First things first. You are not seeing double.

Terry Mattingly and I have, in fact, written separate responses to a very interesting feature story called “The Confession.” This has happened two or three times in 17 years, with our pattern of calling dibs on new articles via email. After seeing that our pieces focused on different angles in the report (click here for tmatt’s take), he suggested that we hold my post for a bit and then run it as a kind of year-ender. I thought this was one of the best long forms of the year. Here, then, is how I saw it.

The Washington Post’s series on hate crimes has delivered another wonderfully complicated story, and this time it includes notes of forgiveness and grace.

The 5,300-word story by Peter Jamison does not engage this point directly, but calling the behavior of Nathan Stang a hate crime illustrates the occasional oddities of the category. Stang, an atheist gay man pursuing doctoral studies in music at Indiana University, served as the paid organist about 35 miles away at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom.

Stang claimed to have discovered the swastika and two messages left in black spray paint on the church’s exterior. “Heil Trump,” one message said. “Fag church,” said the other. 

The latter invective led to rapid cries of a hate crime. Within six months, the Brown County Sheriff’s Department arrested the perpetrator, and it was not a neo-Nazi wearing a Make America Great Again cap or carrying a sign filled with vile insults. It was Stang, who confessed his act of vandalism to sheriff’s deputy Brian Shrader. 

The deputy had suspicions about the malicious graffiti from the beginning, and Jamison’s choice of adjective for the congregation helped unlock the mystery.

 Jamison writes:

The detective had put his finger on what was bothering him: the words “Fag Church.” St. David’s was indeed a beacon of support for gay rights. But the fact had gone all but unnoticed outside the church’s several dozen parishioners.

“I didn’t know that. People in the county didn’t know that. People I work with didn’t know that. Someone ‘down the road,’ so to speak, really would not have known that,” Shrader said. He began to wonder if the hateful graffiti could have been scrawled Saturday night by somebody who planned to sit in the pews Sunday morning.

Jamison reports on how Deputy Shrader traced the crime to Stang and persuaded him to confess, which is engaging in itself, but the details of Stang’s life before and after the arrest make the feature story great.

Jamison discovers a fraught relationship between the organist and his mother, which became only more fraught after his crime came to light. He also reports beautifully on responses to the crime by members of St. David’s:

St. David’s leaders fired Stang after his arrest. But when the time came for him to be sentenced, they sent an extraordinary letter to the judge and prosecutor that was less a recommendation on Stang’s punishment than a confession of the congregation’s own sins.

Members of the church council wrote that they had “looked within ourselves to find ourselves guilty of assuming it was done by a ‘certain sort of person.’”

“We forgave Nathan,” the letter continued, “then found we also had to forgive ourselves. We discovered ourselves guilty of the same prejudice we silently accused others of.”

They concluded by acknowledging “a lack of consensus” within the congregation on whether Stang should face further consequences in the legal system for his actions: “Some feel that Nathan has shown genuine remorse, has suffered professionally and personally, and should receive no additional punishment. Others feel the need for further accountability. All strongly believe that the prosecutor and judge should take Nathan’s confession, state of mind and expressions of remorse into account during sentencing.”

There is much more to the story about the organist and his strained relationship with his mother, Rhonda Stang. Here is a taste of that angle:

Yet it was politics, not sexual identity, that drove mother and son apart.

When Barack Obama was elected, Rhonda embraced the tea party movement. She began to fear that the U.S. government was dominated by a network of shadowy, corrupt elites bent on enriching themselves and destroying citizens’ freedoms. She wept when Obama won a second term, and as his presidency came to a close, she began trying to interest Stang in strange theories she discovered on YouTube.

By then, she was living with him in Bloomington after renting out her house in Florida. Arriving home from work or class, the doctoral student would listen in astonishment as his mother discussed the possibility that the U.S. government was secretly promoting homosexuality in its citizens through chemicals placed in tap water, or that Queen Elizabeth II and other world leaders are disguised envoys of the Anunnaki, an extraterrestrial race of lizard people.

Rhonda acknowledged that the ideas were far-fetched but said she found them intellectually stimulating. “What’s the old saying, that truth is stranger than fiction?” She said. “No, I don’t necessarily believe [the queen is] a lizard person. But I like tossing around the idea.”

The idea of extraterrestrial lizard people notwithstanding, both mother and son ultimately become characters for whom many readers will feel sympathy and compassion.

To put it another way: in the sort of story that too often leads to one-dimensional victims and villains, this account is filled with human beings in all their conflicted brokenness and glory. Read it and be moved.