10 years ago, my family and I said goodbye to our lives in Canada and arrived at our first apartment in Tennessee. I’d accepted a job with a Christian publishing organization, successfully made it through the visa process, and was ready to start this new mission that I felt God had called me to.
Growing up in Canada, I knew as much about the United States as anyone who consumes a steady diet of America’s exported pop culture can. So a lot and nothing at all. After all, there’s a lot that you can’t know until you’ve spent a significant amount of time here. And this is doubly true of the South where animosities run deep, and you don’t know what you might have stepped in until it’s too late.
This is the place the Lord brought us, and I’m grateful for it in so many ways. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that, despite the thin veneer of Christianity that haunts the South, it is, in some ways, even harder to live faithfully than in the post-Christian land of my birth ten years ago.
Here’s what I mean by that: Little by little, the United States has become something other than what it was meant to be. It became a country that has lost its moorings, one that could no longer recognize the ideals that make it great: of freedom and opportunity for all people. Rich and poor. Young and old. Of any and every ethnicity. Where everyone’s self-evident equality is known and respected, and the inalienable rights endowed by our Creator—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are recognized by all. Instead, we’re living in a moment where dehumanizing others has become mainstream. Those who once represented the outermost fringes of their sides of the religious and political spectrums were moving toward the center. And too many professing evangelical Christians moved with them.
The symptoms of the larger problem
It’s easy—tempting—to blame all this on the first Trump presidency. But that wasn’t the beginning—it was only an accelerant. Trump is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. We’ve already been isolated into ideological camps by algorithms for years. The President’s “us vs them” language tailor made for those algorithms. That isolation only increased with the COVID pandemic. And after a contested election led to an attempted insurrection, we never really found a way back to unity. Instead, we were met with the progressive virtue-signaling of the early days of the Biden administration, followed by the chaos and outright corruption of the second Trump administration.
I genuinely never thought I would ever see people publicly advocating for the repeal of the 19th amendment to the constitution (which recognizes women as having the right to vote). Or a case seeking to essentially strike down the 14th (birthright citizenship) making it to the Supreme Court. I never expected to see immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers demonized, arrested at USCIS appointments and court hearings, and denied due process. (A constitutionally protected right for all people in the United States, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, by the way). Or that a convicted felon found liable of sexual assault with deep ties to the largest scale human trafficker and p*dophile, would hold the nation’s highest office, not once but twice. Or that so-called “Christian influencers” would flirt with and or embrace Nazi ideology and receive little pushback.
If you had said many evangelicals would not even blink at any of these, I don’t know that I would have believed you.
Yet, here we are.
The damage of dehumanizing others
Some might write this off because I invoked the President’s name and his many disqualifying traits. But, again, he is a symptom of the deep problems in this nation I now call home, not the cause. And these problems go far beyond our simplistic and ineffectual “right vs left” debates. Because as much as it affects our political views, it is not a mere political issue. The problem is that we’ve lost our understanding of what it means to be human. We struggle to every man, woman, and child as God’s image bearer (Gen. 1:26–27). As people made with dignity, value, and worth that is theirs by virtue of being made like their Creator. And we desperately need to recover this.
At the heart of every debate we have in this nation, you’ll find this question: How do we see others—and ourselves? Are they first and foremost human beings, fearfully and wonderfully made as representatives of their Creator in creation (Psalm 139:14)? Calling immigrants and migrants “illegals,” burdens, and drains on society is to say they are something less than human. The same is true of labelling political and social liberals as “Demoncrats” or “libtards,” and calling political and social conservatives “transphobes,” “homophobes,” “Nazis,” or “Christian Nationalists.”
When we treat people as “other,” we don’t simply diminish them—we harm ourselves. We lose our ability to empathize, to grow, and to influence.
We must re-embrace humanity’s worth
And this is what the last decade has convinced me we need to recapture. It is what I see as the most significant need in this nation. It is the most significant opportunity for all of us who are Christians in the United States. We need to recapture, re-embrace, and defend the essential value of all people, at all time, in all places. To believe in our hearts what we affirm with our mouths.
And this why I still feel compelled to be here. It’s one of the main reasons I ultimately chose to become a citizen of this nation. As an immigrant, I know the realities we face coming here and establishing a new life. As a Christian, I have a duty to defend the dignity of all people, regardless of their beliefs. And as a naturalized citizen, I have the opportunity to use my voice to make this nation a better place for all people. To do my part in reminding this nation of what actually makes it great. Because this is how I can love the Lord—by loving my neighbor. And I’m going to keep doing that here until the Lord calls me elsewhere, or until the end of my days.
