Raj Against the Machine

About Raj Against the Machine

Contrarian reflections on life, faith, mental health, and more from Raj Lulla, author of The Caring House. rajlulla.substack.com (https://rajlulla.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Raj Lulla

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Jul 2024

Latest episode

6 May 2025

Latest episodes

5 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 May 2025

   Tiger in a Lifeboat - Interview with Lauren Cibene

   A few weeks ago, I recorded a conversation I had with Lauren Cibene. I say “recorded a conversation” because “interviewed for my podcast” doesn’t really capture how things ended up going. Normally, I’d say something like, “I had the honor of interviewing Lauren,” which makes it sound like a celebrity’s agent finally found 30 minutes in her schedule to let me set up my A/V squad microphone and ask her a few questions. But that’s not what this is. I first met Lauren through her writing. I was inspired by it, kind of jealous of her seemingly effortless talent, and felt less alone as I tried to hold my unraveling faith together. For a while, I was just a supportive reader, but when Lauren reached out for some publishing advice, we became friends. As much as the internet can be a flaming cesspool of humanity’s basest instincts, I have met three real friends through the internet who have made my three decades online worth it. First was my friend Marcie, who helped me grow up. Second was my wife Lindsey, who is obviously the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life. Third was Dan Cumberland, who has helped me survive fatherhood, business, and turning 40. It’s only been a year, but I’m pretty sure Lauren Cibene is the fourth. Lauren’s debut book, Tiger in a Lifeboat (https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Lifeboat-Discovering-Deconstructing-Deciding/dp/1957687657?crid=1TCKCM0PQ6YI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.3zJ42S4fSCOscsz9kWmrkA.hBV69X6uDPKZnEu6Igng7BMiBVRL2zi34hsvDwgGfC0&dib_tag=se&keywords=lauren+cibene&qid=1745301855&sprefix=lauren+ciben%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=rajlulla-20&linkId=5ab921eced92e3e83e7287f720e7387a&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl), is a spiritual memoir and travelogue through India. Her vivid writing makes it feel like you’re right there with her as she explores the beautiful, and at times overwhelming, country. Her path to recovery from a spiritual crisis will feel familiar to anyone who has been there, including those who don’t know that’s what they’re experiencing. Tiger in a Lifeboat is easily the best book I’ve read so far this year. It sticks with you in the best ways. I’m so honored to count Lauren as a friend. Please enjoy our conversation, follow her on Substack (https://laurencibene.substack.com/?utm_source=homepage_recommendations&utm_campaign=1637051) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/laurencibene/), and of course, buy Tiger in a Lifeboat (https://www.amazon.com/Tiger-Lifeboat-Discovering-Deconstructing-Deciding/dp/1957687657?crid=1TCKCM0PQ6YI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.3zJ42S4fSCOscsz9kWmrkA.hBV69X6uDPKZnEu6Igng7BMiBVRL2zi34hsvDwgGfC0&dib_tag=se&keywords=lauren+cibene&qid=1745301855&sprefix=lauren+ciben%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=rajlulla-20&linkId=5ab921eced92e3e83e7287f720e7387a&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl). ————————— P.S. I’ll be on a panel discussion with Lauren and some other amazing folks next Tuesday, May 13th. RSVP below to join that conversation. Get full access to Raj Against the Machine at rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   3 Apr 2025

   The Call

   There’s a guy on YouTube who mows lawns. I find his videos addictive. It’s weird to write that sentence because I don’t even like watching myself mow the lawn while I’m mowing the lawn. But this guy tackles the bad ones, the lawns that make you assume the people inside are doing drugs, the ones that tempt even the most empathetic neighbors to call the cops. And he does it for free. He timelapses his videos into dopamine-releasing makeover stories, condensing hours of mowing, trimming, and clearing into the most oddly satisfying half hour of your day. About a million people watch each one. This guy is an artist with a string trimmer, a virtuoso with a mower. He reveals sidewalks where you would swear there couldn’t be one, even weeding the cracks like I can’t be bothered to do on my own home. The closest thing I could compare it to is the feeling of a fresh new haircut. It’s that satisfying. If this guy’s first toy wasn’t a Fisher Price lawn mower, I’d eat my hat. He seems like he was born to do this, not to just cut peoples’ grass, but to perform lawn transformations as a public service and make oddly satisfying videos about it. He has turned a mundane chore into poetry in motion. It’s hard to imagine this guy ever going home with anything but a smile on his face. Most people would say he has found his calling. Who am I to disagree? We all want to feel that we are doing the singular thing that we were put on the planet to do - floating through the air like Michael Jordan, preparing a Beef Wellington like Gordon Ramsay, or destroying democracy like a monopolistic tech bro. People don’t just perform their calling, they become their calling. Calling is intertwined with identity, shaping our education, marriage, career, and life. Going to the Chapel The summer after second grade, my mom loaded me up in the family station wagon with my siblings. She packed a duffle bag with shorts, t-shirts, and swim trunks and entrusted me with our family’s only sleeping bag. When I was younger, I would’ve sworn that our destination - Louisville, Nebraska - was two or three hours away. In reality, it’s about four episodes of Bluey away (they’re eight minutes long, if you’re not a parent, or if you’re not a cool parent). She dropped me off at an old Air Force “missile control” station that had been converted into a Christian summer camp. No AC. Communal showers. Food that could be repurposed as spackle (and maybe should’ve been). It was there, between the homesickness, water balloon fights, and skits about heaven and hell that I remember feeling called to ministry for the second time. The first time was when I was in kindergarten or first grade. I remember that I was putting something away in the hall closet, and I was suddenly struck with the idea that I wanted to preach like our pastor David. It felt like a calling. These days, I would say that I was absolutely enamored, even at that age, with David’s use of words, his oratorical flair, and his command of a room. As the third of four siblings, one who often felt like a fish out of water at school, I loved the idea of my voice mattering, of it moving people to tears, life change, and action. But at summer camp, I heard about Africa, about how there were so many people there who would die never having heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. At the tender age of seven, I learned that if people like me didn’t do something, these people would perish in eternal damnation because there were simply too few men who would study and preach the Word of God. I say “men” because women weren’t allowed to do this job, naturally. Why would we need fifty-one percent of the population to participate in this “all hands on deck” mission? During the altar call, it took everything within me to stay seated and not go volunteer myself for a life of overseas missions work. But since I had received several stern warnings about not losing or misspending my ten dollars of snack-shack money, I thought it was possible that I wasn’t ready to be drafted into the Lord’s army quite yet. Am I The Only One Feeling This? Every summer, a Christian organization rents out college campuses to host weeklong conferences for high school students. Pot and partying are replaced with prayer and preaching for a few weeks in June and July while the undergrads are home waiting tables for textbook money. It’s summer camp, but when you host it in an auditorium with stadium seating and a million dollar sound system, you get to call it a “conference” and give it a cool name like “Riot,” or “Mix,” or “Engage.” Our group the summer before my junior year included Alicia and Tim (names changed because adolescence is brutal). I had been harboring a crush on Alicia since freshman year when Tim joined our youth group. Tim was a sun-soaked athlete whose hijinks probably weren’t even notable among his teammates but were positively scandalous in youth group. He would sneak out of “lock-ins” (aka church sleepovers) to make out with girls, get McDonald’s delivered to him, and generally assert his personal autonomy however he saw fit. By coming to the summer camp conference, he was well on his way to having the bad-boy-to-born-again transformation story that (literal) choir boys like me deeply envied. Still, I couldn’t wait for Alicia to see that she was playing with fire and to run into my not-a-little self-righteous arms. If you’ve never been to one of these conferences, you should know that they’re usually set up with a specific rhythm. Students load fifteen-passenger vans on Sunday right after church. They arrive at their chosen college campus for the conference in the late afternoon for registration. We always liked this university in Illinois that had a Taco Bell and Burger King instead of lunch-lady-slopped cafeteria food. Sunday evening, there’s a late night worship session (aka rock concert for Jesus) to set the tone for the week. Each weekday, there is a morning session, followed by “quiet time” (aka read your Bible and pray time), classes, lunch, free time, and dinner. After dinner, everyone convenes in the auditorium for the evening session. Evangelicals are no dummies, so they frontload the week with funnier speakers and Christian improv comedy groups (yes, those are a thing) to soften the hearts of teenagers who genuinely believe they are too cool to be there. The evening sessions grow more and more serious as the week progresses, culminating in the full-court-press gospel presentation and actual “come to Jesus” altar call on Thursday night. Even the improv group is in on it, usually performing some kind of recreation of the crucifixion to a vaguely spiritual pop song, often because one of their characters drank alcohol or had sex outside of marriage. After the speaker finishes their impassioned sermon, the worship/rock band returns to the stage to play songs with titles like “I Surrender” while youth pastors line up at the front of the auditorium to receive crying teens who are ready to lay their life down for Jesus. If you’re already “saved,” this moment invites you to double-down on your commitment to the Almighty, either recommitting yourself to your faith or taking steps to become a missionary or a pastor. Just as I had when I was in first grade, second grade, and junior high, I felt that calling again. How could you not? I had seen orphans begging on the streets of India. I had served sandwiches to homeless people and taught Bible lessons to kids growing up in the projects. How could anyone go from seeing the life-changing power of unconditional love and then choose to study computer science and get a well-paying job? I earnestly expected the auditorium to erupt into youths tearing out the seats and stampeding their way onto the mission field. Except. They didn’t. In fact, barely holding back tears of profound gratitude for my eternal salvation, I looked to my left and saw Alicia and Tim flirting. I didn’t begrudge them. I didn’t even envy them. In that moment, I realized that I wasn’t like them. This whole Jesus thing was obviously resonating more deeply with me than it was with my peers. If we were to save Christianity from being “one generation away from going extinct” (yep, that’s a real thing they said) and save the whole world from going to hell (with or without the handbasket), then somebody had to do something about it. And clearly, that somebody was me. The Dinner When we got home from camp the conference, I asked my parents if we could go out to dinner, just the three of us. I nervously beat around the bush as we grazed our way through a platter of Chili’s chips and salsa. When our entrees arrived, I confessed that the reason I had asked my Hindu father and Christian mother out to dinner is that I wanted to accept the “call to vocational ministry” (aka I wanted to go to Bible college and become a pastor). I wasn’t sure if my Indian father, who not-so-subtly nudged me to become a doctor, would rend his garments or if he would just rub ash through his hair while wailing. He did neither. Instead, my mom answered, “We already knew.” The Narrow Path I know I might sound off-puttingly jaded about the whole thing. After all, I know many people whose lives have been genuinely changed in moments like the one at the conference. I know people who have confessed affairs and saved their marriages. I know people who stopped smoking and drinking cold turkey because they let Jesus into their heart. But I also know people who took out $40,000 in debt to graduate Bible college just to find a job in ministry that pays $35,000. I know people who were running from their sexual orientation or trying to fill a codependency black hole. It seems to me that maybe we shouldn’t let sixteen-year-olds decide their college and career because the key change in the alt-rock spiritual anthem hit just right on a Thursday night. When I neared the end of Bible college, a Lutheran friend of mine asked how the “screening” for ministry placement was going. I had no idea what she was talking about. She told me that in her denomination, prospective ministers had to undergo personal and psychological evaluation to make sure they were fit to serve as clergy. Then she looked on in bewilderment when I told her that evangelicals don’t do it like that. You create a resume, and you shop it around for youth pastor and worship pastor jobs until a small desperate church is willing to take a risk on a 22-year-old idiot. At the time, I scoffed at how stuffy and formal their ministry placement process sounded. Now I realize that sometimes calls are just wrong numbers. Get full access to Raj Against the Machine at rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   22 Aug 2024

   The Ones I Didn't Want to Write: Screaming Underneath

   Raj Against the Machine is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber. 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. My debut novel The Caring House is available on Amazon. Please consider buying a copy to support this publication! To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Songs used under the “Commentary” provision of the United States’ Fair Use doctrine. Get full access to Raj Against the Machine at rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

4. 

   30 Jul 2024

   The Ones I Didn't Want to Write: Before

   Raj Against the Machine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I never thought I would be critical of the evangelical church. Even now, I have to fight this urge to defend an institution where I was treated horribly at times. Some of that tension is fighting deeply embedded indoctrination, but the rest is because it’s complicated. Every abuser in the evangelical church is a victim themselves. When you believe at your core that you’re literally doing what the Creator of the entire universe wants you to do, you do it with conviction, even when you’re wrong. I have done harm, thinking I was doing the right thing. Individually, I don’t think I’ve ever met more selfless, goodhearted, and generous people than evangelicals - though I will say, Indians have them beat in terms of sheer hospitality. But I also have never been stabbed in the back so viciously as I have been by individual evangelicals, and their ability to justify their actions and rally others around them in their wrongdoing is honestly terrifying. I promise I’ll get into that more as we go. But first, some background, because it matters . . . According to my mom, I was in an evangelical church the Sunday after I was born. In order to miss church growing up, we had to have a fever or be throwing up. Even then, we got a little side-eye. I attended youth group, played guitar on the worship team, and learned how to deliver sermons. I’ve taught children, led worship services in prisons, and visited the sick and elderly in their time of need. I was bought in, dyed in the wool, a true believer. The first time I remember being “called” to ministry was in early elementary, maybe first grade. Our senior pastor, David, commanded the attention of several hundred people every Sunday morning. I’m not exaggerating when I say that David shares a similar poetic flare to Martin Luther King, Jr. He used to raise his voice while preaching, reaching the volume of shouting but never out of anger. His sermons sounded liked a wife pleading for her husband to step back from the ledge of a tall building - urgent, passionate, full of desperate love. I wanted to be like him. Part of me still does. David is not a villain in my story. I have never known him to be anything other than good. I was a senior in high school when ten highjackers flew two planes into the World Trade Center buildings. On the week of 9/11, when most Americans banded together in our greatest display of unity since World War II, some white Americans showed that they cannot tell the difference between Saudi Arabians, Indians, and Mexicans on spec. I can’t remember if it was the night of 9/11 or one shortly thereafter, my dad, a darker-skinned Indian American man, was accosted on his way home by some white a******s in a truck. They drove recklessly, leaning out their windows and shouting at my dad to “go back where you came from.” Dad circled the main streets around our neighborhood until they stopped pursuing him so they wouldn’t know where we lived. I only remember seeing my dad visibly shaken twice in my life. The first was when he received the news that his mother in India had died, and he would never see her again. The second was that night. Any black person in this country will tell you about “the talk.” It’s the one where your parents sit you down and shatter any remaining illusion you have as a person of color about your equality in this land of the free. They tell you that you have to be more careful than your white friends. They tell you that you must never mouth off to a police officer. They tell you that you’ll be considered a threat like an adult, even while you’re still a child. Though we’re not black, my brother and I got the talk that night. At our home church, there were two special services following 9/11. One was a Wednesday night prayer service. The other was a Sunday morning service where a special offering would be taken up and donated to a Christian organization providing relief in New York City. My dad was, and is, a practicing Hindu, but the breadth of his polytheistic faith allowed him to attend church with us on occasion. Between the trauma of the previous week and the special occasion of raising money for New York, Dad joined us in the pews that Sunday. David preached with his usual tender passion, a master healer and conciliator. Our small church of three hundred or so people raised over $10,000 that day, a record high for our congregation. As soon as the service was over, David descended from the pulpit, walked to the back row where my family was sitting, and hugged my dad - a sixty-year-old white man from southern Missouri embraced my brown immigrant father in front of hundreds of white people while the rubble still smoldered at Ground Zero. David is not a villain in my story. But his path could not be my path, for more reasons than either of us appreciated. I felt called to ministry again at Camp of the Risen Son in second or third grade. And I felt it again at a high school youth conference the summer before my junior year. That is when I finally answered. Despite scoring in the top 99% of all students on my ACTs - which would have basically paid for any degree in the University of Nebraska system, I only shopped for small, private evangelical Bible colleges that would train me to be a pastor. And that was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. Suicide Squeeze I’d never really been like other boys. Besides the obvious differences in Nebraska - my dad didn’t drive a Husker-red Ford F-150, I had never been fishing or camping, and my only real interest in sports began and ended with Michael Jordan - I was also a rather serious boy. In seventh grade, my English teacher described my writing as that of a “romantic soul.” While other boys were salivating over Britney Spears’ naughty schoolgirl schtick, I preferred Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “girl next door” vibe. That to say: I always wanted to grow up to be a husband and a father. In high school, I became madly infatuated with a girl from our church youth group. She was cute but not ostentatious about it, and she had this wry, impish quality that made her a little unpredictable. For my anxious little soul, she seemed both conservative enough to marry and bold enough to add some spice to life. We were both the type to dream about moving away. She talked about the Peace Corps a lot. I imagined that if my call to ministry ever led us overseas for missionary work, she would’ve been down for it - exactly the kind of girl I was looking for. But there was a problem. Well, two, actually. First, she didn’t like me like that. Content to play the slow game, I didn’t mind. We still had six years until college graduation, which would be the ideal time to marry, so we wouldn’t really have to start dating for at least five years. I figured I could win her over in that time. Secondly, she was made up. Not really. She was very much a real girl. I danced with her at my junior prom, in front of plenty of witnesses, and there is photographic evidence of her existence. Rather, I had created an image of her in my mind that wasn’t entirely real. My crush was on who I wanted her to be, not on who she actually was. In real life, she liked salsa dancing and cheerleading. In my mind, she liked reading books and going for quiet walks. Either way, her life almost ended during her senior year. She had been struggling with depression - something that didn’t fit into my idealized picture of her. What I had perceived as flashes of quirkiness - flaking out on coffee dates and not keeping commitments to worship team rehearsals - were actually symptoms of her depression. One night, she had had too much, and attempted suicide. Thankfully, it wasn’t completed, and she got the help she needed. But I was ashamed, and then I was furious. I was ashamed that I had spent so much time thinking and caring about a version of this girl that wasn’t real. I could have been a much better friend to her if I hadn’t been planning our wedding that she had no idea about. Maybe I could have even encouraged her to get the help she needed. I was also furious, furious at a faith community that could celebrate this girl as the model of young virtue - a volunteer in the children’s ministry, a smiling face and sweet voice in the church band, and the first to sign up for youth group trips - all while she was dying inside. For seventeen years, I had been told that Jesus was the wellspring of life. I had been told that he came to make all things new, that he would wipe away every tear. Every week, hundreds of people gathered in a red brick building with red pews and a steeple that reached toward the sky to sing the praises of a Creator who conquered death, and yet it lurked among us. I’m old enough now to know that depression hides itself well, and even the girl’s own parents weren’t aware of the depth of her despair, but still, there is a serious rift between a community that claims to bring hope to the darkest places and our utter impotence to save the life of one of our most promising young women. At seventeen, I faced an existential crisis. I felt called to be a pastor. I knew this as true as I knew the color of my hair or the feeling of the ground beneath my feet. But I couldn’t believe that the congregants of our little suburban church were so happy to play religion, to dress up in khaki pants and sing light rock hymns, to hear a Bible story from an eloquent orator, and to be completely unchanged by it all. We were so closed off. No one talked about anything real. Even if she had wanted to tell someone, most people scurried off to lunch at Olive Garden before the last notes of Sunday services stopped resonating. If church - the place where we were supposed to find the meaning of life, to experience everlasting joy, to commune with the savior of our mortal souls - couldn’t be a place where one of our best and brightest could find hope that would save her life . . . . . . then what the f**k were we doing? Raj Against the Machine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber. You can also support this publication by buying a copy of my novel The Caring House or reading it on Kindle Unlimited. Get full access to Raj Against the Machine at rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

5. 

   19 Jul 2024

   The Ones I Didn't Want to Write: Michael Brown

   In the first episode of the Raj Against the Machine podcast, I start unpacking the factors that led me to leave the evangelical church. As a former pastor and someone who still has a lot of relationships in the evangelical world, I avoided speaking publicly about this growing personal change for more than a decade. Now, I hope that it will help others who have either experienced similar things or are interested in this institution that shapes so much of American life and culture. Find the essay in text format on my Substack. Get full access to Raj Against the Machine at rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe (https://rajlulla.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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