Message received

 

Today at work, I was conducting a training, and saw someone in the class wearing a shirt that said “Jesus loves you”.

I didn’t get a chance to pull him aside and talk to him about it today, but as the trainer I am obligated to talk to him about it, so I’ll catch him before class tomorrow.

What I will actually say is constrained by the limits of our respective roles. The agency rule is simply that we don’t wear clothing that sends political, religious, or sexual messages. That’s a rule that pretty much every employer has, but it’s especially important in my field because we work with people who have intellectual disabilities and mental health challenges. So if they don’t like his shirt, they aren’t going to just roll their eyes inwardly like you or I would… they’re going to either shut down, or act out. That’s the message I’ll send, and it’s true.

But there’s more I would say if we were having the conversation person to person rather than professional to professional.

If I could be real with him, I would ask him how he would feel if a co-worker or trainer or supervisor came to work wearing a shirt with the slogan “Allah is great”, or “Praise Brahm”, or “Hail Satan”, or “Your god is a lie”, and point out that this is how his clients and co-workers who are Muslim or Hindu or Satanist or atheist feel about his shirt.

If I could be real with him, I would further point out that not only does his shirt tell me at a glance that he’s definitely an Evangelical Christian, that fact also tells me with 80% certainty that he’s a Trump voter. And while some of his non-Christian co-workers might be open to the message that Jesus loves them… all of his liberal co-workers know for certain that Trump does NOT love them, and by extension will have good reason to assume that this guy doesn’t either.

If I could be real with him, I would ask him “Does Jesus also love your gay and trans co-workers? If so, why does he intend to torture them eternally for simply being gay or trans?”

If I could be real with him, I would also point out the high likelihood that he has co-workers or clients who were abused or mistreated by someone who told them Jesus loved them, and ask if he was paying any fucking attention at all to the part of the class (which he’s taken multiple times) in which we discuss the affects that trauma has on people. He could be triggering a trauma response from people that he is supposed to be helping heal from trauma. Only I won’t be able to use the word “trigger”, even though it is the clinically accurate word for what he’s doing, because Trumpian Evangelical conservatives hear the word “triggered” and think it means “I’m a whiny snowflake who can’t handle people expressing an idea I don’t agree with” rather than “I’ve had an abusive experience that re-wired my brain and makes me physically unable to not feel rage or panic when this thing happens, and that abuse was done to me by people like you”.

And you know what? I think this guy is genuinely a good guy who wants to do the right thing. He is, after all, doing a low-paying job to help people who are poor, who often are without family, who often are without friends… the “least of these” that Christians are supposed to help and so seldom do – this guy really IS trying to help them. He really DOES believe in loving his neighbor as himself, doing for others what he would want done for him if he was in their place, being the good Samaritan who helps rather than the good priest or Levite who doesn’t. I’m sure that the message he wants to send really is a message of love.

But that’s NOT the message most people will receive.