Growing up in the church, I subconsciously assumed that the calling of God was, at least from our limited perspective, random, egalitarian, global in scope, and purely individual in nature. I just accepted that God would choose who he would choose — that there is no way for people to predict or influence who is actually called to salvation.

We could plant, water, persuade, and convince, but the best we could really do was to walk faithfully ourselves, and hope that others would follow.

Maybe it was a logical extension of singing “Whosoever Will” in church, or just the result of being saturated in American hyper-individualism, or maybe just a tinge of theological residue from the Billy Graham revival era, where God just seemed to move a random peppering of people in an otherwise skeptical crowd.

While it’s true that God alone calls and saves, and is no respecter of persons, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that there’s more to the story of how God affects his redemption of the world.

Part of the change has come as I’ve consistently sought the Lord for the souls of my children.

We are actively raising our sons in the Word, and our two oldest have already confessed Christ as Savior and Lord. Yet, as I look at the world around me — filled with former church kids not only ditching the faith, but also actively using their Christian upbringing to elbow their way to the front ranks of the mockers and skeptics (I’m looking at you, Abraham Piper) — it seems almost impossible that we would be able to adequately equip our children to cling to Christ for the long haul.

Invariably, as soon as “Amen” passes my lips, I find myself wondering whether, or how, my prayers might be answered by way of our best efforts as parents And of course, more ominously, what the consequences of my failings will be on the souls of my little ones..

Does it matter that we saturate our boys in the gospel? Are they any more likely to be one of God’s elect because we pour our lives into teaching them the way of righteousness? Or is that merely more likely to make them moral, decent people in the sight of others? Can I ever truly have confidence that I can lead my children to an enduring faith in Christ?

I know I’m not the first father to be haunted by these questions.

But while reading Exodus 14, I was struck by the words of God to Moses just before the crossing of the Red Sea:

“And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew to you to day: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no more for ever. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace. And the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward: But lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea.”

-Exodus 14:13–16

How odd that Moses tells Israel not to worry because God will fight for them, while Moses himself is apparently still crying out to God for answers! And it’s equally surprising that God’s response is not to just split the sea right there, but first nudge Moses to make the switch from prayer to action: “Why are you still crying to me? Start walking!”

Of course I don’t take this as God ceding the title of deliverer to Moses — the story of the Exodus is one that affords no praise to anyone but God. But I do think it serves to show that God communicates a course of action to people, and then expects us to step into those actions with haste and determination (“I will show you my faith by my works” — James 2:18).

God had deliberately led them to this point, and that knowledge should have spurred action — not just prayer — from Moses. In other words, God had already acted, and now He was waiting on Moses to act.

This is really, really important.

God didn’t need Moses’ rod to part the sea.

Or to turn the Nile to blood.

Or to call forth hail mingled with fire.

Or to bring water from a rock.

But because God chose the rod as his instrument, Moses was required to stretch it forth, with the result that Moses, the man, was given the opportunity to impact the judgements and miracles of God, both in obedience and disobedience (smiting the rock when he was told to speak to it).

God didn’t need swords and warriors to conquer the promised land, and in fact did use nature to drive the Canaanites out as well (Hornets, ya’ll. He literally chased them out with wasps — Exodus 23:28, Joshua 24:12), but he chose the sword. He chose war. He even required that some Israelites would die during a conquest that God himself ordained and brought about.

Because God chose conquest, God required that the men of Israel arm themselves and fight. And if they did not fight, they would not inherit the land — which the previous generation had already proved. God had already acted, now he waited for Israel to act.

God didn’t need a handful of meal and a bit of oil to feed Elijah — he had already commanded the birds to bring him food. But he demanded the last bit of food from a widow and her son during a nationwide famine, and it became the means of deliverance for both the prophet and the widow’s household. But first she had to grab that last bit of meal to make bread for the prophet, not knowing whether she would ever eat again. She didn’t know it, but God had already acted — now she had to act. And her faithful obedience was the earthside trigger of the miracle performed by God alone.

The principle is both intuitive and evident if you look at comparable relationships.

I frequently let my sons “help” with construction and farm work around our property. I require significant, but doable, actions from them in order that they might play a part in the much larger project I am accomplishing. I might lift a board three times their bodyweight but ask them to place blocks to prop it up. Of course I could find a way to do it myself, but I want them to follow my lead, learn from me, and invest in the work we are doing together — contributing what strength they have, and reaping the rewards of work they could never have done alone.

All this to say that, while God’s purpose of election and intervention in the course of human events sometimes comes in the form of direct, independent action, those incidents are the exception rather than the rule.

Most of God’s work in the Bible is performed deliberately, by people and communities devoted to accomplishing his will in practical ways. And through faithful obedience, they receive power (John 1:12).

God does choose some people for some purposes, without apparent condition outside of his own foreknowledge. We aren’t given a direct reason why God chose Abraham, Rahab, Samuel, Esther, Elisha, or Mary.

But while the Bible doesn’t give God’s rationale for selecting these individuals, that’s a far cry from blind, duck-duck-goose randomness.

Was Abraham chosen because God knew that he was the ideal man to lead a family and build a national heritage (Genesis 18:19)?

Were Rahab and Esther just in the right place at the right time (…for such a time as this)?

Was Samuel chosen because of his mother’s prayer and devotion in charting the course of his life and dedication to God before he was even conceived?

Could Mary have been anyone with the right bloodline, or was Mary “highly favored” because of her posture of belief toward God?

Was Elisha chosen to follow Elijah because God knew that Elisha had a quality of loyalty bordering on downright stubbornness (II Kings 2:1–6)?

While Jesus describes the goodness and mercy of God in an arguably random or universal fashion (Matthew 5:45), he does not describe the Kingdom of Heaven that way.

Rather, he compares the Kingdom to leaven and mustard seed. Neither of these things act in a random fashion — they are both uniform and progressive.

Just this week I made pizza dough from scratch and got to watch the interaction of yeast with warm water and sugar. Even though the initial placement of the yeast was my doing, no further action was required on my part, because it’s in the nature of yeast to spread and fill. Likewise, a sower plants the seed where he wishes, but once planted, that seed grows in a specific direction, fills a specific area, and reproduces in a set, proportional way.

In other words, Abraham may have been the initial seed, but the stalk of Israel was defined, limited, and linear: a chosen people descended from a chosen person, not a chosen people pulled at random from throughout the populated world.

Jesus sums up this tension in his conversation with the Samaritan woman:

“Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.”

— John 4:22–23

Salvation was of the Jews, and limited by proximity to God’s chosen people. Even Rahab and Ruth — foreigners to Israel — were not called by God apart from Israel, but called by God to join Israel.

Likewise, the foreign prophet Balaam — who clearly had a real relationship with Jehovah — is only mentioned to the extent that his story intersects with the nation of Israel. There is no book of Balaam, detailing his other independent prophecies or exploits.

This adds weight to God’s condemnation of his chosen people throughout the prophets: Israel was God’s only chosen vessel of salvation, and their failure and disobedience had an impact far beyond the borders of Israel. Just as David’s sin “gave great occasion to the enemies of God to blaspheme,” Israel’s apostacy not only brought God’s judgement on their own nation, but caused God’s name to be blasphemed among the Gentiles by erasing the distinction between God’s chosen nation and the pagan cultures around them.

But even in divine national judgement there were exceptions, and they usually weren’t isolated.

Israel had a national heritage, to be sure, but within that they also had family and tribal subcultures that grew in different directions.

The tribe of Benjamin was nearly wiped out in Judges 20, because they, as a tribe, embraced and defended evil.

Ephraim developed a warrior culture that resonated throughout the history of Israel with great military exploits.

The sons of Issachar had a special understanding of the times and were uniquely equipped to lead their brethren (I Chronicles 12:32).

God reserved a special blessing for the faithful Rechabites for keeping an extrabiblical family commandment handed down by their forefather, Rechab (Jeremiah 35:18–19).

There are many other examples — Asaph and his sons becoming a line of dedicated singers, the frequent connections of nearly all the central figures of the captivity (Ezra, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, and most of the minor prophets), and Elizabeth being Mary’s cousin, which made John the Baptist the cousin of Jesus.

Of the disciples of Christ, nearly all came from the same small region of Israel, and fully half of them were sets of brothers from the same three families. Andrew, referred to Jesus by Jesus’ own cousin, John, told Simon Peter about Christ before Peter himself met the Lord, establishing connection by relationship. Peter, Andrew, James, and John were all fishing partners. Philip lived in the same city as the brothers, and apparently knew both them and Nathanael, whom he brought to Jesus and was also called.

Jesus could have called anyone in the world to follow him. Men could have ridden in from Greece, Rome, and the Orient to serve as a disciple of the Christ. But that’s not what happened. Instead, a natural sort of chain lightning passed through a couple of local Gallilean peer groups, bringing mostly men already connected to Christ by relationship and proximity. Of course there were other disciples whose connections we don’t know, but even half the posse makes the point.

Even Cornelius, the righteous centurion, was directed to go fetch Peter to hear the message of the gospel, when clearly the angel sent from God could have just given the good news right then and there. In other words, in the absence of a human connection for the sharing of the Gospel, God’s solution is to make one, not bypass it.

On the flip side, patterns of evil also spread through infecting relationships and wicked traditions. Or, as Paul says, “evil communications corrupt good manners.” (I Corinthians 15:33) Ahab’s family was so thoroughly wicked that it corrupted the house of righteous king Jehoshaphat, resulting in them ultimately sharing the judgement of Ahab’s house.

Canaanite culture became so utterly corrupt and depraved that God ordered every trace of them wiped from the Earth, though clearly not every single Canaanite partook of every evil.

Haman the Agagite carried with him the centuries-old grudge between Amalek and Israel, seeking revenge on God’s people while serving in a Persian court, on behalf of a nation long since wiped out by larger Mediterranean empires.

These are not random connections. God’s operation on the earth is executed deliberately and progressively, at specific times and places, and typically in a manner that builds and expands on what came before it.

The impact of this realization on my life has been immense.

Your faith is neither incidental nor accidental, and it is not intended to remain yours alone. Our mandate is to build families, cultures, and nations of faith, because that is the means that God has elected for salvation to be spread throughout the world — this is the urgency of evangelism.

As Paul writes in Romans 10:

“For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!”

- Romans 10:13–15

The clear assumption of this passage is not that, if we fail to share the gospel, God will magically reach down and grab those he wants to be saved.

If we don’t share the gospel, people will go to hell.

And according to Ezekiel 33, their blood will be required at our hands. Or, as Mordecai says in Esther 4:14, deliverance may come from another place, but we will be destroyed.

When Christ rose from the dead, he didn’t put a permanent billboard in the sky announcing it. He relied on the testimony of witnesses who have been spreading the gospel for 2000 years and still haven’t reached everyone.

But with this responsibility comes hope and significance. Since we have been entrusted with the gospel, the most powerful weapon in the universe is at our disposal in the war against darkness. Our efforts are never futile, because God’s word does not return void — and we, through Christ, are bearers of his word.

You can lead your entire family to follow Christ, blazing a trail from which your children can build the King’s Highway — a godly family legacy, and a protection against division and deceit.

You can create a church community that does not bow to the storm of culture, but stands faithfully as believers cling to Christ and to each other, defying the wind and rain.

You can establish a community where people maintain godly traditions and reject corruption and depravity.

You can fight for a country that honors God, limits government, and defends individual rights, becoming a beacon of hope to the world.

These things are not just possible — they are the expected fruit borne of the gospel in human civilization. And like all fruit, it also contains more seed, to spread further and repeat the process all over again.

Christ is the vine, and we are the branches. It is the nature of vines to spread. It is the nature of fruit to seed. So we abide, not just to deliver the fruit of good works to the Father, but also to deliver back to the sower more seed.

Some seed will fall by the wayside. Some will fall on rocks. Some will fall on thorny places, and some on good ground.

But none will fall where God’s people remain fruitless.

Surely we can never comprehend all of his reasons or the downstream effects of his sovereign election (I use the term carefully), but what we can see shows that God builds the same way he commands us to build: line upon line, precept upon precept, stone upon stone.

In fact, scripture goes so far as to call us co-laborers with God in the building of the kingdom.

“For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”

I Corinthians 3:10–16

We are not just the temple of God, we are also called to build the temple of God. We are contingent creatures — both cause and effect. We are bricks in the building, but bricks laid out individually on the ground do not a building make. Bricks are built on each other, using overlapping patterns to bind, strengthen, and extend the edifice.

Our interconnectedness is meant to advance the gospel and build the kingdom.

Human relationships, institutions, and societal structures are neither naturally hostile nor incidental to the gospel. Rather, they have always been both anticipatory of, and ancillary to, the gospel. The gospel was delivered under the assumption that it would be spread using all the avenues of human interaction that already existed.

God is not random or arbitrary, and his dealings with people are not either. God rules in the affairs of men, but dignifies us with the opportunity to be instruments of his rule. We are entrusted with real responsibility and real decisions, bearing real consequences — not just to ourselves but to others, our contemporaries and our progeny.

“Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”

— Ephesians 2:19–22

Why you can’t win arguments against intersectionality — and shouldn’t try

Two statements, same assertion:

1) “The sky is blue.”

2) “Sunlight reaches Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.”

Both statements include the same claim.

The first is a statement with readily observable properties and immediately available provability/disprovability. It allows for very specific discussion and debate, and a consensus on this point will allow further research into the factors behind it.

The second can still be discussed, but there’s so much context and reference that to argue it one must systematically accept or reject many assertions, and risk looking ignorant at each one.

The argument, in this case, is not strengthened by logic, but by volume.

Most of the claims the second statement makes, we accept on faith. Most people have never seen a molecule. Most have never experimented with atmospheric gasses. Most have never delved into light theory, and have only a generic understanding of the relationship of wavelength and other properties related to light and color.

Fortunately, we can all agree the proposition at issue is true.

But let’s change it up a bit, and submit two more claims.

1) “The sky is red.”

2) “The sky is red because the atmosphere is full of quintillions of microscopic organisms that grow and multiply every night, and then during the day, the sunlight slowly kills most of them and they begin emitting a florescent reddish glow. This red color is apparent to most animals, with the exception of human beings, whose eyes have no receptor for the exact wavelength of red emitted, so our brains interpret this unidentifiable color as blue, except at such times as we inhale trace amounts of Ozone, which allows us to see the red in the sky once in a while. And this is also strongly supported by my experience — I’ve personally seen red in the sky, so if you think the sky is blue, you’re invalidating my experience and questioning my reality, and that makes you a horrible human being who doesn’t deserve to speak in a civilized society.”

As before, the first statement is a single assertion that can be proved or disproved using any number of objective measurements.

But the second is rendered nearly impervious to attack, once again by volume. In order to argue that the sky isn’t red, you have to deny the existence of these microbes, the effect of sunlight on some similar microorganisms, clearly observable examples of bioluminescence elsewhere in nature, as well as brazenly calling into question someone’s lived experience.

And all the while you’re on the clock, because in taking the contrary position and working to disprove the various claims, you’re cementing the final claim — that you’re a horrible human being.

Any opponent starts out in the defensive position and must produce copious amounts of research and expertise to substantiate all claims to the contrary, since the original claim, though utterly ridiculous, is extremely cohesive — it exists within its own stitched and armored mythological framework, whereby a challenge to any one point is dispersed across the entirety of the ideological fabric, and resisted equally by all.

This is the endgame of intersectionality.

And it’s why conservative arguments against it fall flat.

Not because they’re factually wrong, but because it’s just one piece of a postmodern mythology that we have failed to effectively understand and combat in its more nascent and manageable stages.

Now the mythology is mature, and has become a religion that demands unquestioning loyalty and unflinching sacrifice.

And we have no answer for it, because it’s a hydra — for each head you cut off, two more take its place.

Each part makes sense to adherents, not because of externally-substantiated fact or logical flow, but because of the self-referencing nature of its claims.

It is *designed* to be insular, to shed attacks, and to ultimately define all who oppose it as heretics and enemies of the common good.

Now let’s try two final statements.

1) “George Floyd’s death was immoral and criminal, and his killers should face justice.”

2) “George Floyd’s death immoral and criminal, and was the inevitable result of systemic racism in law enforcement, which itself an expression of rampant racism in broader American society, and that’s due to longstanding white privilege shown in everything from economic inequality to life expectancy. Plus, I and people I know have personally experienced this, so if you try to tell me that it’s not due to systemic racism, you’re invalidating my personal experiences, and that means you’re probably a racist too.”

If you have been engaged in this debate lately and feel frustrated that facts and figures bounce off of the social justice crowd, don’t be discouraged. You’re not just challenging a media narrative or a faulty assumption. You’re calling into question an entire worldview, and leaving the other person without a frame of reference through which to understand the world. And when you challenge someone’s innermost worldview, you’re not just questioning their understanding of politics or current events, you’re challenging their identity, their character, their priorities, and their morality.

They can’t concede any one piece of intersectional dogma, because (just as in other religions) to concede the errancy of one piece of canon means leaving all the rest of it vulnerable to attack.

So in order to defend against that, they will build more and more context, weave more and more mythology around the premise under attack, leaving you with insufficient time, energy, or information to dismantle it all — leaving their holy scripture intact.

The only way to win is not to play.

Don’t accept the negative position — build and defend a positive one. Endless seminars, videos, books, and conferences have sought to be the final nail in the coffin of postmodernism, critical theory, socialism, secular materialism, etc., and none have succeeded, because people convinced of a worldview can easily muster — or manufacture — sufficient fact in support of it.

Don’t be forced into someone else’s gameplan.

Assert truth.

Substantiate truth.

Defend truth.

Force the other side to play defense, and stop apologizing, qualifying, weakening, and negating your own positions.

When you begin a post with “I’m not a racist, but…” you’ve already lost your argument and your audience, and the best result you can hope, no matter what point you’re making, is establishing, or undermining, that baseline.

Ditto for “I’m not sexist/homophobic/a science denier/judgemental/partisan, but…”

When truth is at issue, let truth fight for itself, and don’t allow consideration for your self-image to blunt its blade.

There’s precious little reasonability left in political writing these days.

There’s not much market for a nuanced argument that doesn’t hand one side a club with which to pummel the other. Pundits who have become household names in America today are those who best represent the bias of their tribe and become adept at mocking the opposition.

People don’t want to hear that they’re kind of right but also kind of wrong. Nobody wants to read a headline that acknowledges weaknesses on both sides of an argument. Writers can garner a lot of traffic by smacking around half of their audience to draw cheers from the other half, but there are few clicks to be gained by acknowledging that both sides have a piece of the truth, and that the big picture can only be seen by putting the pieces together.

And nowhere is that unfortunate trend more evident than in the recently-rekindled immigration argument.

In the wake of Mollie Tibbetts’ murder and the subsequent arrest of her alleged assailant — an illegal alien — everyone is screaming about immigration again, but nobody is listening. Each side has dutifully marched out the hashtags and headlines, but each only tells half the story — the side that confirms their own bias.

Liberals tend to lump together legal and illegal immigration to exaggerate the results of studies showing lower immigrant crime rates, and often rely on implicitly or explicitly attributing racist motives to their opponents on the Right.

Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to get tunnel vision on illegal immigration and cling to one or two outlier studies that suggest specific subsets of illegal immigrants do in fact raise overall crime rates.

But there is a reasonable centrist position on immigration that brings together disparate data sets into a cohesive vision of our present immigration problem, and suggests a solution too — if people are willing to entertain it.

But careful assessment of the arguments of both sides can show common ground if we allow ourselves to be led by the data, and not drag the facts behind our feelings.

For the purpose of this article, when I discuss crime, I’m going to exclude the crime of illegally immigrating, in order to focus on the kind of violent crime currently being debated. Obviously, including immigration law makes 100% of illegal immigrants, well, criminal.

Claim on the Right: Illegal immigrants have a higher federal crime rate than the general population.

Truth: The study cited for this claim does indeed show that illegal immigrants committed a disproportionately high number of federal offences, but there are a couple important pieces of context missing.

One is acknowledged within the study itself: the word federal. Relying on federal crime rates alone does not present a realistic sample size, since upward of 90% of crime is handled at the state or local level and is disregarded by this study.

Second, the study quietly acknowledges that illegal immigrants are below the rest of the population in several violent crime categories, including robbery, sex crime, arson, and burglary.

The federal crimes associated with illegal immigration are all the ones associated with the tragic and costly drug war plaguing our southern border: drug charges, money laundering, fraud, and of course kidnapping — a symptom of our growing human trafficking problem.

In summary, this claim doesn’t rebut the prior claim, because it’s talking about a different subset and not illegal immigrants as a whole group.

Claim on the Left: Immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans.

Truth: This claim is substantiated by a significant body of work, and if you have a few hours to blow on Google, I’d encourage you to read a few of the supporting studies in their entirety.

The tricky part here is that much of the data fails to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants — many jurisdictions merely break down their arrest totals by citizenship status alone, which blends the two. Studies that do show the distinction invariably find a significantly higher (non immigration-related offense) crime rate for illegal immigrants than for their legal counterparts, a fact often disregarded by those politically invested in erasing the distinction.

Claim on the Right: If stopping illegal immigration would save one life, it’s worth it.

Truth: Some of the worst policies are reactionary policies intended to save one life, because they impose the penalty for a crime on society, rather than on the individual. Of course conservatives have embraced this response in reaction to Democratic insistence on changing gun laws after each new shooting, but it fits as poorly on the Right as it does on the Left.

Immigration, like gun rights, has to be treated as the massive, complex national issue it is, and not boiled down to absurd reactionism. Immigrants do commit crimes, because immigrants are human beings, with the same sinful nature the rest of us have. But also like the rest of us, they are not defined only by their criminal minority. Aside from being a relatively law-abiding bunch, immigrants as a whole are generally both more religious and more socially conservative than natural-born American citizens. They also account for nearly 11% of our GDP, and are a necessary buffer against our dangerous negative birth rate.

The bottom line is this: whether it’s conservatives on immigration or liberals on guns, we have to resist the urge to amalgamate large groups of people and instead recognize that both immigrants and natural-born citizens are individuals.

Some are saints, some are criminals, some are wise, some are foolish, some are selfish, others generous, some broken, some whole. And the sooner we stop blaming groups for individual choices, the better off we, as a United States of America, will be.

It took me a while to gather the courage to write a response to Joel Michael Herbert’s recent installment of convenient Christianity, “‘Modest is hottest’ is not in the Bible” — not because there isn’t a lot to say, but because of the backlash I know is coming.

You can always tell which ones are going to spark outrage, because it’s always the stances that are contrary to our habits, desires, instincts, and ultimately, our sinful nature.

One of the biggest ironies of living in the age of internet outrage is that all the things we love to hate are things *almost* nobody is actually inclined to do. Focusing on the narrow sins someone, somewhere is probably committing allows us to finger-wag at the hypothetical rather than examining the evil growing quietly within our own hearts.

I use first person pronouns because, well, I’m no stranger to it.

One of the first dangers you have to confront as a regular analyst/critic is the reality that continually turning the spotlight on others tends to leave your own actions and choices in a comfortable darkness. Most people don’t question the questioner, so it’s important for us to seek out accountability from older, wiser Christians who can see past the public image to question the individual motives and rationales that cultural combat can sometimes blind us to.

It’s easy to harp on the sins of other people. Hard to focus on your own. Harder still to accept that they can be equally wrong and equally sinful. Most of us, if we’re honest, tend to rank sins not by importance, but by distance. Think about the things everyone condemns. It’s a pretty short list these days, but there are still a few areas of general consensus which are likely to stay that way until a large enough group of people enamored of that particular fault decide to start a pride campaign. Things like racism, hatred, violence, and pedophilia are pretty safe to criticize in most online contexts, because only an insignificant portion of the population actually does any of those things.

It’s much harder to call out the sins that appeal to us all. So hard, in fact, that the only people who can be reliably trusted to do so, are those engaged in the less popular sins, who use the more popular ones as a shield. It usually goes something like this:

“Well sure I had an illicit relationship with a minor, but the Bible condemns gluttony too — are you telling me you’ve never overeaten?!”

The reaction is as predictable as the statement.

“Well sure but that’s not the same thing — everyone overeats but that’s not really gluttony… (insert generic rationale)”

Everyone is eager to justify or marginalize their own bad habits, while condemning someone else’s, and that’s every bit as dangerous as the tug of moral relativism’s universal acceptance.

Why can’t we sincerely mourn and repent of our own gluttony, while still acknowledging that pedophilia and other sexual deviance is also wrong? Why is it so hard to see that pride is, in fact, just as disgusting to a holy God as rape and murder — maybe more if Proverbs chapter six is any indication.

Why do we tend to see a comparison of sins as an excuse of one, rather than an indictment of both?

I think it’s necessary to explore these kinds of questions before diving into an issue like modesty, because it’s the kind of discussion that immediately lends itself to mud-slinging, comparisons, and accusations of legalism or being judgmental.

We need to look at the bigger questions first because, ultimately, modesty isn’t a problem of clothing. It’s a problem of the heart, as expressed by clothing.

Having grown up in a group of believers who made dress length, headcoverings, and suit jackets an issue of codified church polity, I feel like I’m qualified to speak to the issue in perhaps a broader capacity than many.

As a teen, I questioned the church’s clothing standards from both the purity side of modesty and the simplicity side. To me it seemed strange that we interpreted modesty in a way that forbade makeup and jewelry, but required button up shirts and dress shoes. It was clear to me that plain and modest for 1900 was all kinds of dressy for 2000. I saw guys who dressed in perfect conformity with church code but clearly placed too much value in their appearance and found ways to get attention anyway. I saw women who wore church-approved dresses pulled as tight as any nightclub top you’ve ever seen. I sat through hours of arguments and church business meetings discussing — in inches — skirt length and hair coverage.

I know at this point most of my mainstream Christian readers are shocked at what they consider to be pure legalism, but before the fingers start wagging too much, I want to point out that the questions addressed in those meetings are symptomatic of nearly every practical application discussion that believers have: we always want to ask how much we can get away with, rather than asking what is most pleasing to our Lord.

In the end, the problem with legalism isn’t legalism. The problem with legalism is that it results in license. Legalism and license aren’t opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re two different evidences of the same heart problem — a refusal to follow the shepherd.

Legalists like to talk about the importance of building a fence before the cliff as a protection against sin, but that’s not how it ends up working. In reality, legalism hangs its whole body over the cliff with one hand still on the fence, while license just jumps off and hopes for a parachute.

The truth of the matter is that if you’re following the shepherd, you don’t need a fence; and if you’re not following the shepherd, no fence will stop you.

Legalism and rigid moral codes allow us to define away sin, masking the evil in our hearts with an outer appearance that deflects challenge and rebuke from other believers and hardens our consciences against the Holy Spirit.

In short, it directs our gaze to the minimum requirement rather than the highest goal.

So rather than addressing whether “Modest is Hottest” is in the Bible, I want to ask a different question:

How can we please the Lord and honor others in our clothing choices?

See it’s pretty easy to make the case that wearing whatever you want isn’t sinful, much harder to make the case that it pleases God — which should be our goal in everything we do. The principles of scripture apply just as much to clothing as anything else, and I don’t believe anyone can honestly make the case that the requirements are gender-specific in any way.

The New Covenant is all about the heart, all about the motives, and is a much harder, much higher calling than the Old Covenant. The call of Christ on our lives doesn’t allow us to measure our conscience by skirt length or brand tag, it’s a call to live in a way that’s separate from the world, and be known for our character.

Thus, the question of modesty needs to start and end with motivation, and I think an honest application of scripture will give opportunity not just to modify our habits, but also our hearts.

By way of disclaimer, I’m going to say that when discussing modesty it’s necessary to speak in generalities, so please don’t ignore the rule for the exceptions that are bound to come up. Yes, there are times you’ll have to go to the store in your bathrobe because that’s the only clean laundry you have. No, that doesn’t mean you should make a habit of it.

With that in mind, here are a few scriptural principles that I think should inform our clothing choices.

1. Physical clothing matters in the spiritual realm.

Too many folks like to start the clothing debate in Timothy, when really, it begins in Genesis. God created Adam and Eve in the garden, perfect, naked, and without shame. After the fall, Adam and Eve sought to cover themselves with fig leaves, an instinctive reaction to the shame sin had wrought in them. After God confronted and sentenced them, he clothed them with animal skins, endorsing the concept of clothing and tacitly acknowledging the element of shame now connected to the naked state.

Now a lot of folks go off the rails theologically here, speculating on the fact that clothes were meant to symbolically cover sin, that the animal skins were a representation of the eventual sacrifice of the redeemer, etc. I think such speculation isn’t really necessary here, though, since we can clearly establish two things:

a) While clothing was not God’s original design for man, he immediately endorsed it as necessary after the fall.

b) Ever since the introduction of sin by Adam, nakedness has been associated with shame, though not necessarily sin.

These two elements are reinforced throughout scripture many times. The prophets continually refer to the shame of nakedness, but Saul, while prophesying, was caused to lay down naked in the street all day and night. David’s wife Michal shamed him for exposing himself while celebrating the return of the Ark of the Covenant, and rather than denying the shame, David responds that he was being shameless in worship, and would be “more vile” for the sake of dancing before the Lord — to his credit. Much descriptive wording is used about clothing, with Proverbs referencing “the attire of an harlot”, and the Chronicles referencing the robe of a king. Ephods, girdles, cloaks, and sandals sometimes get their own subplots in scripture. Clothing is referenced in the gospels and the epistles, and when Revelation wraps it all up, it discusses the clothing we will wear in our perfected state in the new heaven and the new earth — white robes.

All this should establish the fact that there is a spiritual significance to clothing, nakedness, dignity and shame. What we wear — or don’t wear — matters.

2) Modesty, in all of its applications, stands in opposition to pride, vanity, and self-centeredness.

The word modesty is a knife in Christian circles, and dropping it into casual discussion can immediately divide a room into two groups: the cover-up crowd and the dress-up crowd. Some will start tugging at hems and necklines, trying to stretch fabric into places they didn’t intend to cover when they left the house, others will pull a sleeve down over a flashy watch or tuck a pearl necklace under a collar. In his MiH article, Herbert chooses to focus on the dress-up element of modesty, which is perfectly valid. But I disagree with his choice to dismiss the second, equally important element of modesty — purity. Both sides are critical because both evidence a heart problem that’s actually the target of scriptural teaching on modesty. The common thread is selfishness, not style.

Typically, the guy who wears the ten-thousand dollar Rolex with his three piece suit isn’t concerned with condescending to men of low estate, as scripture commands. Ditto the hipster who waltzes into the room wearing all the latest styles and trends. And the woman with the plunging neckline and the jeans lacking sufficient slack to accommodate a cell phone. And the homeschool mom in the denim jumper.

Their clothing choices were all made specifically to attract attention, though they certainly seek different types of attention from different people.

Watch guy wants you to know about his wealth, though if you ask him I’m sure he’d say he just wants to be respectful or professional. Hipster wants you to know he may not be rich, but he’s cool, and you should probably ask him for music suggestions. Jeans lady wants you to know that she spends a lot of time working out, and your stare is the payoff. Homeschool mom wants you to know she’s not a slut like jeans lady.

Now of course all of these are generalizations, and there will be individual circumstances where they don’t apply. I never want to suggest that every clothing choice is made selfishly, I know that’s not always the case. But more often than not, the clothes we wear and the wardrobe we build are intentional, meant to convey something about us that we want people to see.

3) What do you want people to see in you?

I think this is the main point of the admonition in I Peter 3:

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; 2 While they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear. 3 Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; 4 But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price. 5 For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own husbands:

It’s not just a generic commandment, a clear contrast is drawn. Don’t do this, do that. Peter places outward adornment and inward adornment in contrast with each other, and encourages believing women to choose the latter. He also carefully intertwines the concept of modest apparel with humility and subjection within the marriage relationship. I can’t imagine the flak any pastor would get today in encouraging women to call their husbands “lord”, but that’s what Peter holds up as the ideal. These verses suggest that modest apparel for women is honoring both to God and to a husband, and it includes a challenge to both halves of the marriage. Women aren’t to seek out attention by their beauty or adornment, but are to remove themselves from the spotlight and direct attention to Christ by their character and demeanor. Likewise, men are not to objectify their wives either materially or sexually by exhibiting them to the world, as King Ahasuerus tried to do with his queen in the book of Esther.

Women want to know they’re desired, guys want to know they’re respected, and both of these dynamics are at play when it comes to modesty within marriage.

My wife is gorgeous, and every day I’m shocked that she ever agreed to marry me. Since the first time I met her, I was struck by her face and her figure and an overall hotness score way out of my league. I enjoyed her beauty for its own sake, sure, but a fringe benefit was seeing the surprise and jealousy from other guys when they saw us together. For a guy who had spent his whole adult life shopping for husky jeans in the “you’re such a nice person” section of the friend zone, it was/is incredibly satisfying to know other people were/are jealous of my hot girlfriend/wife.

And as much as I’d like to say that’s a compliment to my wife or a way of showing my appreciation, in fact it’s just selfishness and pride, and it’s ugly. When I show off my wife, I want people to see her and I want people to see me, I’m not trying to display Christ.

For my wife, choosing not to accentuate her body in dress is not just an act of humility, but it’s also an exercise in trust, because a wife who chooses not to accent her sexuality in dress might naturally worry that her husband will start to look elsewhere in the sex-saturated culture that surrounds us.

But the call of holiness as it relates to modesty is to become invisible, so that Jesus can shine through our character. People only see the invisible when the distraction of the obvious is removed, and most of us can think of a time in our lives when we have misjudged someone based on their clothing, only to find that our assumptions were totally wrong. The goal shouldn’t be to look good or to look bad, to look rich or poor or hot or professional or pious. The goal should be to let others look past us and our clothes and see Christ in our attitudes.

We’re still learning and growing, but we’re trying to set goals in a way that’s different from the world. I don’t want to be known as the stocky guy in the cheap sneakers and carpenter jeans. I want to be known as the guy with the infectious smile and the love of God written all over his face. My wife doesn’t want to be known as the hottie in the mom car. She wants to be known as a godly wife and mother who chooses each day to prioritize the Lord and her family over her makeup kit and sex appeal. How does this play out in our clothing choices?

Cost, comfort, and utility have moved up our clothing priority list. Fashionable, flashy, and fitting have moved down. In terms of family fashion, we would all be described as utterly unremarkable — which leaves a lot of opportunity for people to see past that to our clothes to what we really want to display.

4) Culture does matter, but scripture matters more

Citing the modesty standards of South American hunter-gatherers isn’t really an honest attempt to wrestle with God’s design for sexual purity as much as an attempt to escape any objective standard at all — The fact that some remote tribe eats other people doesn’t mean that God doesn’t mind cannibalism.

Likewise, insinuating that American women adopt the hijab because someone might get excited about an ankle gets the charity argument backward and imposes our liberty on our sisters, which is equally wrong.

Of course there are different standards of modesty, but that doesn’t mean that we ignore the concept completely. There are a lot of different cultures, but we don’t live in all those cultures, we live in our own. And I completely agree that there’s nothing in scripture that says Victorian England or the 1950s American Midwest cornered the market on modest apparel. Clearly, there have always been more sensual and less sensual clothing choices, forming a range within each culture and time. But attempting to isolate modesty within that broader spectrum is a deliberate obfuscation of the clear and simple responsibility before us: within the context of our time, and our culture, be modest.

Again, stop trying to build fences, and follow the shepherd.

5) It’s really not about you.

One of the critically defining differences between a Christian worldview and a secular one is the idea that your life ultimately isn’t about you. The fact that a cosmic drama is playing out and your individual, day-to-day choices can affect the course — though not the conclusion — of that struggle should make us feel small but honored, wondering with the Psalmist “What is man, that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man, that thou visitest him?”

Our clothing choices can reflect this if we choose to prioritize our own preferences below the call of holiness and the call of charity on our lives — and make no mistake, charity builds on the demands of holiness. Holiness says don’t dress in a way that draws attention to yourself, charity says be willing to defer for the sake of others as well. Paul addresses this in I Corinthians 8, where he talks to believers about meat offered to idols, which had become a point of contention in the early church.

9 But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak. 10 For if any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol’s temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols; 11 And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ died? 12 But when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ.

I think the application to dress is apparent — even in acknowledging our rights and liberty in Christ, the call of charity is to consider our brothers and sisters before ourselves. In that sense, though none of us are responsible for someone else’s sin, we are all responsible to help each other pursue righteousness, and as James reminds us, to him who knows to do good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.

I have never heard any Christian suggest that women are sexual gatekeepers as Herbert suggests, neither that men aren’t responsible for their behavior, neither that a woman is to blame for tempting a man too far.

Never. Not once. Not in a dozen different churches over the course of my whole life.

That whole assertion smells a bit like a strawman — deliberate misinterpretation of an argument so that it can be easily refuted.

The Bible clearly teaches personal responsibility — that we will all give account for our choices when we stand before the Lord. Finger-pointing won’t be an option. If I were locked in a room full of naked models, the requirement of holiness and purity for me would be exactly the same.

Situation is irrelevant to our responsibility. It is not, however, irrelevant to our struggle.

A woman is not responsible for a man’s lust problem, but the fight against lust is a microcosm of the cosmic drama I referenced earlier; and though we can’t determine the conclusion of an individual struggle against lust, we can certainly impact the course, and make it harder or easier for a brother or sister to stand strong. To act like our choices don’t impact each other is to deny the impact of the church in its entirety.

If I have given in to lust and am pursuing sin, then it’s correct to say that no matter how much clothing a woman applies, I will find a way to lust. Again, no fence will stop someone intent on jumping. But that’s not always the case, and especially not within the context of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Sometimes people — men and women — are gritting it out against the devil and fighting for purity one step at a time in a sex-soaked culture where access to every kind of fantasy is only a URL away. The fight for purity is exhausting, and when someone has spent the last month trying to break a porn habit — which, by the way, is epidemic within the church — the last thing they need to see is selfies of you in your two-piece swimsuit on Facebook.

In other contexts this isn’t controversial at all. Scripture clearly doesn’t prohibit alcohol consumption, but I’d never break out a case of beer in front of someone struggling with alcoholism.

Is it my fault if he falls off the wagon and kills himself and six other people in a car wreck?

No.

But could I have been the reason he held on a little longer? Could I have helped him choose a different path by denying my own impulse and deferring my own liberty because I cared more about his soul than my drink?

Yes.

You and your husband might be fine with you showing off your legs at Bible study, but what about the younger single girl sitting across the room who has struggled with loneliness and can’t seem to attract a guy by dressing modestly and displaying her godly character? Is your choice going to embolden her to flaunt it in violation of her conscience?

You might be fine with your wife wearing a sexy dress when you go out for a double date, but are you setting your friends up to struggle with lust? Is it worth it?

You might be perfectly okay tubing down the river with a bunch of guys in your swim trunks, but are there brothers there who have struggled with same-sex attraction? Maybe you should consider enduring the discomfort and covering up for their sakes.

Brothers, your ego needs to be put aside. Sisters, your sense of beauty and confidence needs to come from Christ, not from your threads.

To paraphrase Romans 14:15, Destroy not him with your clothes, for whom Christ died.

6) Don’t treasure appearances

I think some of the key passages about appearances are seldom referenced in the context of dress.

One is God’s challenge to Samuel at the anointing of King David (I Samuel 16:7) — “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”

The other comes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6.

28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? 31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? 32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. 33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

And finally, from I John 2:

“15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

If there’s one way to wrap up a discussion of modesty, it’s to remember that there are much, much bigger things to focus on. The call to purity and shamefacedness (a lost concept in our age) shouldn’t be something that stresses us out or makes for lengthy churchwide battles between believers.

Most people tend to paraphrase “take no thought…” as “don’t worry”, and while there’s certainly a valid exegesis in that direction, I like the first phrase for its breadth — which is actually more in keeping with the passage as a whole. The point isn’t that God will provide, though He certainly does. The point is that the believer shouldn’t be focusing on the material, but the spiritual; the fact that God provides is offered only as a reason in support of that conclusion.

So if you’re standing in front of your closet for 15 minutes chewing your nails trying to find the right outfit, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t give your mind to that. Don’t give it more importance than it deserves. Don’t let it steal away your joy. Take no thought for what you will put on. Seek the Kingdom, and your clothing choices will be made for you.

There’s some merit to the allegation that Christians argue about things like modesty so often because we aren’t doing what we’re supposed to be doing. Christians in Egypt, China, and Sudan don’t have the luxury of fighting about headcoverings, they’re busy preparing their families for the eventuality of martyrdom for the gospel. Surely they care about many of the same scriptural intricacies we do, but they also understand that those things are less important than sharing the gospel and encouraging one another in the face of hostility and persecution. Doctrinal nitpicking is something of a Western privilege.

It’s not contradictory to assert that clothing matters, and then suggest that we should “take no thought” for what we wear. Christians are called to live in the tension of uncomfortable truths, and this is no exception.

So if you’re someone who works hard at honoring the Lord through your modesty, let that be its own reward. Don’t seek the praise of men, don’t spend your time worrying what others think of you, and don’t allow yourself to look down on those who are still immature in that area. Let truth govern your personal standards and grace flood your relationships.

If you’re someone who has let the world dictate your standards of dress by comparing yourself to others rather than seeking out what is most honoring to the Lord, don’t live in guilt or become defensive when others approach you with critique or challenge. Rather, practice humility, accept reproof, then check it against scripture to see if there are habits God would have you change.

Don’t love the world, or its trends, or its praise, or the things it says are cool. Be set apart in everything, even dress.

These are the dynamics of Christian life, and they all evidence the Spirit in our hearts more than any piece of cloth ever could.

As a political writer and opinion columnist, I swim in an ocean of criticism.

The outrage culture we’ve built over the last 20 years — for which Sean Hannity and Trevor Noah bear equal blame — has degenerated healthy debate into insults, shouts, jeers, slurs, and just so, so much anger.

It’s not that we argue too much — I actually wish Americans argued more—and better — but we do sometimes fall into a rut of criticism that we’re unwilling to climb out of.

See, argument is a structured discussion used to discern the truth of a proposition, and if we had more arguments we would have less outrage, shouting, and street fights. The lack of actual argument has left us unable to discern and defend truth, which is why we spend so much time screaming our baseless opinions at others, and getting offended when others scream theirs at us.

It’s an untenable situation, and one that will likely resolve itself as soon as people start caring more about what’s true than what’s polite.

Like argument, there’s an appropriate place for criticism and even condemnation. Law enforcement officers who abuse their power should be criticized. Alt-right “race realists” intent on rekindling 1930s ethnofascism should be condemned, along with their violent, pro-censorship Antifa counterparts on the Left.

Criticism is meant to pressure, to challenge, to motivate toward something higher. Condemnation is meant to isolate something harmful, letting others know to stay away for their own good and the good of society.

But the problem we face is that both of these important tools are habitually abused.

Criticism isn’t meted out reasonably in hopes of modifying behavior, it is piled on everyone as a way to elevate the one offering the critique. Condemnation isn’t reserved for the truly heinous among us, it is slopped on indiscriminately like mayo on a McChicken.

Convinced of the impossibility of maintaining standards, we hitch our wagons to the slogan “nobody’s perfect” and seek equality around the lowest common denominator, by hanging every mistake around the neck of those who aspire to something higher.

And so doing, our entire generation is missing the opportunities laid right in front of us:

Build something. Create something. Improve something.

Innovate.

Engage.

Learn.

Grow.

Unite.

Before I get too close to sounding like an inspirational poster, I need to narrow the scope of what I’m talking about. Let’s strip away the layers of presuppositions that have built up over the years, and address the things we all care about — most of which have nothing to do with the issues that fill the headlines any given day.

One of the more insidious side-effects of the two-party system is that it has turned everything in the world into zeroes and ones. We know how we’re supposed to think about different things, based on who we identify with.

Republicans in New Hampshire are supposed to obsess over illegal immigration — even though they’re 2000 miles from the southern border — because, well, they’re Republicans.

California Democrats feel compelled to take a position against North Carolina’s bathroom segregation, despite the fact that it has no impact whatsoever on their state.

We square off against each other on social media, fishing for clues to confirm what column the other person belongs in, rather than judging whether their arguments are valid.

Less than halfway through this column, odds are you’ve already scoped out my profile, followed a couple links, and browsed the comments or my prior articles to decide whether you should share this or mock it.

We all do. It’s the norm now. And it’s cynical and destructive.

Partisanship and identity politics are tearing the nation apart, and the only people who benefit from it are those who receive the blind loyalty it creates.

But many articles have been written on the problem — it’s time to address solutions — and that’s where things get sticky.

On one hand there’s no silver bullet solution to “making America great again”, and anybody pitching one is usually out to make a buck. Red and blue America learned to resent each other decades ago; it’s not going to be undone overnight.

On the other hand, it’s lazy and intellectually irresponsible to suggest that we continue doing what we’re doing, and just accept the fact that left and right will always hate each other, battle in the street, and post gory images of severed heads in place of civil dialogue.

Given current trends, we can’t continue, even if we wanted to. Normal, reasonable Americans are abandoning both major parties at either an alarming or encouraging rate, depending on your perspective. “Independent” continues to rule the national party affiliation race by a wide margin, and third party presidential voting rose 300% from 2008 to 2012, and 800% from 2008 to 2016, despite some of the worst third party candidates in recent memory.

So the question we face isn’t whether the political landscape in the US will change, but rather what it will change to: a perpetual battlefield between increasingly partisan extremes, or an open marketplace of political ideals offered representation within competing jurisdictions — an appified version of government that fits with where culture and technology have already been for years.

The answer was baked into the country by the radical progressives (of their day) who founded it — Federalism.

Federalism has a way of relieving all kinds of tension and returning relationships to normal by developing and maintaining separate spheres of influence. This works with government just as it does for business or even family — who doesn’t have a better relationship with their parents after moving out?

Obviously there are a few things that the whole country needs to agree on in order to maintain a united identity and share the same space, but we shouldn’t have to agree on everything. For a culture that emphasizes diversity, we seem incredibly hostile to the idea that people in different regions should be allowed to have different lifestyles and priorities.

The trend in American politics over the last few decades has been to nationalize every single dispute, either through Congress, executive order, or — most often — the Supreme Court. Every special interest group seeks to wield the Federal government like a cudgel against their political opposition, and so doing, establishes the precedent for the other side to beat them with it given the first electoral opportunity.

Aside from being incredibly uncharitable and narrow-minded, this form of governance is backward, inefficient, and, well, stupid.

It creates redundancies at every level of government, as federal departments conflict with state departments, which in turn conflict with city and county policies established in the interests of folks in those locales. It fails to balance the different views of people in different places with different jobs, lifestyles, and priorities.

Many have written on what I believe to be the most important divide in America today — the rural/urban divide — but few have put forward any ideas to deal with the divergent subcultures.

It’s a real problem, and one extremely evident in my home state of Iowa. Our century-old farm culture is often at odds with the growing segment of the population living in the cities and taking service jobs. The Republican-controlled state legislature has declared war on blue-leaning city governments around the state, using preemption laws to block those cities from instituting policies that conflict with their own.

Over the last eight years, red America encountered a similar problem, and states fought tooth and nail to nullify President Obama’s far-reaching executive initiatives on immigration, health care, housing, climate change, and more.

This “standardize everything” mentality causes gears to grind between each level of the government machine, and ultimately you end up with multi-tiered bureaucracy that is bulky, unresponsive, and useless to most people who are more interested in building a new deck and taking a second job as an Uber driver than arguing the merits of traditional marriage or the war on terror.

What’s really interesting about this stubborn trend in American government is that it stands in stark opposition to pretty much every other cultural trend. Millennials have embraced small businesses over global corporations, customization over comprehensiveness, and individuality over uniformity.

We reshape the world with technology, defying convention and challenging time-honored societal institutions with innovative new concepts. We seek the compartmental, the object-oriented, the personalized, the individual, in everything we do.

Except government.

When it comes to the political system, most Americans — millennials included — are still content to let partisanship guide the system, and pretend to enjoy the biannual knock-down-drag-out that leaves the same two groups of people in charge of our everyday lives.

We have a million different options on our cell phones covering everything from food and fitness to business and entertainment, but when it comes to government, we have only two options — and pretty much every data set you’ll find suggests that few people are excited about either of them.

What if we applied the lessons we’ve learned in every other area of society to government for a change?

What if we increased choice by allowing more parties to develop and challenge the big two?

What if we modernized our electoral system to eliminate gerrymandering, and increase access and transparency for average people looking to make an impact on their government without having to take up activism as a full-time job?

What if you could invest in what you care about through an app in your pocket, rather than by standing in the freezing cold collecting petition signatures?

What if we created an object-oriented system of government that allowed your city or state to reflect the things that are important to you, without asking permission from Washington first?

What if the appetite for Federalism both on the Left and the Right brought us back to a place where we could agree to disagree again?

What if we actually believed in ourselves, and in our ability to break out of the two party shell and build something together?

In the aftermath of tragedies like Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando, Dallas, and now Manchester, I always see a lot of posts discussing the problem of hate, and how we need to just replace all the hate with love — John Lennon style — and that’ll fix what ails the world.

Only it doesn’t work that way.

Human beings aren’t loving by nature, neither are we lovable. We are selfish, proud, ruthless, deceptive, and violent. Love isn’t a naturally-occurring ingredient that just drops into humanity and, once stirred, fixes everything.

Neither is hate as one-dimensional as we’d like.

Love and hate are dependent attributes — their value is derived from their object.

For instance, if I love lying, my love isn’t healthy or right, and I need to let it go and learn to hate dishonesty.

If I hate healthy criticism, I need to drop that hate and learn to appreciate the occasional challenge or rebuke.

Not only are the attributes dependent, but they are also interdependent.

Omar Meteen loved ISIS. He loved and revered an ideology that said it’s okay to murder people, and he very likely loved those who worked with him to those ends. Ditto the Manchester bomber, if indeed it turns out he was connected to the Islamic State that continues to revel in his crime.

To love ISIS is to hate ISIS’s opponents.

If someone threatens my family, my love for them can drive me to violence in confronting the threat. In fact, the whole notion of the armed forces is that love for one’s country — not a hateful desire to kill and maim — should be able to drive someone to violence in its defense.

Some things in this world are contradictory to each other, and one cannot simultaneously love both.

This is expressed several times in the Bible:

Romans 12:9 Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

See the source of hate in the world isn’t a lack of love, but rather loving the wrong thing.

People love pleasure, we love comfort, we love security, we love money, we love routine, we love praise.

Most of all we just love ourselves, and therefore tend to hate anything that contradicts our desires.

And that’s why saying that more love will stop these kinds of attacks is so hopelessly empty. There’s plenty of love for all the wrong things, and it hasn’t helped us escape the grip of the evil ingrained in our nature.

Therefore the question becomes not whether to love, but what to love.

And the only answer that can possibly satisfy is God.

He’s the only reason to love anyone or anything, because God himself is love.

I John 4:7–8 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Notice it doesn’t say “love is God” but rather “God is love”. There’s a difference. God is the source and the destination of love, and in loving him we love all that is good, because he encompasses all that is good.

There has to be a reason to love. It’s not a magic “end all violence” button that we’ve just never pushed.

It’s apparent to me that we no longer understand hate, because we don’t understand love — and that’s as tragic as any shooting or bombing could ever be.

I came home exhausted on Caucus night, just as I had many other nights in the year leading up to our first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

As a veteran of the Ron Paul revolution, I considered myself a hardened political warrior, charging the trenches of the establishment and lobbing internet hand grenades at weak-kneed moderates and security-state neocons alike.

My wife and I met through Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, and Ron was personally involved in our engagement. I was a regional director for Dr. Paul here in Iowa, and, under his state campaign chairs, managed the laborious delegate effort that resulted in Iowa delivering a majority of our national delegates to Ron Paul in Tampa.

As the 2012 campaign wound down, I undertook two new initiatives.

A couple of friends had an idea for a state organization to leverage the strength of the liberty movement into state and local issues, and together we launched Liberty Iowa, which has grown into the most robust libertarian organization in the state.

I also ran for a seat on Iowa’s Republican state central committee, and became part of a libertarian coup that wrested power from the Iowa establishment for two years.

Each of these endeavors included hard-fought battles both political and personal, but it was always worthwhile for the sake of helping people wake up and smell the coffee of individual liberty. The movement was small, but we stuck together and were growing rapidly into a formidable force within the GOP. Iowa’s political analysts and media sources started regarding us with a sort of grudging respect, and the question of the “liberty vote” came up repeatedly during the 2014 midterm elections.

Of course the train of Rand Paul 2016 had already started to chug as well, and many of us were engrossed in the what-ifs of a Rand Paul run.

Rand had alienated much of his father’s base with consecutive endorsements of establishment fixtures Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell, and a lot of liberty people around the state quietly grumbled that the apple had fallen too far from the tree.

Those of us actively working to grow the liberty base and keep our people involved spent a lot of time defending Rand against accusations of selling out. We had seen too much real success here in Iowa to believe that the future of libertarianism lay only in message candidates and internet activism. We knew that a Rand Paul presidential run could do what two Ron Paul runs could not — bring libertarians together with conservatives and tea partiers into a winning coalition.

Quietly, the Ron Paul army left the Gary Johnson purity police behind and began gearing up for Rand 2016.

A Time For Choosing

Many of us only noticed Ted Cruz as an accessory to the great Rand Paul filibuster of 2013 — a guy we knew had enjoyed strong support from libertarians for his senate run, and a fitting sidekick for the heir apparent.

But as time wore on, Rand seemed less and less inclined to identify with the liberty movement, describing himself as “libertarian-ish” and seemingly desperate to dissociate politically from his father and the movement he spawned. Libertarians around Iowa and the nation balked as he added Maine Senator Susan Collins to his endorsement list, lined up a private meeting with Goldman-Sachs executives, and even accepted an invitation to a DC fundraiser for Iowa’s establishment Governor, Terry Branstad, even as the Governor spent his political capital actively trying to oust the Paul faithful — including myself — from the leadership of the state party.

Other problems began to surface with the evangelical and tea party voters we hoped to win over before 2016. When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, Rand Paul went on the record praising the majority opinion — regarded by some as an anti-Christian polemic — and suggesting that Republicans simply “agree to disagree”. Later, Paul stumbled on the same issue by going AWOL during the Indiana religious freedom law controversy.

Those of us stumping for Rand early knew this would cause a firestorm within the Christian community, as the gay marriage issue had already begun a rapid metamorphosis into a credible threat to religious liberty.

By the fall of 2013, those of us leading the liberty crowd in Iowa were working just to keep people together and rally around common state goals — like ending highway speed cameras and police militarization, and fighting a state gas tax hike. To many, the national dialogue was just too discouraging to invest much energy in.

When the debt ceiling fight erupted in the fall of 2013, we expected to see Rand take the lead again, fighting tooth and nail to stop Obamacare and force congress into fiscal restraint.

What we got instead, was the backup.

Ted Cruz’s 21-hour speech was just part of the enthralling episode. He single-handedly forced a government shutdown, drew the ire of Mitch McConnell, and held the establishment deal-makers at bay long enough for an army of activists to swarm DC in opposition to President Obama’s closure of national monuments.

It was no coincidence that our libertarian-dominated state party invited Cruz to keynote our Reagan dinner a few weeks later.

By the time 2014 rolled around, the talk was much less about Rand Paul, and much more about Paul, Cruz, and Lee, the whacko bird triumvirate that had now formed a close alliance in the Senate.

Back in Iowa, midterm primaries were heating up, and the Liberty Movement was actively engaged in two congressional fights, while also allying with hard-line social conservatives to defend our State Party turf against a Branstad-led attempt to drive us out. Few of us had time to think about the presidential race.

That’s when the meeting happened.

A handful of grassroots evangelical, tea party, and libertarian leaders were invited to meet with Ted Cruz for an extensive roundtable Q&A in Ames, where the Senator was scheduled to speak at an event for influential Iowa evangelical group The Family Leader.

For two hours we pummeled him with questions as he presented his vision of stitching the Reagan coalition back together.

I introduced myself as a Ron Paul guy, and asked the Senator whether he was willing to slash and burn the Federal government the way that Ron had proposed. His answer was unexpectedly deferential, expressing deep admiration for, and gratitude to, the Liberty Movement. He assured us that though he did not call himself a libertarian and could not promise to agree on everything, he shared many of our goals, including drastic and specific limitations of federal power.

I came away from the meeting impressed, but not yet entirely sold. It was one thing to indulge a couple libertarians in a friendly group of pastors and Tea Partiers, quite another to sell his record to a group of Revolution die-hards. I needed a second opinion.

The follow-up roundtable I organized in the beginning of 2015 was a test for Ted. I brought together a relentless group of issue-first libertarians, several of whom I knew beyond any doubt would be supporting Rand Paul.

Forgoing the stump speech pleasantries, Cruz engaged us with confidence and knowledge, challenging us to skip the softball questions and get to some areas of disagreement.

This request, of course, we obliged.

Cruz spoke our language, and held his own on a wide range of liberty issues including state nullification, the military-industrial complex, and drug policy. There were some areas of disagreement, and his appeal to us wasn’t grounded in ideological purism, but in common policy goals. Still, even those who still had reservations came away with more respect for his candid approach and willingness to engage us directly.

A Movement to Identity

A few weeks after the meeting, Cruz’s staff quietly began informing us of the Senator’s intent to announce, and asking us for commitments to support him for President.

Such a choice is hard enough for anyone, but for members of the tight-knit liberty community, it was even harder. We knew that Rand would be rolling out his campaign soon, and banking on all of his father’s supporters to fall in line. Undercutting Rand’s political machine by publicly advertising libertarian support for his competitor was asking for trouble.

I just didn’t know exactly how much trouble.

After a lot of thought and prayer, counsel and research, my wife and I became some of the first members of the Liberty Movement to publicly endorse Cruz.

While we immediately set about building a libertarian network in support of Ted, we paid a personal price all year long, as did others who joined us.

At the time, I was a fairly new writer trying to elbow my way into the political blogosphere; my web traffic took a hit, our personal relationships frayed, and we became the target of relentless discrediting efforts.

Traitors, backstabbers, sellouts, frauds.

The hate was poured on for months, further fueled by our unexpected success: by summer we had assembled a strong team of well-known and respected Iowa libertarians to combat Team Rand’s narrative of a libertarian consensus, including nearly all of our state’s libertarian-leaning elected officials.

We began networking on a grassroots level, breaking out the contact lists and meeting up with Ron Paul friends over coffee or lunch, and talking about the great divide. Some flatly rejected the idea of joining Cruz, others said they were still on the sidelines and not ready to get involved. But some were ready to join, and hit the ground running.

The invisible libertarian network began to buzz with something unfamiliar to us: competition. Team Paul declared themselves to have the only “liberty” candidate in the race, and both candidate and campaign frequently insisted that Ron Paul’s base would never support Cruz.

Their narrative took a hit in September, when Cruz scored an unexpectedly close second-place finish in a libertarian straw poll. Rand’s team released a pointed statement attempting to ward off the Cruz counter-narrative, but the damage had been done — national media picked up the story and with Rand’s campaign on life support, the speculation was on about how much of his father’s base would go to Cruz.

The possibility of Cruz not only splitting the libertarian vote, but actually boxing Rand Paul out of his donor and activist base became team Rand’s top concern, and the campaign abruptly changed course.

In the final four months of 2015, Rand left the party-broadening, let’s-agree-to-disagree charade behind and went, as libertarian insiders affectionately refer to it, “full Paulbot”. His debate performances became much more hardline libertarian. He left the foreign policy tough talk behind and echoed his father on peace and restraint. He touted his record on the Fed and criminal justice reform.

In short, he became the candidate we wished he had been all along.

Rand’s supporters cheered the new direction, and claimed that his earlier, watered-down messaging had all been a carefully-executed scheme to win broader support before revealing his true colors.

Those of us on team Cruz saw it differently. We saw a candidate running out of money and support, changing his message to hold on to what remained of a long-neglected base — the political equivalent of taking the ugly girl to prom when the pretty one shoots you down.

None of that is to suggest that we didn’t have problems of our own. Cruz, whose record on foreign policy was so close to Rand’s that the Kentucky Senator actually accused him of “stealing” his foreign policy ideals, had sharpened his rhetoric to appeal to more hawkish Trump and Rubio supporters. His promise to “carpet bomb” ISIS until the “sand glows” created an opportunity for Rand’s team to counterpunch.

For the final two months before Iowa, Cruz libertarians were told that we were the defectors — a splinter vote that wasn’t representative of the movement as a whole. “Liberty Leaders for Cruz” was mocked, and Rand supporters insisted that Cruz had no more libertarian support than the number of people appearing in the group’s promotion video.

Their assertions were largely unsubstantiated, as few polls allowed voters to self-identify as part of the liberty movement. In place of hard data, anecdotes were thrown around by Paul and Cruz to indicate support, and occasional straw polls offered a snapshot of a competitive race for the libertarian vote.

Within our group, though, we knew better. Rand Paul activists who had stood with him for most of 2015 began to quietly approach us, indicating their support for Ted.

More and more, we saw liberty people accepting the premise of a conservative coalition, and weighing the positives of a Cruz presidency against the internet derision they would suffer for joining us.

Slowly but surely, the movement decided to pursue actual policy change rather than lazy and uninvested ideological purity.

Iowa’s Secret Swing Vote

In the lead-up to caucus night, all the talk was centered on the Iowa evangelical vote — the dominant block of voters that had carried Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to consecutive wins in prior elections.

Forgotten — as usual — was the fate of the 26,000 caucus-goers who voted for Ron Paul in 2012.

Cruz’s campaign focused primarily on evangelicals as the larger voting bloc, but understood the significance of the libertarian vote, and made sure to include a pitch to liberty-minded Republicans at nearly every campaign stop in the final weeks. The idea of a candidate not named Paul actually working to earn the libertarian vote was a novelty in itself, and appealed to a lot of grassroots liberty folks used to being despised by both the establishment and the moral majority.

The night before the caucuses, Ron Paul appeared at a rally in Iowa with Rand, and the following morning made an appearance at a small breakfast for state liberty activists in Des Moines. The event was not a campaign stop, and was deliberately tailored to state and local issues rather than the presidential, to allow those of us on different teams to come together again around the man who had united us in the first place. My family joined about a dozen other Cruz supporters in a room full of Rand fans excited to caucus for the younger Paul that night.

Despite disagreeing on presidential candidates, there were handshakes, hugs, and healing all around, as friends and allies realized that the next day we would be back in the same foxhole again.

Then we smiled and bumped gloves and headed back to our corners to await the opening bell.

The caucus results have been sliced and diced a hundred ways, and with Rand Paul’s subsequent exit from the presidential race, the question of where the liberty vote will go is finally being asked — a question Iowa already answered.

Ted Cruz’s win was hailed as a show of power for Iowa’s evangelicals, but the math simply doesn’t add up for that narrative.

Even if Cruz benefited from the Trump-inspired turnout bump — for which there is little evidence — that doesn’t explain his leapfrogging Trump and finishing more than 6,000 votes ahead.

What does explain such a phenomenon is the addition of Iowa’s libertarian voting bloc from 2012. While Carson, Trump, and Rand worked to bring new voters into the caucus process, it is widely accepted that Cruz’s base was primarily reliable, traditional caucus goers — people who showed up in 2012 and 2008.

Though the libertarian vote was cohesive in 2012, the evangelical vote was fractured, with Rick Santorum eeking out a miracle win while losing some votes to Michelle Bachmann, and to a lesser extent, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich.

In 2008, when evangelicals and libertarians each rallied around a single standard-bearer, Mike Huckabee won the caucuses with just over 40,000 votes, and Ron Paul managed fifth place with 11,000.

If you combine the 2012 totals for Santorum, Bachmann, and Ron Paul, and subtract the 2016 total for Rand Paul, you wind up with 53,000.

Adding Mike Huckabee’s 2008 total to Ron Paul’s 2008 total yields 52,000.

Ted Cruz’s 2016 vote total? 51,000.

Of course many other factors weigh into the caucuses, and the math of prior elections is hardly conclusive when dealing with a +50% turnout factor. Still, given that libertarians are among the most active political groups in the state, the question of the 18,000-vote gap between Rand Paul and his father is a huge one.

Two final clues lend themselves to the narrative of a Cruz victory among libertarians. First, in 2012, Ron Paul won 16 Iowa counties. Nine of those counties voted Cruz in 2016, and almost all of them were in the less-traditionally-conservative eastern part of the state. Second, Cruz won the youth vote in Iowa handily, besting Rand Paul among notoriously-libertarian millennials by 12 points.

Ted Cruz’s coup among libertarian Republicans is perhaps the quietest revolution of 2016, in part because it’s the one that Washington fears the most — a union of anti-establishment outsiders overcoming their differences to pursue areas of commonality.

In short, the reassembling of the Reagan coalition.

The Untold Story of Ted Cruz’s Libertarian Victory was originally published in Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everything on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Division is a constant in American society today.

There is division between black and white, Democrat and Republican, men and women, citizens and police, Christians and atheists, T-Swift fans and Kanye fans.

Social media bleeds suspicion and otherness dominates the campaign rhetoric of politicians on the left and right.

There’s a degree to which division is necessary, even healthy, in a free culture — it is the price of choice.

Competition thrives where liberty is the rule, whereas people are necessarily united by oppression.

But the cruel irony of the increasingly vitriolic division that has racked America in recent years is that it is fueled by a slow drift toward group mentality — effectively, a division caused by unity. We’ve moved toward identifying each other as homogeneous masses of skin and ideas, and in our rush to boil everything down to hashtags and headlines, I fear we have lost sight of individualism entirely.

Which is tragic, because a return to individualism is exactly what is needed in the face of the current Syrian refugee crisis.

Both sides of the refugee debate are half-right.

In light of the Paris attacks, it makes sense to question the risk associated with importing refugees from regions currently ruled by radical murderers known for planning and executing terror attacks against civilian populations. This is true regardless of whether the latest attacks in Paris involved Syrian refugees (a question still being hashed out by French police).

Whether ISIS currently plans to infiltrate western nations by posing as refugees or not, the fact stands that they could.

Besides, if they hadn’t thought of that strategy on their own yet, a quick trip to Breitbart would probably give them all the ideas they need.

It is foolish to deny that there is risk associated with accepting refugees from areas under the control of the Islamic State. There are grave risks, and there is a chance that some individuals we accept as refugees could turn and use their freedom to kill Americans.

But that doesn’t mean we should turn them away.

I confess I’ve been torn on this issue for weeks, as the stories of the plight of the refugees poured in, balanced with stories of their sometimes frightening and aggressive behavior in Europe. For weeks I went back and forth between “we should accept the refugees and offer them asylum, because that’s who we are as Americans” and “we can’t afford to offer asylum to people who could pose an imminent threat to our national security, when all the nations around their homeland have explicitly rejected them.”

But as I sipped coffee this morning and tried to catch up on the news, it occurred to me that every time I discussed the issue, I built my reasoning around the terms “we” and “them”.

Somewhere along the way I accepted the premise that every American must be forced to make the same decision with regard to the unfortunates seeking shelter on our shores. At some point I unwittingly decided that the mass of displaced men, women, and children streaming away from war-torn Syria were a uniform group of people just as likely to bomb a stadium as to live a peaceful suburban life.

Only, they’re not.

The refugees aren’t a group — they are individuals, each with their own beliefs, values, and story.

Many of them are simply seeking a new home in which to start over after watching their country destroyed by a war that presents no hope for them, regardless of who wins.

Others may bring with them a hatred for the west and a willingness to commit violence against Americans.

Still others may seek to come here and spend the rest of their life drawing on our entitlement programs and gaming the system.

Some may be insane. Some may be criminals. Some may be radical Islamists. But some could also be good people looking to escape tragedy and build a better life.

The truth of the matter is that this risk has been present with every refugee anyone has ever accepted from anywhere, and if we grabbed a boatload of Americans fleeing Detroit tomorrow and put them on a ship to Japan, Japanese officials would have to assess the same risks. For all they know, that ship could include the next Timothy McVeigh.

Like any virtue, hospitality comes with hazard, and sometimes sacrifice.

But this is exactly why individuality is key: virtue is not exercised collectively, but individually.

Every time I discussed what we should do about the refugees, I neglected to ask myself what I should do.

It’s common folk wisdom to approach the question of war by asking if one would send their own son or daughter to fight and die on the battlefield. My willingness — or unwillingness — to make that sacrifice truly discovers the depth of my conviction with regard to the cause at hand.

Similarly, I had to do some soul-searching as I cast the question of the refugees into an uncomfortably personal light: Would I invite a family of displaced Syrian strangers into my home?

It’s a scary thought, no doubt. I have a beautiful wife and a six-month-old son at home, and we are devout evangelical Christians who are considered infidels by anyone who worships Allah. We would be offering our home, resources, and to some extent our lives, up to strangers — and no security measures could truly guarantee our safety.

After a lot of soul-searching, I decided that I do stand willing to take that chance, to shelter a stranger in need and help them start over.

Opportunities to change someone’s life completely don’t come up every day. They are precious, and must be tended carefully with the understanding that such acts of compassion are the kinds of acts that can change history.

Of course trust is built over time, and my family would want to get to know the people we are trying to help — which might be an inconvenient and scary process. But it’s a process best handled by individuals, and not impersonal and apathetic government agencies.

Maybe the solution to this whole thing is for government to step aside and allow those willing to assume the hazard and reward of taking in strangers to do so, with the understanding that there is no such thing as perfect security in a free society — it’s just a question of what we are willing to take risks for.

Rather than turning the responsibility of refugee resettlement over to government, maybe we should allow voluntarism to govern the process and place these people with families willing to help them get on their feet.

Maybe getting to know someone personally is a far better vetting process than standing in line waiting for paperwork from a naturalization officer behind bulletproof glass.

Maybe learning to take risks and showcase our values in spite of fear is exactly what will render the tactics of terror ineffective.

Maybe we should learn to treat people as individuals again.

Legalizing Compassion: How American Individualism Can Solve the Syrian Refugee Crisis was originally published in Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everything on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.