I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how faith changes, not because we abandon God or reject the childlike trust we’re called to, but because maturity allows us to honor the Mystery without taking it for granted. Over the last few years, I’ve gone through something I can only describe as an unlearning. Not deconstruction, but a slow and sometimes painful re-examination of what tradition handed me, and what it left out.
And even before I understood any of those inherited systems, I had already learned what theological tension felt like. I became a Christian at eight years old, entirely on my own, while attending a Catholic grade school. That meant growing up with two communities that both claimed to follow Jesus yet practiced their faith in ways that felt worlds apart. I was the Pentecostal kid who didn’t want to kneel during Mass or recite prayers I didn’t see in Scripture, and it forced me to ask tough questions long before I had the language for them. It grew me up fast. I wasn’t doubting God. I was trying to understand why people who loved God could disagree so sharply about what it meant to follow Him.
Much of my early formation came from my father and from pastors who genuinely shaped me, people of deep integrity like Drs. Jack W. Hayford and Myles Munroe, along with elders and mentors who still speak into my life today. Their sincerity left a lasting imprint. But the theological systems they inherited, frameworks shaped by 19th-century dispensationalism through Darby and later popularized by Scofield, became assumptions I never thought to question. I didn’t recognize them as systems at all; to me, they were simply “Christianity.” It wasn’t until I began reading scholars like Daniel McClellan and historians like David Blight and Douglas Blackmon that the blind spots appeared. The world behind the text opened wide, and what I found wasn’t crisis, but clarity.
As I continue to study history, linguistics, and biblical scholarship, I see that the faith I inherited: sincere, grounded, taught by men who lived what they preached, was not the same as the cultural Christianity dominating public life today. My mentors passed down devotion, integrity, and reverence for Scripture. But around that core, American Christianity absorbed cultural narratives many mistake for theology. And in recent years, those narratives have hardened into something louder, angrier, and far more political.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the rise of Christian nationalism. It dresses itself in biblical language but is fueled by fear, nostalgia, and mythologized history. It talks righteousness while grasping for dominance. It quotes Scripture while ignoring context. It proclaims liberty while demanding uniformity. Ironically, the very discipleship I received from pastors like Hayford and Munroe, their humility, scholarship, and commitment to truth, now helps me see how far today’s cultural Christianity has drifted from the Jesus they taught me to follow.
And this, more than anything, has made “truth before tradition” not a slogan but a spiritual discipline. When you read actual history, not the sanitized versions, patriotic sermons, or myths, you realize how much you never knew.
When I was a kid, my father’s record collection was my library. The album that grabbed me most wasn’t jazz or the classics, it was Harry Belafonte’s Swing Dat Hammer, full of chain-gang songs sung by men whose sorrow cracked through the vinyl. I must have played it a thousand times, trying to understand pain I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for. I didn’t know it then, but those songs were my first encounter with historical truth: raw, unfiltered, un-theologized.
Decades later, reading Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name hit me like a punch to the gut. Most of us saw Roots on ABC, but reading this primary-source history brought a tightness and heaviness I couldn’t shake. This time it wasn’t a soundtrack. It was documentation. Policy. Court records. Evidence. America laid bare.
Reading David Blight’s Race and Reunion showed me how intentionally our nation rewrote its memory. The “reconciliation” we were taught celebrated unity while burying Black suffering. The “heroic” narratives were manufactured, curated, stripped of complexity. We weren’t taught history. We were handed comfort.
So yes, I resist easy answers about hell, the second coming, or rigid systems like dispensationalism. Not because I’ve abandoned belief, but because I refuse to cling to interpretations built on selective readings instead of honesty.
Data isn’t cold. Sometimes it breaks your heart. But it also sets you free.
This shift has changed how I think about charity. My wife and I recently packed shoeboxes for a church outreach to kids in need. We loved it. The instructions were simple: one “wow gift,” like a toy, then essentials like toothbrushes, combs, and the things most of us take for granted.
I love strolling around the store aisles with my wife as our impromptu dates. But as we picked out small toys, a familiar ache surfaced: poverty is a policy choice. Scarcity is a policy choice. The fact that nonprofits carry burdens that governments and institutions refuse to shoulder, that too is a choice.
It made me wonder: how did we come to accept generosity as a substitute for justice? How did Christians become comfortable with systems that create the very suffering they pray over?
Long before I wrestled with this, the prophets did. Isaiah, Amos, Micah, and Jeremiah all spoke to people who loved religious gestures but ignored structural injustice. Their message was unwavering: God wants justice, not offerings that soothe the conscience while leaving oppression untouched.
The Old Testament Minor prophet, Amos, said it best:
“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Nothing I’m feeling is new. I’m simply waking to what generations of theologians, pastors, and justice-minded thinkers like Gustavo Gutiérrez, Dorothy Day, Howard Thurman, Walter Brueggemann, Jacques Ellul, Cornel West, and Michael Eric Dyson have already named with far more courage: faith is hollow when it refuses to confront the systems that harm people.
They all said, in their own way, what the prophets proclaimed: a society that relies on charity to survive has abandoned justice. Charity isn’t wrong. It’s simply what becomes necessary when justice fails.
So, when I feel the tension of packing a shoebox while grieving why it is needed, I’m not discovering anything new. I’m stepping into an old, sacred discomfort shared by those who believe God’s heart aches wherever inequity is normalized. Their work gives me language for what I’ve sensed: that nonprofits are not signs of moral health, but symptoms of structural failure.
My wife and I have tried to live this tension quietly. No announcements, no applause. We’ve helped single mothers who were homeless, housed children abandoned in the fallout of federal policy, and stepped in when systems failed people we knew. We didn’t post about it. We didn’t run it through a nonprofit. We weren’t trying to “do ministry.” We were trying to be present in the way Scripture describes the church: not an institution, but a people who see another’s burden and decide to carry part of it. Those moments taught me more about justice and compassion than any sermon. They also showed me how unnecessary much of our suffering is, not because God wills it, but because the safety nets are thin and the gaps are wide.
This is where my faith still burns hot.
Not in dogma, but in integrity.
Not in defending systems, but people.
I don’t have all the answers. But I won’t turn away from truth, not even when it’s uncomfortable, disruptive, or politically inconvenient.
Faith that cannot survive data is not faith. It’s indoctrination. A God who cannot withstand scrutiny was never God, but an idol shaped in our image. And love that cannot face history is not love at all. It’s sentimentality.
I still pray. I still believe. I still pursue the will of God.
But I want a faith that is deep, courageous, and honest.
One that embraces truth rather than hides from it.
Faith can withstand scholarship, history, and nuance.
It rejects the counterfeit certainty of Christian nationalism and honors the God who tells us not to fear truth, but to walk in it.
This, I’m learning, is what spiritual maturity looks like: not knowing less, but finally recognizing how much there is to learn and trusting that our questions don’t threaten God.
