Becoming Antonio

by Angela Denker

   Antonio (name changed for privacy reasons) wasn’t sure he’d be able to talk with me on that blustery January day we’ had originally scheduled for an interview. He was working on boats, as he often did, during a break from seminary. The East Coast had been rattled with blizzards, heavy snowfall and roaring winds for the past few days. Antonio wasn’t sure he’d have a reliable cell phone connection, much less a quiet place for us to talk and for him to tell me the story that had brought him to this place after years of confusion, tragedy, pain, trauma, forgiveness, grace, searching, rejecting and finding God.

   A writer friend of mine had taught Antonio in a few courses, telling me a curious story about how he, a trans man, had found himself in almost “ad hoc” counseling and care conversations at right-wing Christian rallies with mostly white, middle-aged Christian men. He’d written a paper on the subject for his master of divinity degree, with a concentration in chaplaincy. The paper was titled, in part: “The Jihad of Liberation.” 

   After growing up the child of a former evangelical pastor, homeschooled in conservative Christian traditionalism, Antonio said he now practiced both Muslim and Christian traditions, while holding onto faith in Jesus as a central figure of devotion, but not necessarily of divinity. All this likely would have sounded heretical to young Antonio and he likely never would have believed he would find himself at a Christian seminary studying such things, potentially even pursuing a career as a chaplain. But then, as I’d already seen in the story of so many young, white Christian men whom I’d been studying, and in my own life—God moves through our lives in mysterious and even meandering ways, if only to finally arrive at a place of greater love, understanding, acceptance and grace.

    That word—grace. I kept returning to it as I heard the unfolding of Antonio’s story.

    He was brought up in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a conservative branch of American Presbyterianism founded in 1973 in Birmingham, Alabama. Its predecessor body was the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), originally the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States in America. The PCA split off from the PCUS rather than submit to a merger to become the PCUSA. The PCA is loath to admit the role of racial disunity—during the civil rights movement in the South, in its formation. But the denomination has again and again taken positions against progress and inclusion for all sorts of marginalized groups, beginning in the South with the segregation of Black Americans, and continuing with a refusal to ordain women or LGBTQ people, or to allow gay marriage. New York City pastor and Reason for God author. Tim Keller, is probably the most well-known PCA leader, though the denomination was also home to former Republican vice president Dan Quayle and former senators Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Ben Sasse (R-NE). The PCA, like its leading champion, Keller, had a penchant for making its exclusionary beliefs seem somehow anodyne and even aligned with pop culture and a forward-looking church, even as its leaders fought vociferously against social movements like those supporting gay rights, abortion rights, or feminism. Antonio’s dad had been a church pastor, but he lost his job when Antonio was a baby and became what Antonio remembers as “leadership-adjacent” in their new church so that Antonio and his younger brother still felt like “PKs” (pastor’s kids).

   While Caleb’s family emphasized a sort of blue-collar, hard-working, freethinking, western version of conservative Christianity, Antonio’s family was even more rooted in the academic discipline of raising their children according to conservative Christian principles. Antonio remembers being homeschooled until middle school—and his brother until high school—with his mom as their only teacher, using fundamentalist Christian curriculum. Meanwhile, his dad got a PhD in economics, writing a dissertation wondering if God was an economist. He was perhaps perfectly situated, then, to grow in prominence in an American conservative church culture that had come to emphasize economics and recruit “businessmen” under the church growth model popularized by pastors Warren and Hybels. Still, Antonio’s dad never quite settled professionally. He worked low-paying teaching assistant jobs and other side jobs to try and pay the bills, supplemented by Antonio’s mom’s inheritance after her mother’s death. The family was surely not well-off, but they lived in economically depressed areas, and were relatively affluent compared to their impoverished neighbors; so Antonio didn’t notice the financial worry much. He had other demons to battle.

   For years, hidden and concealed from the rest of the family, Antonio’s father had been sexually abusing his child. Antonio tried to tell his mom, but he said she didn’t believe him. “She thought it was anti-Christian rebellion,” Antonio said, because, at the very same time, Antonio was starting to question the misogyny and patriarchal structures of their church. He had begun to question things as he left the family home more often, beginning at a Christian charter school with other homeschoolers for the first two years of middle school and then starting an early college program at the community college at age 14.

   Around that time, Antonio (who was born biologically female) started to realize that he was queer, though he didn’t quite have the language for what he felt inside.  “I knew there was something different about me,” he said. “At the time, I would have said I was experiencing same-sex attraction. I wasn’t sure if God made people gay. I knew God didn’t want me to act on my same-sex attraction.”

   Instead of hearing her child’s cries for protection, Antonio’s mother cracked down on her teenage daughter. She was practicing what Antonio now calls “punitive parenting.” Life at home had become unbearable. But outside the home, Antonio was meeting new people and feeling more confident in his queer identity. He got a full-time job and moved out the day he turned 18. Nine months later, then still living as a woman, he was married to a community college classmate, a man a decade older. “It was definitely some purity culture stuff,” Antonio says, looking back at the quick marriage. “I wanted the stability of marriage. I was thinking that was the only option.”

   At the same time, Antonio was wrestling with his faith. “I knew that the Calvinist God would be evil for condemning us to hell, as people with original sin. I just kept thinking that if all this is true, then God is either evil or God doesn’t exist.”

   Antonio says his husband at the time was gentle and patient, giving him the reassurance he’d never had that “I was gonna be OK.” He desperately needed that reassurance, because in sharing about his queerness publicly, Antonio had been “pushed out” by his church. “A lot of the community just stopped talking to me,” he said. “I really experienced the loss of support and community through that experience. [My husband] was really a rock in that time.”

   Antonio also connected with his then-father-in-law, and the two of them would go clamming, or out on the boat, or do construction work together. These were simple but deeply meaningful experiences for Antonio, who never got time like that with his own father. “He was, in many ways the father that mine was not,” Antonio said. 

   As Antonio leaned more and more into this new supportive community surrounding him, he felt his understanding of his own identity continue to shift. He realized that he was not just queer, but transgender and he started to begin the transition process from female to male, and to use he/they pronouns. (His gender identity is still evolving today and Antonio says he is “tired of all the gender wars.”)

   “Basically, what I tell people is I feel much more comfortable in a masculine expression. I feel like my spiritual work is to exist as a man in the world.”

   In July of 2020, he and his husband were divorced after four years of marriage, though Antonio says they still have positive regard for one another and did not end on bad terms. “We were on a similar journey of self-discovery,” Antonio said. “We were both just going in different directions.”

   His ex-husband wanted to remain in the Pacific Northwest town where they’d met, but Antonio was on the move. He spent the next few years before entering seminary working for environmental nonprofits, continuing to do the work with his hands he’d always loved to do, as well as working with mutual aid groups to address homelessness and overdose prevention. The work was active and meaningful, but Antonio missed the rites of faith and religion he’d grown up with, divorced from the baggage of his abusive and angry parents. Eventually, during a sweep of a houseless camp where Antonio and his fellow workers were attempting to assist people, he met a Mennonite pastor who was “yelling about Jesus.” Antonio and the pastor ended up meeting every week to talk about theology. He started reading voraciously, finding liberation theology and ideas about communalism, libertarian socialism, and anarcho-communism. True to his western roots, Antonio says, “I’m big on autonomy, but I don’t want to be individualistic about it.”

   As I watched Antonio’s deep-set eyes bore into mine as he shared passionately about his calling to Christian anarchism, I saw within his face and heard within his words so many of the other young, white Christian boys and men who have been a part of my research journey, and a part of my life in general. I think back to the restless isolation and uncertainty that turned to racist hatred in the case of mass shooter and white supremacist Dylan Roof. I think back to Connor, lining up for drill at the Citadel, and still finding a place for his tears to flow after the overdose death of his friend. I think of the confirmation students in the rural Midwest who dreamt up an idyllic paradise with only white boys and naked girls; of the rural teenage boys learning at the feet of an ex-military couple of pastors, in a garage on an autumn night in Minnesota, down the road from the white supremacist Hof, and how they told me that to be a man was to be kind, and that Jesus wasn’t white after all. I think of small, angry screaming Pastor Mark Driscoll, desperate to reclaim his manhood by the repression of women and anyone who might reveal his own thinly-veiled inadequacy. I think of my blond-and-red-haired sons, running blithely down the city sidewalk, telling me they liked to hear me preach, getting in trouble at school for playing too rough; they were brave, kind, nervous, afraid, hugging me, ignoring me, loving the world and the people they meet, growing up and into men, with fits and starts and imperfections.

   Antonio told me that what made him go to seminary was in part a calling back to some of the same “themes in the spaces in which I was raised,” even though those same places and themes he also now saw as at least partially Christian nationalist.  “There’s a libertarian bent,” he told me, of his conservative Christian upbringing. “An emphasis on freedom and community-building. A deep community and relationship to land, even if sometimes in an extractive way. There’s a relationship to place. It’s been a long road, and it will continue to be a long road for me.”

   Antonio said he’s been through years of therapy and is “as healed as someone can be” who has a history of sexual abuse. Through that process, he found a way to forgive his dad.  “I realized that had I been socialized as a boy, and gone through some of the experiences my father experienced, who’s to say I wouldn’t have become like him? Seeing my dad’s dysfunction has increased my compassion.”

   Antonio’s process of forgiveness and grace is not prescriptive or even necessarily recommended for other survivors, each of whom has their own paths to follow. I include his story here not to recommend others do the same, but instead to lift up his uniqueness, and the inescapable power of grace in everything Antonio had explained to me. This was especially moving because I understood that I had not often expressed that same sense of grace toward trans people in my own Christian past. In my own growing-up faith development, tangential to the ‘90s evangelical purity culture, I learned not only to repress and be ashamed of my own femininity and sexuality, but I also learned fear and shame related to LGBTQ people, something that has taken me a long time to undo, even as I have socially and theologically supported full affirmation of LGBTQ people in the church for more than a decade now.

   The miraculous and hopeful part of this story for young, white Christian men in America can find its culmination here, because here we have Antonio, who spent his childhood abused and victimized by a father who’d been shaped by a harsh masculine mold and a Christian culture that did not leave space for men to be vulnerable and seek love. Here we have Antonio, who in his own transgender masculinity has found a deep well of compassion and understanding for the very men who propagate the culture of Christian masculinity that terrorized his childhood years.

    Here we have Antonio at the right-wing rallies, off to the side, talking to men about construction and “bro-ing” out, wearing coveralls, but then also talking about fathers and grandfathers and pain and longing and God. At a Proud Boys rally in Oregon during Trump’s presidency, Antonio and nine of his “comrades,” including community organizers, social workers, biker moms in recovery, public defenders, and other friends, formed an impromptu “de-escalation cooperative.” This group of 10 dispersed themselves, standing between protesters and counter-protesters, something Antonio described as “creating space for activated people to reconsider their actions.” Antonio talked to militiamen, “using humor to diffuse tension,” and “asked questions about their lives.” He wrote later of the experience, “My goal was to humanize myself as a queer person and to help the agitators feel heard in their distress.” Later that day, a rally attendee and Iraq war veteran named Mike, wearing a baton and a loaded .45 on his hip, shared with Antonio about his “key formative experiences, all of which had been traumatic.”

   Writing later of that experience, Antonio wrote: “When I consider Mike’s childhood, I am overcome with empathy for his search for safety.” He felt not only compassion, but deep connection to Mike’s story, adding, “While I cannot deny that I hold contempt for Mike’s Christian nationalist and fundamentalist evangelical beliefs, I remember how well they served me as a teenager. These doctrines were a fortress of cosmic security in the face of political unrest, financial instability, and familial abuse. However, it was also through my experiences of suffering that I was able to grasp the existence of systemic oppression. Had I not been raised as a girl under patriarchy, were I not bisexual and transgender, I may have found myself standing by Mike’s side as his comrade.”

   Antonio said he first entered into Christian nationalist and right-wing spaces because, in some way, they represented where he had come from—people he had formerly known and even loved—and he wanted to cling to a sense of common humanity. Even despite the challenges and pain his life has wrought, Antonio still has a desperate and deeply-rooted hope for the future. He sees the spirit of God working change in his own life, in powerful ways, and he can’t help but believe that the spirit of God could also be at work in changing these Christian nationalist men.

   “They’re just men,” Antonio says. “I don’t always like the phrase ‘Christian nationalist,’ even though I use it. They’re shaped by culture and experiences just like me. With my own healing journey, it has really blurred the line between oppressor and oppressed . . . it shifted things for me. We are all harmed. I noticed cycles of harm. None of us are innocent.”

   Antonio said his father’s dad had four affairs and was “married to his work.” His mother once told him that his father had “eaten his dad’s cigarettes in order to feel close to him.”   

   The pain and sorrow and shame of generations can run deep, like a river, through our lives, twisting and turning and shaping us and our paths in ways we don’t always understand. But here we have Antonio: the transgender seminary student reading his Bible next to his Qur’an. He’s still young. He’s still figuring it out. His manhood is in process, revealing itself—like how all boys become men, like how God reveals Godself, as the Apostle Paul writes, as in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face-to-face,” (1 Corinthians 13).

Author’s Note: When I first received an invitation to write for this issue of Christian Ethics Today, I knew that I wanted to tell a story that illustrated pastoral and hopeful ways to engage together in communities and push back the rising tides of hatred, disinformation, white Christian Nationalism, and violence. As I thought about how to tell this story, I kept returning to the story of Antonio, whom I interviewed for my recent book, Disciples of White Jesus. What makes Antonio’s story so powerful is the way that he embodies both the trauma, abuse and isolation that can arise within church communities and also an almost inconceivable response of resurrection, hope and grace. When I began writing a book about right-wing radicalization of young white men and boys, I didn’t think that one of the stories I would tell would be of a trans-man who grew up in purity culture and now frequented right-wing rallies to serve as a peacekeeper. But I think that element of unexpectedness is part of what makes Antonio’s story so compelling and even relatable. This essay is an excerpt from my latest book, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, (Broadleaf, March 25, 2025), reprinted here with permission from the publisher. 

Rev. Angela Denker is an award-winning author, ELCA Lutheran pastor, and veteran journalist. Her first book, Red State Christians, was the 2019 Silver Foreword Indies award-winner for political and social sciences. Her second book, Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, came out on March, 25, 2025.  Pastor Angela also serves Lake Nokomis Lutheran Church in Minneapolis as pastor of visitation and public theology. You can read more of her work on Christian Nationalism, American culture, social issues, journalism, theology and parenting on her Substack, I’m Listening.

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