Conviction Without Contempt

What I learned from East St. Louis, a violent God, and the death of Charlie Kirk.

I never expected Charlie Kirk’s death to stir up memories of myself. Yet as I listened to the public responses, I realized how much he reminded me of who I once was: zealous, angry, convinced I was a victim, and armed with a violent God. This is the story of what shifted in me, how I moved from contempt to compassion, and why that same shift matters for our public life today.

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The Whole Story

As I stood outside of Denver’s Whittier Café a dog sitting on the patio looked at me with eyes that insisted I should give her some love. As I approached, the pup leaned into my legs. Before I could say anything the owner declared, “Oh my God, Charlie Kirk just died.”

I froze there in that strange moment: petting a dog, absorbing the moment, not knowing how to respond. The dog’s owner, also unsure of how to respond, just sat there with me. Both of us were clearly convicted for any number of reasons. Some of them are what you might expect, disagreements with Kirk on both style and substance, an opposition to political violence, and a fear that the reprisals we are seeing would in fact come.

But this isn’t a post about those things, this is a story about reaction and re-grounding, about how a violent picture of God makes violent lives, and how love can unteach our reflex to strike back. Because more than anything else I found myself conflicted because, much to the surprise of anyone who knows me today, Charlie reminds me of a young me.

Charlie and Young Me

When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a paper against affirmative action. I filled it with caricatures about lazy, unqualified people getting jobs they didn’t deserve, and I framed myself and people like me as the true victims.

In high school, when my church youth group took a trip downtown to hand out sandwiches to the unhoused who gathered outside the Denver Rescue Mission, I refused to go. I thought people without homes were just mooching off the goodwill of others. I told myself they should stop being lazy and get a job.

And when I first read about educational disparities in East St. Louis as a part of a class in undergrad, I dismissed it all as propaganda. It was also around that time that I argued with some guy on a ski slope chair lift that everything wrong in American society started with the passing of Roe v. Wade.

So when I came across clips of Charlie, I heard echoes of my past self: young, zealous, angry, convinced I was a victim, determined to be right, and armed with a God who gave permission for resentment and judgment. I look back on those moments now and cringe, but at the time they felt righteous. That’s why Charlie reminds me of a young me. But I also know me today: grounded, curious, empathetic, rooted in love, and convicted without contempt.

And that last piece matters. Conviction matters, because without it we either get swept into the loudest voice in the room or retreat into apathy. But what also matters, is the ground under your convictions.

Me Today

So what happened to the ground beneath my convictions? What changed me and how can we learn from what happened to me, that could help us all?

In the end, two experiences prompted my transformation. The first showed me how varied our human lives really are. The second was a slow turn in my understanding of God, a turning that moved me away from a God bathed in violence to a God whose nature is relentless love. But what brought about such radical shifts?

Ironically, it all happened because I decided to pursue a Master of Divinity degree at that bastion of liberalism that is Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. I hope you picked up on the sarcasm there. Even in the early 2000’s, you didn’t measure people at Concordia on a spectrum of liberal to conservative. You measured them in degrees of conservatism. With maybe one or two exceptions, there were those on the Right, those of the Far Right, and the Ultra Right. In other words, it was an institution that would, barring the completely unexpected, keep me deeply embedded in the only world I’d ever known. Thankfully, the unexpected happened, starting with the church I was assigned to worship at while in Seminary.

Lessons in East St. Louis

Before we ever moved to St. Louis, my then-wife and I were warned again and again to never cross the river into East St. Louis. We were told it was dangerous, a place to avoid at all costs. The same warnings came about certain neighborhoods in downtown St. Louis, places that were almost entirely Black and marked by poverty, disrepair, and disinvestment. People rarely said it out loud, but the message was clear: the danger was not only about crime, it was about race. Those warnings brought to mind the book I had read in undergrad about educational disparities in East St. Louis, the one I had dismissed at the time as propaganda.

So when the seminary assigned me to do my field work at Unity Lutheran Church in East St. Louis, I felt an immediate wave of discomfort. Every student was given a church to serve in during their three years at Concordia, and out of more than a hundred possible congregations in the area, mine was in the very city we had been warned again and again to avoid. When we got the news, my then-wife cried. The fear we had absorbed about that side of the river was so strong that the assignment felt less like a ministry opportunity and more like a sentence.

Seeing Is Believing

That first Sunday morning driving to the church my heart absolutely broke as I drove by the dilapidated school buildings I read about in undergrad. I began to wonder if that book actually understated reality because the truth was so unbelievably abhorrent.

That morning, I met a number of neighborhood children who would come to church on Sunday mornings because adults there would pay attention to them. A few of them had parents who were strung out, but most were single moms working two and three jobs just trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. In either case, they were functionally absent parents and these kids suffered both academically and even more so emotionally.

Doing Life Together

Over the next three years, I spent hours every week in inner city St. Louis and East St. Louis, hearing the stories of the people who lived there. We worked side-by-side on neighborhood projects and wept together at funerals. We worshipped together and, despite coming from two radically different worlds, in many ways we lived as one. Reality had a way of speaking louder than ideology. Fear gave way to encounter, and encounter unraveled me. The categories I had used to divide the world no longer worked.

What that experience gave me was the gift of learning to really understand someone else’s perspective. Listening to real stories and connecting at a genuine and human level tears strawmen apart. As it does, you realize you can still disagree, sometimes profoundly, but it becomes very hard to judge. Because now you know the road that brought them to where they are. You see the struggles, the losses, and the choices that shaped their vision of the world. And when you know the story behind a person’s convictions, the caricature dissolves. You can disagree without contempt, which also creates opportunity for good faith questions when something doesn’t seem to add up.

The Death of a Violent God

But as much as that experience transformed the way I saw the world around me, it did not heal the way I saw myself. I could sit with people whose stories were very different from mine and meet them without judgment, yet inside I still carried deep contempt for myself. The God I believed in still kept score, amplified shame, and demanded perfection only to reminded me that I would never measure up, all before turning to violence to bring peace. So even as my categories for others unraveled, my inner world remained heavy with anger, depression, and a gnawing sense of unworthiness.

However, just like it unintentionally transformed my outer world, Concordia Seminary also planted seeds that, in time, would open space for a different way of seeing God and myself.

You see, at Concordia I had multiple professors who told us that they weren’t there to teach us what the Bible said, they were there to teach us how to read the Bible. And in part, that meant reshaping our understanding of what the Bible is.

What is the Bible?

At Concordia, we were taught to engage with scripture not as a text that dropped from heaven, word-for-word from God's lips to our ears, but as a collection of texts written by real people in specific historical contexts, addressing real situations, using the language and cultural understandings of their time.

This approach was worlds apart from what most people encounter in churches today, where individual verses are often plucked from their context, treated as isolated divine declarations, and applied directly to our modern lives without any consideration of their original purpose or setting. When we read this way, we miss the rich tapestry of what scripture actually is: a diverse collection of human voices wrestling with the divine across millennia, across cultures, and across vastly different historical situations.

Such a flattened reading not only produces bad theology when Christians do it, but it's precisely why many people reject scripture altogether. They've been taught that the Bible demands this kind of wooden literalism, that it's all or nothing, that each sentence must be treated as equally authoritative regardless of genre, audience, or historical moment. Without nuance, without recognition of metaphor, poetry, hyperbole, and the limited perspectives of human authors, the text becomes impossible to reconcile with both history and our lived experience.

How To Read the Bible

But when we approach scripture with attention to context, language, genre, and historical setting, something I was taught to do at Concordia, we find something far more complex and far more beautiful than a divine rulebook. We find a conversation spanning centuries, a community trying to make sense of their encounters with the divine, and a story that continues to unfold as we engage with it today.

And while my application of that teaching took me to places my professors never would have agreed with, those seeds stayed with me. In time, that approach unsettled some of the simple answers I had been taught and opened me to questions I had never dared ask. Almost ten years later, when writing my doctoral dissertation, the habits of careful reading I learned while working on my Masters at Concordia shaped everything. They gave me the tools to see a different kind of God in the text, not the God of violence I once carried, but a God whose nature is relentless love.

Now that may sound sentimental, but I think it is the most disruptive starting point imaginable.

Love that Undoes Violence

We live in a world where we’ve woven violence into everything. Into our politics, our economies, our sports, and even into our religion. We have told the Jesus story as if the Father demanded blood. We have treated divine love as something earned only after someone suffers. We have believed the only way God could save was by being more violent than the violence of the world.

But what if that is not the story? What if God is not violent at all? What if love, not violence, is the foundation of everything?

To even ask that question means we have to notice how the violent story got woven into Christian theology in the first place. Because the violent God is not as old as many of us were taught. It is, in fact, a relatively new addition.

How God Became Violent

Around the year 1000, Anselm of Canterbury wrote a book called Why God Became a Man. He lived in a feudal society, and he overlaid that structure onto the Bible. God became the Lord. Humanity became the serfs. When a serf dishonored the Lord, tribute had to be paid. Anselm argued that our sin offends God’s honor, but none of us can make a payment big enough to restore it. So Jesus steps in and makes that tribute on the cross. That isn’t what the Bible actually says, rather it’s Anselm forcing the Bible to fit the world he knew. In the process, he set us on the road to a violent God.

God actually became violent five hundred years later as Luther and Calvin shifted the metaphor from a feudal estate to a courtroom. Sin became crime. God became judge. The punishment required was death. Jesus steps in and takes the death penalty in our place.

But God would soon take an even more violent turn. Another two centuries on, the American theologian Charles Hodge at Princeton proclaimed that sin was no longer about honor or justice. It became about vengeance. God was imagined as wrathful, demanding not restoration but retribution. In that telling, the cross became the site where God’s anger was poured out, and Jesus was crushed beneath it. That is the violent God many of us inherited.

The Violent God in America

But why did this view become so popular in America?

Every translation makes interpretive choices, so much so that translation is the first level of interpretation. The theology of translators are left like fingerprints on the Bibles we read. Because the theology of Hodge is central to the faith of many modern Bible translators and translation efforts, the word choices often invite us to read the violent God into the story. This includes the NIV, ESV, New King James, the Christian Standard Bible, and the American Standard Version.

Together, these translations dominate the American religious landscape, accounting for well over seventy percent of Bible reading and church use in the United States. They are the default texts of evangelical pulpits, Sunday school classrooms, evangelism campaigns, and personal devotions. The cultural weight of Hodge’s theology is so heavy that even if you grew up in a tradition like Catholicism that didn’t explicitly promote it, you likely absorbed it in the air you breathed. Which means that every Bible you have ever opened, nearly every sermon you have ever heard, and every stranger, friend, or family member who has tried to evangelize you has been shaped by the violent God of Hodge’s imagination. Not because the earliest church proclaimed him, and not because the text itself requires him, but because the translators and preachers who handed you the Bible were already convinced of him before ink ever met the page.

As You Believe, So You Live

And that brings us back to Charlie and a younger me. Because the last thousand years of how we interpret the Bible is not just a history lesson or theology on paper, it’s an unpacking of the God we carried. We both lived out a theology where violence was baptized as virtue.

When I was young, that weight, made me loud. I was depressed in a way that looked like fury. My public posture was certitude and ridicule, but underneath it was a steady, private ache that I masked with being right. The violent God I had learned to serve did not comfort me. He shamed me. He amplified my smallness and made it into a moral failing I could never outperform. So I boxed that shame up and threw it at other people. I became skilled at correcting and destroying, because I wanted to hide the truth that I felt unusable and unlovable.

When my perception of the world outside me changed, that shame became a festering rot in my soul.

Naming that is important because it shows how a theology makes a life. A God imagined in terms of honor, vengeance, or domination will recruit us into shame and performance. It will harden our edges and then invite us to blunt those edges on the people we meet. That is the spiritual logic that feeds religious rage. The story we tell about God becomes the grammar of how we live with each other. But, as I’ve implied, this is not the only way the Bible has been interpreted over time.

History of the Non-Violent God

For the first thousand years of the church, Christians often spoke of the cross in very different ways. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, described what later came to be called recapitulation. He pictured Jesus as the new Adam, stepping into every stage of human life and reversing the failures of the first Adam. By being born, by growing, by suffering, by dying, and by rising again, Jesus “recapitulated” the whole human story so that it could be renewed from the inside out. In that telling, the cross is not a payment to a wrathful God but the moment when humanity itself is healed and restored.

A few centuries later, Gregory of Nyssa leaned on a different picture that is sometimes called the ransom model. In his view, humanity was trapped in bondage to sin, death, and the devil. The cross was not God punishing Jesus but God outwitting the powers that held humanity captive. The devil took the bait, so to speak, and by overreaching in killing the innocent one, he lost his claim on humanity altogether. In that telling, the cross is God’s great act of liberation, breaking the chains of oppression and setting creation free.

These stories may sound strange to modern ears, but they remind us that Christians once imagined the cross as healing, liberating, and renewing. They were not locked into a single picture of God as judge or avenger. They saw in Jesus a love strong enough to absorb violence without returning it, and a power deep enough to undo death itself.

The picture of Jesus I have found invites something else. It shows us a love that undoes violence by taking it into the grave. It shows us a God who absorbs harm rather than passing it along, who refuses to answer death with more death.

That kind of love does not erase the reality of violence, but it makes violence the place where resurrection breaks in. When I step back, I see how the two stories I have told here, my years in East St. Louis and my slow unraveling of the violent God, drew me into that vision. One reshaped how I see other people. The other reshaped how I see myself. Together they gave me a different ground for conviction. A ground that makes it possible to hold strong beliefs without contempt, to stay present to disagreement without sliding into despair, and to keep seeing both myself and others as beloved.

Changes Conviction Without Contempt Brings

So how might a broader adoption impact our public discourse if we made a point of understanding each others’ stories and, whether we get there through faith or some other means, embraced our inherent belovedness?

First, it would reshape the way we form communities. We would focus less on building walls that keep people out and more on digging wells that invite people in. We would create spaces that explore what others believe and, more importantly why they believe what they do. This doesn’t mean all opinions are equally valid, but nurturing trust creates the opportunity to ask honest questions that can change perspectives. Community would become an act of invitation rather than exclusion.

Second, it would interrupt the cycle of political escalation. Just as theology once amplified God’s anger from dishonor, to punishment, to retribution, so our politics now grow more frantic and vile with each exchange. A discourse grounded in love could slow that spiral. It would remind us that conviction and disagreement do not require contempt, and that courage lies not only in holding strong beliefs but in holding them humanly.

Third, it would change what we grieve. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, public mourning has focused almost entirely on his death, with little reflection on the pain he magnified in life. He mocked the struggles of people of color, belittled those without homes or steady work, and championed policies that made life harder for millions of ordinary people. A discourse rooted in love would not ignore his death, but it would also grieve the suffering he dismissed and the real harm caused by his words, things that should have bothered us all along.

Taken together, these shifts could reorient our life together. They could help us build communities of invitation, recover a healthier political imagination, and expand our capacity for grief and empathy. This is what happens when we let go of the violent stories we have inherited and begin to live from love.

Real World Examples

As a few tangible examples, consider the transformation possible through relationships.

Daryl Davis, a Black jazz musician, spent years sitting down with members of the KKK. He listened, he shared, he stayed curious. Over time, more than two hundred people left the Klan and handed him their robes. That happened not because he crushed their arguments but because he saw their humanity and invited them to see his. And while I wasn’t a KKK member, if my younger self had been treated only as the sum of my harshest opinions, I would have been driven even further into them. What made change possible for me was not dismissal but encounter, not ridicule but people willing to share their lives with me and to listen to mine.

Or consider scapegoats undone. Politicians often point to immigrants as the reason for lost jobs, but very few people can honestly say, “I lost my livelihood because an immigrant took it.” Almost nobody is losing jobs in strawberry fields, meatpacking plants, or other places where immigrants typically work. Similarly, anti-immigrant rhetoric often portrays immigrants as dangerous criminals who threaten public safety, but studies consistently show that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. Finally, the argument that immigrants drain public resources and burden social services falls apart with truth. Immigrants contribute billions in federal, state, and local taxes annually, while often being ineligible for many public benefits that native-born citizens can access. In all of these examples, immigrants become a convenient scapegoat for deeper structural failures. A discourse grounded in love resists the bait. It names the real systems that exploit both citizen and immigrant alike, and it refuses to let race or class be the easy target.

And finally, a faith critique. Many liberals have dismissed Christianity as little more than a tool of oppression. Progressives often join them. Yet, as I have unpacked here, there is another story to tell. And this vision is not limited to Christianity. In the mystical traditions of many faiths, we find the same thread: a wisdom that unmasks violence rather than sanctifies it, and a vision of the divine whose nature is relentless love. Sufi poets speak of a love that dissolves boundaries. Jewish mystics tell of a God who repairs the world through mercy and justice. Buddhist teachers point to compassion as the highest path. These wisdom traditions all converge on the truth that love is not weakness, it is strength, and it always calls us toward justice, solidarity, and human dignity.

Ultimately, that dog leaning into my legs on the café patio embodies everything we need to know. We need to realize that like the dog, love is always approaching us and leaning in. What we need to learn, is to lean back. Because that’s how we stay human.

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Practices To Move Undermine Contempt

Here are three practices to help you move towards a life of conviction without contempt. Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation reflection, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, I have something for you.