I Voted For Trump

And other confessions that led to the collapse of my Conservatism

Kevin Young, Easter Sunday 2016, the year I voted for Donald Trump

My journey from fundamentalism wasn’t a long drawn out process. It was like flipping a switch. One moment I was a conservative Republican, and then 8 minutes and 46 seconds later, I was something else…

It took a long time for the dust to settle and for me to see, though.

In many ways, I am still trying to understand who I am.

And while I may not be able to quantify what I currently am, I can assure you that I wasn’t trying to collapse my idealogical walls.

I swear.

Far from it.

I wasn’t looking to destroy the Conservatism that had surrounded my life since birth. I wasn’t looking to blow up the very thing that brought comfort, protection, and insulation from the outer chaos of the world.

Conservative fundamentalism does that. It’s offers safety. It promises to bring law and order to chaos and messy things.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I was raised Republican, indoctrinated into the Grand Ol’ Party from a young age, and baptized into the waters of latent McCarthyism. I sipped at the fountain of Pro-Life Rallies and Reaganomics.

One of my earliest memories was joining my grandfather in a voting booth so he could teach me how to vote “straight ticket.” It was a decade before I would be of legal voting age, but he wanted to be sure I was ready.

Red, of course.

Was there any other color?

I bled red.

We bled red.

Why?

Well, because God bled red …or so I was told.

And I bought it.

Why wouldn’t I?

Every influential voice in my life reinforced the narrative that conservative Republicans were the party of God, doing his work in this world. With one voice, pastors, parents, grandparents, and fellow parishioners regularly reminded me that a Christian could only vote for one party and be a follower of Christ. No exceptions.

Thus the wall was built—one row at a time—as each person I respected and trusted laid their brick upon the mortar of my impressionable mind.

“Democrats are evil.” … another brick laid.

“Christians are Republican.” … another brick laid.

“Jesus was Conservative.” … another brick.

Every sermon.

Every Bible study.

Every conversation inside the Christian bubble.

Bible College. Seminary. The Pastorate. Row after row of bricks.

Year after year.

Decade after decade.

One Less Brick In The Wall

More then three decades of work building the wall had resulted in my being a Pastor who moved freely in conservative Evangelical circles. I was old enough to be considered mature and seasoned, but also, young enough to still have the energy to be a revolutionary.

I was climbing the ladder.

I pastored one of the Fastest-Growing Churches in America™️. It was dying when I began, and it began to die again when I left. I pastored a second church which, like the first, was borderline megachurch.

I was living the dream of every Evangelical Pastor

From a distance, my Conservatism seemed stalwart and strong, but up close a few bricks were missing here and there.

For instance, I had met enough Democrats over the years to know that they were not evil. At least, not all of them. I had made some amazing liberal friends… though I did not know they were liberal when I had met them, or else I probably wouldn’t have let them into my heart

Each of those people had removed a brick from my wall, allowing a bit of light to shine through here and there.

Another example: My favorite boss in the Church Media department I served in during Seminary had been a closet liberal, but I had seen how his convictions translated into a deep love for me and others in his life. There was a sizable hole in my wall, thanks to him.

I had never known a conservative to love like this, and it rattled me.

By 2016, I had also done considerable damage to the wall myself while trying to prove the unaffirming stance of my youth. I had spent the better part of a decade trying to concretely prove that LGBTQ+ individuals were living in sin and against God, but my years of work in the original languages, ancient culture, and deep study had only served to weaken my stance… and in turn, weaken my wall.

Most of what I had been told and taught about God and the LGBTQ+ community was false, if not outright deception.

I didn’t know how to deal with that, so I avoided that area of the wall as best I could.

Enter Donald Trump

I saw Donald as the savior of my conservatism.

As such, I was on the Trump bandwagon before he was ever an official candidate. I had been a fan of The Apprentice, and I appreciated his no-nonsense style. I got caught up in his political-outsider tone, his style of rhetoric, and ashamedly, the barely-veiled hate and toxicity he wielded.

In retrospect, I can see that Trump stroked the same strings on the guitar played by my childhood fundamentalist icons. He tapped into the same rhetoric, fears, and bigotry that was embedded in the bedrock of my foundation.

Trump’s voice resonated in the depths of my dark soul.

… it resonated in places that I thought were redeemed and controlled by Christ, but I was wrong. There was no Christ in those caverns. I had walled them off from Him.

Trump masterfully stoked and rekindled the fires of my conservatism, … not my Christianity, but my Conservatism.

I simply could not tell the difference between the two …yet.

So I supported Trump blindly, without question, because I needed to.

I needed him.

He was the only thing that stood in between me and the collapse of my wall.

Too many bricks had been removed from it over the years, and I simply wasn’t ready to deal with the ramifications of its collapse.

So to be clear: In the 2016 Presidential Election, I cast my vote for Donald J. Trump in both the Primary and General Election.

Proudly.

I did my best to support and defend Trump in the years that followed, but my conservatism was increasingly at odds with how Jesus treated marginalized communities… and it was increasingly at odds with Trump’s bombastic behavior.

Compassionate Conservatism was out, having been replaced by a more caustic brand of conservatism within the Republican Party.

As COVID took hold in 2020, I didn’t recognize my Christian and Conservative brother and sisters. Their callous response to the health of others shocked me. All told, I lost 19 people to COVID. All of them would be alive had Conservatives and Christians practiced “Love Thy Neighbor.”

Though I could not see it at the time, the wall that had taken a lifetime to erect was dangerously close to collapse.

The Brick That Toppled The Wall

It took 8 minutes and 46 seconds for my wall to be reduced to rubble.

The exact length of time that a white police officer’s knee was on George Floyd’s neck.

08:46

One man, Officer Derik Chauvin, pulled a brick and the wall came down.

Even now, that moment reduces me to tears.

“I can’t breathe.”

The wall that had taken 43 years to build took 8 minutes and 46 seconds to come crashing down.

The life that I once knew was gone in a moment.

It was as if everything that I had believed, known, and professed clicked like a gear into a different setting and then fell back into place.

Everything shifted.

I was in a new place. I had a new way of seeing. I was a new person who I did not recognize.

The old life passed away; all things became new.

George Floyd’s story wrecked me, and it wrecked my belief system.

I have never watched something so egregious, so inhumane, so sinful in real time. I recognize now that this is because my blinders were on. I had built my wall so high as to be unable to see the world on the other side of it. My wall wasn’t protecting me, it was hiding me… insulating me… preventing me from seeing the reality of the oppressed and the marginalized.

And I am convinced that Jesus—as he always was in the Bible—was on the other side of the wall, with the hurting, not with me.

My wall had been so high as to have prevented me from seeing the effects that my decisions, my votes, and my thinking had on the very people that Jesus loved most.

In the aftermath, I took to Facebook and made a post about George Floyd that now seems quite saccharin, but at the time it was radical for me.

A few days later I pulled together some of my Black friends and asked them to dialogue with me. It resulted in this live conversation. That talk was a gut punch to me. I knew these people, but I had never heard their stories. I couldn’t believe what they were telling me about racism and fear.

Why hadn’t they told me before about their oppression?

The answer was obvious. I wasn’t safe space… nor would I have listened anyway. My conservative constructs had me believing I was right

It was gut punch after gut punch.

And like a flood, the wall that had been a dam against the greater reality I had been actively avoiding now crushed me underneath its weight, threatening to drown me.

• Ahmaud Arbery

• Breonna Taylor

• Colin Kaepernick

• The Summer of the Black Lives Matter Protests

As each of these stories, and others, returned to the news cycle, I realized that I had changed. I no longer saw the world through a conservative lens, I was seeing the world through a more Jesus-centric lens.

I was seeing the world in color first the first time, no longer whitewashed.

Beautiful, brilliant living color.

I cried and cried realizing the ignorance in how I had lived and thought and taught. I was ashamed at so much of who I had been.

A Switch Flipped

It wasn’t until I entered the voting booth in November of the Year of George Floyd that I realized how much I had changed… and not just on race. The shifts in my thinking, I soon realized, were tectonic.

I had never before voted for a Democrat. But there I stood, ready to face the world (and my history) as the person I felt Christ compelled me to be,

Joe Biden was the first bubble under a blue candidate I had ever darkened.

It felt like catharsis.

I admit that it felt so freeing that I darkened every single one of those damn blue bubbles and danced my way to the Ballot Return.

I don’t consider myself a Democrat or a Progressive, and I certainly don’t see myself as a Republican or Conservative.

But I suppose that I do lean heavily in one direction.

To be honest, I now feel like a Christ-follower without a tribe. I feel like none of the categories of this world feel like home to me anymore… I’m just passing through. I feel like a foreigner in a strange land.

Do I feel guilt for the effects of my conservatism and for voting for Trump?

No, I don’t.

I have to understand that the old Kevin is gone, and I can’t punch him the face. Like it or not, he was a critical stage of becoming who I am today. I don’t feel the need to right any wrongs or redeem my past, yet I often do so when needful. I’ve let all of that go… which is a great advertisement for good therapy.

I find that the best restitution is to use my voice, platform, and privilege to help others.

And that is what I am really passionate about, at the end of the day: Helping others.

I want to help others pull bricks from the wall. I want to give them the courage to pull down the parts of their walls that are separating them from their present reality. I want others to step over the rubble that remains after the wall falls in order to experience the kind of full-and-overflowing LIFE that Jesus spoke of in John 10:10… no matter how they vote.

So, am I progressive?

I hate labels, but I suppose so.

You should know, though, that I came to this place kicking and screaming.

And it was Jesus who dragged me.

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Yes, I voted for Donald Trump… once.

This is my confession.

And Grandpa—if you can hear this—I still voted straight ticket in the next Presidential Election, just for you. 😉