I love a good detective story.
The Washington Post ran an incredible feature story recently that was, first and foremost, a detective story that offered piece after piece of a complex puzzle that mixed politics, religion, crime, clickbait news and an agonizing family drama.
I’ve been thinking about “The confession” for some time now, trying to figure out what to say when praising it. First of all, this story itself is about crime that rocked a rural heartland community and the struggles of the gay organist who faked an attack on the tiny liberal church that had hired him to help lead worship, even though he was not a believer.
The story of Nathan Strang and why he did what he did is, of course, at the heart of this feature. But what haunted me was what this story reveals about America life right now and all of the forces that are making tolerance and public discourse so difficult.
This is a must read and I will not dwell on all the details. What I want to set up is the pivotal moment — part politics, part religion — when a detective takes the first big step in solving the crime. Here is the overture:
BEAN BLOSSOM, Ind. — The knock on Nathan Stang’s door came just after 1 p.m. Stang, a doctoral student in music at Indiana University, answered the soft rapping that Friday wearing a blue bathrobe. Standing outside his apartment was a clean-shaven man dressed in beige slacks and a pink, checked shirt.
“Hi, Nathan,” said Brian Shrader, a deputy with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department. “Remember me?”
“Yeah,” Stang replied. It was Shrader who had interviewed him after an appalling act of vandalism at St. David’s Episcopal Church, where Stang played the organ and directed the choir. On the Sunday morning after the 2016 election, Stang had discovered the church’s walls defaced with black spray paint: a swastika, along with the words “Heil Trump” and “Fag Church.”
The graffiti in rural Indiana became a national sensation, part of a string of high-profile hate crime reports in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory.
Let’s underline that point: National news reports, of course, framed this story in the context of Trump’s stunning victory — one that created a wave of anger and grief in many major newsrooms.
So here was a crime that illustrated what ordinary Americans out in flyover-country Trump territory really thought about their liberal and gay neighbors.
But the detective finally spotted the missing piece of the puzzle.
For starters, St. David’s Episcopal Church was a struggling oldline Protestant flock that was not all that well known in the community. The congregation was tiny. The choir was tiny. Why would anyone attack it?
The national-media narrative said: Well, isn’t that obvious? This was a pro-LGBTQ parish surrounded by conservative heartland bigots.
But here is the moment in the detective story when reporter Peter Jamison slides a crucial piece of the puzzle into place. This passage is long, but essential:
The crime was highly unusual in Brown County, where residents prided themselves on their neighborly ways. …
“You believe what you believe. I believe what I believe. We just don’t talk politics,” said Sandra Higgins, a local township trustee and Trump supporter who, along with her grandson, helped to scrub the graffiti from the walls of St. David’s.
But something else was nagging Shrader, and as the first day of the investigation drew to a close it finally hit him. He called his boss, Sheriff Scott Southerland.
“Did you know that church performed gay marriages?” Shrader recalled asking Southerland, who replied that he did not.
The detective had put his finger on what was bothering him: the words “Fag Church.” St. David’s was indeed a beacon of support for gay rights. But the fact had gone all but unnoticed outside the church’s several dozen parishioners.
“I didn’t know that. People in the county didn’t know that. People I work with didn’t know that. Someone ‘down the road,’ so to speak, really would not have known that,” Shrader said.
Who would know that this tiny, obscure church had started performing same-sex rites? The most obvious answer: Someone who was directly connected to the church.
On one level, the key to the story is the devastating rift between Stang and his Trump-loving mother.
What I really appreciated was the fact that Post editors gave Jamison enough room to report some of the crucial details about other stakeholders who caught caught in the line of fire, so to speak. I am referring to the ordinary people in this conservative, but tolerant, community as well as the faithful believers and unbelievers in this Episcopal congregation.
Here is another strong moment in this drama:
… The church was empty. Shadows gathered in the recesses of the boxy pipe organ where Stang had once presided over the church’s small but enthusiastic choir.
Much had changed at St. David’s in the three years since Stang called … the church’s priest, to describe a crime he had secretly committed. …
What had not changed was the struggle of an aging congregation to attract new members. A single child had attended worship the previous Sunday, seated amid two dozen adults, most of them past middle age. At a time of political and religious certainty, Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow, celebrity pastors and nondenominational megachurches, the quiet tolerance and familiar rituals found at St. David’s were facing extinction. But they appealed deeply to Jan Benham, a retired doctor who was one of the two people taking Holy Communion on this October evening.
“If anything smells of certitude, I tend to run the other direction,” said Benham, 78, who has worshiped at St. David’s for 14 years. “I don’t believe anyone is lost forever. I don’t believe in hell, and I may not believe in a literal heaven.”
A member of the choir, Benham was close to Stang, and felt the sting of betrayal when she learned he was responsible for the violation of the church. But she also felt remorse that neither she nor her fellow parishioners had recognized the pain that drove him to his crime.
Read it all. This is one of the best (and saddest) religion-related stories I have read this year.
This is not a simple story. That’s what makes it strong.
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