When Your Neighbor Becomes the Enemy
Why the loss of neighborliness may be America’s most dangerous political shift
The house was quiet. The TV was on but barely, doing that background-noise job televisions do late at night. The blue-white light from my phone made the room feel colder than it actually was.
I was doing that familiar modern thing — thumb flicking, brow tightening, reading faster as the temperature rose — telling myself I was just catching up on the news when really I was marinating in somebody else’s contempt.
One person posted a clip. Another replied with a laughing emoji and a line about “these people.” A third person arrived already furious. By then nobody was trying to understand anything. They were just sorting each other into moral categories and throwing punches from behind glass.
Traitor. Fascist. Cultist. Marxist. Bigot. Snowflake.
Pick your tribe, and the insults change a little. The contempt does not.
After a few minutes, the whole thing started to feel less like debate and more like liturgy — the same words, the same outrage, the same certainty that the people on the other side were not merely wrong, but rotten.
Maybe that is the real story of this American moment.
Not that we disagree. Not even that we are angry. It is that more and more of us have started to experience our fellow citizens as morally bad people.
The good I want to protect here is simple but fragile: the possibility of seeing fellow Americans as neighbors before we see them as threats.
The New Moral Instinct
That is what makes a recent Pew Research survey so striking. In its 25-country study, the United States was the only country where more people said their fellow citizens have bad morals and ethics than good ones: 53 percent to 47 percent.
That is not just polarization. That is moral suspicion becoming national habit.
I keep coming back to a simple question: when did disagreement stop feeling like difference and start feeling like evidence of depravity?
And yet I do not think contempt is the whole story. Most of us still know, somewhere underneath the noise, that life is better when it is shared with actual people rather than performed for our tribes. We still know the relief of being understood by someone who does not agree with us on everything.
The hunger underneath all this is not just partisan victory. It is the older human hunger to live in a place where disagreement does not automatically threaten belonging.
How We Learned to See Enemies Everywhere
Sadly, it is not hard to see how we got here.
It matters when ordinary people trade contempt online. It matters when cable news turns every disagreement into a civilization-ending emergency. It matters when partisan media trains us to see the worst ten seconds of the other side and call it the whole story.
But it matters even more when this language is modeled from the top.
Donald Trump is again serving as president, and the “enemy from within” rhetoric that marked his campaign and public speeches did not emerge from nowhere. When leaders speak about fellow citizens as enemies, they give moral permission to millions of others to do the same.
Once your opponents are enemies, you no longer have to understand them. Once they are enemies, you no longer have to ask what pain, fear, memory, or formation led them there. Once they are enemies, cruelty starts to feel like clarity.
And to be fair, the contempt is not confined to one party, one platform, or one ideology.
The right has its villains. The left has its monsters. We are all increasingly fluent in the vocabulary of disgust.
But saying that does not require us to flatten every difference or pretend all forms of contempt carry the same power. They do not. The language of a president matters differently than the language of an anonymous account with an eagle avatar and 214 followers.
Public office amplifies moral temperature. It normalizes postures. It disciples people.
The Damage Contempt Does to the Soul
Still, I do not want to write this as if the problem lives only out there — in Washington or on somebody else’s timeline.
I know the temptation because I feel it too.
I have had moments where it felt easier to write someone off than to stay curious about them. Easier to assume bad faith than to do the slower, humbling work of remembering there is an actual person on the other side of my irritation.
I have felt this most in small moments — in conversations that tighten too quickly, in glances exchanged when a political name comes up, in the quiet calculation people make about whether honesty is even safe.
I have felt it in smaller, more ordinary places too — standing in a church lobby after the service should have ended, or lingering in conversation with someone I like and respect when a political name comes up and the air changes just a little. Not explosive. Just tighter. More careful. You can almost hear both people deciding, in real time, how much honesty the moment can bear.
The harder truth is that contempt usually arrives in me before I notice it. It rarely announces itself as hatred. It arrives disguised as discernment.
And that is where the Christian part of this becomes unavoidable for me.
A politics that trains me to despise my neighbor is doing damage to my soul, even when it flatters my sense of righteousness.
I can believe some ideas are destructive. I can believe some policies are cruel. I can believe some leaders are dangerous. In some cases, I do.
But if my moral seriousness turns into moral contempt, something has gone wrong in me.
What People Are Really Hungry For
That may be why someone like James Talarico has gotten so much attention lately.
For readers who may not know him, Talarico is a 36-year-old Texas state representative and Christian seminarian who has drawn attention for speaking openly about faith in politics while criticizing Christian nationalism and calling for a politics shaped by love rather than hostility. You can hear the spirit of that message in this talk on faith and public life.
Not because he has solved America.
Not because everyone agrees with his politics.
But because people are exhausted.
There is something arresting about a public figure who speaks as if fellow citizens are still neighbors and not prey.
I have also seen the opposite of contempt in ordinary life.
I have seen people share a table after voting differently. I have seen friendships survive real disagreement. I have seen neighbors refuse the script that says every hard conversation has to become a final rupture.
The habits that formed our contempt are strong, but they are not irreversible. Human beings can be retrained by presence, by patience, by memory, by meals, by churches and neighborhoods and friendships sturdy enough to hold disagreement without collapse.
In other words, many Americans are not only asking, Who is right?
They are also asking, Who still seems human?
Opposition Is Not the Same as Contempt
For too long, especially in Christian political spaces, we have evaluated public figures almost entirely through ideological alignment.
Are they right on this issue? Wrong on that one? With us here? Against us there?
Those questions matter. Policy matters. Law matters. Elections matter.
But character matters too. Posture matters too. The manner in which a person treats opponents matters too.
Because democracy requires more than procedures. It requires moral imagination.
It requires enough self-command to say, I think you are wrong, maybe badly wrong, and I still refuse to talk about you as if you are subhuman.
It requires enough humility to remember that every person I am tempted to flatten into a symbol is someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone made in the image of God.
A country cannot stay whole when its people start to experience one another as moral contamination.
And Christians, of all people, should understand the danger here.
Some things do need to be opposed. Some lies do need to be named. Some abuses of power do need to be confronted.
But opposition is not the same thing as contempt.
That line matters.
The Way Back to Each Other
I do not want a politics with no convictions.
I want a politics where conviction has not been severed from conscience.
I want a country where we can still tell the truth about one another without reaching so quickly for disgust.
I do not want to hand my heart over to a politics that leaves me less able to love the people God placed around me.
Maybe the first repair is smaller than we think.
Spend less time arguing with strangers whose faces you will never see. Spend more time with actual human beings whose stories complicate your categories. Sit at a table. Ask one more question before making one more accusation. Go to the cookout. Stay after church.
Maybe the first step is as small as choosing one embodied conversation this week over one more performative argument online.
It is harder to hate someone you have broken bread with.
Some of the most hopeful moments I’ve seen in this country have come when two people who were clearly never going to vote the same way still laughed at the same joke, helped each other move a couch, or stood side by side watching their kids play.
There is still something beautiful about a country where people who would never choose each other can still learn to share a place, a meal, a school, a pew, a town.
And maybe that is where healing begins.
Not in pretending our differences are small.
But in refusing to let those differences become an excuse for forgetting each other’s humanity.
Because once citizens become enemies, everybody loses.
And once neighbors become neighbors again, even a little, something holy has a chance to grow.