Lately, it feels impossible not to notice how much the language around belonging in Christianty has shifted.
Who is welcome.
Who deserves compassion.
Who gets protected and who gets pushed out.
In times like these, old lessons have a way of resurfacing. The ones that shaped how we first understood love, faith, and human worth.
For me, one of those lessons still rings clearly.
“Red or yellow, black or white.”
I still hear it the way it was sung to me as a child in Sunday School.
Soft. Certain. Reassuring. A simple way of saying that everyone mattered — that love wasn’t selective based on skin color, and that belonging wasn’t something you had to earn.
I believed that then. And I still believe it now even if I no longer call myself a Christian.
That’s why I feel such dissonance listening to some of the conversations happening in today’s political climate.
I hear people who identify as conservative or Christian people who often speak the language of faith talk about removing, excluding, or pushing out entire groups of people because of where they’re from or what they look like. And I struggle to reconcile that with what I was taught faith stood for.
Jesus was born in the Middle East. He likely lived as a brown man in a colonized land. His story centers on hospitality, humility, and care for the outsider values I was taught to admire and emulate.
I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure where I land on the Bible anymore.
I was taught to trust it because it was written by prophets, interpreted by men of God, and upheld by leadership I was never supposed to question. That same leadership, those same “men of God” broke my trust repeatedly. Not quietly. Not accidentally. But in ways that left real harm behind. Completely rejected and exposed publicly. We will talk about that more at a later date.
So I wrestle with this now.
How do you place unquestioning faith in a book when the people who taught you to trust it proved themselves untrustworthy? How do you reconcile belief with a history of reinterpretation, revision, and power held by people who claimed divine authority?
And yet, despite all of that, there are teachings I still believe. Not because of who delivered them, but because of what they point to. One of them is this.
“Thou shalt not kill.”
It was taught as absolute. No footnotes. No exceptions. Life was sacred. Period. And I find myself confused about when or how that conviction became something that could be set aside depending on the specifics of the situation.
I’m not confused about what I believe when it comes to human worth. I’m confused about how compassion became conditional, especially among Christians and those who claim to be people of God.
How love that was once preached as universal now seems to stop at borders, skin color, or status. How faith that emphasized mercy can coexist with language that feels hardened, fearful, or dismissive of shared humanity.
Living outside the box hasn’t meant abandoning belief. It’s meant separating belief from institutions that taught me to override my own conscience.
It’s meant holding onto what still feels true, even if I no longer use the same name for it.
I may not call myself a Christian anymore. But I still believe in the kind of love I was taught to sing about.
For those who believe in the Bible, or still identify as Christian, these scriptures played a meaningful role in shaping how I understand love, impartiality, and human worth. I’ve included them in the King James Version, the one many of us were required to read in church. If you know someone who might need a reminder, these passages are still in there in that Bible.
Acts 10:34–35
Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.
Leviticus 19:33–34
“And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Galatians 3:28
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
1 Samuel 16:7
“But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”
— Life Outside the Box