I Didn't Leave. I Believed.
On formation, fidelity, and the values that got me in trouble with the movements that taught them.
The post was nothing unusual.
A man I’ve known since I was a kid. I can still see him a few rows ahead of me on padded pews during Sunday sermons, usually smiling. He was the kind of man who always seemed genuinely kind. A leader in the church, as I recall. He’d called a group of people idiots for their political opinions. Not argued with them. Not challenged them. Called them idiots. I remember my heart dropping when I saw it. The comments beneath it were a small chorus of agreement from people I also recognized.
I stared at it longer than I should have.
Not because I was shocked. Because I wasn’t.
The Mirror
I know this man’s voice. I know the specific pleasure of it, the way a perfectly placed dismissal can feel, for just a moment, like clarity. Like you’ve cut through something. I spent most of my teens, my twenties, a good portion of my thirties chasing that feeling. Theology, politics, culture. I treated all of it as an arena where the point was to be right, and being right meant someone else was wrong, and making sure they knew it.
I wasn’t curious. I wasn’t kind. I was, in the language I’d been raised with, not loving my neighbor. I was defeating him.
There’s a guy named Brent I think about when I say that. We argued on social media for years, theology and politics, whatever the controversy of the moment was. I only knew him as a screen name and a set of positions to dismantle. He was an opponent to conquer, not a person to love. Then we actually met in person. And he became a genuine friend.
I didn’t know that was possible because I wasn’t treating him like it was.
There was a phrase I used to justify all of it: speak truth with love. I said it sincerely. I believed it covered what I was doing.
I’ve thought about the people who were on the receiving end of me speaking truth with love.
I don’t think they felt loved. I’m fairly certain most of them didn’t.
The truth is I’m not sure I actually loved them. I knew the right words. I had the right framework. But love, the actual thing, requires a kind of attention and surrender to another person that I wasn’t offering. I was offering correctness. Delivered warmly, when I remembered.
I still feel the pull. Less than I used to. But it’s there. Some argument surfaces and something in me wants to dunk rather than ask, to correct rather than understand. I notice it now in a way I didn’t then. I don’t always win.
So I’m not writing this from high ground. I want to be clear about that.
What I Was Given
But here’s what I can’t reconcile.
I was formed in communities, churches, youth groups, Sunday school classes, conversations with older men and women who took me seriously, that handed me a set of values I genuinely absorbed.
The first: character matters. Not competence. Not outcomes. Not whether your team wins. Character. I was taught this explicitly during the Clinton years. The argument was that a man’s private behavior and his public leadership weren’t separable. That what a person does when they think no one is watching tells you who they actually are. I believed it. I still believe it. I wasn’t told it only applied to Democrats.
The second: how we treat people matters more than what we believe about them. This came through Scripture, through youth pastors, through the kind of ordinary formation that happens when a community actually tries to practice what it preaches. Love is patient. Love is not easily provoked. The fruit of the Spirit is not a sharp argument.
And then there’s something I’ve only noticed in retrospect.
I grew up learning the Ten Commandments. I was taught the parables. I knew the rules and the stories. What I don’t remember is much emphasis on the Beatitudes. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are the peacemakers.
That absence is strange when I think about it now. The Beatitudes are where Jesus describes what a faithful life actually looks like from the inside. Not the law you follow, but the person you become. They’re also the parts of his teaching most directly concerned with power, vulnerability, and how you treat the people who oppose you. That they weren’t the center of what I was taught might explain more about where we’ve ended up than all the other pieces put together.
The third thing is harder to name.
Alongside the formation in character and love, there ran a persistent undertow: learn to spot error. Know your doctrine well enough to identify where someone else’s falls short. Be alert. Be discerning. This was framed as faithfulness, and I took it that way. I got good at it.
What I’ve come to see is that Jesus almost never aimed this practice at ordinary people trying to follow him. His warnings about false teaching were directed at religious leaders using doctrine to protect their own power and exclude the vulnerable. He wasn’t handing his disciples a sorting tool for the neighbors. The heresy-hunting instinct I absorbed wasn’t Gospel formation. It was a cultural inheritance dressed in Gospel language, and it did exactly what you’d expect it to do.
It made contempt feel like discernment. It gave the cruelty a clean conscience. And the phrase speak truth with love stitched it all together, so the whole apparatus felt not just permissible but righteous.
The Inversion
What I’ve watched over the last several years is those values inverted, in public, by the same communities that handed them to me.
I’ve watched people who handed me these values share content designed to humiliate their political opponents. I’ve seen comment threads under church friends’ posts that are indistinguishable from any other online mob, the same speed, the same pleasure, the same pile-on. The names at the bottom were people I recognized from the communion line.
The coarseness toward political opponents. The tolerance for behavior in leaders that would’ve been disqualifying a decade ago. The comfort with contempt as a mode of engagement.
The people who bear the cost of this aren’t abstractions. They’re fellow Christians who hold different political beliefs and have been made to feel less faithful for it. They’re people in poverty whose circumstances get treated not as a systemic reality but as a personal moral failure. They were never the enemy. They were always the neighbors.
I’ve tried to understand the theology that permits this. I haven’t found one that holds.
But I want to be careful here, because I don’t think most of these people reasoned their way to contempt. They were formed the same way I was, by community, by belonging, by the slow accumulation of what the people around them rewarded. Going against your community is genuinely hard. The cost of dissent isn’t abstract. It’s Thanksgiving dinner and Sunday morning and the group chat that goes quiet. I understand that pull. I’ve felt it.
That understanding doesn’t change what I see. It just makes me less self-righteous about seeing it.
I Took the Formation Seriously
What I haven’t done is stop believing the values I was given.
That’s the part that keeps getting misread. When people who knew me in those years see where I’ve landed, more skeptical of partisan loyalty, less comfortable in the tribal tent, harder to place on the standard grid, they sometimes read it as drift. As loss of faith. As someone who got soft or got worldly or got influenced by the wrong people.
Maybe you’re reading this and that’s exactly what you think. I understand. I used to think it about people who left before me.
The actual story is simpler. And more unsettling.
I took the formation seriously.
I applied the values. Not perfectly. I’ve shown you how imperfectly. But I applied them. And when I held them up against what I was being asked to overlook, to excuse, to perform loyalty toward, they didn’t survive the comparison. Not the values. The movements.
What faithfulness to those values would actually require is harder than doctrinal precision. It would require intellectual honesty about the leaders we choose to defend. And genuine love for the people who disagree with us, or might even despise us. That’s not a soft standard. That’s the one I was taught.
I didn’t leave because I stopped believing.
I left because I believed.
What Remains
The man from church posted again yesterday. Something I disagreed with. Something that made me feel that old familiar pull.
I didn’t respond.
Not because I’m above it. I’ve already told you I’m not. But because I know what that conversation looks like from the inside, and I know what it costs the person you think you’re correcting. Being right was never actually the point.
I think about Brent sometimes. About how many years we spent as opponents before we became friends. About how many people I never got to that second part with.
The tradition gave me something real. Something that, taken seriously, keeps getting me in trouble with the tradition.
I wonder sometimes if that’s exactly how it was always supposed to work.