I’ve been sitting with a weird feeling for a while now. I finally figured out it’s coming from the anxiety I’m feeling of religion vs politics, something we’re all seeing and hearing play out right now. I feel like I understand, at least at a basic level, those folks who are holding up Christianity (or any religion) as the reason to behave as they are.

I was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). I don’t say that as a confession or an accusation. I say it because it’s the soil I grew up in, and for a long time it was the only solid ground I knew.

If you’ve never been inside a faith like that, it’s pretty hard to explain what it feels like. It isn’t just attending Sunday services every once in a while. It’s the shape of your whole life. You learn and are trained to feel the Holy Spirit. This comes as a warmth in your chest, a stillness that tells you something is true. You learn to stand up in front of your congregation and bear witness and testimony, to speak about the moments when the Spirit moved through you. And when you do, the room nods. The room holds you. You feel you belong. It’s all embracing and it’s tribal.

For women, the path was clear. We were to marry a good religious man, raise our children in the faith, obey our husband, and the male elders, and give back to the community through selfless service and good works. I followed that path. Not because someone forced me to, but because I believed in it down to my bones. The structure of religion honestly felt like safety. The rules felt like love.

When you believe that way, and when your faith is woven into every part of who you are, the world divides neatly. There is right and there is wrong. There is light and there is darkness. And you believe that people who don’t share your faith, no matter how kind or good, are living in a shadow. You don’t hate them. You do feel badly for them. You pray for them. You knock on their doors because you genuinely believe you’re offering them salvation. The love is real. But so is the judgment, even when you’ve been taught not to judge.

I know exactly what it feels like to be so certain. To feel chosen and to feel so smart for choosing. To believe that your way of living is exactly the one God intended. And I also know what it feels like when someone challenges that certainty. There’s a fear that rises up inside you and your whole body and mind resists. Because doubt isn’t just an intellectual exercise when your faith runs that deep. Doubt feels like if you give into it you’ll lose your soul. Hell won’t then be far away.

This is the nerve that certain politicians have learned to press hard on right now.

When you hear political leaders wrapping their agendas in the language of Scripture, when they talk about spiritual warfare and God’s plan and the battle for the soul of a nation, I recognize that language. Again, I grew up in it. So did anyone who is deeply religious in any faith. And I know exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s designed to make us feel that disagreeing with a political position is the same as turning our backs on God. It takes the deepest, most sacred part of us, our faith, our fear, our longing to be good and it uses it. Not to bring you closer to God. To bring you closer to a vote and compliance.

A politician isn’t your pastor. A campaign rally isn’t a congregation. A slogan isn’t a prayer. Praying before a political moment is not serving everyone. And them calling what they say a “truth” is them using your belief to manipulate you. And yet I know that when they borrow the cadence and the certainty of faith, it feels the same to people who have spent their whole lives being told to trust their spiritual leaders without question. That’s not an accident. That’s a political strategy.

The church didn’t lose me. The church pushed me out. I was excommunicated after having an affair and removed from the only community I’d ever known, separated from the people and structure that had defined my entire life. And I won’t pretend it didn’t devastate me. It did. I grieved it the way you grieve a death, because in many ways that’s what it was. I felt like a bad person who would never be redeemed because I’d broken a sacred covenant.

But something happened to me on the other side of that closed door to the chapel.

When the institution that had told me for years what to think, how to feel and who to believe was no longer standing between me and the world, I could finally see the world more clearly. Not all at once. Slowly, painfully, and then with a relief I hadn’t known I needed. I realized that my capacity for goodness, for compassion, for moral seriousness hadn’t come from the building. It had always been mine. The faith I’d been taught to place in the church, I could place in myself and in the forms of spirituality I believed in. And I could extend it outward, not just to people who believed what I believed, but to everyone.

That’s what I guess I want to say. Wherever you are on this religious spectrum this is true. If you’re deeply faithful, I’m certainly not here to take that from you. Your faith is yours. But please hold it up to the light when someone in political power tries to speak for God. Ask yourself whether what they’re saying serves your soul or their ambition. You deserve leaders who appeal to your best instincts, not your deepest fears.

And if you’re on the other side and you look at people of faith and see only ignorance or gullibility I’m asking you to see something more. I was one of those people. I was intelligent and loving and completely sincere about my faith. The architecture of belief is powerful because it meets the real human needs of belonging, meaning, purpose, community. Dismissing it dismisses the person we are inside it.

We’re never going to agree on everything. We’re not supposed to. But we can start by understanding that the person across from us isn’t our enemy. They might be someone whose deepest convictions have been borrowed by people who don’t deserve them. They might be someone who is terrified of losing the only framework that’s ever made the world make sense. They might be someone like me standing outside their chapel, mosque or synagogue door that they no longer choose to walk through, discovering that the sky is bigger than any ceiling they were told to live under.

A policy is not a commandment. A political agenda dressed in Scripture is still a political agenda. When someone in office tells you that opposing them means opposing God, they aren’t protecting your faith, they’re exploiting it. They’re counting on the fact that you’ve been taught never to question spiritual authority, and they’re hoping you won’t notice that they don’t hold any such authority no matter how much they pray in front of you. Your devotion is sacred. Their use of it is not. Learn to tell the difference, because that difference is where your freedom lives.

We can talk to each other. But first, we have to see each other. Not as enemies. Not as projects to convert. As people doing the best we can with the beliefs we were given, trying to figure out which ones to keep and which ones to set down.

I kept my compassion. I kept my sense of right and wrong. I put away forever the certainty that I and any religion are the only ones who get to have it.

That’s what set me free. And today knowing that church and state must be kept separate in order to serve all people is what keeps me grounded in who to believe for my politics and who to trust with my faith.

❤️🇨🇦