It was my honor to speak for the 59^th Presidential Inaugural Prayer Service.  The service, virtual this year, is usually held at the National Cathedral the morning after the inauguration.

When I first saw the list of participants, I was humbled.  Who am I to be in the company of leaders who have fought for civil rights throughout their lives, while I, a privileged White man, was clueless about my entitlement?  Fortunately, life should not be judged by our failures. The question is not whether we have failed, but whether we allowed those blessed defeats to shape and form us into better vessels for service.

There are times I still feel like a privileged White evangelical male leader, even though that world has completely rejected me.  But that sense of entitlement is difficult to shake.  It grips its claws into your needy ego.  But I have learned much over the last seven years, including how to let the past be the past.  I remain an alpha personality, and I do not apologize for that.  Interestingly, however, virtually every opportunity that has come to me since transitioning is not something I went looking for.  I did not reach out to TEDxMileHigh or TED.  Both came to me.  The same is true of my speaker’s agency, my book agent, the publishing house releasing my memoir, the movie studio making a film about my life, the Biden campaign for which I was privileged to serve, and every church at which I have preached.  Every single opportunity came to me.

I said in a sermon not long ago that hope usually arrives from the outside.  Whether as a result of hard work, fate or just good fortune, opportunities come our way.  But it’s not that we have no agency in the matter.  We must say yes to those opportunities.  You have to say yes to hope, though it is almost always terrifying to do so.  “What if my TED talk isn’t very good and no one watches it?” ” What if no one reads my book?” ” What if I say something wrong in the Inaugural Prayer Service?”  I am always terrified when I say yes, but in the past I learned how awful it feels when you dare to say no.  I only said no once, but it took me years to get over that decision.  You do not say no to hope.

Of course, though saying yes is the first step in responding to hope, the call of hope always includes a period of time on the road of trials.  Therefore, yes without perseverance, guarantees that a journey will end before it ever really begins.  If you persevere, however, your yes eventually leads to the prize of great price, the Holy Grail, as you experience the joy of doing good work.

I believe that hope, plus yes, plus perseverance, equals destiny.  Saying yes to an opportunity that comes your way, and persevering through the journey that arrives with that yes, is what creates your destiny.  Achieving your destiny includes both external and internal elements.  Being in the right place at the right time is certainly a part of it, but how you respond to that external opportunity means everything.

Saying yes is difficult for most of us, because someplace deep within, shame stalks our better angels and tells us we are not worthy.  I find that a lot of people who are jealous of the good things that have come my way actually have nothing against me personally.  They just have not wrestled their own shame demons to the ground.  They think, “I know I’m not worthy of honor, so what makes her think she’s worthy?”  The truth is that we are all worthy.

When I finished my reading in the 59^th Presidential Inaugural Prayer Service, I wept. I wept because of the privilege and honor of participating in the service.  I wept because it was a very moving service, a fitting end to the two days of the inaugural festivities, the collective sigh of relief we all so desperately wanted for the last four years.

To those who invited me to be a part of such an inspirational service, I offer my thanks.  I owe a debt of gratitude to Josh Dickson from the Biden Inaugural team and Michael Vazquez from the HRC and everyone else involved in planning the service in which more than two dozen people from a plethora of faith perspectives came together to produce one amazing hour of conviction that we can work together to heal our nation.

It was just seven years ago this week that I was at the lowest point in my transition from Paul to Paula.  I had lost all of my jobs and almost all of my friends. I didn’t know if I would survive. But I believed the call toward authenticity is sacred, and holy, and for the greater good, and I persevered. And since that time, I have been wonderfully blessed, far beyond anything I could have imagined.

When we are placed on this earth we are given the responsibility to shape our lives to fit the challenges of our times.  The faith, conviction, and determination with which we approach those challenges is what will be remembered.  How much suffering did we ameliorate?  How well did we love?  How many times did we say yes when hope came knocking on our door.  Did we persevere through the challenges?

I have no idea what hope is yet to come, but I do know I will keep saying yes, and I will persevere.  It is the only decent way to live.

I understand White Christian Nationalism and White Christian men.  I grew up immersed in the first group and was a member of the second. I served as a leader in a religious movement of over 6,000 churches with origins on the American frontier. These churches are overwhelmingly White and 100 percent male-led. The same is true for almost all evangelical denominations.  Evangelicals make up about one quarter of the American population – our largest religious group.

My own theological education was from an evangelical perspective, but in my twenties I was introduced to a more liberal expression of evangelicalism, primarily through one seminary in our denomination, a place where I later taught as an instructor.  I was also influenced by The Wittenburg Door, an irreverent satirical journal of the period that appealed to an entire generation of terminally curious young theologians. Although my theology became much broader, I did not leave evangelicalism. I was comfortable. I liked the people and the camaraderie. I did not understand the damage I was doing by remaining.

I did push and cajole, particularly on the subject of women in leadership, something frowned upon in almost all corners of evangelicalism, and certainly within the movement of churches of which I was a part. When I wrote a magazine column on adding women to the eldership of churches and placing them in lead ministry positions, I received letters from leaders within our denomination who reminded me that “God placed men in charge of the church.” Uh, okay, that’s actually not true. But that view has a deep history in the church, and has dominated evangelicalism.

So much of White Christian Nationalism is rooted in White Christian men who were taught that God intended for things to be this way, not just for the church, but for all of society. I don’t know how many times I heard professors and evangelical thought leaders say, “America was founded as a Christian nation.” Except that it wasn’t. When America was founded, a lot of its citizens were Christians, but our Founding Fathers protected our nation by not establishing a government-sanctioned religion.

White Christian Nationalism tries to gloss over this truth and make our Founding Fathers more Christian than they were.  They try to make us believe that it was a conservative form of Protestantism that created the core values of the United States.

I suppose you could say that the core values of this nation can be found in the Magna Carta, written in England in 1215.  You could also say that the Magna Carta finds its core values in Judeo-Christian teaching. But to go from that to saying America was started as a Christian nation is quite a leap. To say it was begun as an evangelical nation is an even wider chasm. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, George Washington and John Adams were all Christians, but they were also all Deists, believing that none of the supernatural events depicted in scripture were factual.

The influence of evangelicalism on American government is actually quite recent, dating back to the 1980s and the Moral Majority. Since the time of Ronald Reagan, evangelicalism has gained greater and greater influence in the halls of government.  Many of the top lieutenants of George W. Bush and Donald Trump were evangelicals.

I was invited to attend the National Prayer Breakfast in 2002, and was surprised at how many members of Bush’s cabinet identified themselves as evangelical.  Eight members of Donald Trump’s cabinet identified as evangelical, including Betsy DeVos, a member of the Christian Reformed Church, and Mike Pompeo, a member of a very conservative Presbyterian denomination.

This relatively recent evangelical influence on American government is the product of White Christian Nationalists, who believe evangelical teachings should be the rule of our nation.  I say “White Christian Nationalists” because they are almost all White.  There are very flew Black and Brown people among their ranks. They believe LGBTQ support is anti-Christian, though that perspective comes from a narrow evangelical interpretation of scripture.  They believe our laws should ban gay marriage, transgender rights, and other basic civil rights.  Simply put, they want to impose their narrow interpretation of the Bible on the entire American population.

Beneath their desire for an evangelical-based rule of law is their desire for current power structures to remain in place.  Not only are they opposed to LGBTQ rights, they are also opposed to a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body.  That is consistent with a worldview that says men should be in charge of women at home, at church, and by extrapolation, in every other area of society.  It is the major religious teaching on gender roles in 28 states of the United States.  Who drives this teaching?  Men. Of the 100 largest churches in the nation, all 100 are led by men, and 93 of them are White.

White Christian Nationalism is a threat to the core values of American democracy.    That I used to be a part of that power structure, barely lifting a finger from within to challenge its dominance, is a great regret.  Fortunately, none of us should be judged by the worst thing we’ve ever done.

When I was a leader in the evangelical world, I am sorry I did little more than write an editorial or two on women in leadership.  When I see the power evangelicalism has today, and the rabid fervor with which they wield that power, I am frightened. I am afraid of White Christian Nationalism.  You should be afraid too.

Character is destiny.  Anyone can fake integrity for a while, but without character, it is not sustainable.  Basic building blocks must be in place to become a person of character.  Early in life you need to have been given a sense of self-worth and confidence in the safety of your existence.  You also need parents who have enough character to delay their own gratification to meet your needs. It is obvious Donald Trump did not have the building blocks necessary to become a fully functioning adult. He never had a chance. More than likely, his narcissism can be placed at the feet of his harsh and demanding father.

With Josh Hawley, it might be a different story.  In Friday’s New York Times, David Brooks wrote a scathing op-ed in which he said, “Hawley didn’t just own the libs, he gave permission to dark forces he is too childish, privileged, and self-absorbed to understand.”  Ouch.  Hawley’s mentor, the venerable Missouri Republican John Danforth, said mentoring Hawley was “the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life.”  This has not been a good week for Josh Hawley. There is nothing wrong with ambition.  I have always been a person of ambition, though I have noticed the world was far more accepting of my ambition when I was a man than it is now that I am a woman.  But ambition without character will sooner or later lead to a great fall.

Cancel culture defines a person by the worst thing he or she has ever done or said.  None of us should be defined by the worst thing we have ever done or said. We all screw up.  There were times when my own ambition was blind.  I cringe when I think of those occasions. They are never apparent in real time. Only in the rearview mirror do you see that we all have the capacity for self-absorbed, privileged, and childish behavior. I hope this is a tipping point for Hawley. Will he experience the kind of blessed and necessary defeat that forges character, or will he be more like Ted Cruz, who has already demonstrated his true and abiding nature?  Time will tell.

One of the most damaging realities about Hawley, Cruz, and many of the others who have bowed down to Trump, is that they identify as evangelical Christians. During my last 25 years in the evangelical camp, I lectured frequently across the nation on the subject of postmodernism. Evangelicals thought postmodernism was evil and that we needed to return to the modern age, as if the modern age had been with us since the time of Christ. In reality, the modern age was about 500 years old.

I was attacked for saying postmodernism is a good corrective to the modern age. One of the biggest complaints that evangelicals made against postmodernism was that it created a world in which truth was nothing but a social construct. At the extremes of postmodernism, I actually shared their concerns.  But in my lectures I said that truth has always been slippery.  There is no such thing as objective truth, because humans always bring their own bias to any observation.  But I also said that through rigorous inter-subjective discipline, we can get very, very close to something resembling objective truth. My friend Phil Kenneson at Milligan University helped me understand that in an excellent chapter he wrote for the book Christian Apologetics in a Postmodern World entitled, “There’s No Such Thing as Objective Truth, and It’s a Good Thing Too.”

At its extremes, postmodernism has ushered in a confusing world that says all truth is social construct, what a group of people arbitrarily decide is true. I frequently get in trouble with some in the world of sociology because I do not believe gender is purely a social construct.  I believe we have a pre-disposition, before experience, to specific gendered behaviors. That is not a popular viewpoint among those who believe everything is a social construct, including gender.  I believe there is something close to objective truth. Which brings me back to the election.

What Hawley and Cruz did on Wednesday was capitulate to the notion of truth as anything but social construct.  They made their objections based on no actual facts, but only on the reality that people believe the election was stolen.  That’s all it took for them to object.  There was no examination of the veracity of those beliefs, or their source. Their source is clearly a president pedaling lies to bolster his sagging ego, and television networks like Fox and Newsmax pedaling lies for profit and power. Hawley is extremely well educated.  He should know exactly what is going on. I must assume that blind ambition has made him, well, blind.

When it comes to the nature of truth, the very evangelicals who demonized postmodernism have embraced it in the most damaging of ways.  They have embraced a president who has made over 20,000 false or misleading claims.  With Trump’s extreme narcissism, I would expect nothing different from him. It takes a lot of lies to prop up an extremely fragile ego. With media titans Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and Christopher Ruddy, and their desire for power and profit, I would expect nothing different. With Ted Cruz’s previous behavior, I would not expect anything different. With Josh Hawley, however, I am surprised. I mean, this guy clerked for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  A lot of damage can be done by blind ambition.

My mother’s extreme narcissism made me question the safety of the universe and question my own self-worth. My father’s love and grandmother’s devotion saved me from the worst effects of that unstable environment. Still, I am aware of my flaws. I can be too ambitious. I can be self-referential and self-serving. Thank goodness I have surrounded myself with people who will tell me the truth. I hope Josh Hawley listens to John Danforth. It is not too late for him to yoke his ambition to a higher cause than his own self-aggrandizement. We will see what happens. Character is destiny.

Okay, uh, 2020 was hard.  I was isolated, set apart, and miserable, and then Covid-19 happened.  Yeah, the other stuff had already taken place before Covid-19 burst onto the scene.  I lost a friendship and my compass, as I realized I have had more conflict with women as a woman in six years than I had with women as a man in 60 years.  I won’t write any more about that right now.  You’ll have to wait for my memoir to come out in June.  I definitely wrote about it there.

Before Covid hit full force I squeezed in one last speaking engagement.  I spoke for a conference at Rutgers University on March 7. The conference was packed with students who didn’t seem to have a care in the world.  The speakers felt otherwise. We were all antsy, and more than a bit uncomfortable with the meet and greets scheduled after each session.  One of the other speakers was the editor of the Onion.  It seemed ironic, since everything happening felt like an article in the Onion.  Another speaker was an elderly Holocaust survivor.  I felt so badly for him as students crowded around to express their admiration.  It was obvious he would have appreciated more adoration from a distance.

When I flew home from NYC the next day, a flight attendant on my flight out of Charlotte refused to fly until the crew was given cleaning wipes with over 67 percent alcohol content.  There were exactly 15 American Airlines personnel in the jetway mediating the dispute as we all sat on the crowded plane waiting to fly to Denver.  The flight was an omen of the chaos to come.  I have not flown since that CLT-DEN leg on March 8.

Within a week, all of my live speaking engagements for the remainder of the year had cancelled.  Then I was pulled from the preaching team of our church, which left me sitting at home alone trying not to catch a virus that might well kill me.  Which turned out to not be a bad thing, because I also had to write a memoir, which it turns out is about as fun as eight months of daily root canal procedures.  I do not recommend writing a memoir when you are not currently in therapy.  I kept having to schedule one-off sessions with Naomi, my New York therapist for 28 years. Dredging up your past in the middle of a pandemic while you are also in the saddest and most troubling work experience of your life (which in my case is saying a lot) is not something I would necessarily recommend.

Then after a few months I found myself a co-pastor again, working with people I adore.  That was nice, and redemptive, and the church is thriving.  Then all of these corporate conference departments realized if they didn’t use their budgets they were going to lose them, and I started doing one keynote after another after another, all from my living room.  I earned more in two months than I did in my first four years as Paula.  And about 1,200 people a week watched our worship services from John Gaddis’s front porch, including people from New Zealand and Australia and British Columbia and Mexico and Brazil and Ireland and England.  Which was all kind of cool. And then writing the book didn’t suck so much for a while, until it did again.

Writing about gender inequity (two chapters) and the unfortunate realities of evangelicals and their rejection of LGBTQ people (another two chapters) and a chapter about the differences between male and female sexuality and spirituality were all enjoyable.  Then my editor said I had to get real and talk about the things I didn’t want to talk about when it comes to my own journey from Paul to Paula and what happened at church, and suddenly writing sucked again and I wanted to give back my advance and throw out the whole book.

Then my editor reminded me that I had told her I didn’t want to write a good book.  I wanted to write a great book and if I wanted to do that, I had to get down and dirty about the stuff I didn’t want to write about and I knew she was right, and I did write about it.  I wrote for about 10 hours a day for three weeks and finished the manuscript before Christmas.  It still has to go through copy edits – but it’s mostly done, and I don’t hate it.  I’m not sure if its great or not, or if it will sell, or if the folks at Simon and Schuster will hang their heads and say, “Why did we offer that contract?” and I’ll never get a contract to write ever again, which happens way more often than you might think.  But getting nervous about that can wait for the second half of 2021.  That I was able to write at all during the pandemic is an accomplishment in and of itself, right?

Cathy and I got together on New Year’s Eve and ordered in a nice meal and talked about getting married 48 years ago when we were only 12 and 10 and how things have turned out so far.  Then she went home, and I went to bed and it was well before midnight.

All of 2020 felt like this post – disjointed and without a thread running through it, other than random chaos, which is a thread of sorts, I suppose.  And I haven’t said a word yet about the man who will still be president for another two and a half weeks, which in Trump world is time enough to start a war or two, pardon everyone who has ever been to Mar-a-Lago, and search for still more heart-stopping ways to destroy our democracy.

Here’s to 2021.  It’s gotta be better, right?