I Once Was Lost: My Search for God in America
By Don Lemon
Little, Brown and Company; hardcover, 224 pages; $30.00
Don Lemon is a Brooklyn College alumnus who had a respected tenure on CNN as the anchor of Don Lemon Tonight, where he was a trusted voice covering the Sandy Hook school shooting, war-torn Eastern Europe, and the riots of 2020. He now is the host of The Don Lemon Show, which streams on all platforms. His book on race, This is the Fire, was a #1 New York Times bestseller.
I Once Was Lost: My Search for God in America is Lemon's follow-up to his acclaimed first book, as he faces a test of his faith through some of America's toughest moments, and how he had to compartmentalize his feelings while covering them in his role as a reporter.
Lemon always had a complicated relationship with God, as he cherished the Southern Black church he grew up in, but struggled with the fundamentalist rejection of his right to exist as a gay man who wanted to marry his longtime love in a church wedding with all the traditions.
Throughout his years on CNN, Lemon proved to be one a deep thinker, and with this book, that proves it more than ever. He deftly handles melding his feelings on the church to what it has been like for him in a United States that has had an emboldened right wing led by former President Donald Trump, whose supporters use the flag for their own means.
"Those of us who believe in the teachings of Jesus made a terrible mistake allowing right-wing Evangelicals to co-opt His name over the past fifty years. It's equally egregious for loyal citizens of the United States to allow election deniers and insurrectionists to alienate us from our Stars and Stripes. It's profane for them to carry the flag of the United States alongside the flag of the Confederacy, just as it is profane for an Evangelical church to hang a cross next to a sign that says GOD HATES F**S.
If the cross is shorthand for Jesus, displaying it should be a declaration of love. If the flag is a symbol of unity, flying it should be a declaration of our willingness to go together even if we don't match. If it's a symbol of belonging, it belongs to all of us - the multitudes within us - and we defend it by declaring our individuality.
Bold on bold on bold.
I've known for a long time exactly who I am, but I was so good at reading the room, I didn't always let the room read me, the United States of my own diversity as a gay, Black, Christian, American journalist.
In many unexpected ways, the process of thinking through, writing, and revising this book has given me my God back. Now I want my flag."
Lemon details some of the biggest stories he covered, starting with the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14, 2012. He was at the Washington bureau that Friday morning, and got on the first Acela he could to get to Stanford, Connectictut, before heading to Newtown. While he goes into how tough it was to cover that excruciating painful event, he writes how, after covering a press conference by the CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, he gave an impassioned speech on-air about gun violence, and the backlash that followed on Twitter.
Then, nearly ten years later, there was another school shooting, in Uvalde, Texas, at Robb Elementary School, and Lemon also got there as soon as possible to cover the tragedy. One moment he writes of was covering a memorial service at the sanctuary at Primera Iglesia Bautista (First Baptist Church), and how he maintained his professional stance, which was being severely tested with all the raw emotion and heartbreak in the air.
"When the congregation started singing," Lemon writes, "I didn't understand the Spanish lyrics, but I recognized the melody and sang the hymn I'd known since I was a child.
I once was lost but now am found..."
Lemon forthrightly admits that the gun issue really tests his objectivity, as he sees those wanting more God in schools want more guns in them as well, that the issues of religion, freedom, and security are fused together. He also sees a country that drastically changed between Sandy Hook and Uvalde, that outrage has turned into acceptance, and that anyone can become a gun violence victim anywhere. He sums it up thusly, "Because freedom means gun, and security means gun."
In this discussion, Lemon admits that he has been a gun owner himself, but clarifies his feelings on being a well-regulated, responsible one and those who see it as a larger meaning of love for the country. Along with that, Lemon also writes of how he was a Young Republican, and how the party had a much-different platform in the mid-1970s than it does now, while a Democrat in Louisiana meant "Dixiecrat" and were stocked with racists still debating the Civil War. The switch in party identity happened soon after, in the early 1980s, as the Moral Majority, led by Evangelical Christians, began to dominate the Republican party.
One constant in the book, which gives it a real poignancy, is Lemon's relationship with his older sister, Leisa, who he leaned on while covering brutal moments like Sandy Hook and how she always looked out for his interests.
Leisa died tragically in 2018 in a fishing accident, as she drowned in a lake near her home. In processing her untimely death, he thought of religious axioms that he leaned on in tough moments, and their surprising origins.
In this excerpt, Lemon writes of the services he and Leisa grew up with, and what stuck with him: "I first ran a foul of the Holy Ghost on a sweltering summer evening in 1969 at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Port Allen, Louisiana. Sunday night service was in full gospel swing. I was about three years old, restless and grumpy on my grandmother's lap, worn out by a long day of trying to be good. My mom, Katherine, and my grandmother, Ma'me (pronounced like the Cajun mah-MEE) dragged me and my sisters, Leisa and Yma, to Southern Baptist services every Sunday morning at 7:45. After church was fellowship and family time with cookies in the church kitchen and over-the-top Sunday soul food at my aunt's house. Then we went to Sunday school. There was some respite in the afternoon, but in the evening, we went to another revival-type service that thundered into the night, with Reverend Isaiah Warner exhorting righteousness and the choir singing salvation.
Services began in the parking lot. That's where the congregation did their congregating. We all gathered outside while the piano and organ players warmed up in the sanctuary. This was an era of musical genesis: the traditional music of the American Black Church had given birth to this fresh, distinctive thing called funk, and funk returned the favor, bringing its raw energy home again. You'd hear gospel standards like 'Jesus on the Mainline' alongside Billy Preston's 'That's the Way God Planned It." The driving rhythms and infectious harmonies were built for inclusion. Everybody in.
The matriarchs of Shiloh gathered under the muggy southern sky, wafting paper fans printed with pictures of Mahalia Jackson, JFK, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They were voluminous dresses that looked and smelled like flower gardens, and most of them had white lace doilies bobby-pinned on top of their stiffly sprayed hairdos. As they nodded and greeted one another, those doilies bobbed like white lilies on the breeze.
Ma'me wore a hat with tulle netting and alligator shoes that matched her purse. Mom was always dressed to the nines: Lena Horne audacity meets Chanel boucle. Her tailored suit would be covered by a choir robe as soon as she got inside, but out in the parking lot, ladies would elbow Leisa and Yma and say, 'Girrrrl, your mama! You know she can rag.'
When the deacons opened the door, Mom went off to join the choir. Ma'me collected her program and led Leisa, Yma, and me to our usual pew up front, close to the choir side so Mom could see us from her place in the alto section and shrivel us with harsh looks as needed."
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