I am much older than you and started attending private Christian schools in the early 1970s that were effective segregation academies. One of them was in Gadsden, Alabama. Another was in Ohio. Although each school is located in an area with lots of Black residents, neither school had any black students. I had no idea this was by design, and I’m not certain my parents did.

They wanted me to receive a Christian education, being new converts to Evangelical Christianity. I learned a lot of garbage. I learned evolution doesn’t take place, that the Earth is only 5 or 6,000 years old, and just a bunch of other complete nonsense like that.

I shrugged most of it off, realizing my teachers were superstitious fools, but I wasn’t able to shrug off the guilt and shame of the sexual teachings that were much more insidious. By the time I was 12 years old, I already knew for sure I was gay, and that led to serious agony and mental health crises. Both the anti-scientific nonsense my teachers pushed and this sexually condemnatory version of Christianity they preached ended up snuffing out my faith.

Nobody like Rachel Held Evans yet existed, and I found myself believing I faced the choice between rejecting Christianity entirely or embracing love and mental health. I chose the former.

Oddly, it’s only within the past few years that I’ve began to realize that racist impulses led to the founding of the schools that I remember mostly as instruments of torture in my life.

That has caused me to think a little bit about scapegoat theory. While many Evangelical Christian churches and schools are effectively racially segregated today, overt biblical defense of such segregation has has almost entirely disappeared.

And as it has, the Evangelical world has increasingly latched on to people like me as their scapegoat of choice. Or at least that’s how it feels from my position on the ground with Evangelical boots in my neck.