‘And lead us into laughter … ’

“I’ll get real big hair, marry a man, let him lead, write a book called, ’Submissive Wife, Submissive Life,’ adopt a Southern accent out of nowhere,” comedian Taylor Tomlinson joked while imagining what it might look like for her to repent and return to her conservative evangelical roots in her new Netflix special, Prodigal Daughter.

It’s the fourth set she’s performed for Netflix. And while Tomlinson is known for the occasional jab at her conservative upbringing, Prodigal Daughter is the first special where she devotes the entire theme of the night to her deconstruction journey. Prodigal Daughter leans into the religion theme so much that she filmed it at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Doing comedy at a church doesn’t mean Tomlinson opts for a more Tim Hawkins “Chick-fil-A” parody type of stand-up though. She still has plenty of sex jokes and profanity to toss around, which can feel unexpected as you hear talk of “dicks and drugs” echoing off the stained-glass windows and iconic artwork throughout the building and wonder what kind of church this might be.

The mission of Fountain Street Church is to “support the creative tension between intellect and spirit, science and faith, individual and community, tradition and change, challenging us to honor our legacy by embracing the future.” So it provided an ideal setting for Tomlinson to explore her journey.

“I was really jealous that Christianity had worked for other people and not me.”

“If you watch all my other specials, I usually take a few minutes to take a few shots at Christianity,” she admitted. “And that’s because I was working through a lot of stuff from my childhood and also I was really jealous that Christianity had worked for other people and not me.”

Comedy and the deconstruction journey

Conservative evangelicals often take theology jokes from comedians personally. But for those of us who begin to deconstruct our conservative upbringing, comedians can play an important role in helping us name and feel our way through the hurt we’ve personally experienced.

As an independent Baptist fundamentalist, the only comedians I was allowed to listen to were Andy Griffith, Dick Van Dyke and the occasional pastor. My laughter was limited. So when I moved into mainstream evangelicalism and discovered Mark Lowery and Tim Hawkins, I felt more free to look for the humor in life, as long as it was “family friendly.”

That opened me to enjoy comedians like Jeff Foxworthy, Brian Regan and Jim Gaffigan. I was pretty sure they weren’t “real Christians” who understood penal substitutionary atonement. But they were clean and Christian adjacent, which felt like leaving the front yard while not venturing past the stop sign.

When I entered into TheoBroLand, I became more comfortable with cussing and enjoyed comedy that played on gender roles and stereotypes. So I started liking comedians like Bill Burr, especially when he made fun of his wife. Of course, I didn’t make fun of my wife like that. And I’ve never really embodied that toxic, bombastic manhood that Burr likes to play up. But it made me laugh. My deconstruction journey was healing me enough to listen beyond the stop sign, while being entertained with humor that played into our patriarchal prejudices.

Eventually, my faith deconstruction opened me to valuing everyone, which led me out of evangelicalism entirely. Today, I resonate more with comedians like Hannah Gadsby, Pete Holmes, Tig Notaro, Mike Birbiglia and Taylor Tomlinson, who include critiques of the patriarchal Christianity that wounded us and observations about religion and spirituality that still intrigue us.

And in the age of social media, you can always count on a good, healing laugh from people like Kevin James Thornton sharing his purity culture, worship team and speaking in tongues stories from his “super fundamentalist church when it was the nineties.”

Being honest

As I consider how my deconstruction journey paralleled my shift in comedians, it’s notable how each comedian helped me laugh while being more honest about what I observed and felt about the world.

“To be clear, I’m not an atheist,” Tomlinson clarified. “I just don’t know what happens. Neither do you. Spoiler alert: Nobody knows. I’ve never related to the certainty so many Christians feel, where they’re like, ‘I just know.’”

Conservative evangelicalism taught me to never listen to my intuition, and to make sure all my feelings bent their knees to a patriarchal hierarchy. That meant I never could really be honest about what didn’t make sense to me. Instead, I had to feign certainty.

And for many years, I was certain. But when I was introduced to self-awareness through processing my wonders and wounds, I was moved with compassion for myself, which led to questions about the scripts I had recited about myself. Then learning to love myself led to having questions about my neighbors.

The more I explored, the more I began to realize how the authors of the Bible wrote within the ancient genres and assumptions of their day, which undermined my modern assumptions about biblical inerrancy. There were fingerprints of patriarchy in the text that felt like they violated the human dignity of my neighbors, but that I had to accept and explain as good. Perhaps the clearest example of this was when I went to seminary and read a theology book that considered the conquest narratives and proposed “some surprisingly positive developments around war rape.”

“My biggest issue with church wasn’t that they wanted us to save people, it’s that they wouldn’t let you make a good point,” Tomlinson shared. “Anytime you were growing up in church you were like, ‘You have to admit it was pretty messed up when God did this in the Bible,’ they’d be like, ‘Well, that was the Old Testament!’”

As I opened myself to how little inerrancy made sense of the Bible I was exploring, I became freer to recognize how much evidence there is for such modern scientific ideas as the age of the universe and evolution. But I couldn’t ask these questions in the conservative evangelical church unless I dissolved my curiosity in their certainty.

Tomlinson explained: “Any time you had an unanswerable question at church, they always said the same thing. They’d go, ‘That’s a great question. And we can ask God that when we get to heaven.’” It reminded me of the old Chris Rice song, “Savin’ Up Questions for Heaven.”

While being honest meant I had to leave evangelicalism, it didn’t mean I gave up all curiosity in God or spiritual community. Similarly, Tomlinson said, “I don’t think I’m smarter than religious people. I hate it when atheists talk down to anyone who believes in God.”

Comedians like Tomlinson didn’t turn me into a God-hater. They simply helped me care more about being honest and less about being cool.

The cool kids

As much as we derided “the world” in evangelicalism, we were obsessed with being considered cool. During my TheoBro days, this often showed up in pastors wanting you to notice them cussing.

“I have a lot of cool Christians in my life,” Tomlinson reflected. “Cool Christians love to let you know they’re cool. They do. They love to like swear in front of you. … Then they look at you like they did a trick on a skateboard.”

This was especially true during my church planting days when all the complementarian Calvinist men in Denver seemingly wanted to be cool like Mark Driscoll, “the cussing pastor.” You’d be listening to a sermon or sitting through a small group discussion, and suddenly the Driscoll wannabe would say “hell” or “damn” and then pause while their eyes got big. Then nobody heard whatever they said for the next 30 seconds because we were all making eye contact with them knowing they just cussed.

As hilarious as those moments are to remember, the insecurity they reveal is kind of pathetic and dark.

“I have a dark sense of humor, partially because I grew up in church. Church is a dark place.”

Tomlinson said, “I have a dark sense of humor, partially because I grew up in church. Church is a dark place.”

That explains a lot of her religious themed humor. “I do think when you grow up in a scary religious environment, you spend a lot of your young adulthood untangling who you are from who they wanted you to be.”

The TheoBros often reject modern science because they have a created order based on a pseudo-literal reading of Genesis they need to slot everyone into. Men and women must be distinct, must get married and must have sex in order to procreate the hierarchy in which the women and the children all submit to the men. And any talk of queerness or of asexuality messes with this script.

For example, Tomlinson joked about how people assume those who identify as bisexual are experts at sex. But she countered, “I think we need more gay prudes to stand up and go, ‘I too am bisexual. I’m attracted to all of you. And I trust no one.”

It reminded me of Fox News host Will Cain, who recently said, “Young people aren’t having sex. … Yet they are calling themselves bisexual. I’m having a hard time adding those things together.” Apparently Fox News doesn’t understand the concept of being attracted to both men and women and yet still choosing abstinence.

A more kind Christianity

While Prodigal Daughter enjoys naming the disillusionment that comes from evangelicalism’s dishonesty, Tomlinson thinks religion can have a place in helping humanity become more kind than cruel.

“The problem I have with religion is it can be interpreted so many different ways,” she said. “Religion can be used as either a weapon or a tool. And to be clear, if you are using religion as a weapon to control, manipulate, scare people, to make yourself superior to everyone else, f**k you. That’s not what it’s for.”

“If God does exist, he does not exist to make you feel better than other people.”

Then she added, “If God does exist, he does not exist to make you feel better than other people. He exists to make you better for other people.”

Those of us who leave evangelicalism but still have a curiosity about God and spiritual community want to be around Christians who are more concerned with being kind than with being cruel or even cool. For me, the primary way I’ve experienced this kind of Christian post-deconstruction has been through the connections I’ve made with Baptist News Global.

As Tomlinson shares, “There are a lot of people who are using religion correctly — people like my aunt and uncle, my grandparents, the people of this church. There are a lot of people who are using religion as the tool for community and connection and compassion and comfort.”

We need churches that free their people to be curious and honest. And one medium through which that can happen is through standup comedy. When I share my own wild stories of the church, people often say they don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I tell them they can experience the healing of both if they want.

As Tomlinson looks back at her experience with church, comedy is one of the positive things she remembers. Despite all the ways the church wounded her, it also opened her to wonder.

“I started doing stand-up in churches,” she said. “That’s how I started doing this. They called it testimony. But I was getting laughs.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.