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| Photo by Elizabeth Cavagnaro Photography |
Chelsea Kim Long is the author of the new book Faithfully Dissident Daughters: Reclaiming Christian Womanhood Beyond Patriarchy. She is a lay theologian and lay pastor.
Q: What inspired you to write Faithfully Dissident Daughters?
A: I got married at 24 with a very clear picture of how it “should” go. I was supposed to move from obedient daughter to cheerful wife, and then into perfect mother and happily ever after. I got pregnant at age 26 and everything started to crack.
My first birth was traumatic. I had postpartum depression that I didn't understand for a long time. In the midst of it I couldn’t feel God anymore, which was what scared me the most, because I didn’t know myself outside of my relationship with God and the church.
I started to realize all the ways I didn’t align with the worldview I had been given, so I went looking for a way to renegotiate my relationship with my religion. What I found is that Christian tradition and practice is much more vast than the version I was handed.
Most importantly for me, I discovered that feminist and womanist theologians had been mapping women’s lives onto God for decades. A thread of the divine feminine runs straight through the Scripture I memorized as a child, I just never saw it.
I was equal parts furious and liberated, honestly. I needed a book about a woman who chose herself and got to keep her faith too, and I couldn't find it, so I wrote it.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: A primary argument I make in the book is that it is a faithful interpretation of Christian scripture and tradition to see God in the feminine. I’m a lay theologian, which means I haven’t been to seminary and don’t have a theology degree. I read for about a decade before I thought of any of it as research, because I needed to find answers for myself.
Some of the most influential modern voices for me have been Wil Gafney, Cynthia Bourgeault, Christena Cleveland, Christy Bauman, Beth Allison Barr, and Kristin Kobes Du Mez. These secondary sources pointed me to primary ones, and I was surprised to find out how old the history of the divine feminine is in Christianity.
Origen, a church father in third century Egypt, wrote that there’s nothing absurd about the Holy Spirit being Jesus’s mother. Julian of Norwich called Jesus our true mother in the 14th century in England. Saint Jerome, writing from Bethlehem in 412, refers to Mary Magdalene as the one called the tower because of the intensity of her faith. None of this is a modern importation.
My most surprising find was here in the United States. In 1748 the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, carved a prayer to the Trinity into the stone above the Single Brothers’ House, and in it they refer to the Holy Spirit as “Mother.” Later generations got uncomfortable and tried to obscure it, but the stone is still there.
I use the word “reclaim” in my subtitle because I’m not sneaking something foreign or modern into Christianity. These threads of seeing God in the feminine were buried, which means we can dig them back up.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Sue Monk Kidd’s memoir The Dance of the Dissident Daughter was hugely inspiring to me. She was one of the first women I heard asking questions about the divine feminine and the exclusion of women within Christianity. I titled my book as an homage to her work and influence.
I walk a path of tension; in my work I often get criticism from conservative Christians who accuse me of not being a “true” believer anymore. I also get criticism from post-Christians or people who don’t have any relationship with religion at all. They argue that it’s irrelevant, or that you can’t be a feminist and a Christian.
For me, to be faithfully dissident is to stay rooted in the love of God and the way of Christ while dissenting from expressions of faith that harm, exclude, or diminish people. My dissent comes out of commitment, not cynicism. I love the tradition enough to wrestle with it.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Permission, mostly. You shouldn’t have to cut yourself into pieces in order to belong.
Some say the word religion traces its roots to the Latin religare, meaning to bind or to link. Religion is meant to be a re-joining, a way of tying the human back to the Divine and to each other. This means a system that requires you to sever parts of yourself in order to participate is failing at the one job the word describes.
Psalm 86 asks God for an undivided heart. That’s the prayer I’d want somebody to close this book with. Not try harder, not be better. Pursue wholeness. And if you only take one sentence, take the one from the manifesto at the end: my body is not an obstacle to God but the very place God dwells.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: This fall I’m doing a limited book tour with an event I call Crowded Table. It started in my actual life as a monthly ritual of a shared meal and prayer around the table with friends and neighbors here in San Diego.
For the tour I’ve created a 90-minute liturgical dinner. Imagine something church-like, but much warmer and more intimate. It’ll have candles, call and response prayer, blessing, communion, good food, and everyone at one long table. I’ll be in Raleigh, Portland, Orange County, and Austin this fall.
I’m also working on a podcast called How to Be a Christian, exploring the landscape of progressive Christianity in the United States, especially for folks like me who felt pushed out of church spaces but still miss the community and rituals we grew up with. The podcast will come out in 2027.
Lastly, I love creating spiritual resources for people. I published a liturgy called A New Churching of Women, to be used communally after abortion and pregnancy loss, because the church has a rite for nearly everything and nothing for those painful experiences.
I co-lead a small faith community, and once a week I write a morning prayer liturgy for us to pray together. In the future I’d love to publish a daily prayer book that is modern, feminist, and uses inclusive language for God.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I studied the Black Madonna with Dr. Christena Cleveland for a year and then was honored to have her write the foreword of my book. God Is a Black Woman was one of the books that cracked my imagination for God open.
Find tour dates along with my free liturgies and guided meditations at chelseakimlong.com, and come say hello @chelseakimlong on Instagram.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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