I found the presentation from Elizabeth Neumann interesting. It was encouraging to hear from somebody who had defected from the Trump camp at some significant personal cost, and the insight around terrorism and violence was helpful. But I also found myself distrustful of her for being part of that movement at all.

This is something I think I need to interrogate within myself. Conservatives who are willing to break with MAGA seem like one of the only groups of people who could potentially help the country change course, but like many other left-leaning folks, I find myself so repulsed by the movement that I have trouble embracing them, judging them for having been blind or calloused enough to join that group at all. Of course, this only makes it more difficult for more of them to come out against all of the nonsense. Defectors like her (Pence, Cheney, etc…) find themselves vehemently rejected by the MAGA folks, and still rejected by everyone else – it leaves no safe space for that dissenting position.

                  I read Fr. Greg Boyle’s new book, Cherished Belonging this week. A big part of his push is to abandon the concept of sin, which he calls an “old map,” and instead explain almost all bad behavior as being a result of mental illness. I found myself both resonating with this idea on one level and repulsed by it on another. He’s trying to push back against the way that we blame people for their bad behavior rather than looking at what brought them to that behavior. He works primarily with gang members in Los Angeles, and he sees most of their penchant toward violence, drug abuse, anger, and the rest as the result of trauma and general unwellness. I see a similar landscape in my work among folks experiencing homelessness. Much of the problematic behavior we see is the result of trauma, hardship, poverty, abuse, and a host of other factors. Working in acute behavioral health care facilities and seeing a lot of true mental illness in my church work, I don’t think it’s helpful to collapse this into the category of mental illness, but I do think it’s helpful to move from judgment of folks as “bad people” into seeing the ways that they (and we) are broken people. Our brokenness leads us to hurt one another, no doubt. And we need healing in order to change and grow more often than we need moral lecturing. (This is why we’ve developed our trauma-rooted discipleship programming).

                  But I also think we need something more robust than a label of mental illness to address things like white supremacy. There are ways that white supremacy and other American cultural illnesses invite us into (what I still want to call) sin. They lure even generally “well-adjusted” people into selfishness, pride, and violence. Both systems and behaviors. I don’t think healing from trauma or mental illness is enough to deliver people from sin that the world rewards with financial and social gain. Wellness, if it is undefined and disconnected from morality and ethics, can be something that invites us to trample others on our way to trying to find it for ourselves. Sometimes overtly, and sometimes in ways we don’t even realize.

                  Getting back to Elizabeth Neumann – I do think we need to find the belovedness in every person. I need to find ways to open my heart to folks who have joined the Trump train, especially if they’ve disembarked. We need to find ways to love the youth who are difficult to love, and who have terrible influences pulling them toward violence. We need to find ways to offer healing and love that pushes through poor decisions and harmful behavior. Overt judgment, finger wagging, and blame are generally unhelpful. Even offering unsolicited forgiveness is a sort of judgment that only separates us from one another. But I think we need to continue to work toward moral and ethical formation that can help us name the harm that we do to one another. We need to be able to talk about moral failure, especially among people of power and privilege who have capacity to harm massive amounts of people, and who do have other paths available to them. I’m not sure how to navigate all of this yet. How to name this force that I see in the world that pulls people into darkness, but not hold onto judgment of those who have participated in harming others from positions of power and privilege. I think seeing how folks in Northern Ireland have managed to work through this will be helpful. I think we need (I need) to find generosity toward others, even those who I find “problematic.” I think we all need both healing and an examination of the ethical frameworks at work in our decisions.