Love, Hard Truths, and the Sacred Duty of Boundaries.
A few days ago, on November 4th, I sat on the shoulder of a quiet road and wrote about taking back the things I had surrendered over a long decade of political division: my hats, my Bible, my flag, and my voice.
The response was overwhelming. So many of you expressed a shared relief, a shared exhaustion, and a shared hunger for a community grounded in unconditional love, mutual respect, and basic human dignity. As we work to build this new fellowship—a community rooted in the tradition of the early Friends—we are striving to create a sanctuary where everyone is valued.
Yet, after re-reading what I wrote, I realized I left out the heaviest loss of all.
I spoke about symbols, but I didn’t speak about people. I didn’t speak about the empty chairs at our holiday tables. I didn’t address the broken relationships, the fractured courtships, or the quiet estrangements from family members, lifelong friends, and neighbors who embraced or enabled the MAGA movement.
As we look toward the future, we can no longer step around this open wound. How do we build a community dedicated to love while dealing honestly with loved ones who supported policies of cruelty, turned a blind eye to the suffering of others, and still believe that path was right?
To answer that, we have to look back at history, examine our faith with total honesty, and learn how to hold love and boundaries in the very same hands.
Lessons from History: Power, Lawlessness, and “The Way”.
In the earliest days following the death and resurrection of Jesus, his followers did not call themselves “Christians.” They were simply known as The Way. They formed radical, close-knit communities dedicated to caring for widows, feeding the hungry, protecting the vulnerable, and living without violence under the shadow of an oppressive empire.
That early movement flourished through communal trust, but it proved vulnerable to the political realities of its era. In 62 AD, a sudden power vacuum occurred in Judea. The Roman procurator Porcius Festus died unexpectedly while in office.Before his replacement, Lucceius Albinus, could arrive from Rome, the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus seized upon this temporary absence of legal constraint. He convened the Sanhedrin and ordered the execution by stoning of James the Just—the brother of Jesus and a central leader of the Jerusalem church—alongside several others.
We must be unequivocally clear about this history: this event was not about the Jewish people, and it must never be weaponized to harbor anti-Semitism or direct anger toward our Jewish brothers and sisters. Throughout history,corrupt political actors have used religion to deflect from their own actions. What occurred in 62 AD was a classic display of unchecked political self-preservation. It was about elite institutional power exploiting a temporary lapse in legal oversight to crush a movement of moral conscience.
When James was killed and institutional authority operated without restraint, the early Jerusalem fellowship was severely fractured and splintered.
Over the last two years, we have witnessed a modern parallel: political power operating with reckless disregard for constitutional guardrails, ignoring the clear moral will of the public, and digging in its heels. We have seen a profound backlash against this authority, and none of us can predict how difficult the road ahead will be.
But history teaches us a vital lesson: we cannot allow our community to be splintered by the chaos of unchecked power. We must protect what we are building.
Turning the Other Cheek Is Not Surrender.
So how do we respond when the people who participated in this political destruction are our own brothers, sisters, parents,or lifelong friends?
Jesus famously taught us in the Sermon on the Mount: “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn them the other also.”
For centuries, people have misunderstood this passage as a command to be a passive doormat—to accept abuse, stay silent, and allow cruelty to run unchecked. But in the ancient world, a slap to the right cheek was executed with the back of the right hand. It was an assertion of dominance, meant to demean an inferior. To offer the left cheek was an act of non-violent resistance. It forced the aggressor to view you as an equal. It said: You may strike me, but you will not humiliate me, and you will not force me to strike back in hatred.
Turning the cheek means refusing to retaliate with violence, revenge, or verbal malice. It means we refuse to let their hatred transform us into haters.
However, non-violence does not mean a lack of boundaries.
If a friend or family member realizes that the movement they supported caused genuine harm—if they see that standing by while innocent people were vilified, imprisoned, or mistreated was wrong—our doors must swing wide open. True forgiveness requires no entry fee other than genuine humility. We welcome them back into our lives with open arms and zero self-righteousness.
But what do we do with those who still insist that MAGA was right? What do we do with loved ones who remain willing to look the other way while power oppresses the innocent, insisting that the cruelty was justified?
We must be clear: We are under no spiritual obligation to allow people who embrace hate back into the intimate spaces of our lives.
We can love someone from a safe distance. We can pray for their enlightenment, wish them well, and treat them with basic human civility whenever we cross paths, without granting them access to destroy the peace of our homes or the integrity of our community. Loving your neighbor does not mean allowing them to set your house on fire.
Seeing the Slain Lamb: Power Unmasked
This tension—between worldly power and spiritual truth—is the core message of the Book of Revelation.
For generations, Revelation has been misused as a scary timeline of end-times doom. But read through the lens of early believers living under imperial rule, it is a profound critique of earthly authority. Revelation contrasts two ways of living in the world: the terrifying, coercive power of the “Beast” (the political empire that demands total compliance) and the authority of the “Slain Lamb.”
In Revelation Chapter 5, the narrator is told to look for the “Lion of the tribe of Judah”—the military conqueror everyone expected. But when he turns to look, what does he actually see? He sees a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.
Revelation exposes a fundamental truth: Worldly power relies on intimidation, noise, and force, but true divine power is found in self-giving, non-violent love.
When we look at political movements built on grievance, dominance, and the sacrifice of vulnerable people, we are looking at the Beast. When we stand up for the vulnerable, practice radical hospitality, and refuse to bow to intimidation,we are standing with the Lamb.
We hear one thing from the political podiums—claims of strength, victory, and dominance—but through the eyes of faith,we see something entirely different. We see that real strength lies in protecting the weak.
Righteous Anger Without Violence
Some might ask: Is anger ever justified? Didn’t Jesus himself snap when he turned over the tables in the Temple?
It is true. When Jesus walked into the Temple courts and saw money changers exploiting poor worshippers, he flipped their tables and drove out those who turned a house of prayer into a den of extortion. He was deeply, visibly angry.
Did Jesus go too far?
The Gospel texts are very clear: Jesus did not inflict physical violence on a single human being. He did not strike anyone, nor did he use weaponized force against people. What he did was execute a bold, prophetic, non-violent disruption of systemic corruption. He put his body on the line to interrupt systemic greed. He showed us that love is not always quiet and polite; sometimes love demands that we disrupt injustice and name evil for what it is.
Later, when Jesus stood before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, Pilate asked him about his authority. Jesus replied:“My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight… But now my kingdom is from another place.” (John 18:36). And at his arrest, when a disciple pulled a sword, Jesus commanded him to put it away, reminding him that if violence were the goal, he could instantly call upon legions of angels (Matthew 26:53).
Jesus explicitly rejected violence as the mechanism for building his kingdom. Anyone today who believes that political violence, intimidation, or armed insurrection is the way forward is fundamentally mistaken.
Standing Firm in Our Community.
We find ourselves at a critical crossroads.
We are building a community—a new Society of Friends—that must stand as a lighthouse in a storm. We cannot build it on quicksand, and we cannot build it by pretending that truth and falsehood are merely “differing opinions.”
To those of you carrying the grief of broken family ties: it is okay to grieve, and it is okay to keep your boundaries. You can love your family member without validating their support for cruelty. You can hold space for them to change without permitting them to pollute your sanctuary with hostility.
Here is where we must stand:
- We commit to radical non-violence. We will not use the weapons of our opponents. We will not meet anger with anger, nor hatred with hatred.
- We commit to uncompromising truth. We will call cruelty by its name. We will not appease injustice to keep a false peace.
- We extend unconditional love with clear boundaries. Anyone seeking repentance and reconciliation is welcomed with open arms. Those who persist in supporting harm are treated with civility and non-violent love, but kept at a distance necessary to protect our community’s integrity.
- We stand up for the innocent. Like Jesus in the Temple, we will use our voices, our resources, and our bodies to stand between the vulnerable and those who seek to harm them.
The early believers of The Way survived because they loved one another fiercely, shared what they had, and refused to let imperial power dictate their values. When their leadership was struck down in 62 AD, the movement did not die—it scattered, took root, and eventually outlasted the very empire that tried to crush it.
We do not know how bad things may get in the political arena over the coming months and years. But we know who we are, and we know who we serve.
Let us stand tall. Let us protect our communities. Let us love without fear, hold our boundaries without malice, and refuse to surrender the ground we have reclaimed.
Be safe out there, stay firm in the light, and love one another well.