Thank you so very much for sharing your story! I haven't shared much of mine yet, but here goes:
It boils down to while I was in the ministry I became someone at odds with himself. I wanted to serve God. I wanted to minister. But the increasing social injustices that I was being witness to just in my little community of Gwinn, Michigan had begun to tear down my wall (to steal your term). Racial profiling, people in the LGBTQ+ communities having their houses egged and otherwise vandalized. Things that never made it to the news up here. I was being asked questions I couldn't answer.
Here I am, a Pastor with the charge of planting a church, and I can't answer questions like "Why would God let this happen?" So I began to research. I began to dig. I hadn't yet heard the term "deconstruction" but that's what was happening. My course over corrected though, unlike yours. I sought solace in Atheism, in Wicca. But something never felt right to me. I continued to be at odds with myself. I continued to have more questions than answers. My marriage collapsed (another story entirely though not completely unconnected to this) and I found myself homeless for a short period before a friend brought me into her house and the rebuilding of my life began.
The past five years have been a continual growing experience for me. I know the arguments against God very well now. I don't disagree with all of them. But I discovered a term that was the first peg in a new life at that point: non-overlapping majesterium. Stephen J Gould, an atheist, coined this term in regards to faith and science.
Could faith and science be this non-overlapping majesterium? Could faith have a place in a life? More pegs began to connect boards. The ground floor of my life post-deconstruction was coming into place.
I read up on Universalism and Pantheism, and found I really couldn't argue with that. And then the second story started to be built............I discovered Kevin and many others who were talking the same way I was believing! GOD WAS LOVE AFTER ALL and GOD WOULD TAKE ME BACK.
It's been an interesting journey and one that I love having been through, because as the house of faith that is within me has been rebuilt, room by room, floor by floor (and yes it has a full basement); I have now returned to at least a small bit of the ministry, and now I do have some answers. I won't ever have ALL the answers and I'm okay with saying "I don't know, let me talk with some peers and see if I can't find an answer for you," or saying plainly "I don't know."
Thank you Kevin, for all you've done in my life in the past short time period. God's been working on me throughout the wilderness of over 10 years, and I can see that now!
I'm not in the clergy, but my story is similar. Lifelong Republican since voting for Reagan in 1980. I, too, voted for Trump in 2016. When he first became president I blew off most of his ridiculous comments and policies thinking that he couldn't be serious. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was how he acted when John McCain died. From that moment I vowed to take action. I had never been active in politics, nor really paid that much attention. In the time leading up to the 2020 election, I joined other Republicans against Donald Trump as we raised our voices against him.
Donald Trump is evil personified. Perhaps the Lord is using him as a tool to help Christians see the light. We can all agree that Donald Trump is a TOOL!
Observing the evangelical movement during the Trump era has caused a crisis in faith for me. I no longer recognize the religious movement I was born into. I look at it now with pity, disgust, and shame. Christianity and Trumpism are antithetical and yet they’ve blurred into one for most parishioners. I want no part of mega churches, religion tinted Trump rallies, and thinly veiled racism. I’m out. Christ doesn’t live there.
I've shared with you already that there are similarities in our journeys even though they happened a decade apart.
I regret every minute of being in the conservative movement. Every minute was a debasement of my soul and the debasement of the souls around me as my beliefs became behaviors that shamed and excluded and shouted down people who were the Beloved of Christ.
I can claim I was lied to—and I was, often—but I can say that I also felt uneasy the entire time that what I was belonging to was destructive. It was a belief system founded on lies by men of ill intention, and distilled and fed to people as a movement that was only about purity and holiness and righteousness.
I can remember the various times that something came across my view that disturbed me, but I generally shrugged it off. The very long paper about the foundations of my own church denomination as made by men who owned humans as property because saw that situation fit for the salvation of the enslaved? Well, perhaps they might have been a little off, but they were men of great faith. The denial of the cries for relief from the oppressed in America today, oppressed because of skin color or gender or sexual orientation? If they would just act like white straight males do, they'd be far better off—we're a land of opportunity for white straight males, so obviously everyone else can come along with us.
The in-your-face rejection of people who told me/asked me directly to listen to them was about maintaining a righteous understanding of America and its founding principles. It was white Republicans who fought to end enslavement; it was Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Voting Rights Act of 1966; it was the Republicans who fought against Democrats in 1860 which proves that Republicans fighting against Democrats in the 2000s was exactly the same even though the parties had literally switched sides on civil governance and social & caste values.
It took a brave man to tell me to my face that I, as a white man, was refusing to see him as a Black man. And I was shocked to be confronted, shocked to consider that perhaps I was ignorant, shocked to consider that I had been avoiding what was plainly in front of me.
I went home and wept for my cruelty and indifference and rejection, and for all the decades I had wasted in being "conservative" when what I was was going along with the most selfish, cynical, and white supremacist people who lied from morning 'til night about the rightness of their beliefs.
Maybe in all those years of "not listening" I was listening. Maybe my younger self that was soft and tender had been waiting all along to come out to remind me of who I wanted to be.
I don't know.
I credit God with bringing me repentance. I have attempted to do right by what I have done wrong, making amends as I find opportunity, seeking forgiveness and relationship where I had denied love and acceptance, offering restoration and even reparations to those who have been harmed by the actions of me or of people like me.
Did it take 8 minutes? Maybe. Maybe it was 8 seconds. Maybe it took 45 years. But whatever the cause, I am pushed into change, and it is nothing but good that it happened.
Would that I could go back and undo all the cruel acts I committed, but the past is written in stone. All I can do is to write a better story starting now.
Thank you. Your story brought back emotions that I thought were long passed since my “switch flipped” almost 15 years ago.
I was a conservative Republican from before I could vote in 1976 working for the Ford campaign. My “switch flipped” about four months after I returned from Iraq in 2008. I was dealing with PTSD and what is now known as Moral Injury as a Navy Chaplain and saw all the lies about the war. Then one day I was going from my office at Ft Story to our headquarters at Little Creek while listening to Rush Limbaugh as I had done for years. He was in the middle of a very racist screed about Barack Obama when I began sobbing. I had to pull over to the side of the road crying uncontrollably. At that point it all came crashing down. Obama was the first Democratic I had ever voted for President.
In the years that followed I was ostracized and ghosted by most of my conservative clergy friends in my denomination and in the Chaplain Corps. I was also kicked out of my denomination in the summer of 2010 for being “too liberal.”
It was the Iraq invasion - "shock and awe," built on lies - that did it for me. And I have been more and more horrified over the years as the fruit of the deranged marriage between "conservative Christianity" and "conservative politics" has grown up into, of all things, lawless Trumpism. We have not yet swallowed all the poison, but the deadliest is coming. Predictably, we are reaching the point where "Christian" is considered a word for ignorance and hatred. How that must grieve our savior. I wish you would write more about how Trump's love of vengeance, hatred abd violence ever could have seemed "Christian" to you. People need to hear it.
I grew up in a very similar conservative background, but never really identified as a Republican, sympathizing more with Libertarian political philosophies. When elections came around I researched as many candidates on my ballot as I could and would often vote third party, but whenever there were only two candidates to vote for I'd always break red.
I also voted for Trump in 2016. I was told over and over again that it was the right thing to do; that it was the only thing a Christian could do because we couldn't let Hillary become President. That as brash and antithetical Donald Trump was to everything I stood for and believed, choosing a devout Christian conservative like Mike Pence as his running mate would surely temper Trump's worst instincts and behavior and Pence would keep him in check.
Throughout his presidency I thought Trump was just as ridiculous as the day he announced his candidacy and the day I walked into the voting booth and held my nose to vote for him. As scandals continued to pile up around him and stories about some of the stupid and often cruel things he'd say in private leaked, I didn't give much credence to them because I believed American politics were just about as stupid, but at least he was passing and standing up for good conservative, Christian policies.
My "scales" moment ironically happened in a moment of deep faith: I felt the call to mission work and was led to Sierra Leone, where I served from the time I graduated college until a few months into the COVID pandemic.
My arrival in Sierra Leone was deeply impactful for me. For the first time in my life, I was in the racial minority. I was in the religious minority. Walking down the streets, children would wave to me shouting "apoto" - "white man" - and run up to me with the biggest smiles on their faces wanting to walk with me and ask me questions about my life, about my family, and about America.
The hardest thing I wrestled with those first few weeks wasn't adjusting to a new time zone or a new culture or even being unable to walk down the street without being noticed. Many of the children I spoke with shared dreams of leaving their country someday to go to America and make some money that they wanted to use to help their family. Everytime they shared their dreams of going to America or asked me questions about my home I was left with this knot in my stomach, this uncomfortable feeling that I didn't know where it came from or why it was there.
One day one of my kids asked me "Who is the President of America?" and that feeling hit me harder than it ever had before. I was deeply embarrassed, ashamed, and I didn't want to tell him that Donald Trump is the leader of my country. But I did, and he moved on to his next question, and I was finally able to understand what exactly I was feeling and I was better able to reflect upon why I felt that way afterwards.
I realized what came to mind was reporting that went in and out of my ear, successfully deflected by my wall when it first came out: Donald Trump's comments about people being from s**thole countries. When that was first reported my initial reaction was "eh, sounds like him, but what does it matter." When it came up in my reflection, I was overwhelmed and started crying.
Here I was in one of the poorest countries on the planet, who's people were so kind, loving, and welcoming to a total stranger who looked and talked nothing like them, and I knew what my president thought of them and of their country. That if any of the kids I'd met made it to America one day, they would not be met with the welcome and care I received in their country. That looking and talking different in America wouldn't be met with the love and openness I received from them.
A very moving and (for me) illuminating statement. I would not describe what you used to be as conservative. I think the proper term for that is reactionary, which is what I think the modern GOP has become. Also, people seem to forget that, before the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s caused a lot of racist Democrats to become Republicans, the GOP used to have a contingent of political liberals and the Democratic Party used to have a fair contingent of conservatives and even reactionaries (especially the Dixiecrats). Also, people today seem to forget that Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive (even if at the same time he was also an imperialist and war monger).
It's amazing how much of your story aligns with mine.
I also grew up very conservative. It was "christian's" responses to kolin kapernick and George Floyd that really started to wake me up. As well as a fantastic relationship with a very liberal christian (once he was a friend, the liberals weren't the boogey man any longer).
We're not so different, really. I was a few years ahead of you in timing, mainly because my denomination isn't/wasn't really "fundamentalist". I hadn't had cable TV for years by 2016, and I already didn't like Trump at all - I thought he was the "novelty" candidate. Also I was beginning to hear, beginning to see by then, largely because Eric Garner and Ferguson hit me hard in 2014. I didn't vote straight ticket in 2016, but I didn't vote for Trump because I couldn't I've voted straight ticket ever since, though I check that impulse each time. I'm not really a Democrat; I call myself a "recovering Republican", and like you I'm really just a Christian who decided to follow Christ rather than the state religion that carries his name. And yes, my LGBTQ+ friends and loved ones forced me to think hard about some things and come to very similar conclusions as you have.
God bless you for the way you share His love and for your transparent confession here.
There are many who share your experience, albeit it in different ways, of turning away from engaging in politics of oppression to engaging in the apolitical cultivation of Christlike character. Since I am tribeless now, too, I like to think that someday we’ll find out as the ancient prophet did that there are many who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Perhaps as soon as 2024? May God have mercy on our nation.
Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this! I've been on a bit of a different journey...growing up in a more liberal household, I embraced conservativism and evangelism in my late teens/early 20's. Honestly, looking back, I think my type A personality liked the "certainty" that both movements offered. Things started coming undone for me during the 2016 election cycle. I had abstained from voting for certain Republicans in the past, so I did not have any qualms about not pulling the lever for Trump. In the end I voted third party. By 2020 many of the issues that you mentioned (covid, the racial reckoning, etc.) also led me to vote for a Democrat for the first time. I have since taken a lot more time and care when deciding who to vote for, at every level of government. I have voted for some Republicans, some Democrats and even abstained from voting in a few cases since then. I now consider myself to be a right-leaning moderate. I often feel politically homeless, but it helps to know I'm not the only one!
I’m pleased to see that cracks are finally appearing in the wall of bigotry and hate erected by decidedly NON-Christian evangelicals who twist and ignore what the NT actually says. But it sure is going to be a long road for a lot of those hypocritical Pharisees.
With a similar story, I often refer to myself as "a recovering Republican". Everyone finds it funny, except Republicans.
Thank you so very much for sharing your story! I haven't shared much of mine yet, but here goes:
It boils down to while I was in the ministry I became someone at odds with himself. I wanted to serve God. I wanted to minister. But the increasing social injustices that I was being witness to just in my little community of Gwinn, Michigan had begun to tear down my wall (to steal your term). Racial profiling, people in the LGBTQ+ communities having their houses egged and otherwise vandalized. Things that never made it to the news up here. I was being asked questions I couldn't answer.
Here I am, a Pastor with the charge of planting a church, and I can't answer questions like "Why would God let this happen?" So I began to research. I began to dig. I hadn't yet heard the term "deconstruction" but that's what was happening. My course over corrected though, unlike yours. I sought solace in Atheism, in Wicca. But something never felt right to me. I continued to be at odds with myself. I continued to have more questions than answers. My marriage collapsed (another story entirely though not completely unconnected to this) and I found myself homeless for a short period before a friend brought me into her house and the rebuilding of my life began.
The past five years have been a continual growing experience for me. I know the arguments against God very well now. I don't disagree with all of them. But I discovered a term that was the first peg in a new life at that point: non-overlapping majesterium. Stephen J Gould, an atheist, coined this term in regards to faith and science.
Could faith and science be this non-overlapping majesterium? Could faith have a place in a life? More pegs began to connect boards. The ground floor of my life post-deconstruction was coming into place.
I read up on Universalism and Pantheism, and found I really couldn't argue with that. And then the second story started to be built............I discovered Kevin and many others who were talking the same way I was believing! GOD WAS LOVE AFTER ALL and GOD WOULD TAKE ME BACK.
It's been an interesting journey and one that I love having been through, because as the house of faith that is within me has been rebuilt, room by room, floor by floor (and yes it has a full basement); I have now returned to at least a small bit of the ministry, and now I do have some answers. I won't ever have ALL the answers and I'm okay with saying "I don't know, let me talk with some peers and see if I can't find an answer for you," or saying plainly "I don't know."
Thank you Kevin, for all you've done in my life in the past short time period. God's been working on me throughout the wilderness of over 10 years, and I can see that now!
Peace in Jesus!
--Rev M. R. Oakley
"Reverend Ruin"
I'm not in the clergy, but my story is similar. Lifelong Republican since voting for Reagan in 1980. I, too, voted for Trump in 2016. When he first became president I blew off most of his ridiculous comments and policies thinking that he couldn't be serious. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was how he acted when John McCain died. From that moment I vowed to take action. I had never been active in politics, nor really paid that much attention. In the time leading up to the 2020 election, I joined other Republicans against Donald Trump as we raised our voices against him.
Donald Trump is evil personified. Perhaps the Lord is using him as a tool to help Christians see the light. We can all agree that Donald Trump is a TOOL!
Observing the evangelical movement during the Trump era has caused a crisis in faith for me. I no longer recognize the religious movement I was born into. I look at it now with pity, disgust, and shame. Christianity and Trumpism are antithetical and yet they’ve blurred into one for most parishioners. I want no part of mega churches, religion tinted Trump rallies, and thinly veiled racism. I’m out. Christ doesn’t live there.
I've shared with you already that there are similarities in our journeys even though they happened a decade apart.
I regret every minute of being in the conservative movement. Every minute was a debasement of my soul and the debasement of the souls around me as my beliefs became behaviors that shamed and excluded and shouted down people who were the Beloved of Christ.
I can claim I was lied to—and I was, often—but I can say that I also felt uneasy the entire time that what I was belonging to was destructive. It was a belief system founded on lies by men of ill intention, and distilled and fed to people as a movement that was only about purity and holiness and righteousness.
I can remember the various times that something came across my view that disturbed me, but I generally shrugged it off. The very long paper about the foundations of my own church denomination as made by men who owned humans as property because saw that situation fit for the salvation of the enslaved? Well, perhaps they might have been a little off, but they were men of great faith. The denial of the cries for relief from the oppressed in America today, oppressed because of skin color or gender or sexual orientation? If they would just act like white straight males do, they'd be far better off—we're a land of opportunity for white straight males, so obviously everyone else can come along with us.
The in-your-face rejection of people who told me/asked me directly to listen to them was about maintaining a righteous understanding of America and its founding principles. It was white Republicans who fought to end enslavement; it was Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and Voting Rights Act of 1966; it was the Republicans who fought against Democrats in 1860 which proves that Republicans fighting against Democrats in the 2000s was exactly the same even though the parties had literally switched sides on civil governance and social & caste values.
It took a brave man to tell me to my face that I, as a white man, was refusing to see him as a Black man. And I was shocked to be confronted, shocked to consider that perhaps I was ignorant, shocked to consider that I had been avoiding what was plainly in front of me.
I went home and wept for my cruelty and indifference and rejection, and for all the decades I had wasted in being "conservative" when what I was was going along with the most selfish, cynical, and white supremacist people who lied from morning 'til night about the rightness of their beliefs.
Maybe in all those years of "not listening" I was listening. Maybe my younger self that was soft and tender had been waiting all along to come out to remind me of who I wanted to be.
I don't know.
I credit God with bringing me repentance. I have attempted to do right by what I have done wrong, making amends as I find opportunity, seeking forgiveness and relationship where I had denied love and acceptance, offering restoration and even reparations to those who have been harmed by the actions of me or of people like me.
Did it take 8 minutes? Maybe. Maybe it was 8 seconds. Maybe it took 45 years. But whatever the cause, I am pushed into change, and it is nothing but good that it happened.
Would that I could go back and undo all the cruel acts I committed, but the past is written in stone. All I can do is to write a better story starting now.
Kevin,
Thank you. Your story brought back emotions that I thought were long passed since my “switch flipped” almost 15 years ago.
I was a conservative Republican from before I could vote in 1976 working for the Ford campaign. My “switch flipped” about four months after I returned from Iraq in 2008. I was dealing with PTSD and what is now known as Moral Injury as a Navy Chaplain and saw all the lies about the war. Then one day I was going from my office at Ft Story to our headquarters at Little Creek while listening to Rush Limbaugh as I had done for years. He was in the middle of a very racist screed about Barack Obama when I began sobbing. I had to pull over to the side of the road crying uncontrollably. At that point it all came crashing down. Obama was the first Democratic I had ever voted for President.
In the years that followed I was ostracized and ghosted by most of my conservative clergy friends in my denomination and in the Chaplain Corps. I was also kicked out of my denomination in the summer of 2010 for being “too liberal.”
Again, thank you for your honesty, and openness.
All the best.
Steve Dundas
It was the Iraq invasion - "shock and awe," built on lies - that did it for me. And I have been more and more horrified over the years as the fruit of the deranged marriage between "conservative Christianity" and "conservative politics" has grown up into, of all things, lawless Trumpism. We have not yet swallowed all the poison, but the deadliest is coming. Predictably, we are reaching the point where "Christian" is considered a word for ignorance and hatred. How that must grieve our savior. I wish you would write more about how Trump's love of vengeance, hatred abd violence ever could have seemed "Christian" to you. People need to hear it.
I grew up in a very similar conservative background, but never really identified as a Republican, sympathizing more with Libertarian political philosophies. When elections came around I researched as many candidates on my ballot as I could and would often vote third party, but whenever there were only two candidates to vote for I'd always break red.
I also voted for Trump in 2016. I was told over and over again that it was the right thing to do; that it was the only thing a Christian could do because we couldn't let Hillary become President. That as brash and antithetical Donald Trump was to everything I stood for and believed, choosing a devout Christian conservative like Mike Pence as his running mate would surely temper Trump's worst instincts and behavior and Pence would keep him in check.
Throughout his presidency I thought Trump was just as ridiculous as the day he announced his candidacy and the day I walked into the voting booth and held my nose to vote for him. As scandals continued to pile up around him and stories about some of the stupid and often cruel things he'd say in private leaked, I didn't give much credence to them because I believed American politics were just about as stupid, but at least he was passing and standing up for good conservative, Christian policies.
My "scales" moment ironically happened in a moment of deep faith: I felt the call to mission work and was led to Sierra Leone, where I served from the time I graduated college until a few months into the COVID pandemic.
My arrival in Sierra Leone was deeply impactful for me. For the first time in my life, I was in the racial minority. I was in the religious minority. Walking down the streets, children would wave to me shouting "apoto" - "white man" - and run up to me with the biggest smiles on their faces wanting to walk with me and ask me questions about my life, about my family, and about America.
The hardest thing I wrestled with those first few weeks wasn't adjusting to a new time zone or a new culture or even being unable to walk down the street without being noticed. Many of the children I spoke with shared dreams of leaving their country someday to go to America and make some money that they wanted to use to help their family. Everytime they shared their dreams of going to America or asked me questions about my home I was left with this knot in my stomach, this uncomfortable feeling that I didn't know where it came from or why it was there.
One day one of my kids asked me "Who is the President of America?" and that feeling hit me harder than it ever had before. I was deeply embarrassed, ashamed, and I didn't want to tell him that Donald Trump is the leader of my country. But I did, and he moved on to his next question, and I was finally able to understand what exactly I was feeling and I was better able to reflect upon why I felt that way afterwards.
I realized what came to mind was reporting that went in and out of my ear, successfully deflected by my wall when it first came out: Donald Trump's comments about people being from s**thole countries. When that was first reported my initial reaction was "eh, sounds like him, but what does it matter." When it came up in my reflection, I was overwhelmed and started crying.
Here I was in one of the poorest countries on the planet, who's people were so kind, loving, and welcoming to a total stranger who looked and talked nothing like them, and I knew what my president thought of them and of their country. That if any of the kids I'd met made it to America one day, they would not be met with the welcome and care I received in their country. That looking and talking different in America wouldn't be met with the love and openness I received from them.
I sat there with my wall and I cried.
Thanks for sharing Kevin as I share the same journey. Its therapeutic for me to read your story and know that I am not crazy.
A very moving and (for me) illuminating statement. I would not describe what you used to be as conservative. I think the proper term for that is reactionary, which is what I think the modern GOP has become. Also, people seem to forget that, before the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s caused a lot of racist Democrats to become Republicans, the GOP used to have a contingent of political liberals and the Democratic Party used to have a fair contingent of conservatives and even reactionaries (especially the Dixiecrats). Also, people today seem to forget that Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive (even if at the same time he was also an imperialist and war monger).
It's amazing how much of your story aligns with mine.
I also grew up very conservative. It was "christian's" responses to kolin kapernick and George Floyd that really started to wake me up. As well as a fantastic relationship with a very liberal christian (once he was a friend, the liberals weren't the boogey man any longer).
Thanks for sharing.
We're not so different, really. I was a few years ahead of you in timing, mainly because my denomination isn't/wasn't really "fundamentalist". I hadn't had cable TV for years by 2016, and I already didn't like Trump at all - I thought he was the "novelty" candidate. Also I was beginning to hear, beginning to see by then, largely because Eric Garner and Ferguson hit me hard in 2014. I didn't vote straight ticket in 2016, but I didn't vote for Trump because I couldn't I've voted straight ticket ever since, though I check that impulse each time. I'm not really a Democrat; I call myself a "recovering Republican", and like you I'm really just a Christian who decided to follow Christ rather than the state religion that carries his name. And yes, my LGBTQ+ friends and loved ones forced me to think hard about some things and come to very similar conclusions as you have.
God bless you for the way you share His love and for your transparent confession here.
There are many who share your experience, albeit it in different ways, of turning away from engaging in politics of oppression to engaging in the apolitical cultivation of Christlike character. Since I am tribeless now, too, I like to think that someday we’ll find out as the ancient prophet did that there are many who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Perhaps as soon as 2024? May God have mercy on our nation.
I am from Newtown, CT. My brother was a very strict conservative up until Dec 15th, 2012, 24 hours after the shooting.
Since then I have quoted Bob Dylan...
How many deaths does it take till he knows that too many people have died?
For my brother it was 26
For you it was 1
Welcome to the dark side. We have awesome cookies. 😉
Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this! I've been on a bit of a different journey...growing up in a more liberal household, I embraced conservativism and evangelism in my late teens/early 20's. Honestly, looking back, I think my type A personality liked the "certainty" that both movements offered. Things started coming undone for me during the 2016 election cycle. I had abstained from voting for certain Republicans in the past, so I did not have any qualms about not pulling the lever for Trump. In the end I voted third party. By 2020 many of the issues that you mentioned (covid, the racial reckoning, etc.) also led me to vote for a Democrat for the first time. I have since taken a lot more time and care when deciding who to vote for, at every level of government. I have voted for some Republicans, some Democrats and even abstained from voting in a few cases since then. I now consider myself to be a right-leaning moderate. I often feel politically homeless, but it helps to know I'm not the only one!
I’m pleased to see that cracks are finally appearing in the wall of bigotry and hate erected by decidedly NON-Christian evangelicals who twist and ignore what the NT actually says. But it sure is going to be a long road for a lot of those hypocritical Pharisees.