It is a troubling dilemma. They are friends, neighbors, fellow church members and family.
Some we’ve known well — or thought we did — for decades. Now we face the stark realization that something at their core is very different.
How to respond is unclear and challenging. These are not mere differences of opinion, doctrine or even political leanings — but of basic human decency.
Long-held and widely shared values like honesty, fairness and compassion once seemed non-negotiable. Now they are tossed aside as insignificant and unnecessary.
To cast these as mere disagreements is to do injustice to the injustices being exacted. The hands and hearts of those supporting such atrocities are not clean.
Also cast aside is the one who explicitly said the greatest commandment is to love God with all one’s being and one’s inclusively defined neighbor as oneself.
To suggest some other ranking of love and concern is raw heresy — fully at odds with Jesus’ life, teachings and calling.
There is nary a word from him suggesting favoritism based on nationality, race or anything else. Yet Jesus is drowned out by the siloed echoes of hatred and hostility consumed throughout the week.
Once well-fed with enough fear, disinformation and false equivalency, it seems anything and everything can be digested despite its resulting harm.
How does — and why would — one stay in relationship with those who enable or excuse such hateful spite, ongoing thuggery and horrific injustices?
Yes, many of these people have long been important in our lives. They are those we like, even love.
We’ve seen the side of them that is generous, kind and hopeful. In fact, we didn’t know there was another side that would come to dominate and erase the most basic human values long taught by teachers, church leaders and parents.
But here we are. And we don’t know what to do.
Staying in relationship would be the obvious default. But at what cost?
It is disillusioning and exhausting. Leaving those relationships, however, feels like giving up.
So the compromise is often to remain friendly, keep any conversation as superficial as possible and not let our total loss of respect show too much.
Yet it’s getting harder to live with hope that this is a temporary matter; that redemption will come. For no degree of corruption, chaos and cruelty seems to move them.
Looking inward, one can detect our own unhealthy feelings of angst, even anger, that can arise when realizing that those long assumed to be driven by care and compassion are now empowering the very opposites of those attributes.
We wonder how they became so susceptible to embracing a heretical, even blasphemous, ideology that claims divine favor and privilege for white Americans at the expense of others whose resulting suffering is ignored or excused.
However, history answers those painful questions. This is not round one in the rise of authoritarianism.
Ideologies matter. They can and do lead to abuse of power and persons.
Retaining respect is difficult when seeing those whose value systems we thought were higher than recently revealed.
Should our response be sympathy in assuming they have been innocently misled? Or have cultural shifts simply revealed previously disguised fearful minds and unloving hearts?
These are questions, not answers to the dilemma so many of us face today.
We are simply aghast at the ways those we long considered to be good persons — even disciples of Jesus — have chosen vastly different basic values.
On one hand, rightly, our default response is on not excluding others.
On the other is a conviction-fired unwillingness to live in relationships that suggest a wide embrace of untruth, inhumanity and injustice is not a big deal.
Complicity (at least by vote if not voice) in the ongoing demeaning and dehumanizing of vulnerable people — leading to arbitrary intimidation, gross inhumanity and family destruction — strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a good and decent person.
To not weigh such attitudes and actions of those we’ve long trusted, and even loved, is to be dishonest with ourselves. And it is a failure to stand up for those with whom Jesus closely identified as the least of these.
Whatever response we choose, it can’t be a play-it-safe refusal to stand in opposition to the growing danger and destruction of white male authoritarianism that embraces everything Satan offered to Jesus that he refused.
Even, or perhaps especially, if a whole bunch of other professing Christians are onboard with such raw dominance and cruelty.
In fact, faithfulness calls more loudly at such times. It is a dilemma that deserves our thoughtful discernment and careful actions.
But, in the face of injustice, silence is never the right choice.
John D. Pierce is director of the Jesus Worldview Initiative (jesusworldview.org), part of Belmont University’s Rev. Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership. Join us for the first Jesus Worldview Conference, October 13-15, in Nashville.