restaurant, we talked about what’s really going on with Evangelicalism in Middle America and what faith means to her now.
But first, there was that pesky matter of her heresy.
Are you going to hell?
I don’t believe in hell.
Well, there are probably people out there who think that’s where you belong, if for no other reason than standing up to Tucker Carlson.
I’ve had a lot of experience being called a heretic, and by the people who supposedly love me the most. And I think what I’ve learned is, it’s more about them than it is about me.
I was curious about how you ended up here, so I went deep on your Contently page. In the beginning you were basically writing clickbait. Like, there’s a Mashable story called “Sea Lion Bobs Head to Backstreet Boys.” And also stuff like “21 Signs that Pinterest Made Your Girlfriend Crazy and Unstable.”
For so long I just wrote the chum bucket of the internet. One time I was on a date and we were arguing about something and the guy started Googling for an article to prove himself correct. He pulled up a Daily Dot article that I had written and started reading it to me.
The nature of your work changed dramatically in the early Trump era, culminating in stuff like your Tucker Carlson piece.
It takes that one person saying, “I like you. You can do better.” Like, I met Jia Tolentino who writes for The New Yorker. And she liked my writing.
That writing got a book deal to write about the evolving role of faith in the Midwest. Then, between inking the deal and actually writing the book, Trump won and you got divorced—two facts that became the pillars of the narrative.
The book sold and everything I had been trying to hold together for so long—I finally just stopped trying to hold it together. If I hadn’t sold the book, I might still be married. Because one of the pressures on my marriage was that I was going to write about all this stuff that we disagreed about.
And you were accomplishing something that was solely yours.
I think the fact that I sold two books within like a month of each other made everything I wanted to do, and everything I wanted to achieve, more real. Before, it was like, “Yeah, you do this little thing, it’s fine.” In every relationship there’s a negotiation of who goes first. I had always assumed he goes first, and then it will be my turn. Then, the moment it became my turn, things fell apart.
Lyz Lenz with Evelyn Birkby
Lenz hanging with 99-year-old Iowa media legend Evelyn Birkby.
In the book, one revelation you have about the farthest-right reaches of Evangelicalism is that, by not exiting it sooner, you were complicit with some of its ideas.
There’s a chapter where I talk about watching that pastor’s wife just be horrible to a gay couple who was at our church. I made an active choice to just be polite rather than call it out. And I could make that choice because I’m a cisgendered white woman and it wasn’t threatening to me. It is a moment that is super shameful. Everybody has that moment where you’re like, “Look what I have done. I can choose to change, or I can choose to bury my head in the sand.”
You chose to change, and to hold certain institutions to account. For instance, your dismay comes through pretty clearly in the chapter about Rural Home Missionary Association in Morton, Illinois, where you attended rural pastor training camp. They defend the practice of wearing a gun to the pulpit.
I emailed RHMA to fact check some stuff and sent them probably a little more of the chapter than I should have. What I got in response was this long email that basically told me how I was the problem with America, and that I was the one dividing America.
I guess we’ll see who ends up in heaven.
I don’t know what I believe about the afterlife, but I do hope justice happens somehow. Read the Bible. Who is Jesus yelling at? He’s yelling at the religious leaders. I just keep coming back to that.
It is like Jesus as a social justice warrior?
I remember in high school I skipped work at the Sears portrait studio in the Eden Prairie mall and went to play tennis with my friends. I lied about it and my parents caught me in the lie. They ended up sending me to this camp so that I could be more holy and resist liberal influences. It was called Worldview Academy camp.
That place really comes right out and says what it’s pushing.
Exactly. They were like, “Socialism is so bad. Communism is so bad.” And I remember being like, But wait, in Acts, in the early church, they all give up all their possessions and live in a commune. And this is the model for the church on Earth. And they were like, “That’s not communism.” And I was like, Kinda sounds like it.
You write about joining your new church, and how you listed all the reasons you’d be a bad member while the pastor calmly smiled and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. You also mention that your ex-husband emailed the pastor to claim his ex was “violating God’s will.” He really did that?
Yeah, he did that.
This was not about church. Let’s talk about the bigger picture instead of specifics out of respect for the life I still have to live. I think it’s about control. If it was about God, and if it was about faith, and if it was about hope and spirituality, then absolutely it would be different. That is what faith should be. But that’s why I talk about cultural Christianity.
There’s a big gap between the identification of faith and the practicing of that faith. And because some of Christianity has become so closely aligned with nationalism, it is less about theology and more about identity and politics.
You ultimately joined a progressive Lutheran church with a woman pastor and a gay pastor. That version of Lutheranism seems like a somewhat logical extension of what Martin Luther had in mind 500 years ago when he posted his 95 Theses, right?
Faith has been shaped by the heretics, by the outliers. Martin Luther was declared a heretic. If he had been a woman, he would’ve been burned at the stake. The idea is that you can look at someone and sit in judgment of them. But the entire history of your religion is that the ones that you burned at the stake were actually right.
In the chapter “A Den of Thieves,” you get at this Luther-esque notion while looking at Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie—and at megachurches more broadly. People are always like, “We need to protest the little Baptist churches that hate gay people.” But what’s way more toxic is taking that same ideology and dressing it up in flannel and giving it a couple drums and a tattooed pastor who is pretty chill. And, oh look, there’s barnwood in this church! They can’t be bad, because they look like us. And that’s when it really becomes insidious.
Lyz Lenz at George Mason University
Delivering a lecture at George Mason University.
This is when I reveal that Wooddale’s founding pastor Leith Anderson is hiding right behind that tree over there.
Good. I would love to sit down with Leith and have a little chat.
Isn’t that part of your point? That when you were ensconced in that faith tradition, you always wanted to sit down with the lead pastor and work through your objections?
I remember being in the youth group at Wooddale and thinking, “I would be a really good pastor, but I’m in this church where women aren’t supposed to lead.” So I wrote this really tortured letter to Leith Anderson. I was a good writer, and good at public speaking. And I just asked him, “Why would I be given all these abilities and not be able to use them? Could you please sit down and talk to me? I want to understand why.” I went and slipped it into his cubby. I thought, even if he brushes me off, he’s got to reply. And he never did.
Crickets?
Nothing. I even said, “I would love to sit down, or you can just preach a sermon about this to help me understand.”
Speaking of dismissing you, has your family? Your mom and dad and brothers and sisters aren’t really present in God Land. Did they shut you out?
The reason they’re not in the book is because they’ve grown and changed with me. A lot of things we have gone through together as a family have resulted in me being the only one of us who stills goes to church. And my parents have chosen to grow and change. Sometimes that’s frustrating because my mom used to take all eight of us to pro-life marches, but now she marches in the Women’s March.
I was like, “Ellen, you know that, uh, they’re like pro-choice.” And she was like, “Well, one of the things I’ve been thinking is, ‘I would never have [an abortion], but I can see lots of scenarios where women should be allowed to choose that.’”
In reporting the book, you went to places like the Asian American Reformed Church of Bigelow, Minnesota, and the rural pastor boot camp in Morton, Illinois. What were you hoping to find?
I was looking for what the hell happened. I was being confronted with a mess. A political mess. A personal mess. A spiritual mess. And I wanted to understand it. And I think that what I found was really frustrating—that a lot of things hadn’t changed. But I also saw really exciting moments happening, too. And I think I found hope in really unexpected places.
It’s subtle sometimes, but you can see the through-line of hope in even the most hopeless chapters in the book.
It’s like what James Baldwin says. That radical change can’t come unless you burn your life down. He probably said it better. Not probably, he definitely said it better. But it was like, “Oh, that’s what I did.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
