WHY I WROTE DONUT DAYS
Just in case you were wondering, here goes nothing:
When I was 17, I started regularly attending a small evangelical church in my hometown in Wisconsin. Almost immediately, my rudderless life suddenly seemed more on course, and I felt both hope and acceptance in my newfound Christian community.
That I emerged from my teenage years with a sense of self, with confidence, and with my sins washed clean is proof that there is a lot right with the evangelical church.
I also found out, in my early 20s, there’s a lot wrong, too.
I left Wisconsin to attend college in Minnesota. After graduating, I found an apartment in Minneapolis and started attending a megachurch in the city. My experiences there became the inspiration for Living Word Redeemer in my novel DONUT DAYS, because I saw that corruption, deceit, and greed can infiltrate a Christian community as easily as hope and love. For the first time, I felt lost in God’s house.
When questions were raised, the congregation was told to “have faith” and to “trust God.” All this while our tithes were misspent, and the pastors lied. I believe in God, and I believe in the church, but I wrote DONUT DAYS because I also believe that it’s okay to question absolute power, and that no pastor is infallible.
Many teens—and, I’d argue, people in general—in the evangelical church have doubts about what they’re seeing, about what they’re being asked to believe. The process through which they figure it all out should be embraced, should be acknowledged. Instead, it’s all too often labeled as doubt, and the person becomes a pariah. My great hope is that DONUT DAYS encourages people to thoughtfully question what they believe, and why, and to remember that even if people suck, God doesn’t have to.
[image: Arcade Fire, Neon Bible]
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