Laying Down Our Lenses

As I've engaged in discussions involving the intersections of faith, culture, and civic discourse, I’ve felt deeply aligned with the mission to resist the fusion of Christian identity with authoritarian politics. And alongside this sense of conviction, there is another voice inside me, familiar and calm, that has quietly spoken up—reminding me of something else that’s vital: the importance of not reducing people to data, no matter how justified or insightful those analyses may seem.

I want to name this tension I feel—particularly around the usefulness of constructs like Christian Nationalism—and how quickly that usefulness can devolve into reductive tagging: labeling White Christians, Liberal Progressives, Conservative Republicans, MAGA Patriots, or Exvangelicals—or even research-based categories like Ambassador, Accommodator, Resister, or Rejecter. Frameworks can offer clarity. They help us trace the patterns that shape culture and power. But there is a shadow side to this clarity: the risk of distorting people by treating the framework or dataset as the person. We begin to talk about people, rather than to them. We explain, analyze, and critique, but somewhere in that process, the sacred work of listening begins to erode.

Even when someone uses a label for themselves—“I am a Christian Nationalist,” for instance—that label is not the whole of them. It may express how they understand their place in the world, but it cannot capture the full mystery of their lived experience, their childhood stories, their fears, their hopes, or what might be softening or shifting inside them that they don’t yet have words for.

We see a different way in how Jesus met people. One example that continues to speak to me is his interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). By every societal measure, she was someone to avoid—foreign, female, morally suspect. A perfect candidate for reduction. But Jesus did not reduce her. He met her with full presence, spoke to her directly and with dignity, and saw her not as a category but as a person. He named truths about her life not to shame, but to invite her deeper into herself. He listened and responded in a way that honored her voice, her questions, and her capacity for transformation. The result was not shame but revelation—and it changed her.

We see this same ethic in his encounter with Zacchaeus (Luke 19). Labeled a traitor and a thief by his community, Zacchaeus had every reason to expect judgment. Yet Jesus saw him differently. He called Zacchaeus by name, entered his home, and treated him not as a symbol of corruption but as someone capable of change and worthy of relationship. It wasn’t condemnation that moved Zacchaeus to repentance—it was the experience of being seen and received with dignity. Jesus didn’t flatten him into a role. He met him as a person, and the transformation flowed from there.

As someone who often participates in transformational work as a therapist, I’ve learned—again and again—that true understanding begins with a posture of presence and humility: the willingness to not know, to be curious, and to hear people from their own frame of reference. And this isn’t just true in counseling. It applies to every space where transformative dialogue happens—over dinner tables, in church lobbies, at school board meetings, in quiet conversations between neighbors. When we rush to interpret, explain, or mentally sort someone into a category, we stop relating to the person in front of us. We relate instead to our assumptions about them. And in that moment, real listening ends. What’s needed is the courage to stay with the unfolding—to let people surprise us, to resist jumping ahead, and to allow their own meaning to emerge on its own terms. We need more than correct diagnoses of social forces. We need presence. We need the courage to listen.

I was especially struck by this while reading Amanda Tyler’s How to End Christian Nationalism. In her first chapter, she draws on sociological research that categorizes people’s responses to Christian Nationalist beliefs into types—like “ambassadors,” “accommodators,” “resisters”, or “rejecters.” While I understand the purpose of these groupings for analyzing cultural trends, I find myself cautioning against how easily such labeling, if uncritically held, can become totalizing. These aren’t people—they’re datasets. The danger comes when we forget the difference. A survey response isn’t a soul. If we’re not careful, we risk imposing interpretation before offering presence. Tyler herself gestures toward something deeper in Chapter 5, where she encourages conversations marked by empathy and relational care. She invites readers to meet others not with a spirit of correction but with curiosity and humility. That ethic resonates deeply with my own work. What I hope to offer here is a more embodied articulation of how presence functions—not just as a posture, but as a way of listening that helps deeper meaning come to light. The sociological method may illuminate patterns, but it cannot hold the tender shifts that happen in a single, attuned moment. It cannot register what softens when a person feels heard. What the data might label as “Accommodator” could, in presence, reveal itself as grief, longing, or hope not yet formed into language.

Let me offer a glimpse of what that process might look like. In the research summarized by Amanda Tyler—originally conducted by sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry in Taking America Back for God—a scale was developed to measure Christian Nationalist attitudes using a series of statements, one of which reads, "The federal government should allow prayer in public schools." A person who agrees with this statement might be classified as an "Accommodator"—someone sympathetic to Christian Nationalist ideals but not fully committed. But that label tells us nothing about why they answered that way. It flattens their complexity into a data point.

Now imagine sitting with this person in real life. They say, “I just think we’ve lost sight of God in this country. Kids don’t even pray in school anymore.” Rather than interpreting that as a political position or reinforcing a cultural category, I might pause and say, “I hear something in you that’s longing for something sacred to be remembered. Is that right?” If they nod or soften, I might gently invite more: “Can we sit with that together for a moment—this feeling that something important has been forgotten? What does that feel like inside? Is there an image or memory that comes to you when you think about what’s been lost?”

In that space, we’re not debating constitutional law. We’re attending to the ache underneath. And maybe what emerges is a memory of childhood, or the feeling of community they used to experience, or even a deep yearning for moral grounding in a chaotic world. Perhaps they’re thinking about school shootings and the desperate need some students feel to call on God together—to kneel beside one another in shared grief and hope. That impulse isn’t about enforcing belief—it’s about surviving a broken world. The person’s fully formed meaning emerges through attuned listening—listening that doesn’t rush to conclusions, but makes space for something real to unfold.

That’s the work I believe in. Not meaning-making for someone, but making room for them to find their own meaning—with dignity, with complexity, and without being sorted before they’ve even spoken.

There is nothing wrong with naming patterns, and sometimes naming is necessary for accountability and resistance. But naming must never replace the work of hearing. If we are going to resist dehumanization in our culture, we must also resist the subtler temptation to dehumanize through oversimplification. Especially when the stakes feel high, especially when we are morally certain—we need to remember that clarity without compassion can become its own kind of violence.

The call I’m hearing is to stay open—not just in a vague, passive sense, but with a committed posture of engagement that makes room for constructive, transformative dialogue. To keep allowing space for nuance, for contradiction, for people to surprise us. To resist the temptation to prematurely define someone based on what they’ve said once or how they’ve voted or what survey box they checked. To hold steady when we feel the urge to sort, and instead lean toward curiosity. This kind of dialogue asks more of us than quick responses or rhetorical wins—it asks presence, patience, and the humility to let another person’s meaning emerge on its own terms. That’s the kind of work that shifts hearts, builds bridges, and creates the possibility for something new to take root.

In this moment of political polarization, it is easier than ever to fall into camps, to cling to our frameworks, to categorize and move on. But I feel we are called to something deeper. Not just to resist Christian Nationalism, but to resist the ways any of us might flatten the humanity of another in the name of our cause.

Let’s not forget: no matter how true a label may seem, no one is reducible to it. Every person is more than the framework we use to make sense of them. And real dialogue—transformative, healing dialogue—begins when we lay our lenses down long enough to truly see.