White Grievance and the Religion of Hurt Feelings
There Is No Forward Here—Part II
By Taylor Allyn
July 15, 2025
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
— James Baldwin
My grandmother knew all the hymns they sang at Mount Nebo Missionary Baptist Church, but she also knew the other songs—the ones white folks hummed when they thought no one was listening. Walking past them on public sidewalks in Omaha, she'd catch fragments: melodies of entitlement disguised as grief, harmonies of supremacy wrapped in the language of loss.
"They always singing about what somebody took from them," she'd tell me later, "but they never mention what they took first."
She was witnessing America's oldest faith. Not Christianity—though it wore a cross when convenient. Not patriotism—though it wrapped itself in flags when useful. She was hearing the gospel of grievance, passed down not through scripture but through bloodlines, dinner tables, and the quiet rituals of exclusion.
America's most devout congregation isn't in any church. It's everywhere. The most sacred text isn't a Bible. It's a list of everything they think they've lost. And the only unforgivable sin isn't against God—it's asking them to let it go.
This isn't politics. It's worship. And like all faiths, it promises salvation while delivering only more hunger for sacrifice.
The Church Was Always Here
The congregation began before there was a country to claim. Before laws, before constitutions, before amendments that tried to write mercy into a document designed for comfort. The faith of white grievance was already fully formed in ships crossing dark water, in hands dividing land that belonged to no one because it belonged to everyone.
I imagine my great-grandmother remembered the hymns too—different ones. The way white voices rose in 1921 Tulsa, not in praise but in justification. The melody they made of destruction, the harmony they found in other people's ashes. How they sang themselves righteous while they burned what they could not own.
This church didn't need buildings. It needed only the belief that comfort was covenant, that convenience was holy, that any challenge to either was persecution.
It taught without scripture: What you have is owed to you. What they have threatens you.
Its heaven was the world unchanged. Its hell was consequence.
And its congregation would multiply through silence—silence in schools when history got too ugly, silence in homes when children asked too many questions, silence in neighborhoods when cruelty knocked on the wrong door.
Silence, it turned out, preached louder than any sermon.
The Sacred Algorithm
Here's what my grandmother couldn't have imagined: how perfectly this ancient faith would translate to infinite scroll. How grievance would find its digital cathedral in comment sections and feeds designed to keep you hungry, keep you angry, keep you scrolling toward salvation that never arrives.
The algorithm doesn't create white grievance—it baptizes it. Takes that old-time religion and makes it feel new, personal, urgent. The same hunger for righteousness my grandmother heard humming on front porches now gets fed twenty-four hours a day through screens that know exactly which wounds to touch.
Watch how it works: A video of Black joy becomes evidence of white erasure. A trans child's existence becomes an assault on their childhood. A Spanish-language billboard becomes invasion. A land acknowledgment becomes theft.
The faith is ancient. The delivery system is cutting-edge. The congregation grows not through conversion but through revelation—helping people discover they were already believers, they just needed someone to teach them the words to songs they'd been humming all their lives.
This is the marriage of our time: Silicon Valley optimization meeting Confederate nostalgia, engagement algorithms feeding ancestral resentment, the infinite scroll as the longest church service in history.
World without end, amen.
The Gospel of Sacred Lack
Grievance is born not from loss but from the belief that loss is inevitable and unfair. It doesn't require actual suffering—only the feeling that suffering might arrive. That someone, somewhere, is gaining something you didn't approve. That equality might actually mean equality.
The doctrine is simple, the theology complete:
If you're poor, it's because they took your job. (Not because they pay you less than your labor is worth.)
If you're angry, it's because they mocked your flag. (Not because the flag was planted in stolen ground.)
If you're lonely, it's because they redefined family. (Not because your definition required other people's exile.)
If you're afraid, it's because they dared to live unafraid. (Not because fear was always the foundation.)
Lack becomes gospel. Imagined or real, it gets passed around like communion bread. They took from us. They laughed at us. They erased us. They hate us.
But here's the contradiction this faith can't resolve: the same people who claim to have lost everything somehow still own everything. The same voices crying persecution somehow still write the laws. The same congregation claiming erasure somehow still centers every conversation.
Grievance doesn't solve. It festers.
And festering, apparently, is the point.
Holy Contradictions
This faith thrives on contradictions that would break any other belief system:
We are both the chosen people and the most oppressed.
We built this country and it's being stolen from us.
We want government out of our lives and laws in everyone else's bodies.
We worship freedom and demand everyone else's compliance.
We are both the silent majority and the most silenced voices.
We follow the Prince of Peace and arsenal-building is our sacrament.
In any other theology, these contradictions would demand resolution. In the church of white grievance, they are the mystery that proves faith. Don't think too hard. Don't ask too many questions. Don't connect the dots between what we say and what we do.
The capacity to hold these contradictions without cognitive collapse isn't weakness—it's the faithful's greatest strength. It means they can be victim and aggressor simultaneously, oppressed and oppressor in the same breath, loving and hateful with the same mouth.
This is why facts don't work against faith. This is why logic feels like assault. This is why evidence gets dismissed as propaganda.
The contradictions aren't bugs—they're features.
Rituals of the Faithful
Every faith has its rites. White grievance is no different. Its rituals are everywhere, if you know where to look:
They pray with ballots—voting not for policy but for punishment.
They tithe through donations—to politicians who promise to hurt the right people, to school boards who promise to erase the right history.
They gather in comment sections and talk radio and barbecues where everyone already agrees: the world is out to get them, and they're the only ones brave enough to fight back.
Their liturgy is outrage. Their hymns are conspiracy theories recited with conviction. Their sacraments are bans: on books, on bodies, on ballots, on breath itself.
Look at their traditions:
Laws passed not to protect but to punish.
Schools stripped of truth to preserve comfort.
Courts weaponized to sanctify cruelty.
Guns worshiped with more reverence than life itself.
They tell themselves this is preservation. But preservation of what?
Of comfort. Of delusion. Of the imagined supremacy they mistake for God's will.
Black Refusal as Sacred Heresy
This is where I return to my grandmother's wisdom, transformed by everything I've witnessed since.
Black refusal isn't just resistance—it's heresy in this faith. Our existence disproves their gospel. Our joy disrupts their hymn. Our breath breaks their communion. Our children learning to read breaks their spell.
We refuse their altar. We refuse their absolution. We refuse their definitions of worth, of love, of belonging. We refuse to let their grievance swallow us whole.
This is why they legislate our bodies—because bodies that move freely remind them they are not God.
This is why they ban our books—because our stories tell different truths than their myths.
This is why they fear our children—because our children refuse inheritances of shame.
Refusal is our inheritance too. Passed down not through silence but through song, not through shame but through survival, not through grievance but through grace that knows itself worthy without requiring someone else's destruction.
My grandmother's wisdom, refined by time: they're still humming those same songs of entitlement disguised as grief.
But we're still here, still breathing, still refusing to provide the soundtrack to our own erasure.
What Dies and What Endures
Faith like this cannot build. It can only burn. It cannot sustain. It can only consume. And eventually, when there's no one left to blame—when no one listens, when no one kneels, when the children refuse to inherit the sickness—this faith turns inward.
It devours its own.
We're already seeing it: the fractures within their churches, the splits within their parties, the hunger to out-righteous one another until all that remains is echo chamber, shouting into itself.
When grievance is your God, there is no resurrection. There is only sacrifice after sacrifice until there is nothing left to offer but yourself.
But here's what my grandmother knew that I'm still learning: empires built on other people's suffering always collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Not because justice is inevitable, but because unsustainable things don't sustain.
The congregation isn't shrinking—it's fragmenting. Growing quieter in some corners, louder in others. Their children are leaving. Their churches are emptying. Their certainties are cracking under the weight of reality that refuses to cooperate with their fantasies.
They need stories more than facts. Stories about what was stolen, what was lost, how they are the righteous few holding back the flood.
But the flood keeps coming anyway—in the form of their own kids who see through the mythology, their own neighbors who refuse to be afraid, their own hearts that sometimes remember what love felt like before it got weaponized.
The question isn't whether this faith will die. The question is what we're building while it thrashes in its death throes.
For Now
Let them kneel at the altar of their hurt feelings. Let them sing their hymns of imagined loss. Let them pass the plate of grievance and call it holy.
We will not be moved. We will not convert. We will not inherit their sickness just because they call it tradition.
"For now" carries weight my grandmother couldn't have imagined and I'm just beginning to understand. For now means this: we hold space for both the ancient and the emerging. For the faith that's dying and the love that's being born. For the old songs of survival and the new melodies of freedom.
For now means we tend the seeds planted in ground they thought they owned forever. For now means we water what they cannot kill with tears they'll never understand. For now means we remember that every empire's "forever" is someone else's "for now."
My grandmother hummed her own songs while walking past them on public sidewalks. Songs of endurance, of resistance, of futures they couldn't imagine and couldn't prevent.
I'm learning to hum them too.
Let that be enough—for now.