The parking lot had been scraped clean of the overnight dusting of snow. I was making the familiar shuffle between the hotel room and my truck — transferring luggage, brushing a thin crust of ice from the windshield, doing the small winter rituals travelers everywhere know by heart. Another guest was doing the same a few feet away. Two strangers, two scrapers, no politics, no noise. Just the cold.
I made a passing comment about the weather and the roads, then went back to my work. After a minute or two, I realized the man had stopped clearing his car. He was standing behind my truck, staring at something. When our eyes met, he shook his head slowly, the way someone does when they’ve already decided what they’re looking at.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, walking around to see what had caught his attention. A flat tire? A leak? Something mechanical, I assumed.
He pointed at my bumper. “I don’t see how those two things can be on the same car.”
There were only two decals there: an Al Gore for President sticker, and a small descending dove — the symbol of the Holy Spirit, a quiet reminder of the faith my wife and I lived out in our Methodist church, where we sang in the choir and taught Sunday School.
It took a moment for his meaning to land. He wasn’t pointing out a problem with the truck. He was pointing out a problem with me. In his view, a person couldn’t be both a Christian and a supporter of a Democratic candidate.
I remember standing there, speechless. In my upbringing — and in my understanding of faith — his conclusion wasn’t just wrong. It was incomprehensible.
This story has stayed with me for twenty‑five years. It was a watershed moment — a quiet shock that left me wrestling with how two people shaped by the same religious and cultural framework could arrive at such different conclusions from the same teachings. Over time, I came to understand that his comment wasn’t really about me, or even about politics. It was the visible tip of a much deeper divide.
What we now call the “culture wars” didn’t appear overnight. They grew out of a widening gulf in how we interpret faith, identity, and moral authority — a gulf made sharper by the certainty that comes with religious righteousness.
When Jefferson and Madison wrote about the relationship between religion and government, they understood the power of personal belief. They also understood the danger of allowing any single religious interpretation to dominate a political system. Even within one faith tradition, the range of beliefs can be vast. Multiply that by the number of religions, denominations, and worldviews in our society, and the risk becomes clear: when one group’s convictions are elevated above all others, the result is not unity but divisiveness, dominance, suppression, and intolerance.
They warned us of these dangers. The question is whether we are still listening.
This series is my attempt to step into this volatile terrain and examine how religion functions within our modern social and political landscape. If we can better understand the dynamics at play, perhaps we can also understand:
how our own beliefs, practices, and biases fit into the larger picture, and
why there is such a powerful impulse to imprint one belief system onto others?