I got verbally assaulted by a preacher man with the police standing by. Welcome to America!
Letters to America #1: This is not one of my uplifting stories but nonetheless one which seeks hope in a contemptuous world.
Dear friend of Cloister notes, a letter for dancing monks and weary pilgrims. This is my inaugural piece for a new column, “Letters to America,” which might come out monthly-ish, whenever I have something to say. This one took some time, simply because it is a very personal one. Thank you for reading and sharing with any one you think would benefit from reading it. If reading up about verbal abusive preacher men would make you too upset just skip today’s letter. You can also manage your subscription here…
It was a lovely Saturday morning in early June. People were flocking to the park down the street and I took our young daughter to see what was going on. We had just gotten back from Germany, our annual overseas visit with my German family and aging parents. With my soul still in transition, wandering and wondering between continents and conflicting feelings of homecoming I walked hand in hand with my 5-year-old down the quaint streets of our picturesque midwest college town toward the park.
Music and dance and voices of playing children welcomed us, as did colored flags, smiling people and a festival atmosphere among the numerous make-shift booths.
At the corner entrance to the park, I also noticed the “screamers” as we have come to call them after we saw them the first time at the town market square: A gaggle of middle aged men with posters and bibles, screaming about how much Jesus despises us all.
I have been taken aback before by their unforgiving theology and hate-filled attitudes, their screaming at passersby (who occasionally screamed back in turn) while police stood at some remove observing the spectacle. What a crash course in American culture (wars) and freedom of speech that was.
This time I walked by quickly. Little did I know that only an hour later I would be deeply entangled in their story and bearing the brunt of a full blown verbal assault in a way I never thought possible.
But let me start from the beginning.
As we were walking among the colorful booths, my daughter was pulling at my hand, excited about all the freebies, spinning wheels, cotton candy and free popcorn among the booths of local associations, vendors and church groups.
“Welcome to America,” I giggled to my jet-lagged self, slightly stunned by this caricature of a Saturday market in small-town America.
Thus it took me a while to realize that we just entered the annual pride fest and all of a sudden everything made sense. The colors, the happy booths and happy treats, the family atmosphere, and also the screamers at the entrance with police standing by.
Whom are they protecting, really?, I wondered, before my daughter pulled me further. We passed booths of our local churches offering competing but welcoming theologies on small pamphlets as well as colorful bracelets for my daughter.
My philosopher self was intrigued. How interesting. All those different philosophies mashed up at one place.
To be honest, I am not a fan of pride fests, really, and I have seen events where good intentions fell off the other side from the horse. Simplistic messaging often hides the underlying complexities of difficult issues and risks to leave some behind.
But this was not a conference after all but a neighborhood fest with well meaning people mingling in an impressive show of peaceful diversity.
Meanwhile, I was trying to read the pamphlets while being pulled by my explorative child who really wanted to get on the stage and dance with the other kids there.
All of a sudden my inner guard showed up, while the hairs on my neck stood up. I scanned the park for possible exit routes as well as the visitors for any suspicious sign. Just a millisecond of hyper-arousal, which has become an unfortunate habit in a country where habitual mass shootings on festive outings in quaint neighborhoods do not make it to the first page any longer.
Despite my vigilance, everything seemed to be light hearted and I tried to relax into the kind hospitality of our neighborhood folks.
After my daughter had collected some treasures and was ready to head to the playground I saw an odd procession nearby:
A young man was carrying a self made cross and was being tailed by the group of screamers who were followed by their lawyer filming everything who was in turn tracked by the aforementioned police, again at a safe distance. I took notice. I went a little closer. I read the message on the young man’s poster nailed to the cross and it broke my heart open:
The loudest of the screamers, apparently their preacher, pointed at the young man and screamed: “ He is a Nazi. Just like the Germans…. You are a Nazi!”
My German self was appalled. What was going on? What was ideological or even German about the young man’s message? What did it have to do with the cruelty of the Nazi ideology? Don’t they know that Nazis threw gay people in concentrations camps? And why was nobody stepping in to protect the young man under viscious attack?
I forgot for a moment that I had our young child at hand and felt pulled to step up towards the screamer. “It is not right how you speak to that young man,” I said, “his message is heart felt and worth considering.” At least I think I said something along these lines. Interesting enough the screamer stopped screaming for a second, apparently surprised by my calm approach appealing to his better self.
“So please, do not harass that young man,” I finished which immediately activated the screamer self again. “He is harassing us,” he bellowed back, “can’t you see, he is following us around!”, apparently not aware of the odd look of a bunch of grown up men waving bibles and screaming loudly that they are being harassed by a young man silently standing by holding a cross.
“Also,” I continued, and here I probably took a wrong turn by volunteering private information, “I grew up in Germany and my family lived through two German regimes and I can tell you what the young man says has nothing to do with Nazi ideology…”
That was too much for him. “Well,” he screamed now at me, “if you are from Germany you should go back to Germany!” And just to make sure I got the message he added in leaving: “You are a Nazi, too!”
This conversation indeed had turned unsettling quickly. I stood watching the odd procession march back towards the corner of the park to their make shift preaching platform.
I felt anger welling up in me, anger at the dangerous venom they had been spewing all day long.
Friends, I did not grow up with the right to free speech. And I have sympathy for all who feel their freedoms are curtailed, even if it might be more a feeling than a fact. But screaming one’s religious abuse at others, then playing the persecuted victim’s role in response to a mild critique, all the while surrounded by so many other peaceful church booths, felt, well, strange to me.
I must have missed some important years of American socialization. Why not use your free speech to actually speak and persuade, not scream? To invite people into dialogue and your truth instead of calling them names all day long? What could possibly be the purpose of this kind of speech?
Instead, I thought about Hildegard. Hildegard of Bingen, another German. But also a medieval scholar and Abess and preacher. Through wisdom and kindness she managed to be listened to by mighty men who usually regarded a woman’s voice as nothing more than an obscenity just as the screamers in the park do. Still, Hildegard managed to admonish emperors and popes for their “rotten” ways, even calling King Frederick Barbarossa a “little boy” and a “madman.” And she did so without screaming or burning the social structures of her days down.
So, I took some courage from her example and held my daughter a bit closer at my hand: “Mummy has to talk to these gentlemen” I told her (probably in German,) “then we will go play.”
I walked to the corner where they stood and went eye to eye with the screaming elder: “Excuse me, sir,” I probably said, “but you just insulted me in-front of my daughter and this is neither Christian nor right!” He looked a bit surprised. “I have to get ready to preach,” he said loudly avoiding my view. “You insulted me in-front of my daughter,” I said louder, leaving the Hildegard calm behind and turning fully into mother bear. “You know nothing about me and my family,” I heard myself saying. “My parents and grandparents have been preachers and lived under religious persecution. You should not preach such a hateful message!”
By now the preacher, half ignoring me, half hiding behind his bible, got back on his little stool to start up his screampreaching again.
I felt a tender tap on my shoulder and turned towards a kind man holding a colorful umbrella. “We try to not engage with them,” he said kindly, “they will not listen and just want to challenge us. So we are here to de-escalate.”
He walked with me behind the 20 foot line where he stood with other kindred de-escalators holding colorful umbrellas and smiling. I chatted some with the de-escalators, congratulating them for their important work but also expressing my dismay for this kind of odd drama.
Like them I had thought about deescalation strategies since I heard the screamers the first time. I often imagined a clown show that silently translated the screamers irate delivery into pantomime and irony.
Some brethren think they can convert fellow people to Christianity by hitting them with their bibles on the head, wrote Søren Kierkegaard (…), the Danish writer. (One can find excellent irony in the fact that I came first to the US to study the work of the Dane. Now I always think about clowns hitting each other with huge bibles when ever I encounter those screaming preachers.)
Encouraged by the de-escalators, I decided to be done with this encounter for the day and to finally go play with my child. It turned out the preacher was not done with me yet.
Soon we met my husband at the playground. While our little one went off to play with newfound friends, I told him the story. My husband, born in the Deep South and enthusiastically baptized several times, and with a stint at the far right Bob Jones University in the late ‘70s before finally correcting course (and in the process graduating in psychology from Princeton), was truly sorry.
“Let it go,” he advised, “all they want is to make you mad.”
“Why?” crowed our little one running back to us, “why mad, mama?”
So it was time for some serious story telling right here at the playground. But since our child learned about priests by playing the good Samaritan (as opposed to the guy who passed by the injured traveller) it might not be too difficult after all.
“There are many preachers claiming the bible for their own,” I started, “and some even use it to scream mean things at others.” She was perplexed. “It’s not nice…” was her very correct pronouncement. Then she ran back to her new best friends at the slide.
“Welcome to America,” I whispered to my husband, because what better reminder could we have gotten on the third day of our jet lag than being reminded of the complicated bliss and burden of the place we call home?
He volunteered to watch our child so I could go home and finish some Saturday chores after all.
Half way across the park I stopped. Which way? I asked myself in a quick moment of panic. The screamers’ corner was directly on the way home. I decided for the shortest way, back through the park, all the way to the corner where the screamers were still standing, still screaming, still filmed by their guy, still surrounded by de-escalators in colored umbrellas, still watched by the police near by.
I skirted the farthest edge of the screamers’ corner to avoid another confrontation. But the preacher man still saw me. And he decided to take his revenge.
I did not think he could scream louder, but apparently he could. While speaking he turned towards me and began his assault, even while I was walking away.
“There she is, not even wearing a bra, behaving like a whore…” I heard him screaming behind me. I stopped in my tracks, it was just like a bomb went off.
I looked back, unbelieving. He continued screaming something like: she is all the evil God despises, look at her, unfaithful, not properly dressed in public, bringing her child to this den of sin or something in these lines.
And then turning fully towards me, while I stood transfixed in the middle of the cross walk, staring back at him, with cars stopping on the street, he screamed:
“You are a whore! Go back to Germany, you damn Nazi!”
Boom.
It felt like a rocket had just exploded. Time blurred into a sequence of disrupt scenes. Never in my whole life had any one spoken to me like that.
And if there had been any doubt in me before now it became fully clear:
I knew this man’s purpose. He was a shooter on a shooting spree. But the bullets he fires do not injuring people visibly. They do not kill them, but they are intended to injure them gravely. They are poisonous arrows launched to pierce our heart and make us mad.
Now, from this calmer distance of reflection, what makes me the most upset is that they soil our faith in a shared humanity. And for this reason we must be careful to protect our hearts from the poison’s venom, to not fall into anger, to not respond with rage ourselves.
If there was still any evidence needed, my psychologist self chimed in, this was the language of a deeply abusive man. This was less about me and more about an apocalyptic culture of fear which had gotten out of hand long ago. It is shameful, that we allow abusive men to become preachers, leaders, judges, presidents.
Is this the price for freedom, dear friend? Should we be willing to pay?
Apparently this man was permitted to injure people all day long, while hiding behind a right of free speech, a bible as weapon and protected by police power.
Still standing in that cross walk, dear friends, in shock and awe, his bullets flew past me but by God’s grace did not pierce me. Standing there, I felt a tender calm washing over me, protecting my heart from the venomous attack.
Perhaps my eyes pierced him, maybe they pitied him, I wish I could remember. But I simply shook my head in disbelief and turned away. I finished the cross walk, entered the safe space of our neighboring street, and the cars drove on, separating us. The feast went on. The children continued to play in the playground.
What happened, I asked myself after arriving at our home. I was still oddly calm, like when something so absurd happens, that one can only walk on by shaking the dust from one’s shoes.
Rationally I fully well knew that I just got verbally assaulted by a preacher man as a person, a woman, a mother, a German, and the police simply stood by.
That fact surely angered me the most.
How is that even possible? The police in the country he wants to send me back to would have probably sent them packing long ago for causing a public nuisance.
Should I go back and talk to the police?
Should I collect witnesses?
First I did what our days women do: I consulted with google. Apparently, I learned, neither hate speech nor verbal assault is illegal in the US. Instead it is protected by first amendment rights.
Still, it felt disturbing that an innocent woman can be verbally assaulted in the light of day on the public square with police standing by with no one stepping in.
The easy way out
Now, dear friend, it would be the easiest way out to hate the hater and to answer their contempt with our contempt.
After all we live in a time and age where the Bible has become a weapon to seduce and abuse people with the American flag deeply embroiderd into it.
Since the event, dear friend, I have asked myself, if I should have gone back, filed a police report, written in the local paper? Shown up in the screamers’ congregation to deliver my sermon in return (taken some from Hildegard’s playbook).
Also I wish that in the moment of the assault when I stood frozen on the cross walk I could have lifted my hands pointing towards him and boom, make him fall from his self made throne.
But it is not on us to have such spiritual super powers, even if they would come in handy from time to time.
“May God bless you in the short years you still have to live”, Hildegard supposedly said to a Bishop who had done her wrong.
Sometimes it is the only blessing left to give.
Friends, I do not have an answer here. But I know many of you have suffered such attacks from religious authorities or have witnessed them before.
And it is hard to get my mind around a country where the police kill someone in a traffic stop or for shop lifting but stand idly by when a white preacher man goes on a mass verbal assault spree.
Perhaps you would choose differently? Or perhaps I have missed something? Or perhaps we have all missed something? Do let me know what you think in the comments.
Peace and Blessings, Almut
Please join me in a prayer for the people:
And may God’s grace heal the broken hearted
and all hurt by abusive words or actions
May God throw abusers
from their throne
into the light of humility
where their heart can learn to
burn for the truth
and not just certainty.
May God welcome the broken hearted
in her loving arms
and share the wisdom of welcome
with those who long for home.
May Divine wisdom
protect our hearts from
the serpent’s lure of
revenge and contempt
and show us a better way.
Amen.
Thank you for reading, sharing and supporting Cloister Notes, a letter for dancing monks, weary pilgrims and wounded healers in the intersection of psychology, philosophy and spirituality. Your support makes this labor of love possible.
If you have been moved by what you are reading, do consider becoming a sustaining subscriber, joining our intimate communion of fellow pilgrims on the deeper way.
You can share this letter by simply forwarding this email or by sharing it on you social networks.
Thank you, thank you.
How to like or comment?
As always, you can comment on this post by clicking below or on the bubble at the upper left side under the title or below each email 💬. To like a post you can click on the heart ♡beside the comment bubble. If you read this text as email both clicks will bring you to the online space where our writings live (Cloister Notes at substack). You will probably be asked to create an account once or to log in. Your email address where you receive my newsletter is the one you are signed up with at our online space and you can use it to begin an account. Let me know if you run into any difficulty.
You can also always respond to this email with comments or questions.
Do you wish to write a reader’s letter?
All your comments you make online will be visible to our subscribers. Thus feel free to engage in a conversation there. But you can also send me a reader’s letter via email. Just let me know which part you wish to share with our readership. I will collect several reader’s letters and publish them occasionally.
It's unfortunately a sign of a man's defeat when they resort to attacking a woman of intelligence and moral conviction by going after her appearance or calling her that timeless female slur. As truly painful and appalling as this preacher's behavior was, you did succeed in dressing him down and cornering him with your poise, courage and clarity. I don't know that I could have mustered such restraint in that crosswalk. I admire your grace under pressure, Almut. Thank you for sharing this.
There is power in story telling. One dimension of that power is the vulnerability that dissolves barriers, closes distances, draws the teller and the listeners into one shared life. I stand with you, Almut. Thank you for further opening my eyes and my heart. May this day be a beautiful one for you and your family.