The older I get, the less interested I am in finding enemies and the more interested I am in understanding people. Don’t Fear the Diversity. Fear the Sorting.
Doomscrolling through local posts. The community Facebook pages, the civics stuff, just whatever’s going on out here in the part of North Texas east of Dallas where I landed a few years back. I’m an avid reader. Always have been, which these days mostly means I’ll read the comment section of a community page I have no business being in, at an hour I should be asleep. And lately I keep hitting the same underbelly I never paid much mind to before, our politics have festered into religion. Predominantly Christian. The us-vs-them. The culture-war stuff. Somebody interprets a message the way ears and minds want to hear it, and all of a sudden there’s a them.
Here’s what gets me. I was raised about as religiously mixed up as a kid can get. Right here. North Texas. The ’80s and ’90s. And not once did it turn into any of this.
So, what happened?
Let me back this truck up a bit.
I grew up surrounded by, immersed in, really — religions, cultures, and ideologies that had nothing to do with the whitewashed schoolbook teachings of small-town North Texas. Early on it was all of it at once. Catholic. Pentecostal. Baptist. Atheist. Depended on which adult you were standing next to. I had theological whiplash before I had a bike without training wheels. Then again, can’t recall having training wheels!
My aunt was a big part of my early childhood. Mexican descent, family native to Texas like a lot of Hispanic families going back over a century. From her I got a culture of family, honest hard work, and looking out for other people. Three generations under one roof. That stuck.
My mother’s grandfather was an Old Testament Pentecostal preacher. The stern old man lived past 100. Spent his days in a suit, in a rocking chair, reading the Bible in a North Texas house with no air conditioning. There I’d be, melting through a t-shirt and cutoff blue-jean shorts, while a hundred-year-old man in a full suit read Scripture like the heat was somebody else’s problem. Whole family under one roof, lives run strictly by the Book and his read on it. People speaking in tongues. My atheist father called them “pew jumpers.” He was a judgmental man, though nobody appointed me to throw the first stone either. But I was already a few religions deep by the time I sat in that room, so mostly I just watched.
I never lived with my biological mother, she left when I was a baby, but I got forced into visitations. Those took place around urban and inner-city Dallas. Pleasant Grove, Oak Cliff, parts of Grand Prairie and Arlington. Neighborhoods people called hoods. My brother and I would go to church with our Godmother, who was Black, and her family. I won’t pretend I understood everything about that life. But the worship, the fellowship — I loved it. It’s where my passion for music got lit. I still carry that to this day with my love of music.
When my adopted father moved us out to the country in the early ’90s, I tried the Southern Baptist churches, mostly hoping to find friends in a new town. He wasn’t religious. Didn’t believe in God. Neither did any of my stepmothers, and yes, that’s plural. Enough of them to need a seating chart throughout the years.
I asked him once, when I was young, whether God was real. For everything he was, and he was an alcoholic, malignant narcissist… I’ll say it plain, he handed me one good line. One. Out of a whole childhood. He said he didn’t believe in some magical spirit in the sky. He said, “God is inside all of us. It’s up to us to determine right and wrong.” Profound, coming from him. He generally was not. But that one hit me.
Around my pre-teens I made friends with the only Muslim kid in our little country school. I learned the basics of Islam from his mother, who was an absolute angel and was always feeding me. Then the Gulf War started. My friend just stopped showing up. They packed up and left. There were rumors among the kids — stupid ones. His name was Hussein Abdul Hussein, and apparently that was enough. Come to find out it’s a common name. He had nothing to do with anybody in Iraq. He was a kid, like me. That’s the first time I remember watching a line get drawn around somebody.
High school is when things got dark for me. I’ll leave most of that where it is, a not-great childhood, except for the time I got with my aunt, my grandmother, and people outside my own house. I started questioning all of it. If there was a God, why did some of the things that happened to me happen? I wrestled with that for the better part of a decade. Nobody’s ever accused me of resolving things quickly.
What I came out the other side with wasn’t an answer. It was a habit. When I run into something I don’t understand, I don’t denounce it. I go learn about it, and build my opinion from there, if I build one at all. It’s made me a menace at dinner parties, but it beats the alternative. Libraries and bookstores were my homes before the internet.
In my mid-20s I befriended some folks from India and got introduced to Hinduism. Later, three friends who’d come over as toddlers, escaping war and conflict in Asia in the late ’70s and early ’80s, taught me about Buddhism, which fascinated me for how simple it is, the way I see it. The thing I noticed with both, and with Islam before them: nobody pushed. They’d share if you asked. Sometimes you had to ask just to understand how to act right around them. That was the opposite of what I’d grown up hearing in a lot of pews.
Later in my late 20s, when I left the “sticks”, I worked with a few Muslims at a car dealership. Again, they melted my heart with great food, great conversation, and one of them just stuck in my head for years. A kind heart, analytical mind, and he is just a good person. Even though the elder of them called a certain dish “camel balls”, which at first I thought was exactly what I had in my mouth, I stopped chewing, until he cracked a smile. Joke was on me.
The one that reached me deepest was pre-colonial Native American spirituality, through a man who became a lifelong friend even though he was a good deal older than me. He went by Cloudy. Some of what passed between us stays mine. But I’ll say this much, he was a guide, in more ways than one, at a time I badly needed one.
By then I could take a piece from each of these and find common ground. Some more than others. Some not much at all. And what I landed on is simple. We’re all different, and that’s what makes us grand. Different people, ideologies, cultures, faces. I like it. Sounds strange, but I think humans are beautiful. Animals too. I find just about everything beautiful — except hatred, violence, abuse, that kind of thing. I’m aware this makes me sound like the inside of a greeting card. I’ve made my peace with it.
Which brings me back to now.
I came east of Dallas with no expectations. I’d put everything into a startup in 2019, and then 2020 walked in and introduced me to the reality of business. I knew the risks. Somehow “global pandemic” never made it onto the spreadsheet. Sold what I had to tread water and floated my way out here.
And out here I found the same thing that’s been happening across the metroplex for over 25 years. Growth. With growth comes different walks of life, and I welcome that, there’s only so many times a man can eat Tex-Mex, steak, burgers, and pizza before he starts praying for literally any other cuisine. This area’s going diverse, the way McKinney already has. It’s not the end of it, either. It’s the front edge of the whole eastern metro filling in, businesses relocating from other states and even other countries for the cost of living, the taxes, the climate.
So, the diversity I was raised inside of is arriving out here on its own. And at the same time, in those same local posts, I’m watching people get sorted into us and them over it.
The deeper I went down the rabbit hole of local Facebook groups and YouTube clips, the more I found myself running into a pastor of a local mega-church. What caught my attention wasn’t the theology as much as the tone. Every message seemed to have an enemy. There was always a “them” lurking somewhere beyond the walls. People who disagreed weren’t simply wrong; they were often portrayed as threats, compromisers, or heretics. After a while, it started feeling less like an invitation to follow Christ and more like a call to pick a side in a never-ending culture war. I couldn’t help but wonder when Christianity became more focused on identifying enemies than loving neighbors.
Here’s the part I keep coming back to. The place that raised me was poor and messy and full of contradictions. Drunk fathers and absent mothers, tongues and atheism, hoods and country churches, all of it inside one childhood. It reads like a sitcom nobody in their right mind would greenlight. And not once did anybody tell me I had to pick a side and hate the other one. I got to walk between all of it. That was the gift, even when nothing else was.
Now I watch the lines I used to cross freely getting policed, and I think that’s the thing actually worth being afraid of. Not the diversity. The sorting.
Almost every faith I ever sat inside of taught the same thing at its core, love your fellow creature, lend him a hand. That part I believe. I just don’t think you get there by drawing a them. I didn’t grow up that way. Right here. And I’m not about to start now.
If your faith is true, it shouldn’t need an enemy. Truth can stand on its own. The moment a leader of a church becomes dependent on a “them” to define who “we” are, I start wondering whether I’m hearing conviction or insecurity.
David A.K.