Breadcrumbs Episode 2: Roots and Rebellion

When you go through a lot of change in a short amount of time, it’s easy to wake up one day and ask: How did I get here?

That question has followed me through my faith deconstruction, my motherhood journey, my politics, and my writing life. And what I’ve learned is that the answer is usually found long before the moment when everything falls apart.

Episode two of Breadcrumbs pulls back the curtain on Chapter Two of Faithfully Dissident Daughters and explores the inheritance I didn’t know I was carrying. This chapter is about acknowledging both the positive and negative pieces of the lineage that shaped me. Becoming faithfully dissident requires us to grapple with our own history within the larger context.

Early Faith Formation

I start the episode with a photograph I love of my sister and me, dressed as candles at a Billy Graham crusade in the mid-90s. We sang This Little Light of Mine with Psalty the singing psalm book in costumes that didn’t give us access to our arms (which feels like too obvious of a metaphor at this point).

A few years ago, that same sister and I visited my great aunt, one of the last remaining members of my grandmother’s generation. I went looking for stories, but what I found was perspective. That pilgrimage helped me realize that I am far more like my great uncle than I ever knew. He was raising questions about evangelical culture in the 1970s—naming anti-intellectualism, legalism, conformity, and authoritarianism decades before I ever had language for them. Reading his words felt both grounding and disorienting.

That realization helped me see my own struggle with voice, authority, and agency as something that lived in my body long before I had words for it. I was shaped by deeply convicted men and deeply constrained women, held together under the banner of benevolent patriarchy.

The Teaching I Received About Womanhood

The episode also revisits some of the materials that formed me more explicitly: worksheets from evangelical high school and college campus ministry that mapped gender roles onto the stories in Genesis, framing women as responders, helpers, and relational beings whose lives orbited men.

At the time, I didn’t question these teachings. I internalized them and tried to live inside them. Looking back now, it’s painful—and clarifying—to see how narrow the imagination for women really was.

And even for those who grew up in progressive religious spaces or non-religious spaces, we were shaped subconsciously by Disney narratives where women gave up their voices for love, and the biggest choice they had to make was which man they would marry.

A Political Awakening Before Deconstruction

Episode two closes with my journals from 2008—the year Barack Obama was first elected. I was a senior in college, newly aware that my political convictions didn’t line up neatly with the evangelical world I still belonged to.

I revisit notes from a talk by Donald Miller on Obama’s behalf, and a journal entry written shortly after Election Day, when I felt deeply disappointed by James Dobson and Focus on the Family for publicly shaming young evangelicals who voted their conscience.

I hadn’t deconstructed yet...that would come years later. But I can see now that something had shifted: I allowed myself to trust my own thinking.

Full episode video and transcript available below the paywall. 

Next month, we’ll move into Chapter Three: The Crisis of Theology.

Why I’m doing this

Breadcrumbs is my humble attempt to map the path. To follow the trail. To honor the version of me who was doing her best with the tools she had.

And if you’re someone who’s gone through massive change—faith change, identity change, marriage change, motherhood change—maybe you’ll recognize yourself in this too. Maybe it’ll help you hold your own past with a little more tenderness.

Breadcrumbs is available to paid subscribers. Watch the full episode or read the transcript after the break!