A Different Kingdom

A July Fourth Reflection

This post is a bit of a departure from what I’ve been writing recently, but I couldn’t let the Fourth of July pass without saying it. This post sits underneath much of what I’ve wrestled with these past several months. It has shaped how I think about the Church, where it’s headed, and why so much of what has happened over the past decade feels spiritually significant to me—not just politically significant. I don’t expect everyone to see it the way I do. I only hope that by the end, you might better understand why someone like me experienced these years so differently.

Language can hide what someone truly thinks. It can obscure the fact that we don’t actually agree, even when we sound like we do. You say love and I say love, and we have never compared definitions. You say Kingdom of God and I say Kingdom of God, and we build churches, write songs, raise children, and dedicate our lives to it—only to discover years later that we may have been imagining very different kingdoms all along.

Today is the Fourth of July. Two hundred and fifty years of this country. This year it feels heavier.

---

Photo by Anthony Shane on Unsplash

For many people I know, November 2024 joined a short list of dates that live physically in their minds—what psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik called a flashbulb memory. The kind where someone asks you years later where you were, and you remember the smell of the coffee, the light in the room, the feeling in your chest. For people like me, November 2016 and November 2024 carry disorientation. Moments where life divided into a before and an after. And yet many of the people I love experienced those same days as little more than a normal Wednesday—perhaps with relief that the election ads had finally ended.

I wasn’t prepared the day after this most recent presidential election. I was prepared to lose but I wasn’t prepared for what that day brought. I walked into work (a church) and into conversations with people I loved, and realized that something enormous had happened inside me while almost nothing seemed to have happened inside them.

That’s why I’m writing this post.

Not to rail. Not to condemn. If this were a conversation, I’d want to hear your story too—what led you to vote the way you did, what hopes or fears shaped that decision. Substack doesn’t really allow for that. So all I can do is tell you what it felt like from inside mine.

I’ve been shaped by the people closest to me, by the books I’ve read, the podcasts I’ve listened to, and yes, by algorithms that know exactly how to keep my attention. I’m not writing from neutral ground. I know that. But I also can’t honestly tell my story by pretending everything I’ve experienced feels symmetrical. From where I’ve stood—from the churches I’ve loved, the communities I’ve belonged to, and the people I’ve trusted—I watched something change. Maybe you experienced the same years very differently. I’m only trying to explain why I can’t tell the story that way.

Rev. Raphael Warnock has said, “a vote is a kind of prayer for the world you wish to see.” Whether or not that framing captures everything, it captures how voting feels to me. My vote wasn’t simply about policy. It was an expression of the kind of world I wanted to help build.

I know many faithful Christians prayed just as sincerely before casting a different vote. I’m not questioning whether they prayed. I’m trying to explain why discovering that we were praying for such different visions of the future left me feeling like we had begun speaking different languages entirely.

“I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.” - Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock

Political choices are rarely clean. None of us gets everything we want. Our two-party system forces compromises that frustrate nearly everyone. A vote doesn’t mean you endorse every word a candidate has ever spoken or every decision they will ever make. I know that. But it does say something about what we were willing to accept in pursuit of the future we hoped to create.

What I will say is this. Something has been creeping in—not just out there, but in places I know well. Something like secondhand smoke. Not loud. Not always obvious. Just present. A residue. You don’t always notice it until you realize the air has changed.

I have watched people I genuinely love begin describing those on “the other side” as enemies of America, enemies of the Church, or enemies of God’s purposes. Some of those people taught me. Some prayed over me. Some shaped my faith. I don’t doubt their sincerity. But I also can’t ignore what it feels like to realize that, without either of us changing rooms, I slowly became one of the people they were warning others about. That realization has changed me and changed many of the people who agree with my vision of the future.

I no longer know how to comfortably worship in a church where I believe most people hold conservative political convictions. That sentence grieves me to write.¹ The reason isn’t that I think those churches are filled with bad people—I don’t. Many are filled with people I deeply love. This is not a condemnation. It’s a confession of loss. Because I know that I couldn’t invite my closest friends to my church. I don’t know that they would feel comfortable enough to exhale. And if I’m honest, I know that I wouldn’t feel comfortable either.

---

Suppose I ran for Congress. Suppose everyone already knew exactly what I believed before I ever walked into a church—my politics, my views on LGBTQ+ inclusion, everything I’ve written. Would I be welcomed? I don’t mean greeted. Churches are usually very good at greeting people. I mean welcomed. Would people hope I came back next Sunday? Would they celebrate my family becoming part of theirs? I’m sure you would welcome me. But what about the person sitting to our left during the sermon? Would that family be okay with mine? Would I quietly become someone’s concern—someone to pray about, someone whose presence made the room just a little more uncomfortable.

Let me flip that question around: What would you do if you knew you were the one making the room uncomfortable?

That is the experience of being my authentic self in most churches. And it’s even more true for my friends who don’t carry what I do—years of knowing, really knowing, that people in those rooms have loved me. They don’t have that cushion. They already know how the room feels before they sit down.

I grew up believing the Church was the safest place to tell the truth about who you are. Somewhere along the way, I stopped experiencing that. Not because everyone changed overnight. But because, over time, the political culture, the media culture, the online culture—somehow that became the driving culture of the church. A secondhand smoke of a different world has settled into so many hearts inside the church that it is slowly dividing who either of us can fully be inside these communities.

It’s not that we voted differently. Its not even that we disagree. It’s that I know the communities that once felt like home to me, would no longer recognize me as family.

1. Even as a political liberal, I grieve this. The country and the church needs both—a left that tears down barriers that never should have existed, and a right that holds the lines that never should be crossed.