Lance Aksamit
Lance Aksamit was born into a world dominated by two authoritarian regimes - one political and the other ontological. General Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno was the Panamanian autocrat, and Jesus the benevolent dictator. These two regimes found themselves at odds in the backwater jungles of the Darien when Noriega accused Lance’s blind father of being a spy. The son of an ordained minister and missionary, Lance’s life was intended to have a straight and narrow trajectory and for a while it did. He grew up fully immersed in the Evangelical church, not some fringe element or offshoot, but mainstream nondenominational “born again” Evangelicalism. As a teen, he picketed abortion clinics, accosted strangers in the name of Jesus, and debated his teachers on the falsehoods of evolution, global warming, and Catholicism. He rarely failed to perform such Christly duties as warning fellow students about the dangerous lies humanists and atheists were busy propagating in the classrooms. As an active member and leader in Evangelical youth programs, Lance was a zealot.
The unthinking convictions Lance adopted at a young age would later propel him into close proximity with the Alt-right. They hawked secret and suppressed knowledge that smelled of home. Ultimately, his flirtation with right-wing conspiracy theorists fizzled out. However, his short-lived immersion in the burgeoning Alt-right did provide a unique perspective from which to critique. Lance found his way from Christian fundamentalism to atheism and from right-wing conservatism to Marxist humanism over the course of 8 years while he traveled the globe.
Lance is currently a high school history teacher by profession who employs his love of both storytelling and pedagogy in his compelling narratives. He lives in Claxton, Georgia.
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