Knowing More, Doing Better

Seeking knowledge for understanding and healing instead of preparing for battle

Photo by Photocreo on Canva Pro

I was the type of kid who always did the right thing. I wanted to know the rules so that I could follow them. I was uncomfortable with change. When a teacher yelled at the class, I usually felt tremendous guilt over whatever had happened even when I had nothing to do with it.

But I also had a tremendous sense of justice. Long before I ever learned what the Enneagram was, I fell right in line with the Perfectionist personality characteristics of Ones. I believed that people should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do. They should be consistent in their understanding of right and wrong. And if people didn’t do the right thing, I wanted to understand why. I wasn’t content with the explanation that we live in a sinful world and people do sinful things. I wanted to understand the complexities of systems and know why we did things and believed as we did despite our human nature.

And maybe that’s why I struggled with workshops during youth evangelism training that argued that America had always been a Christian nation. Maybe that is why I appreciated college professors at my Christian university who listened to me puzzle through Manifest Destiny and Containment Policy without telling me what to think. Maybe that’s why, over the course of my adulthood, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to podcasts and books that ask for more, wrestling with hard questions and refusing to give simple answers.

My schooling in both Christian and public schools actively instilled a desire for knowledge. My teachers encouraged me to want to learn more and they didn’t offer me simple answers.

But my youth group education was slightly different. I had wonderful adult youth leaders who deeply cared about my spiritual formation and me as a human being, but they also saw my spiritual education as a kind of preparation for a spiritual battle. If I knew enough Scripture, if I understood God’s plan for marriage, if I saw the outside world as a kind of dangerous place that I needed to be ready to face, then they had effectively done their job.

I know that I wasn’t alone in that journey. One only needs to wade into the shallow end of deconstruction spaces to know how many of us faced similar experiences.¹ Our parents signed us out of sex ed because too much information might encourage sexual activity.² When we were taught evolution in high school, we were taught in church all of the ways that evolution was wrong and told that learning the theory would only strengthen our Creationist arguments against evolution.³ We were taught about the Christian influence on our country’s founding without grappling with the nuances and complexities of faith expressions throughout the colonies and just how disjointed it all was. We were taught of all that was good about Christian expansion across empires without discussion of the human cost of power pursued under the banner of the Cross.

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Perhaps the experiences of my childhood and young adulthood are the reason why I keep fighting against the urge to defend faith and institutions and political beliefs and instead seek to understand how we ended up in a particular situation at a particular time or why people are responding to current issues the way that they are. I don’t need more books on why I should feel a certain way or telling me how I can convince others to agree with me on religion or politics.

Instead, I see a broken world that has always needed healing. I see the echoes and rhymes of the past showing up in the present. I understand that the long arc of human history has been a series of starts and stops, improvements and collapse, innovation and destruction. And instead of despairing over what has been lost, I would much rather figure out how to move forward. I believe that God is big enough that He doesn’t need me to defend Him against darkness. He can do that on His own. He created us for Hope.

Fear is a dangerous drug that encourages us to see our opposition as an adversary that needs to be defeated, instead of seeing the humanity in our worst enemy. I’ve been guilty of it too, and I want to do better. I would much rather be building something than standing in the way of inevitable change. I would much rather nurture a flame that gives light and warmth instead of a fire that just destroys.

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Because focusing on defense is nothing but a path to destruction.

A defense of America as a nation founded on Christian beliefs does not help us solve the problem of systemic racism.⁴ Giving a Creationist defense against evolution doesn’t erase the fact that global climate change is a real threat to all of humanity.⁵ There is nothing wrong with defending against harm, but if our determination to defend consistently brings harm to those who weren’t hurting us at all, it might be time to reevaluate our why.

There are no easy fixes to the current cultural moment. We are facing threats to our democracy, people are reevaluating their faith, relationships have been broken by social discord, and a global pandemic accelerated changes that were already percolating in the background, waiting for the right moment to make an appearance. Changes and challenges are not easy, and not all change is good, but what if we encouraged each other and brought more people to the table to talk through, struggle together, and adjust as necessary?

I am a perfectionist, but I’m also a hopeless optimist. I expect to be left wanting while always believing that there is something better on the horizon. I expect people to disappoint me only to hope that they will someday at least attempt to view the world through my eyes. I believe in Grace and Redemption and that our fate is not preordained.

And so I’ll keep being curious. I’ll keep seeing knowledge. And I’ll keep trying to better understand the world and the people I share it with.

My current favorite resources for fostering curiosity and understanding

• The podcast Pantsuit Politics and their accompanying books, I Think You’re Wrong (But I’m Listening) and Now What?

• The podcast Holy Post

• The Substack newsletter of

  Heather Cox Richardson

• The Substack newsletter of

  Jemar Tisby, PhD
  and his book The Color of Compromise

• Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized

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1. This is also why Kristen Kobez Du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne spoke to many of us who grew up deep in Christian spaces.

2. As a parent of two adolescents, I empathize with this desire, but I’m just now beginning to see how much damage was done by two generations of Christian teens being discouraged from understanding the basics about our sexual health.

3. This is not to decry Creationism or Intelligent Design. I do believe that God created the heavens and the earth. But in many Christian circles there is little to no room left for us to discuss different readings or understandings of both the stories in Genesis or the overwhelming scientific record.

4. Also spoiler, America never has, and never will be a “Christian Nation.” For more information, I highly recommend Kaitlyn Schiess’s book The Ballot and the Bible.

5. I strongly contend that if we believe that God created our earthly home, we have even more reason to take better care of it. For more information, I highly recommend Saving Us by Katharine Heyhoe.