Someone called me a liberal last year, and I just looked at them for a second before I said anything, because I wanted to make sure I was going to say the right thing and not the reactive thing. And what I said was: I’m not a liberal. I’m a Christian. And they kind of blinked at me like those two things were obviously different, and I thought, well, that’s exactly the problem, isn’t it.
Let me tell you how I got here. I didn’t grow up with a sophisticated theology. I grew up going to church the way most people in the South go to church, because your parents went, because the community went, because that’s what Sunday meant. And I didn’t think that hard about it until I was old enough to start reading the New Testament on my own and actually paying attention to what it said, and then comparing it to what I was seeing in the pulpits and in the actions of the people who were loudest about their faith. Those two things did not match. They did not match at all. And that gap, between what Jesus actually taught and what a lot of people were doing in His name, is what has occupied a corner of my thinking ever since.
The Jesus I read about in the Gospels was not complicated. He was radical, but He wasn’t complicated. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Welcome the stranger. Care for the poor. Love your neighbor, and when you ask who counts as a neighbor, He tells you a story about a Samaritan, which in that time and place was equivalent to Him pointing at the person you were most likely to cross the street to avoid, and He says: that’s your neighbor. That’s who you love. There is no asterisk. There’s no footnote about deserving poor vs. undeserving poor. There’s no clause about the stranger needing the right paperwork. The Sermon on the Mount is not a political platform. It’s a way of being alive in the world that starts and ends with the question of how you treat other people, especially the ones who can’t do anything for you in return.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. You take that list of things, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, welcoming the stranger, caring for the vulnerable, fighting for the dignity of people who are being stepped on, and in 2026 those things are called liberal. They’ve been called woke. They’ve been packaged up and labeled as a political ideology that the other side is supposed to oppose, and a large number of people who identify loudly as Christians have ended up in the position of opposing them. And I don’t know how you read the same book I read and land there, I genuinely don’t, but I know it happens, and I think it happens because somewhere along the way the party became the faith rather than the faith informing what party, if any, you chose.
I think about my Eagle Scout oath a lot when I think about this. Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I earned that rank at the same time Gary did, and after we got our Eagles I stayed with it and he moved on, and over the years I came to understand something about labels. If you claim a label, you’d better be ready to live it. If you walk around telling people you’re an Eagle Scout, those twelve words become a standard you’re being measured against every day, whether you invited the measurement or not. Same with Christian. If you tell people that’s what you are, you’d better be living what you claimed. And the test is not what you do on Sunday morning. The test is what you do on the other six days, and specifically what you do when it costs you something, when helping somebody isn’t convenient, when welcoming somebody creates friction, when the easy thing and the right thing aren’t the same thing.
I’ve given ninety-eight units of whole blood. Not because anyone asked me to, not because it’s impressive, but because once every eight weeks I can scrape twenty minutes out of my day and do something that might save somebody’s life, and my body reproduces blood, so it costs me nothing except the twenty minutes and a needle I don’t love. I’ve driven people home at two in the morning when they had no business driving. I’ve given students a place to sleep when they had nowhere to go, and it probably violated some policy somewhere, and I’d do it again. I distributed more than eight thousand Hate Has No Home Here signs across fifty-three cities and seven states, because I believe that, I actually believe that, and I wanted the people in those cities to see that their neighbors believed it too, because sometimes you need to know you’re not alone in what you know is right. None of those things are political positions. They’re responses to what the Gospels ask of you.
So when people use the word woke like it’s an accusation, I want to ask them what they think it means, because the original meaning of being woke was being awake to injustice, being aware that there are systems and habits and arrangements that hurt people, and deciding to pay attention to that rather than look away. And if you go back to the prophets, if you go back to Isaiah and Amos and Micah, if you go back to the Sermon on the Mount, that is what they were asking people to do. They were asking people to wake up. They were asking people to see the widow and the orphan and the stranger and the prisoner not as background characters in someone else’s story but as the central moral test of your own. Being awake to that is not a partisan position. It’s a very old religious one.
I’m not asking anyone to agree with me about politics, because I don’t really think of this as politics. I think of it as a very basic question about what your faith actually requires of you on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody is watching, when there’s no social credit to be earned, when the person who needs something from you is inconvenient and maybe not the kind of person your crowd would approve of. That’s the test. Not the bumper sticker, not the church attendance, not the volume of the worship, but the Tuesday. What do you do on the Tuesday.
I’m not a liberal. I’m not a conservative either, for that matter. I’m a person who read the Gospels and tried to take them seriously, and what they asked me to do turned out to look a lot like what some people mean when they say woke. I’m fine with that. I’d rather be caught living it than caught debating it.
Further Reading
- Can Graphic Design Help Mend a Political Divide? (AIGA Eye on Design) — Design bridging political divides
- The Design of Democracy: Branding Shapes the Battle for Belief (PRINT Magazine) — Visual communication and political/faith narratives
