When someone you love leaves the faith because of how Christians practice politics, you may be tempted to fix it fast. You may want to send an article, make a better argument, or explain that the church is not really like that. This guide asks you to wait. Grieve first. Then, slowly, look honestly at the kind of public faith that caused the wound, so that your own faith does not cause it again.
You can work through this guide alone over a few quiet sittings or with a small group across one or two meetings. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone else your story. The questions and practices work whether or not you share.
Start with the loss, not the lesson
A loved one walking away from church is a real loss. It can feel like a death that no one else has noticed. You may still eat dinner together and text on birthdays. But something you hoped to share with them for the rest of your life is gone, at least for now.
The familiar religious responses often make this worse. “God is in control” can be true and still arrive too early. A strong case for the resurrection can be sound and still miss the point. If your loved one left because of what Christians did in public, an argument about doctrine answers a question they did not ask.
Lisa Fields, founder and president of Jude 3 Project, describes a shift in the objection people raise most often. For a long time it was suffering: why would a good God allow pain? Now she hears a different question from the next generation: “If he’s so transformative, why are people behaving this way?” That question is aimed at us. So the first honest act is to stop and feel its weight before trying to answer it.
Give yourself permission to be sad. Grief is not a lack of faith, and it is not a failure of hope.
Name what they saw
Before reading any Scripture, try this observation exercise. Take a sheet of paper and write down, as specifically as you can, what your loved one said or showed you about why they left. Use their words if you remember them. Do not defend, correct, or explain anything yet. Just record it.
Then write a second, shorter list: what you think they saw that they did not say out loud. Be careful here. You are guessing, and your guess may be wrong.
Fields says that when parents ask her to help with a child who no longer wants to be in church, she sometimes tells them the biggest obstacle “is the way you behave.” She adds, “And they often don’t wanna hear that.” She says many “young people are turned off by the way their parents engage politics.” You may not be a parent, and the behavior they saw may not have been yours. Even so, the exercise asks you to leave room for that possibility rather than ruling it out at the start.
Keep both lists. You will come back to them.
Grief that Scripture does not rush
The Bible gives people who love the unbelieving a vocabulary for sorrow. It does not hurry them out of it.
Paul, writing about his own people who had not received Jesus as Messiah, says, “That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart” (Romans 9:2). In context, Paul goes on to make a long theological argument in Romans 9-11. But he does not begin with the argument. He begins by saying that it hurts, and that the hurt does not go away. His reasons are not the same as your situation. His people had not left the church over politics. Still, the shape of the grief is familiar: deep love for people who do not share what you believe, with no quick resolution.
Jesus shows something harder. In Matthew 23, he spends most of the chapter confronting religious leaders for hypocrisy. He tells the crowds to keep the teaching but not to copy the teachers, “for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). Then, at the end of the same speech, he grieves: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37).
Notice where we stand in that chapter. Jesus is the one who names the hypocrisy and the one who weeps. We are not Jesus. Sometimes we sit closer to the people he is confronting than to the crowd he is protecting. The chapter allows two honest responses to sit together. The gap between saying and doing is serious enough for Jesus to denounce it in public. And the right response to people being scattered is longing, not contempt.
This also helps with a question many grieving believers carry: does the church’s failure make the gospel false? Jude 3 holds that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the same as the failure of Christ. Your loved one may have reasoned from a real wrong to a conclusion you believe is mistaken. Do not use that distinction as a weapon. Matthew 23:3 tells you that Jesus himself treated the wrong as real.
What a parent’s story shows
Michael Wear, founder, president and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, tells a story that belongs in this guide. A friend who works on human rights called him about a daughter in college who had stopped attending church. She could not reconcile the values she was raised with and her parent’s political work. Wear considered his friend faithful and their reasoning coherent, even where the two of them disagreed. The daughter was not persuaded.
Wear recalls his friend telling him, “I no longer care so much about the future of my daughter’s politics. I just want her to start going to church with her family again.” He calls it one of the “saddest, but also most hopeful conversations I’d had in a long time.” He says that around the country there are “so many people who are waiting to hear that from their parents,” waiting for a loved one to say that losing politically would be worth it if it meant they might come near to Jesus.
Look closely at what made the call sad and hopeful at once. The parent was not exposed as a fraud. The parent simply reordered their loves. Nothing in the story says the daughter came back. The hope lies in the parent’s change, not in a guaranteed outcome. That matters for your grief. You cannot control whether your loved one returns. You can control what you care about most and whether the people you love can see it.
Turning toward a humbler public faith
Only now does the guide turn to change. If you started here, the change would be a strategy for getting someone back. Grief first keeps it honest. The goal is to become a different kind of Christian in public, whether or not anyone is watching.
Wear argues that “the kind of people we are has much to do with the kind of politics we have.” He says politics belongs “within and under the gospel,” not above it and not outside it. He adds that people are “watching Christians when they show up in politics,” not only when Christians share their faith. Fields makes a related point: our politics are often driven by “trying to find our identity in something that’s too small” to carry it. A person whose sense of self rests on winning cannot afford to admit a contradiction.
Jude 3 teaches that a Christian’s ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician. That does not tell you how to vote. It tells you what your vote must never replace. Fields observes that people on the right and the left both tend to feel righteous by ranking their own favored issues above the rest. A humbler public faith is not the possession of one side.
James gives a plain instruction that fits both grief and politics: “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” and then, “For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20). Wear warns that with anger and fear, “we think that we’re using them when they’re actually using us.” He also insists that rejecting a politics of anger “is not to say that we should not be compassionate towards those who are angry and fearful.”
That compassion applies to your loved one too. Fields describes anger as a secondary emotion: “It comes from unmet expectation, disappointment.” If the person who left sounds angry about Christians, she would ask what pain lies underneath. If you react only to the anger, she warns, “you’ll miss that this is a human being that’s probably in pain.” The same may be true of you.
A practice for this week
This practice has two parts. Do the first even if you skip the second.
Part one: a written lament. Set aside twenty minutes with your phone in another room. Read Psalm 13 slowly. It opens, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). Then write your own short lament to God about the person who left. Use the psalm’s movement if it helps: complaint, then a request, then whatever trust you can honestly manage. If trust feels out of reach, stop at the request. The psalm itself does not pretend the sorrow is over. This page is for God and you. You never have to show it to anyone.
Part two: one act of listening. Go back to your first list from earlier. Pick one thing your loved one said they saw. Wear says that if you feel strongly about an issue, you have an obligation “to actually seek out information for why people disagree with you.” This week, read or listen to one careful, good-faith explanation of the view you resist most on that issue. Your aim is not to change your mind. Your aim is to understand why a thoughtful person might hold that view. Wear says that in silence and solitude he can “start to remember that other people have souls too.” Notice whether anything in you softens toward the people your politics has taught you to dislike.
Do not use this practice to plan a conversation with the person who left. If a conversation happens later, let it come from what changed in you, not from a script.
Questions for conversation
- What part of this loss is hardest to say out loud, and what makes it hard? You may answer silently.
- When you first heard why your loved one left, what was your instinct? What did that instinct protect?
- Romans 9:2 and Matthew 23:37 both express sorrow without an immediate solution. What would change if you let your grief stay unsolved for a while?
- In Matthew 23, where do you honestly find yourself: with the crowd, the leaders, or somewhere in between? What evidence do you have?
- Wear’s friend said they cared less about their daughter’s future politics than about her return to church. Is there a political outcome you would find hard to give up for someone you love? What does that tell you?
- What would a stranger conclude about your faith from your public speech alone: your posts, your arguments, your jokes?
- If your loved one never returns, what kind of Christian do you still want to be toward them?
If you are leading a group
This topic touches family wounds and political loyalties at the same time, so protect the room. Ask people not to name the person who left or share private details about them. Make it clear that anyone can pass on any question without explanation. Do not let the group turn into a debate about candidates or parties. If someone starts defending a side, gently bring them back to the question of what their loved one saw.
Avoid rushing anyone toward hope. Some people will leave the meeting still sad, and that is acceptable. If someone’s grief seems to be affecting their sleep, work or health over a long period, encourage them privately to talk with a pastor or a trained counselor. Seeking that help is not a failure of faith.
Consider ending the meeting in silence for two or three minutes rather than with a summary. Let people sit with what they heard.
One question is worth carrying into the weeks ahead. Wear asks it of the whole church, and it fits here too. Would you be willing to lose something you want in politics if it meant someone you love might draw near to Jesus? You do not have to answer it today. You only have to stop treating the answer as obvious.