Part I: A Convert Mulls Christian Values

And the irony of Christians as experts in anti-evangelization.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

Two things happened recently.

First, this week and last, the military occupied a US city, brutalized farm workers, and assaulted and detained, among others, the father of three U.S. Marines.

Second, the reading for Mass this week just happened to be Luke 10:25-37.

For those like me who can’t riff Bible verses off the top of their heads, here’s the relevant passage:

There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test Jesus and said, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

Jesus said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?"

He said in reply, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."

He replied to him, "You have answered correctly; do this and you will live."

I don’t pretend to be a Biblical scholar, but when I think about the simplicity of the Christian faith this pretty much nails it.

Love God with all your heart and soul and love your neighbor as yourself.

These, more than anything else in the Bible, are fundamental cornerstones of Christian faith. I would go so far as to say that you cannot be a Christian unless you believe these two things. They’re not sufficient, of course, but they’re absolutely necessary. And if you overlook these foundational Christian commandments in favor of political or procedural or liturgical or historical or theological details, you’re doing it wrong. Full stop.

Jesus even goes further, just in case some talented sophists like J.D. Vance try to argue that neighbor means “people who are legal citizens” or “people who have the same political beliefs as I do.” To clarify what he means by “neighbor”, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan, a stranger and (crucially) an outsider, who demonstrates mercy when leadership (in this case priests) completely fail.

Jesus isn’t messing around here. He’s not playing tribalistic games. He doesn’t require citizenship or ideological or any other kind of purity test to qualify for mercy.

A neighbor is someone in need. Our duty - as followers of Christ - is to help.

You don’t need to be a Biblical scholar to read this - the clearest and most foundational of Christian texts explaining the Christian faith - to wonder in what possible universe this teaching is compatible with arming masked agents to roam the streets, rounding up unarmed and hardworking fathers and mothers and ripping children from their mothers’ arms.

Any Christian should see all this and realize that Jesus would weep.

I’m not yet seeing that realization among some of my co-religionists and it makes me angry.

Fellow Christians As Barriers to Faith

This anger at my fellow Christians has deeper roots than their contemporary support for open cruelty. Part of my anger at failures like this is that such failures prevent people from finding the Church in the first place. Our failure to bear witness to our faith actually prevents people from finding God. I know it does this because for decades I was one of those people.

I converted to Catholicism in 2019. Despite two decades of hearing God’s call, I resisted, and my greatest obstacle to converting to Christianity was, ironically, other Christians.

Admittedly, I’m an weird convert. My parents were (and still are) devoted Zen Buddhists and not the "I occasionally meditate with an app" variety. We had a Buddha on our mantel, I attended Zen Center Sunday School monthly, celebrated the Buddha's birthday, participated in the children's version of jukai, and read the Dhammapada and (our) Roshi Philip Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen. I would slip quietly (maybe not that quietly) through the house each morning getting ready for school, knowing my parents started their hour plus meditation sessions by 5am. I still remember every word of the Kanzeon chant, which later helped me through labor contractions while giving birth.

While my parents intentionally didn’t raise us to identify as either Zen or Buddhist, I nevertheless identified as some kind of admittedly fuzzy Zen Buddhist for most of my childhood.

And whatever my confusion about the specifics of my religious identity, I knew with absolute certainty that I was not a Christian.

Like most Americans, I had extensive experience with Christians—and most of these encounters were, to put it diplomatically, not great.

Perhaps the most formative relationship was with my irascible born-again Christian grandmother, who repeatedly disowned my mother in painful episodes and attempted to convert me to a sketchy basement church in rural Tennessee when I was eight years old.

She, at least, though was truly devout. That’s harder to say about the judgmental holier-than-thou Christians, the prosperity gospel televangelists, the hateful racist Christians who hid behind white hoods, and the blatant hypocrite Christians who embezzled church funds and slept with parishioners. And perhaps most painfully for me given my chosen church, the devastating sex-abuse scandals within the Catholic Church.

Six years have passed since my conversion, and only recently have I overcome the distaste the word "Christian" left in my mouth. For years, I felt more comfortable identifying as Catholic because it seemed more intellectually grounded and therefore at some distance from the deep failures of white evangelicalism.

But I've come to realize that much of my discomfort stemmed from needing to reclaim the word "Christian.”

I still joke that had it not been for the poor witness of other Christians, I would have converted decades earlier.

Unfortunately, it’s not really a joke.

And while I’ve realized that I need to focus more on Christ than on other Christians, that becomes harder to do when Christian values are wielded as justification for cruelty and outright destruction.

The Return of Doubt

When I see fellow Christians today dismissing empathy as weakness, openly supporting cruelty toward migrants, or excusing political corruption those old doubts creep back in.

To be clear: I have never questioned my conversion to Catholicism itself. It was a profound spiritual experience, one I felt called to by a force only God could have exerted.

My doubts these days are not about God. My doubts are about (some of) my fellow believers.

The fact that a recent survey found that 62% of white evangelicals agree with the statement that "immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country” makes me question what kind of Christ these Christians claim to be following.

This isn't about spiritual purity tests or defining "good" Christians.

I certainly fall down (constantly) when it comes to my faith. I’m a work in progress, like all of us. And I fail to live up to Christ’s model due to weakness, cowardice, and sometimes just exhaustion.

But the deep contradictions between what Jesus says about immigrants and what many Christians support isn’t about the weakness of the flesh but about the fundamental tenets of our shared faith—principles I see more Christians abandoning as they attempt to force their religion into partisan political boxes.

Call me naive, but it seems to me that if you call yourself Christian at the very least you shouldn’t hold beliefs that are diametrically opposed to what Christ identified as his primary values.

Christian doctrine certainly doesn’t mean we can’t argue for better or more efficient government programs, but it does seem to - at minimum - require us to cry out against outright and avoidable cruelty in the public sphere.

Hopeful Signs

While most of this post is something in the vein of a primal scream, I do see some hope and will hang onto it.

There’s been heartening pushback from the Catholic Church to the extremes of cruelty on the immigration front, not least of which were responses from both Pope Francis and then-Cardinal Robert Prevost (now Pope Leo) critiquing JD Vance’s politicized reading of ordo amoris to promote cruelty to immigrants. Recent decisions by Bishops in Los Angeles to suspend the obligation for Mass for those worried about immigration raids is a merciful response to the intentional escalation of fear this administration prioritizes.

Last month, before the recent hardline raids on farms and parks, The National Association of Evangelicals lauded President Trump’s claim (not, apparently, communicated to his subordinate Kristy Noem) that DHS will cease pursuing non-violent undocumented immigrants in agriculture and hospitality.

And even before that, polling found that majorities of white evangelicals support providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented non-criminal immigrants, keeping families together, and receiving refugees.

These are hopeful signs, to be sure. It’s reassuring that majorities of the faithful support a humane and human immigration policy. But it’s also the case that large percentages of Christians don’t.

And it’s also the case that many people - potential converts included - are watching how Christians react to the use of their religion by the current administration.

As Christians we have a choice of whether to speak out as witnesses to our faith, or stay silent.

If we choose the later, people like me twenty years ago will hear that silence - loudly. And those - like me long ago - will turn their backs for good though heartbreaking reasons on a Christian faith that they see as neither Christian nor faith in any meaningful sense of the words.

We’re don’t just harm our own relationship with God by this silence. We actively prevent other people from developing their own.

Our silence in the face of cruelty will succeed in anti-evangelization in a way diehard atheists can only dream of.

And it will prevent many people from finding God in a world that needs Him more than ever.

Your Turn

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