“I lived in reaction. If Trump and his supporters were for something, I was automatically against it. Not being like ‘them’ became a defining force in my thinking,” Harris explained. “But as Richard Rohr points out, when you organize your life around opposing something, you often become a well-disguised mirror image of it.” Rohr is an ordained Catholic priest known for his progressive theology.
“I adopted a condescending posture,” said Harris. “I othered people. And whenever we do that, we lose some connection to our own humanity.”
Harris went on to explain that he witnessed progressive people exhibit the same problem he had observed in conservatives. It was a “bully energy” that expected everyone to agree to the same beliefs.
“There was just a different orthodoxy, a different list of correct beliefs that made you righteous and acceptable,” he said. “But underneath it, I felt the same fear I had felt in the church. The same anxiety that if you said the wrong thing, or didn’t signal hard enough, you’d be judged, labeled, or pushed out.”
“I thought I had left a high-control environment,” said Harris. “But I had mostly just joined a new one.”
In his second term as president, Trump has displayed a “use of power [that] is more blatant and ruthless than ever. It’s authoritarian and dissent-crushing,” Harris said, citing United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, “people being shot in the streets,” and “families being torn apart.”
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“This is not abstract for me,” said Harris. “My own grandmother was sent to a detention camp in the U.S. during World War II. She was an American citizen. Her crime was being Japanese.”
As Harris has processed these events, which make him “afraid and unsettled,” he has found himself turning to “the stories of the Bible.” He mentioned Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel, Ahab and Elijah, and Pilate and Jesus. Harris was clear that his focus is not on doctrine but on story.
“And when I look through that lens, I find something new,” he said. “I find a fresh awe at what it takes to stand up against unchecked power. I’m seeing Jesus not as a mascot for anyone’s politics, but as someone who stood alone before the bullying power of his day and refused to bow.”
Harris said he used to stare at the cover of Keith Green’s album “for hours” and that he “always assumed that man was Jesus.” Now, he is asking “new questions” prompted by what he is witnessing in our society.
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