I know the pleasure of believing that the world’s troubles belong to people unlike me. As a pastor, I had a vocabulary that made this arrangement feel holy. Leaving religion forced me to question that vocabulary, but it did not automatically remove my desire to be counted among the righteous.
That desire has a comfortable home in politics. Conservatives and liberals alike find ways to turn their convictions into evidence of their superior character. The danger begins when that verdict changes what they permit themselves to do to other people.
A conservative who invokes freedom while demanding obedience owes us an explanation. So does a liberal who invokes human dignity while taking pleasure in someone’s humiliation. Neither gets to submit the nobility of the cause as an answer to the conduct. What interests me is how quickly we recognize this evasion in our opponents, and how fiercely we defend it in ourselves.
Political commitment gives us a place in a struggle larger than our private lives. We find people who share our concerns, work toward changes that matter, and discover that our efforts have consequences beyond ourselves. For someone who has felt powerless or overlooked, being needed is a profound experience.
But a cause begins carrying a dangerous burden when allegiance becomes a measure of personal worth. Supporting justice is taken as proof of being just, while defending freedom supposedly establishes respect for the freedom of others. Political identity supplies a flattering account of character that actual conduct might not sustain.
A political victory changes public conditions; it does not certify the character of everyone who helped achieve it. Those involved remain answerable for how they exercised power, treated dissent, and responded to people whose needs complicated the preferred strategy. A worthy goal leaves those questions open.
When political identity becomes the foundation of personal worth, criticism acquires a different force. An objection to our methods feels like an accusation against our entire person. We defend ourselves by defending the movement, even when the criticism identifies something the movement needs to confront.
That is how protecting a cause becomes entangled with protecting an identity. The movement must remain right because admitting its failures would threaten a member’s sense of being good. The people it exists to serve then become secondary to the moral innocence its members need to preserve.
One of the most seductive rewards of political identity is the feeling that we have located the source of the problem outside ourselves. We identify cruelty, dishonesty, domination, or indifference in an opposing group and experience our opposition as evidence of our own character.
Sometimes the accusation is accurate. People do defend cruelty, spread falsehoods, and support arrangements that harm others. Intellectual honesty requires us to name those actions without dissolving them into vague claims that everyone is equally responsible.
Yet recognizing another person’s wrongdoing does not guarantee an honest reckoning with one’s own. Conduct, motives, and consequences still require examination. The presence of a worse offender does not suspend that responsibility.
Moral innocence becomes dangerous when it serves as an exemption from self-examination. An identity built around resisting harm makes the harm committed in its name easier to overlook. Humiliation becomes acceptable because its recipient supposedly deserves it, while good intentions supply an excuse for recklessness.
A more demanding form of moral confidence rests on reasons that withstand scrutiny and methods open to correction. It allows someone to act decisively while remaining answerable for the consequences. Commitment carries no promise of purification.
Leaving the church meant reconsidering my beliefs. It took longer to recognize the lessons about belonging: whom to trust, which doubts to conceal, and how to remain acceptable to those whose approval mattered. Those habits were harder to identify because they had become part of how I moved through the world.
Leaving an authoritarian religion does not, by itself, teach us how to belong without obeying. We sometimes carry the habits of the congregation into the movement, including the fear that an honest question will cost us our place. New convictions give us something different to say while leaving the old discipline of self-censorship intact.
Someone supports a movement’s aims but questions its tactics. Does publicly humiliating this person accomplish anything? Are we applying a standard to our opponents that we refuse to apply to ourselves? Instead of answering, fellow members question the speaker’s loyalty. What began as a disagreement about conduct becomes a test of whether the person belongs.
The pressure often arrives as disappointment from people whose respect matters. A friend suggests that the question gives ammunition to the enemy, and others become noticeably less welcoming. The person softens the objection, then stops raising it. Acceptance returns, teaching a lesson no one needs to state explicitly: staying close requires keeping certain thoughts to yourself.
Eventually, the editing happens before anyone else hears a word. A reservation goes unspoken, an unexamined judgment receives endorsement, or an ally’s behavior passes without the condemnation it would provoke in an opponent. Each concession feels small enough to justify. Together, they establish the terms of belonging: continued acceptance depends on how much independent judgment a person is willing to surrender.
I understand why someone makes that bargain. After losing a religious community, finding friends who understand your concerns brings enormous relief. The prospect of renewed isolation gives their disappointment a force that “think for yourself” scarcely acknowledges.
But the freedom to reject yesterday’s authorities remains incomplete if today’s authorities are protected from scrutiny. Self-authorship requires taking responsibility for a judgment even when it disappoints beloved friends or challenges a cherished cause. A trustworthy community makes room for that responsibility without making agreement the rent anyone pays to stay.
Christian nationalism gives the desire for political righteousness a claim to divine authority. In ** my writing on Christian nationalism**, I have examined what happens when a particular religious identity becomes the measure of national belonging. Those who claim to speak for God also claim the right to decide whose lives the state should protect, restrict, or recognize as legitimate.
Once political power becomes an instrument of God’s will, democratic limits become obstacles to a sacred mission. Compromise looks like betrayal, and electoral defeat becomes harder to accept as a legitimate outcome. Citizens outside the favored faith find their equal standing recast as a privilege that the religious majority has authority to grant or withdraw.
The danger reaches beyond certainty into the organization of power. Leaders gain a justification for coercion that places their agenda above ordinary accountability. People whose beliefs, identities, or relationships violate the prescribed order bear the consequences through laws and institutions they have an equal right to shape.
Similar habits of moral certainty elsewhere do not imply equal power, equal harm, or equal political consequences. Recognizing that distinction still leaves those of us opposing Christian nationalism responsible for our own conduct. Its dangers give us compelling reasons to resist; they do not give us permission to treat every action taken in resistance as righteous.
Defending pluralism requires keeping power open to challenge, including power exercised by one’s own side. Demanding accountability only from opponents reveals an entitlement to rule. The test comes when scrutiny reaches an admired leader, a favored tactic, or an abuse committed in the name of a necessary cause.
There are circumstances in which a moderate response protects an intolerable arrangement. When people’s rights are being stripped away, cruelty is becoming policy, or institutions shield those abusing power, calls for patience deserve scrutiny. Those bearing the harm have reason to demand fundamental change. Anger might register something that a more comfortable observer has learned to overlook.
The question is what that recognition authorizes. Believing an injustice must end does not settle which methods will end it, who will bear their costs, or what restraints those exercising power should accept. Urgency makes these questions harder to answer, but more consequential. Acting in the name of liberation leaves anyone capable of coercion, reckless judgment, and abuses they would immediately recognize in an opponent.
Radical opposition becomes self-righteous when the cause places those advancing it beyond criticism. An ally’s objection is treated as betrayal, evidence of harm is dismissed as enemy propaganda, and the very community being defended loses the right to question its defenders. At that point, loyalty begins protecting the movement from the realities it exists to confront.
Accountability does not require making resistance agreeable to those benefiting from injustice. Disruption, refusal, and sustained pressure often impose costs, and their legitimacy cannot depend on the approval of those being challenged. But a movement must be able to explain how its methods serve its aims, distinguish necessary pressure from gratuitous cruelty, and change course when those bearing the consequences expose its failures.
The demand is for conviction strong enough to endure scrutiny. Those confronting unjust power must also be willing to place limits on their own. A cause that promises a more humane world must allow that promise to become a standard by which its own conduct is judged.
Political judgment requires distinctions. Some proposals deserve rejection, some conduct demands consequences, and some uses of power need to be stopped. The obligation to recognize another person’s humanity does not erase any of these responsibilities.
What it challenges is the habit of treating one judgment as a complete description of a life. We encounter a statement, a vote, or an affiliation and allow it to consume everything else there is to know. A person becomes a position with a face attached.
There are circumstances in which a political commitment tells us something consequential about someone. It might reveal a willingness to accept another group’s suffering or support the removal of basic protections. We do not owe anyone a reassuring interpretation of conduct that threatens us.
Still, recognizing the seriousness of a belief differs from assuming that its holder has become entirely transparent to us. People arrive at their convictions through histories we only partly understand. Those histories include fear, dependence, misinformation, resentment, experience, and sometimes a sincere concern that has been badly interpreted.
Understanding those conditions improves our ability to respond. It helps us distinguish the person directing harm from the person drawn into supporting it, and the committed ideologue from the frightened neighbor. Such differences affect what persuasion, protection, accountability, and resistance require.
The question I keep returning to is whether we are able to oppose someone without needing them to be less human than we are. That question offers no easy resolution. It asks us to hold the reality of harm alongside the reality of a human being, without using either to conceal the other.
The people closest to us encounter aspects of our character that our political affiliations reveal little about. They know what happens when we are frustrated, when our authority is challenged, and when acknowledging their experience would require changing our behavior. They have to live with the distance between the principles we defend and the treatment we deliver.
A person speaks eloquently about human dignity, then interrupts a partner who is trying to describe feeling dismissed. A colleague advocates equality but treats a junior employee’s criticism as insolence. Both might sincerely believe their stated principles. The failure becomes visible when someone asks them to apply those principles to an encounter in which they have something to lose.
Consider what happens when a partner says, “You humiliated me in front of our friends.” The response is an explanation that it was a joke, an insistence that they misunderstood, or a reminder of everything done for them. Soon the hurt partner is defending their right to feel hurt, while the other protects a reputation for kindness. Preserving that self-image takes precedence over hearing the person whose experience calls it into question.
Differences in power make this more consequential. A junior colleague risks opportunities by challenging someone senior. A financially dependent partner has fewer choices about what to tolerate. Criticism deserves particular attention when it comes from someone dependent on the person receiving it. Their eventual silence might reveal how costly honesty has become.
As a writer and teacher, I have reason to keep this close. Publishing an argument about dignity is easier than receiving an account of how I failed to honor it. The argument allows me to choose my words and establish the terms. Accountability requires listening when someone else names the problem.
A commitment to dignity is tested when its advocate becomes the person being held accountable. Taking another person’s experience seriously requires allowing it to unsettle a cherished self-image, then making the changes their criticism warrants. The people who have to live with us deserve more than eloquent statements about the world we hope to create.
Political crisis reaches into the ordinary conditions of being alive. A threatened right changes how someone imagines their future. Institutional failure makes planning precarious, while sustained public hostility turns encounters with strangers into occasions for fear. Such disorientation has causes that private reflection alone cannot resolve. Existential health requires attention to the conditions under which a life must be lived.
Collective action offers a way to respond. Someone who feels helpless joins neighbors challenging an eviction, helps protect a threatened community, or organizes for conditions that make a dignified life possible. The outcome remains uncertain, but participation changes their relationship to that uncertainty. Working alongside others brings specific responsibilities through which their concern becomes useful.
Participation strengthens agency when people gain practical competence alongside the experience of being heard. They learn to organize, weigh competing needs, negotiate disagreements, and take responsibility for decisions whose consequences extend beyond themselves. A movement contributes to existential health when its members become better able to exercise judgment, including when their judgment unsettles the group.
This gives us a reason to stay politically engaged while remaining demanding about the terms of engagement. Working with others toward material change brings meaning into contact with responsibility. Its value rests in what we accomplish and how we learn to act together, including whether we preserve the freedom to question the people standing beside us.
In my work in existential health, I am concerned with our capacity to remain engaged with life when it unsettles the identities we depend on. Political commitment brings that challenge into sharp focus. A cause gives us purpose and belonging, but criticism of its methods might threaten both. Staying accountable requires enough ground within ourselves to examine the criticism without making the…
