An Open Letter to Preemptive Love

Dear Jeremy and Jessica,

I am writing this in hopes that it will lead to peace, healing, and wholeness. Those are, after all, the values that drew me to your team in 2016 and they still inspire me to this day. They’re also the reason I cannot sit by and watch you preach peace while you bully, gaslight, and abuse the peacemakers on your team until they give up and quit. I have watched too many incredible humans leave your organization burned out, beat-down, cynical, and depressed. Most of us have needed therapy to recover.

Many of us have repeatedly expressed our concerns about how you treat your employees and lead your organization. We’ve shared these concerns with you directly, as well as with other leaders in the organization and members of the Board of Directors. But despite the mountains of evidence that back up our claims—like the organization’s unusually high turnover rate, the public and private complaints, the social media posts and Glassdoor reviews calling out the dysfunction, and your extremely questionable and increasingly erratic behavior (for example, abruptly firing multiple C-suite leaders this past summer), we’ve been repeatedly dismissed and no action has been taken.

But you underestimated the power of your own message if you thought we would just walk away and do nothing about the abuse we witnessed.

You see, we believed you when you said that violence doesn’t get the last word… that we do. So here we are, drawing boundaries and calling out violence in order to protect the emotional and mental wellbeing of Preemptive Love’s employees, while also holding space and grace for your collective repentance and healing. In August 2021, thirty-one former Preemptive Love employees sent a letter to you and the board of directors, lining out what we experienced and asking for accountability. Not because we’re angry (though some of us are). Because we want peace. And peace, I learned while I was working and writing for you, is healing and wholeness for all parties involved.

When I started as a writer for Preemptive Love the day after the 2016 election, I brought your total stateside staff to eleven employees, and I truly felt like I’d found my people. The first six months were intense, and intensely meaningful, as we delivered aid to Mosul during its liberation from ISIS. I woke up at 4:30 am every day to work because of the time difference between the West Coast and Iraq and I honestly loved every minute of it. It felt like we—collectively—were doing great work, and I was so honored to be a part of it.

But as the organization grew, Jeremy and Jessica, so did your celebrity. And along with it, your ego and your fear.

The result was that by late summer 2017, the culture of the organization had shifted. It no longer felt like we were building something together. It felt like we were cogs in a wheel. Hired to follow your orders, build your reputation, execute your ideas, and celebrate your accomplishments while oohing and ahhing over your increasing access to the rich and famous, which you held as an irrefutable indication of success. 

Over the course of just 9 months, Preemptive Love went from a place that loudly valued “owner’s mindset” (a phrase you used often in the early days) to one that valued unwavering loyalty to you two, above all else. Any questions or pushback about what you were doing or how you were doing it was seen as a betrayal, regardless of the validity of the concern.

As troubling as this is in concept, it didn’t practically become an issue for most of the team until fall 2017. That’s when several of us in the States started pushing the organization to speak into the fraught social issues we were facing at home. It was Trump’s first year as president and we were increasingly polarized. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining traction, and anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate crimes were on the rise. There was a rising tide of blatant white supremacy, and the Me Too movement was in full swing, among many other issues. 

I believed Preemptive Love’s message of “love anyway” could offer Americans a potential path forward.

You eventually caved to the pressure and we started trying to apply Preemptive Love messaging to US social issues by writing about our own peacemaking efforts, speaking into major current events in the US, designing local Preemptive Love groups, and eventually even doing some disaster relief after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. 

But it wasn’t long into the attempt that things went sideways. Perhaps some of the blame lies with me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed you to try to bring your messaging stateside. But I believed in it deeply. And I respected the two of you so much.

The issue turned out to be twofold:

1) Your ego and fear both grew pace-for-pace with the organization and its influence, making it difficult for you to share leadership or power. In fact, the bigger Preemptive Love got, the more tightly you held onto power until it was fully consolidated between the two of you. And it remains there, to this day. For the last 4 years, anyone with any kind of leadership skills has been bullied, fired, silenced, or forced out, because you saw them not as an asset to your organization, but as a threat to your power. 

2) Having lived outside the U.S. for so long (it had been 13 years in 2017), your understanding of race and other American social issues was… behind. You’d missed a lot. In addition, as you discuss in your books, Jeremy, your understanding of culture when you did live here was largely informed by conservative, white evangelicalism. When we began to discuss these things internally, it quickly became clear that there are pieces of your cultural understanding that needed to be reexamined. Especially when it came to gender and race.

This was evident when you reprimanded me for an article I wrote in response to the Charlottesville riots, saying the “angry tone” I took with the white supremacists didn’t reflect our commitment to “love anyway.” 

It was evident when Jessica told me I needed to rework the curriculum I wrote for Preemptive Love gatherings because she was afraid it would make white people uncomfortable—and she wanted to make sure these gatherings were a “safe space” for white people. 

It was evident when you both repeatedly demeaned the only war veteran on our staff for courageously sharing her story. 

It was evident in a March 2018 Zoom call when both of you shouted at the team and Jessica cried toxic white woman tears because someone called her out for her backward understanding of race and gender dynamics. It was further evident in that same Zoom call when you, Jeremy, loudly questioned my commitment to feminism because I wasn’t standing up for Jessica while she was crying. 

It was evident when your rebuttal to my challenge of your understanding of race in America was that you “have Black friends.” And again when I asked if all those Black friends were millionaires or celebrities, and you smiled and said, “Yes, well they hear from their people and then they tell me.” 

It was also evident when the one Black employee we hired while I was on staff got fired only a few months into the job for a social media post on their personal account that criticized the white American Christian church. A conservative donor got upset and this employee was gone the next day, despite the fact that many of our non-Black employees regularly posted similar ideas with no recourse.

But you, Jeremy and Jess, refused to hear this feedback from anyone. 

As your team challenged you over these “missteps,” your response was to gaslight, abuse, demote, silence, and bully people into submission. If we didn’t fall in line and agree to everything you did without question, we could leave immediately or be mistreated and stripped of responsibilities until we had no other option but to leave.

The final straw for me wasn’t when you demanded to read everything I wrote before it was published (and never approved any of it, no matter how benign). It wasn’t when you told me that I didn’t “get” the Preemptive Love way and never would. It wasn’t when you told me that, despite a decade of experience in strategic communication, I should stick to answering social media comments because “it’s really what [I’m] best at anyway”. It wasn’t when you told me my master’s degree in International Community Development “was meaningless and had no value.” It wasn’t when you told me that I wasn’t allowed to tell any of my own story on the blog anymore because “we never tell our own story at PLC” (while routinely making yours the center of our messaging.) It wasn’t even when you told me my efforts to be a peacemaker in my local community were nothing more than “attention-seeking.”  

The last straw for me was a voice message from Jessica explaining that you don’t really believe that anyone can be a peacemaker on the front lines where they live. You sent this message in the summer of 2018 after I suggested that we partner with a local organization near my home in Oregon that was helping separated immigrant families being held at a nearby detention center. I had connections there. Partnering with them aligned with Preemptive Love’s commitment to “building up local organizations rather than our own.” But you told me that despite the fact that immigrant families were actively being held here, Oregon was too far removed from the issue. 

You told me that while Preemptive Love said anyone can be a peacemaker on the frontlines where they live… that’s not actually true. You said I could never be a real peacemaker while I lived in Oregon because to be a real peacemaker, I had to be in the “red hot center” of the conflict. Meaning: in the media spotlight. 

Then you said the two of you had decided the only way I could prove myself as a peacemaker and as a Preemptive Love employee was to immediately uproot my family and move to the Arizona-Mexico border to address family separations there—despite the fact that I had no connections there, I speak very little Spanish, I had no intimate knowledge of the issue beyond what I read in the news, and I had no meaningful way to make a difference there. This aligned with your value of “going where the news coverage was” which you had announced at our staff summit a few months prior. But it wouldn’t have helped anyone in need. It was an absurd proposition and would’ve been the worst form of white saviorism. 

It’s also exactly what you guys did 13 years ago when you moved to Iraq in the middle of a war.

That’s when I realized that (a) you really—truly—don’t believe the message you’ve been preaching. And (b) while the message might be the mission, the mission has been distorted over the years. It’s no longer about peacemaking. It’s about you, constantly telling your own dramatic story of white saviorism in the Middle East, seeking all the praise, believing all your own press, and chasing an ever-elusive notion of success. It’s about you desperately trying to cope with the trauma you’ve experienced by convincing yourselves that everything you’ve been through, everything your family has been through, was worth it.

Jeremy, you talk about this in your book Love Anyway. About how all the celebrity, the access to powerful people, all the good press... it wasn’t enough for you because of the immense trauma you’ve experienced. And it’s absolutely true. You and Jessica have experienced immense trauma that I can only imagine. I’m so sorry that you’ve gone through so many hard things, and I hope you find a way to heal from them.

But at some point, you have to face the fact that your trauma, and the resulting drive to prove yourself in a never-ending quest for validation, is affecting your ability to lead.

I implore you to understand and believe that your behavior is not being experienced by people as “caring.” You’re hurting people. You’re undermining your own stated goal of stopping the spread of violence. You’re destroying your own legacy as peacemakers. You are being violent with the people on your team.

I want better for you. I want better for my friends. I want better for Preemptive Love. But it will never happen until you step back and take some time to heal before attempting to lead again. 

To the Board of Directors and other Preemptive Love leaders:

You are complicit in this harm. You’ve known about these problems. You’ve watched dozens of people who once described their job at Preemptive Love as a “calling” leave disillusioned and broken… surely you must understand squandering that level of buy-in is no easy feat. I can’t believe that any of you are gullible enough to believe the lie that all those people just “weren’t our people.” 

Hopefully, you are in a position of leadership because you believe in peace and justice. Now is your chance to use your power to combat injustice. If Jeremy and Jessica do not step down, you must remove them. Otherwise, you will perpetuate the cycle of injustice and harm.

It’s not too late to choose peace, wholeness, and healing. I hope and pray you will choose it with me.

Sincerely,

Courtney Christenson