I’m tired.

Tired of watching the name of Jesus being used as a political tool. Tired of watching churches become extensions of campaign rallies. Tired of pretending that Christianity, as it’s publicly represented in America right now, reflects the gospel I still cling to in my most broken moments.

I’m not coming at this from the outside. I still believe. Despite the religious trauma I carry, the shame, the gaslighting, the manipulation I’ve seen up close, I haven’t let go of my faith. But I do feel like I’m grieving it. Or maybe grieving what it’s become?

I’m a left-leaning centrist. Politically homeless, I guess. I believe in the sanctity of life, but not just in the womb. I believe life matters in prisons, in hospitals, at the border, in communities abandoned by economic policy, and in neighborhoods devastated by gun violence and addiction. I don’t think “pro-life” should stop at birth. And I can’t square how a faith centered on the compassion of Christ has become so tightly tied to power, control, and punishment.

Working in public health shapes how I see the world. I see the outcomes, the overdose deaths, the food deserts, the racial disparities in maternal mortality, the lack of mental health care. I see what happens when we moralize suffering instead of responding to it. And I know, deeply, that Jesus would not walk past a person in crisis and blame them for their choices.

He touched lepers. He wept with the grieving. He fed people before preaching to them.

I want to believe the Church can be a force for healing, not division. That we can disentangle our faith from the obsession with political dominance. That we can rediscover what it means to care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, not just as metaphors, but as real people with real needs.

I still believe in the Church. Or at least I believe in what the Church could be.

But I also believe we need to do better.

And I’m not afraid to say that anymore.

-B