The Ones I Didn't Want to Write: Screaming Underneath
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What does it feel like to be an evangelical?
A sweaty Chris Martin sits down at a piano in 2003.
He had just turned an audience of strangers at the Horden Pavillion in Sydney, Australia, into a choir under his command. They sang the “yeah”s of Coldplay’s radio hit “In My Place” at the top of their lungs whenever he pointed the microphone at them - a perfect place to close the concert.
But there is one more song to perform.
The fresh-faced, 26-year-old Martin has no idea what life has in store for him. Gwyneth isn’t yet pregnant with Apple. They haven’t yet married in a private Santa Barbara ceremony.
Their relationship hasn’t yet hit the rocks, and the term “conscious uncoupling” won’t be coined by them for another eleven years.
Before he begins, he thanks the crowd, genuinely appearing to still be surprised at the band’s rise to stardom. He encourages them to shop fair trade more often, eat more chocolate, and listen to more Coldplay.
Finally, he twinkles out the intro to “Amsterdam,” a deep track from A Rush of Blood to the Head, which mellows the crowd that had been electric only moments before.
It’s hard to imagine with today’s confetti-cannon-era Coldplay that they once ended shows on a quiet, reflective note.
But it was the early 2000s. The Spice Girls had broken up, and moodier acts like Travis and Snow Patrol owned the rain-soaked British music scene. Coldplay knew it was the right song to close with, so they didn’t need the crowd to be whipped up into a frenzy about it.
During the second half of my sophomore year of college, I drove 106 miles every weekend from my tiny Bible college in Norfolk, Nebraska, to sleep in my parents’ basement and to work at a small church in North Omaha.
Each week, minute sixty-six or so of my drive coincided with “Amsterdam” on Coldplay’s Live 2003 CD, and the band took me somewhere spiritual as I traveled back home in my purple Pontiac Grand Prix.
I would join in passionately,
Come on, my star is fadingAnd I see no chance of releaseAnd I know I'm dead on the surfaceBut I am screaming underneath(Coldplay - “Amsterdam”)
I never had words for this feeling before.
At my elementary school, my sisters and brother were the only other Indian kids I knew. There was one Black kid in my class, but he transferred after first grade. They’re might have been a couple of kids of Asian, Pacific Islander, or Hispanic origin, but it wasn’t immediately clear.
As a kid, I didn’t know that this was unusual, but I could feel it. I could feel the cheap black tennis shoes that stained my white socks. I could feel the sting of embarrassment when my mom pulled up in our sensible, but ugly, wood-paneled station wagon to pick us up from school. I could feel the scratch of the Goodwill button ups I wore every day of sixth grade.
I didn’t know that these were common children-of-immigrants experiences, but I could feel it.
What I did know is that I largely played the role of observer. The other kids, especially the boys, seemed to move fluidly from playground to classroom to cafeteria. If they were self-conscious about any of their actions, they showed no sign of it.
Tee ball and Boy Scouts and fishing trips sounded like Mars expeditions to me. I could imagine them, but they were exotic concepts reserved for people who seemed like billionaires.
I felt like a side character in a world that seemed like it was designed for these other boys.
But that was on the surface.
Inside, my head was brimming with ideas. I rehearsed social scenarios in my mind before ever saying anything. I started a pretend “computer business” with a couple of geeky friends, and we created a simple cryptographic language so we could pass notes in class without discovery.
On the weekends, I was in a community choir, and I loved music and performing. While other kids took batting practice, I practiced scales.
I imagined being on Broadway or in a band, travelling the world as my father had done before me - he with a suitcase, me with a guitar.
All of the life that was in me was buried inside. I occasionally got in trouble for talking in class, but generally my teachers noticed that my mind was often somewhere else.
In the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah described this internal unrest as “a burning in my bones,” but his was out of a zeal for God.
Mine was more like being “dead on the surface” but “screaming underneath,” not in an emo way, more like the yelp of a dog that has been kenneled too long.
A decade later, Chris Martin was singing words that expressed how I’d felt for most of my life.
It doesn’t matter if you, like music critic Alan McGee, think that Coldplay is “music to wet your bed to” or agree with Paul Rudd that liking Coldplay means you’re gay.
What matters is when you find songs, or quotes, or passages that telegraph to you that, though you are a unique human, you’re joining an immense ancestry as you experiencing love, joy, loneliness, sorrow, and every other explosively profound revelation this existence has for us.
When I think back on why I liked the evangelical church before I didn’t, this is as close to a singular reason as I can find.
The Endless Source
In 1865, Elvina Mable Hall scribbled a poem on a blank page in a Methodist Episcopal hymnal in the choir loft at her church in Baltimore.
Her pastor read the poem and encouraged her to work with the church organist, John Grape, to put it to music.
The result of their work became the hymn, “Fullness in Christ,” better known today as “Jesus Paid It All.”
In one version, the second verse and the chorus read:
“Lord, now indeed I findThy power and Thine alone,Can change the leper's spotsAnd melt the heart of stone
Jesus paid it all,All to Him I owe;Sin had left a crimson stain,He washed it white as snow.”
And there it is: Christianity summed up in just 42 words.
We all need a place to put that ugly part of us.
If you’ve ever taken anything that wasn’t yours. If you’ve grumbled at the opportunity to be generous. If you’ve wished your rival would fall down a flight of stairs or get genital warts. If you’ve lived long enough on this planet to have anyone expect anything from you at all, then you’ve felt the sting of disappointing your parents, your friends, or yourself so badly that it seems beyond repair.
We are all basically toddlers driving Panzer tanks, too inexperienced to do things right and too powerful to avoid needless destruction.
If Jesus is the answer to this dilemma, it means there’s a place for it. There’s a place for the grime that would stain our souls, for all of the things we wish didn’t do, or the versions of ourselves we wish we weren’t.
It would mean that the universe hums with forgiveness and grace, sprung from a divine and endless source.
You can fail, you can f**k up, you can abandon every shred of your inherent dignity, and there will always be a way to start over again.
As Billy Beane puts it in Moneyball, “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”
When you walk into an evangelical church, you’re usually greeted as though you’re a friend of the family. You’ll often be offered a donut or coffee, like we’re about to begin an AA meeting.
There’s free childcare, a live band, and talk from someone who is typically either a fuzzy photocopy of Fred Rogers or a mediocre stand-up comedian.
You usually know that it’s bad - not evil, but bad in the way that you know the $60 screen print of a painting at Target is pretty but not a museum-worthy masterpiece. It’s a somewhat acceptable version of the real thing.
If you’re lonely or hurting or scared, it looks more like the Mona Lisa.
When the evangelical church works well, people bring you meals when you’re sick or grieving, you have a village helping you raise your kids, and you get a free weekly Ted Talk that makes you a better person.
Churches can make cities feel like small towns.
It’s easy to make friends, you understand your value in the community, and you’ve always got somewhere to turn if things get difficult.
For someone who is deep in an evangelical church, leaving the church makes about as much sense as Beaver Cleaver climbing out of a black and white television to join us in a world of mass shootings, social-media-induced depression, and fentanyl.
The Bridge
141 years after Hall scribbled her hymn, a plucky young songwriter named Kristian Stanfill dared to improve upon “Jesus Paid It All” by giving it a pop-rock bridge.
Normally, this kind of hubris should be rewarded with public shaming and ridicule, but damn if a 23-year-old didn’t transform a mournful song of repentance and gratitude into a chest-thumping anthem.
“O praise the one who paid my debtAnd raised this life up from the dead”
I haven’t sung anything in a church besides Christmas carols in four years, but this bridge still rises up in my throat irresistibly whenever I hear it.
No matter what doubts I’ve had about Christians or the church, this part always has always made sense to me. Whenever a group of otherwise strangers wants to get together to sing songs about the redemptive nature of the universe, I’m on board.
Whether the mythology surrounding it all is cosmologically true, I need to live in a universe where forgiveness is greater than retribution, where mercy is a sign of great nobility if not divinity.
What it feels like to sing these songs is what it feels like to be an evangelical.
This series of essays - I don’t know how many there will be - is called “The Ones I Didn’t Want to Write” because I never wanted the songs to end. I wanted to float forever between the waves of resonant guitars, lofty spiritual rhetoric, and the hugs that only church people seem to know how to give.
I didn’t want to feel unwelcome in my own church.
But a low roar in my conscience grew louder everyday.
The place that had once invited me to express the life that had been hiding inside my bones had become the cause of a new scream that was rising underneath.
I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it anymore.
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Songs used under the “Commentary” provision of the United States’ Fair Use doctrine.
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