Ep. 177 - Sarah Stankorb ”Disobedient Women” pt. 1

[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel American Prophet. I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened. Oh, and the pandemic. And that crazy election. And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging. It's not like I asked

[00:00:18] for the job. Actually, no one would ask for this job. At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy. Getting a date is next to impossible.

[00:00:32] I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me. But the job isn't all that bad. I've gotten to

[00:00:45] see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way. You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes. Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer. That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.

[00:01:51] Welcome to the Deconstructionist podcast. I'm your host, John Williamson. And we're back with an all new episode. Happy holidays and happy new year. We are in 2024. And as I said, got a few more episodes yet to provide for you guys. And I really truly hope

[00:02:24] that you enjoy the next few as we finish up this last season and take a little bit of a break. We'll definitely be back, definitely be back. Working on lots of stuff right now. Just need

[00:02:38] a little time to let it cook. And there'll be more information coming out shortly about what I'm up to. So in the here and now, if you are new to the podcast, I highly appreciate

[00:02:52] you guys checking it out. Hopefully you enjoy what you hear. Those of you who are returning listeners, thank you so much as always for your support. 2023 was a much better year

[00:03:03] for me personally, as some of you have been around for a while now. And I'm looking forward to 2024. Absolutely. So with that being said, a couple housekeeping things, www.thedeconstructionist.com. If you go there, you'll see all things Deconstructionist. It's got links to our

[00:03:23] social media. It's got links to our brand new web store. Brand new, brand new web store. Faster shipping. I think that's the key there. Faster shipping, international shipping for the first time, and a lot more variety, some new designs, all sorts of stuff on there. So check

[00:03:42] it out. Links are in our show notes. And again, you can link through our website as well. Additionally, there is our blog that you can find on there. Guest writers, our writings,

[00:03:55] all sorts of stuff on there, as well as you can stream every single one of our previous episodes for free through the website as well. So check it out. Otherwise, this week's guest is Sarah Stancorp. She's the author of the book, Disobedient Women. It's awesome. It just came

[00:04:14] out through Worthy Books Hatchet. It's a culmination of years of reporting on women who use the internet to call out abuse within their evangelical communities. It's a book for and about people of faith and those who have walked away. It's a deeply researched work that gives long overdue

[00:04:32] recognition to the women who have turned their lives to speak out boldly, even as they were expected to submit and remain silent. Very, very important. Sarah's a wonderful writer. Her works have appeared all over the place, including the Washington Post magazine, the New York Times,

[00:04:48] the Washington Post, Vogue, Marie Claire, Glamour, O Magazine, and a host of others. So I highly recommend that you check it out. Very, very important book that gives voice to a lot of people

[00:05:01] who at certain points were voiceless. So check it out. Great conversation. Just a heads up. Sarah has a vocal disorder that she talks about early on in the podcast. So she felt that was important

[00:05:17] for us to talk about it just so you guys could understand why. Maybe it's a little trickier to hear what she has to say, so you have to focus a little bit more perhaps. I tried to amp up the

[00:05:27] audio a little bit too to give her a little bit of a boost, a little bit of an assist there. But it might be a little bit harder to hear. That's just it. So I'm trying to put together the

[00:05:42] transcripts too. So if you want to read along, you can just to give her a little assist as well. But great, great conversation. She's a wonderful interviewer. I had a great time talking to her

[00:05:53] about all of the research she's done and what she's up to in her career. So hopefully you guys enjoy this. This is part one of two parts. And then I believe I have one more episode after that,

[00:06:03] kind of an interesting one that kind of calls back to an early, early episode that we did. And I'll leave it at that for now. Definitely a different kind of episode, different kind of interview, but fascinating. So with that being said, let's get to it. Without further ado,

[00:06:18] I give you Sarah freaking Stan Corb. There was a little bit of delay and I'm like, has it started or not? Okay. Well, that's a great professional intro by me. Welcome to the deconstructionist podcast.

[00:06:44] I have my guest on today, Sarah Stan Corb. Brand new book out. And all right, so let's get into your most recent book because I think this is a very important book that's out there. You and

[00:06:59] I were talking a little bit before we started recording and just the amount of damage, and I don't want to paint in broad strokes by any means, but I think it's fair to say that

[00:07:12] the movement that has been happening for the past decade or longer now is often a result of some of the damage that's been done by specifically evangelical Christianity in America and the

[00:07:25] way in which it's structured. And we'll certainly get into that, but you have a book called Disobedient Women, how a small group of faithful women exposed abuse, brought down powerful pastors and ignited an evangelical reckoning. And there are a lot of examples in there, oftentimes hard to read.

[00:07:43] And so tell me, how did this book come about? How did it come to be? So there may be two different answers to that question. I think the first answer is, I think it was 2014, I started writing about one of the women in the book, Vicki Harrison,

[00:08:08] who ran a blog called No Longer Quivering. And it was about her life as a quiverful mother, which if people don't know what that is, it's an event that encourages women to have baby after

[00:08:23] baby after baby, and a womb produces an army for God is the idea. Anyway, I interviewed Vicki, and from her website, I found other websites of people reading different forms of evangelicalism or deconstructing or asking questions. And as a reporter, I just bounced from group to group to

[00:08:50] group and dive deeper and deeper into this world that previously I hadn't really understood. The other piece is that after writing about these people, and really primarily women, for years, in more recent years, as there started to be documentaries and podcasts,

[00:09:17] contemplating how did we get here, no one knew. It drove me nuts. People knew. These women were writing about it for years. They're why you know about it now. So in that way, I think the book

[00:09:34] came out of profound irritation that these women had put in a decade or more of unpaid labor to point out abuse, and we're getting very little recognition for it. Yeah. Again, I was telling you, I think before we started recording, there are stories in here that

[00:09:57] are far too identical to ones that I've experienced in my personal life in terms of women that are in my life and have gone through just awful, awful scenarios that I wouldn't wish on anyone. And there was no sense of real justice that took place in those situations.

[00:10:19] And it's because, as you talk about in the book, this patriarchal system that's put in place is so baked in and grained into this very powerful structure that it creates a scenario where

[00:10:32] it's really difficult for the women involved to come out and to bring about a scenario where justice could be possible. A lot of the women in the book still go anonymous just for their own

[00:10:46] protection and safety. And it's just, wow, how do we bring down a system that's got all the power? That's a very good question. I think exposing hardships is a part of it. Creating networks of support for when people do come forward has definitely been a piece of it,

[00:11:13] of people being willing to be a megaphone for other people when they step up. Because not only are these people who have been abused overcoming teachings that are also ingrained, such as do not gossip, telling the truth about abuse to other people instead of just

[00:11:37] accepting the person who you're accusing. That's coded as a sin. They're also overcoming the fact that say they were raped or they were sexually assaulted. If they were raised in purity culture, they believe, they may believe it was their fault that they brought this on, that they attempted

[00:11:58] their sin. So you have all of that even before you step forward. And then when people step forward and they threaten the power of these very influential pastors and their very powerful ministries, often what they're confronted with is a full court press attack and harassment

[00:12:23] that is meant to silence them and is meant to make people believe they brought it on themselves or that they must be lying. Things like this don't happen in our church. And what you need

[00:12:38] on the other side is people who will do their research, will do their due diligence, but will also be willing to stand up and say if this did happen, this is wrong. There needs to be an external

[00:12:52] investigation. This needs to be reported to the police. What we're talking about are not just sins, they're crimes. And crimes are not to be handled within a church or a hurdle. It's not the churches

[00:13:10] as they don't have expertise or the legal ability or the jurisdiction. It's just not the place. Yeah, it's interesting. I was having this conversation earlier where it's confounding to me that there are these scenarios where these horrific acts take place and they're brought

[00:13:31] to the surface and the church deals with them in a way that is outside the law. Meaning that they, well, it's a sin. He made a judgment error, it was a mistake, but

[00:13:44] he's not going to do it again. It's fine. And I don't think anybody's arguing that it was a sinful act that was committed, but why is it that it can't be both a sinful act and a crime?

[00:13:57] And I can work on forgiving this human being while they serve their prison sentence. That's kind of the way I look at it. Yeah. And the forgiveness piece, that was very interesting to me in reporting on so many of

[00:14:15] these stories because when you code the crime as sin, then you equal things out in a way. And so the person who was victimized is told, well, it would be a sin for you not to forgive.

[00:14:33] So that there's not only a diminishment of the attack or the assault or the spiritual abuse, but then that is leveled out with the obligation to forgive them. And then that allows people who may commit another crime slash sin to continue coexisting in these communities without any

[00:15:00] warning to other people. Because if you've forgiven them, you won't gossip about them. You won't tell anyone else. And again, I've seen that in action. Someone very close to me was date raped. I mean, there's no way to soften that. It was what

[00:15:19] happened and the way in which it was handled, it was sort of the same kind of thing. Well, this person had a drinking problem and we're going to put him in rehab and everything's fine. And he

[00:15:31] came out of it and got to live his life and everything was fine, but leaving the victim, and we found out later victims because they didn't act on it in an appropriate way, did not involve

[00:15:43] law enforcement, other women or victims that could have been stopped. And they're left holding the bag and dealing with the broken mess that is left while this individual goes on and lives his merry life. Yeah, I'm sorry we talked about this before we started recording, but just again,

[00:16:07] I'm sorry to hear about that. And also sorry for the commonality. I mean, I think that's why a number of these women that I write about in the book at a certain point when they saw

[00:16:24] how common these situations were, they almost had no other moral option but to speak out and do it in a very loud, persistent sort of way to demand that people look and see and understand what's

[00:16:43] going on. Yeah, absolutely. You did mention you had an interesting kind of journey into evangelical, the evangelical world as did I. We had similar paths, oddly. You mentioned in the book that you grew up Presbyterian and later a youth group Methodist. Mine was, I grew up born

[00:17:02] and raised Lutheran, even, you know, ELC Lutheran. And then I experienced evangelical Christianity for the first time in my late teens, early 20s when I went off to college and got invited as

[00:17:13] often happens. You did as well. And then, and you mentioned that's where you started to learn about, you know, where you say where sin and salvation were fixed. And I found that to be

[00:17:27] the case as well. Talk about like, cause you kind of got pulled into evangelical charismatic Christianity. Like a lot of us, I think did where it all started, where a peer told you,

[00:17:37] hey, you're doing it wrong. Prayed for you, had you testify and then started to indoctrinate you into this version of Christianity that's very much built on shame and guilt and patriarchy. Yes. So I think growing up for me, faith was a refuge. The church that I went to,

[00:18:01] I read my Christopher Pike books. I went to the library and read anything I could find in the religion section. And it didn't matter where I could ask, like, what about reincarnation at Sunday

[00:18:17] school? And no one cared. And then one of my best friends who I thought knew a little bit more about Christianity than me, started taking me to a Bible study. And then at the Bible study, I met

[00:18:35] other kids and ended up in church dance where I accidentally got saved and then had to testify. And I said, I had no idea what just happened. And so in a lot of ways, I just sort of like

[00:18:51] bumped into even all of that. But once I got the idea in my head that there was a right way and a wrong way, it really put me on edge because I had a friend who was gay who had come out

[00:19:09] and I loved him. And I had never really had any worry that he was a sinner. But then I was very interested in Bible study. Absolutely, this is bad. This is going to lead people to hell.

[00:19:25] I had never seen an issue with a woman, the religious leader, our social poster was a woman and I loved her. But then when I thought, you know, maybe I'm getting off the ministry.

[00:19:39] And I told my good buddy, he really took pity on me and had to be the one to break it to me. That's what was in the Bible. That's what I want. I definitely wouldn't have called myself evangelical, but I kept colliding with these evangelical communities.

[00:20:06] And the doubt in what I had believed continued to grow. And I began to have this model that faith could only be one thing. And it was what I was hearing from these

[00:20:23] new to me evangelical leaders. And then by the time I went off to college, there were a number of efforts, but I had a course where I just re-read the Bible, the entire Bible. And we

[00:20:40] learned the history around the times it was written and redacted. And seeing that this this thing that had seemed like a rule book was far more complicated and had a much richer history.

[00:20:59] It bounced off of this form of faith that I've been told is the only way. And by then what I understood is faith was so rigid that I couldn't expand back out. And so my faith just broke.

[00:21:14] Yeah, I think it's interesting. I again followed sort of a similar path where once you start to dig into it, do any amount of research and realize that, gosh, context is really important here. Understanding the history of what was happening around the time these things were written.

[00:21:32] And then even like consulting the scholarship behind it. People who have spent their entire lives who read and speak Greek and Hebrew and saying, well, that's not exactly what that word

[00:21:46] means. Just that alone is enough to say, all right, maybe I don't know everything that's going on here. Yeah, I know. And I took my three semesters of Quidditch, Greek. I mean, I tried. I really, really tried. It's hard stuff. I mean, and they are very complex languages.

[00:22:06] And we've talked a lot about that on the podcast over the years is that, you know, when you're translating into another language, English for us, there aren't always like for like words from Greek or Hebrew into English. And so we have to make a decision.

[00:22:19] So those interpreters are making a conscious decision in that moment on what word to use. And sometimes it can slightly change the meaning behind it. And then, you know, we take it as as factual and create an entire structure around that, you know, that oftentimes throughout history

[00:22:39] has alienated women, people of color, people within the LGBTQ plus community. And like it seems to immediately start shifting things away from what I learned about the gospels anyway, you know, loving your neighbor, period. That's it. There were no exceptions attached to that,

[00:23:00] but only the white ones. No, I don't think that's what it says. Right. Right. And I mean, it's very interesting to me that this worked on me in the way that it did.

[00:23:15] And I know now this vast population of sources were raised in even the local communities. They had the umbrella of authority. They had it. And just my eyes wide with it, at least I like

[00:23:38] for at least a decade. And so I think it gives me a lot of empathy for people who didn't have an alternative. Well, I'll do start with it. It really makes me aware of just how difficult it

[00:23:55] could be to take a step out, not knowing if there's like ground out there. That's also a leap of faith. Absolutely. And one of the things I kept thinking when I was reading your book and

[00:24:10] some of these different accounts by these very brave women who have come forward is, you know, when you are in a situation where your entire community is fully sold on this system of

[00:24:22] beliefs or this version of Christianity, you know, like where do you go? You know, you are deeply ingrained within that community. And sometimes to step outside of that or to leave that is to leave your friends, your family. You know, it's a complete change to your entire life.

[00:24:42] And so I sympathize with that and say, like, I don't know that I would have done things any differently. And often they end up in poverty. So if you're an adult and you have to leave your

[00:25:00] family in order to break free, or if you're a woman in an abusive relationship and you have to leave, you risk losing your children and stay with the abusive spouse. There's just so much

[00:25:18] risk. And the reward is pastors and people on Twitter that I think shows why it was so vital for people to find others and the community of other people who had similar experiences.

[00:25:40] I think sometimes about this because in all of my interviews with folks who took to the internet and discovered it wasn't just me. They really often did believe it was only them who had had

[00:25:55] specific experiences until they read online and saw, I know it's happened to a lot of other people. Maybe there's something systemic behind all of this. So that's the power of the internet is really impressive here. But it also makes me wonder about how many people there were

[00:26:17] before the internet who had similar systems in their church and suffered a lot. And that's something I kind of just sit on. I don't know. I don't have numbers, but I can't

[00:26:36] quantify. I don't know for sure. But I just have a sense this moment, if you want to say it's a rare thing, this moment started a few years back on the internet. It was necessary.

[00:26:53] But I just don't know for how long that it had been there before that. Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent point. The internet, as much as it annoys me sometimes, when used correctly can be used for good. And certainly one of the good aspects of the internet

[00:27:13] has been the fact that it allows us instantaneous information and can very quickly expose things going around anywhere in the world. And yeah, before that, you're like, gosh, they had no resources. There was no recourse prior to the internet for a lot of folks in this position.

[00:27:36] Well, and even just with the idea of deconstruction, which for some people ends up being part of this. And I lost my faith. It was like 1998. And by the mid-aughts, I had a blog, I think like a dozen people maybe read it, but not read the whole thing.

[00:28:00] And I didn't know anyone else who had gone through this. I had my friends who still went to church, and I had a couple of people who didn't. And I didn't know anyone that carried this big weight

[00:28:17] in their chest of what was missing and what they wanted to have again. And I think now when there are so many people speaking up about their experiences in creating online support networks, it's allowing people to own what they're facing and what's theirs for existence.

[00:28:41] And I don't know that that's contributing to people deconstructing. I think there are plenty of other reasons people are deconstructing, but the internet does create a funnel for people to find other things. Oh, absolutely. I think testament to that is the work that I've done over the years

[00:29:01] on this podcast, when Adam, who started the podcast with me, when we both started it, we had very low expectations. We thought maybe, hey, at the end of this first year, if we had like 100, 200 listeners, that'd be amazing without having any sense for how many people

[00:29:18] were looking for a safe place to have these types of discussions and wrestle with their faith and have doubts and have a place where it's okay to do that. And before too long, we had this

[00:29:29] this large collection of people who were expressing this notion that like, oh my gosh, I thought I was alone this entire time. And now I realize that there are people out there, even oftentimes in the same geographical region, who completely identify. It's almost as if,

[00:29:48] hey, we're everywhere. We're just afraid to say it until we realize the person standing next to us is in the exact same place as we are. Yeah, I don't know if this story is appropriate or not.

[00:30:02] But I had a moment. So back when I was first saved and then again, because I couldn't tell. I was encouraged to let my people I love know. So I told my mother, and she just sort of

[00:30:21] raised an eyebrow and that was it. And then years, a few years later, when I decided I didn't want to go to church anymore. I told my mom, and she shocked me and said, well good. I never believed

[00:30:40] any of it either. And she just quit going to church. The woman who enforced me in dress shoes every Sunday morning my entire life, because it was good for me. It was like, I don't know,

[00:30:54] you're reaching adulthood, your parents quit telling you to eat your vegetables. That's what it was. And evidently she hadn't believed for a long period of time, but had no one to tell.

[00:31:07] So she just kept going. That's amazing. It's kind of like, I grew up in a, like I said, Lutheran household and my dad was my pastor. He was the pastor. And I just had probably a list

[00:31:21] of assumptions about what he believed my entire life until I started going through deconstruction. I started having these amazing conversations with my dad and he's like, yeah, I don't believe that either. Whatever it was we were talking about. And I'm like, what? How long have you been holding

[00:31:35] on to this dad? And I'm like, come on. Yes, he has. And then we went to a family funeral and as a pastor, you know, I feel sorry for a clergy to get thrown into a funeral when they

[00:31:52] don't really know the disease. So he was clearly dampening. He didn't really know much about this family member, but he started talking about him singing with the angels. And this was a few months

[00:32:08] after my mom was going to church and she leaned over and whispered in my ear, like, you don't believe that either. He couldn't sing. But never before had she said anything like that. It's definitely a different experience than all other people that I've heard about.

[00:32:33] Yeah, absolutely. One of the things you say at the beginning of the book that I wanted to make sure I mentioned on the podcast, there's a quote at the beginning of the book that hit me like super hard

[00:32:45] where you say, abuse is a unique violence when paired with faith. And I thought, oh man, it really is just a two-headed monster. You're adding trauma on top of trauma in that situation.

[00:32:57] It's a very unique type of trauma in that way. So that thought, I think I actually added that in toward the end. And I can talk about this or just summarize. But while I was writing the book,

[00:33:21] my father, who was an alcoholic most of his life, he was sober by the end. He became very sick. And we learned he and my mother both had dementia. I was put in charge of taking care of both.

[00:33:39] More no one else could do it. So it was my job. And I had this year where I was absorbing so many stories or reabsorbing stories of church-related abuse and church-related trauma. At the same time,

[00:33:59] I was dealing with my father's decline and his memories of being in his rage because it was awful to be at the end of your life and not remember why you're dying. So all of that came

[00:34:16] my direction. And since I had been so afraid of him as a child, I felt a lot of those memories surfacing every time he blew up in a rage. But having both of those experiences, the reporting

[00:34:35] on church-related abuse and the memories of my own childhood, it also distinguished for me the different spiritual units of abuse and the additional layer within spiritual abuse. Many of my sources had fathers who beat them or mothers who beat them, but they did so because

[00:35:03] James Dobson said to. And because their parents believed if I can teach you to live right here, I will save your eternal life. And so that behavior that scared my sources as a child,

[00:35:21] it wasn't as scary, which is bad enough, but it was frightful and rationalized as what God wanted. And that is so, so difficult. And that's why I wanted, I think by the end of these

[00:35:41] dual experiences, I wanted to show people, I mean, a lot of us grow up in difficult families. And I wanted also to have a road for people like me who didn't have the spiritual abuse,

[00:35:57] but could maybe understand what that might be like and why that would be complicated in a different way. So that's what I was starting to introduce. Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel, American Prophet. I was the one who

[00:36:18] dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened. Oh, and the pandemic and that crazy election. And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging. It's not like I asked for the job. Actually,

[00:36:31] no one would ask for this job. At least half the people will hate whatever I say. And almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy. Getting a date is next to impossible. I've got a radio

[00:36:45] host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me and an unhinged president threatening me. But the job isn't all that bad. I've gotten to see the country and meet some really interesting people and hopefully do some good along the way.

[00:37:03] You can find my story on Amazon, Audible or iTunes. Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer. That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.

[00:37:57] Shopify.de. Try. I'm going to make for Germany powered by Shopify. Yeah, and you tell a lot of stories where that is the case where they're they're suffering both types of trauma and oftentimes physical and psychological abuse

[00:38:20] under the guise of religion. And at the very beginning of the book, you talk about the experience of a one named Vicky, who is basically taught that everything secular is basically evil and Satan is in charge of the world system, whatever that is. And it reminded me immediately,

[00:38:37] made me think back to years back when we first started the podcast and interviewed a guy named Dr. Steve Hassan, who is a renowned expert on cults. And he breaks down the different techniques

[00:38:49] that cults use. One of them is to demonize anything that doesn't align with your set of beliefs. Like they're literally oftentimes evil, but literally sometimes like. A demon, it's a demon, they're a demon or a devil, you know, and so they demonize that and then they narrow down

[00:39:08] the approved literature that you're allowed to read to only things that conform with that set of beliefs. Isolation techniques, you know, you can't survive without us, you know, kind of thing.

[00:39:19] So they are even hesitant to leave for fear that their life will collapse, you know, and I keep thinking about all these things because a lot of that, those techniques are very present in a lot

[00:39:30] of the stories that you tell throughout the book. So it's slightly different in that even in the traditional form too, you have spent some time reading these books and conferences.

[00:39:55] So it can feel when you're inside of it like you have freedom. I can go to the Christian bookstore, I can choose my curriculum from the book author or vision forum or a Becca, look at all these

[00:40:11] options I have. But when there is a strong commonality like complementarianism, skepticism about the nature of American child slavery, any of these things, you choose your own adventure is still within a bounded system. So that you have this sense of freedom, but the school of

[00:40:37] ideas that you can choose from is still very limited. Now, depending on your church, you very well may have a pastor who says this is the right way, this is the only way. If you look at those

[00:40:51] books, if you go to another church, you're in a spiritual danger. So you can still have that very high control, but depending on where you fit within evangelicalism, you could also have a sense of freedom and still have a very mysterious worldview. of gold

[00:41:31] finished seminary married found a church he could go on made a living giving dying folks a shoulder and a hand until he told his leaders that he had some feelings for another man and they said John you must go

[00:42:07] take your broken heart and walk it to the door oh John we love you song and channel the divine spent a decade sharing it and kept herself in line until her eyes began to see a light inside the dark

[00:43:21] and the floor of all she thought began to fall apart and they said you must go we didn't know your quest would lead you down this road road we know you're searching and you've been giving but now you've wandered off and you gotta

[00:44:02] Jen we love you we can't have you you you must go Jane was born with skin darker than her peers spent a cycle telling them the reasons for her fears no one seemed to know or care about the past

[00:44:56] then they showed her where she stood with every vote they cast thanks for your time you but there's no room for you when there's power online we know you're hurting we're not listening and we'd help you out but we don't have that kind of time

[00:45:42] you must go so John and Jen and Jane were on the streets without and he said child don't you go I want your broken heart and beautiful soul so but I know they need you you let us go the rejected and broken let us go into the bright