📩 When Goodness Isn’t Enough: Why I Struggle to Talk to My Christian Family About Trump, Hell, and What It Means to Be Human
📨 From: Haley
📬 To: My Readers
đź•“ Sent: March 30, 2025
đź“Ś Subject: NEW BLOG SERIES: The Cost of Belief
Dear Reader,
This isn’t a letter I ever imagined writing publicly, but it’s one I’ve needed to say for a long time. What follows isn’t about trying to convince anyone of anything—it’s about naming the quiet grief that comes when love and belief no longer speak the same language. It’s about what happens when goodness gets overshadowed by doctrine, and what it costs to be true to yourself in a family that sees your truth as a threat.
If any of this feels familiar to you, I hope it helps you feel a little less alone.
The Cost of Belief
Phase 1: Heartbreak
There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from being seen as lost by the people who raised you. Not misunderstood—lost. Not just different—but wrong. Not just human—but in need of saving.
It’s the heartbreak of realizing that to the people you love, all the good in you doesn’t count. Or at least, it doesn’t matter as much as whether or not you believe the right things.
Recently, I asked my brother and sister a direct question: Do you think I’m going to hell? Their answers were very different in tone. One was doctrinal, absolute, unflinching. The other was gentler, more ambiguous. But both led to the same conclusion: yes, if I don’t accept Jesus as Lord, I’m bound for hell. I might be writing more of their specific responses in my next “Letters to My Sister” blog post.
What struck me more than anything was this: my character didn’t matter. My kindness, my honesty, my attempts to be a good parent, a good partner, a good person—none of it would stand on its own at the end of life/time/the world. In their worldview, there’s no such thing as goodness without Jesus. Even my best qualities are seen as hollow, counterfeit, or at best, temporary. They are “in spite of” my lack of belief, not because of it or indifferent to it.
And suddenly, a lot of things started to make sense.
Phase 2: Hypocrisy & Power
I started to understand why people like my siblings could vote for someone like Donald Trump. A man whose life, words, and actions contradict almost every value I was raised with. A man who mocked the weak, lied constantly, cheated and bragged about it, fostered division, praised dictators, and showed no personal humility or integrity. And yet—he was their guy.
Because it wasn’t about character. It wasn’t about goodness. It was about power, alignment, and belief. It was about him saying the right things about God, America, and "traditional values." It was about appointing judges, limiting rights, and fighting back against what they see as sin. Or, just as upsetting, it wasn’t about any of that. It was just about picking a political candidate, regardless of their character and intention, who would pass the laws and disable to policies they value.
And if you believe that the world is in a spiritual war, and that God’s law needs to be upheld no matter the cost, then it doesn’t matter who carries that mission forward. He can be crude. He can be cruel. He can be everything Jesus warned us not to be. Because in that framework, we're all sinners anyway. Trump doesn’t have to be good—he just has to be useful.
That line of thinking doesn’t just apply to politicians. It applies to me.
I can be kind, thoughtful, principled, compassionate—and still be seen as spiritually dead. Because goodness without belief is meaningless in their eyes. And that’s where the deepest disconnect lives.
Phase 3: Moral Disconnect
It’s not just that I disagree with them. It’s that I no longer speak the same moral language.
They see me as someone who might still be saved. I see myself as someone who has already been liberated. They are hoping I return. I am grieving that they never really saw me in the first place.
But then I remember: I'm not doing this to change their minds. I'm doing this because my voice matters. Even if it falls on deaf ears, it matters that I speak. It matters that I tell the truth about how all of this has made me feel and the impact that it’s having on our country and society. It matters that I say: I am not broken. I am not in rebellion. I am not lost. Goodness matters.
I am human.
And that should have been enough.
—Haley
