God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America

by Lyz Lenz, Saba Sulaiman (Other)

Overview

In the wake of the 2016 election, Lyz Lenz watched as her country and her marriage were torn apart by the competing forces of faith and politics. A mother of two, a Christian, and a lifelong resident of middle America, Lenz was bewildered by the pain and loss around her—the empty churches and the broken hearts. What was happening to faith in the heartland?
From drugstores in Sydney, Iowa, to skeet shooting in rural Illinois, to the mega churches of Minneapolis, Lenz set out to discover the changing forces of faith and tradition in God's country. Part journalism, part memoir, God Land is a journey into the heart of a deeply divided America. Lenz visits places of worship across the heartland and speaks to the everyday people who often struggle to keep their churches afloat and to cope in a land of instability. Through a thoughtful interrogation of the effects of faith and religion on our lives, our relationships, and our country, God Land investigates whether our divides can ever be bridged and if America can ever come together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253041531
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	07/19/2019
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lyz Lenz has been published in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, The Guardian, ESPN, Marie Claire, Mashable, Salon, and more. She is also author of Belabored: A VIndication of the Rights of Pregnant Women and has an essay in the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay. Lenz holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University and is a contributing writer to the Columbia Journalism Review.

Table of Contents

1. Dangerous Speculation
2. The Heart of the Heartland
3. Yearning for Better Days
4. The Pew and the Pulpit
5. The Church of the Air
6. Room at the Table
7. A Muscular Jesus
8. The Asian American Reformed Church of Bigelow, Minnesota
9. Bridging the Divide
10. A Den of Thieves
11. Satanists Potluck
12. Reclaiming Our Faith
13. The Fire Outside

What People are Saying About This

D. L. Mayfield

Lyz Lenz writes the story of so many of us—those who have been betrayed by American Christianity and yet are being reborn in the ashes of a new kind of faith. For those seeking to understand the divides of religion—including urban/rural, racial, and liberal/progressive—God Land serves as an intimate chance to listen to an insider account of why people are leaving the faith (and why some remain). Lenz is a funny, irreverent, and keen-eyed writer, who succeeds in converting us to both love and mourn the place of our country known as Middle America.

Katelyn Beaty

God Land gives testimony to human resiliency amid personal and collective trauma. With keen journalistic insights and vulnerable storytelling, Lyz Lenz provides a clear-eyed account of loss and alienation within communities throughout middle America, but she also honors her and others' remarkable ability to pick up the pieces and to keep going when all seems lost.

Josh Gondelman

Lyz Lenz's God Land is deeply critical and probing, but also generous and uncynical. Lenz writes with fury and tenderness, pursuing uncomfortable questions of faith, community, and self with unyielding tenacity. She writes as beautifully about ugliness and frustration as she does about love and grace. And the conclusions she reaches about herself, her religion, and her country are bracing in their thoughtful honesty.

Sarah Weinman

God Land, Lyz Lenz's much-anticipated debut book, is a marvel. Not only is it a window into the middle America so many like to stereotype but fail to fully understand in all of its complexity, but it mixes reportage, memoir, and gorgeous prose so seamlessly I wanted to know how she did it. After laying bare all manner of losses of faith, both personal and community, Lenz journeys to a sense of hope, rooted in generosity, that is fully earned. God Land will expand your horizons on what this country offers and who inhabits it, and why we're better off journeying together, rather than apart.

Deborah Jian Lee

God Land is a gorgeous meditation and clear-eyed examination of Christianity in the heartland. Weaving original reporting and memoir, Lyz Lenz dispels stubborn mythologies and beautifully captures the heartbreak, hope, nuance and diversity of the Midwestern faithful. I love this book and highly recommend it.

Kate Bowler

God Land is a stubbornly hopeful book about how the places of faith we belong to might someday belong to us.

Ted Scheinman

God Land is a remarkable work of reporting, memoir, and cultural criticism—a blazingly intelligent book exploring the ways that faith can both create and scatter communities in America. Lenz's beautiful prose—by turns brutal, lyrical, Biblical, and richly comic—propels the reader along with her on this journey through the churches and faith communities of the Midwest. Amid a trend of books over the past several years that purport to explain the heartland in easy terms, Lenz offers us something far more valuable: a frank and perceptive analysis of what is broken, and will remain broken, among communities of faith in the Midwest and across the country. Easy answers come and go, but our brokenness is here to stay, and Lenz helps us see the hidden jointures while also helping us to see the grace in our brokenness, and to wonder whether it is not also our common bond.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/17/2019

Journalist Lenz blends memoir and reporting in this slim but powerful debut on the faith and politics of Middle America. After a lifetime of straining against her prescribed place within a white, Protestant world, Lenz left both her marriage and church in the wake of the 2016 election. Unable to compromise any longer with a husband who voted for Donald Trump, and unable to worship at a church that ignored violent white supremacy, divorce and departure become her only path forward. “The story of who leaves the church,” Lenz writes, “is just as important as the story of who stays.” In a series of episodic chapters, the author travels across the Midwest exploring stories of both the belonging and exclusion she finds there. Highlights include her tale of a home church that imploded around questions of authority and submission, and her tracking of a resurgent “muscular” and patriarchal Christianity. She also reveals online and physical communities built by women, queer Christians, and people of color pushed out of conservative evangelical spaces. This work will resonate with any readers interested in understanding American landscapes where white, evangelical Christianity dominates both politics and culture. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

[Lenz's] sharp, insightful prose and deep compassion help illuminate many facets of a complicated region and its ties to Christianity. And like the people she meets, Lenz can't quite give up her stubborn longing for a big-hearted faith and an even bigger God. The result is an incisive, sober-eyed yet hopeful look at a vital aspect of American culture.

Shelf Awareness

Lenz holds light to the hypocrisy she finds. And her overall conclusions — that so much of this boils down to white supremacy and white privilege — is not what I was expecting from this book, but so helpful to me. By no means is Lenz, a middle class white woman, the first to point out white supremacy in American Christianity. But I found the structure of her arguments incredibly compelling and straightforward, for me, also an upper middle class white woman.

She Can't Stop Reading

God Land is a gritty, insightful tour guide into some of the realities of the American Midwest. In this highly readable book, journalist Lyz Lenz provides her reader with a window into her own lived experiences as an Iowa transplant, a victim of sexist evangelical church cultures, a divorcee and a mother—a woman entangled with broader cultural histories of white Protestant America, nostalgia, and loss in the heartland. . . . Highly recommended.

Indiana Magazine of History - Kristy Nabhan-Warren

God Land is a courageous narrative account of the religious and political divides that threaten to rip America down its middle.

Foreword Reviews

07/01/2019

Lenz (Belabored) states that "Christianity and politics have made the pulpit a complicated place." In particular, the author finds megachurches, evangelicalism in general, and areas of the Bible Belt to be purveyors of cultural conservatism. In her words, they offer "a dangerous lie," providing "an easy brand of corporate Christianity" that energizes adherents far more than any social gospel. This is the God land that Lenz surveys, against which her own spiritual as well as marital divorce serve as starting points for a piercing cross-examination of the religious landscape within the Bible Belt. For Lenz, her unwillingness to remain silent in the face of domestic horrors such as the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016 spell her doom both as an evangelical and as a pastor's wife. She is proimmigration, ecumenical to a fault, and archly political, attuned to feminist issues only when her voice and advocacy reach a theological glass ceiling. American religion, concludes Lenz, is dying. But, as the Christian message, it is in resurrection that believers find their faith. VERDICT A spiritual awakening for readers of all beliefs.—Sandra Collins, Byzantine Catholic Seminary Lib., Pittsburgh

Library Journal

"God Land is a courageous narrative account of the religious and political divides that threaten to rip America down its middle."—Foreword Reviews

"This work will resonate with any readers interested in understanding American landscapes where white, evangelical Christianity dominates both politics and culture."—Publishers Weekly

"[Lenz's]sharp, insightful prose and deep compassion help illuminate many facets of a complicated region and its ties to Christianity. And like the people she meets, Lenz can't quite give up her stubborn longing for a big-hearted faith and an even bigger God. The result is an incisive, sober-eyed yet hopeful look at a vital aspect of American culture."—Shelf Awareness

"God Landis a remarkable work of reporting, memoir, and cultural criticism—a blazingly intelligent book exploring the ways that faith can both create and scatter communities in America. Lenz's beautiful prose—by turns brutal, lyrical, Biblical, and richly comic—propels the reader along with her on this journey through the churches and faith communities of the Midwest. Amid a trend of books over the past several years that purport to explain the heartland in easy terms, Lenz offers us something far more valuable: a frank and perceptive analysis of what is broken, and will remain broken, among communities of faith in the Midwest and across the country. Easy answers come and go, but our brokenness is here to stay, and Lenz helps us see the hidden jointures while also helping us to see the grace in our brokenness, and to wonder whether it is not also our common bond."—Ted Scheinman, author of Camp Austen

" God Land, Lyz Lenz's much-anticipated debut book, is a marvel. Not only is it a window into the middle America so many like to stereotype but fail to fully understand in all of its complexity, but it mixes reportage, memoir, and gorgeous prose so seamlessly I wanted to know how she did it. After laying bare all manner of losses of faith, bothpersonal and community, Lenz journeys to a sense of hope, rooted in generosity, that is fully earned. God Land will expand your horizons on what this country offers and who inhabits it, and why we're better off journeying together, rather than apart."—Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

"Lyz Lenz writes the story of so many of us—those who have been betrayed by American Christianity and yet are being reborn in the ashes of a new kind of faith. For those seeking to understand the divides of religion—including urban/rural, racial, and liberal/progressive—God Land serves as an intimate chance to listen to an insider account of why people are leaving the faith (and why some remain). Lenz is a funny, irreverent, and keen-eyed writer, who succeeds in converting us to both love and mourn the place of our country known as Middle America."—D. L. Mayfield, activist and author of Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith

"Lyz Lenz's God Land is deeply critical and probing, but also generous and uncynical. Lenz writes with fury and tenderness, pursuing uncomfortable questions of faith, community, and self with unyielding tenacity. She writes as beautifully about ugliness and frustration as she does about love and grace. And the conclusions she reaches about herself, her religion, and her country are bracing in their thoughtful honesty."—Josh Gondelman, coauthor (with Joe Berkowitz) of You Blew It

"God Landgives testimonytohuman resiliency amid personal and collective trauma. With keen journalistic insights and vulnerable storytelling, Lyz Lenz provides a clear-eyed account of loss and alienation within communities throughout middle America, but she also honors her and others' remarkable ability to pick up the pieces and to keep going when all seems lost."—Katelyn Beaty, author of A Woman's Place

"God Land is a stubbornly hopeful book about how the places of faith we belong to might someday belong to us."—Kate Bowler, podcast host and author of New York Times bestseller Everything Happens for a Reason (and other lies I've loved)

"God Land is a gorgeous meditation and clear-eyed examination of Christianity in the heartland. Weaving original reporting and memoir, Lyz Lenz dispels stubborn mythologies and beautifully captures the heartbreak, hope, nuance and diversity of the Midwestern faithful. I love this book and highly recommend it."—Deborah Jian Lee, author of Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism

"Lenz holds light to the hypocrisy she finds. And her overall conclusions — that so much of this boils down to white supremacy and white privilege — is not what I was expecting from this book, but so helpful to me. By no means is Lenz, a middle class white woman, the first to point out white supremacy in American Christianity. But I found the structure of her arguments incredibly compelling and straightforward, for me, also an upper middle class white woman."—She Can't Stop Reading

"God Land is a gritty, insightful tour guide into some of the realities of the American Midwest. In this highly readable book, journalist Lyz Lenz provides her reader with a window into her own lived experiences as an Iowa transplant, a victim of sexist evangelical church cultures, a divorcee and a mother—a woman entangled with broader cultural histories of white Protestant America, nostalgia, and loss in the heartland. . . . Highly recommended."—Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa, Indiana Magazine of History

From the Publisher