The Violence of Civility

It happened again yesterday morning, another social media exchange that I said I wasn’t going to do anymore, but here we are. It is the exact same, tedious, exhausting script, delivered with that wide-eyed, self-righteous earnestness that makes your blood instantly run cold. After a lot of back and forth, they said, without a single hint of irony: “We should all be able to sit in a room and disagree on our politics and spiritual beliefs, without name-calling or violence. We don’t have to be angry with each other about what we believe.”

Are you fucking kidding me?

It sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? It’s marketed as this high-minded, mature plea for unity; the ultimate anthem of the cushioned moderate. It’s a soothing, valium-laced lullaby designed to make everyone lower their voices, shake hands, and pretend we’re just debating marginal tax rates or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. They want to frame a literal existential fracture as a minor lack of manners. A failure of "decorum."

But let’s be entirely honest, because I am completely done protecting the fragile sensibilities of people who use politeness as a silencer. “Disagree politely” is just the most smug, insulated version of “please don’t tell me my rich friends are screwing over your life.” Sharon, we aren't arguing about pizza toppings. We are discussing whether people have the right to exist.

This demand for civility is a trap. Sociologist Ruth Braunstein nailed it when she pointed out that condemning protesters’ “incivility” without engaging their actual issues is just a way of changing the subject. When the state is actively murdering your rights, telling you to be civil is just another dodge. Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about this decades ago. He called out the people who are more devoted to "order" than to justice; people who prefer a negative peace, which is the mere absence of tension, over a positive peace, which is the actual presence of justice.

When your body, your money, your family, or your safety are on the chopping block, being quiet and polite is exactly what the executioner orders. Demanding that victims adopt a highbrow tone while their lives are being bargained away isn't unity. It’s insanity.

I. The Luxury of the Abstract

We need to face a brutal truth: to some people, politics is an abstraction. It’s a trivia game. It’s a Sunday morning talking-head routine. They have high-speed internet, stable corporate careers, and zero chance that a Supreme Court decision will reach out and rip away their health insurance, their autonomy, or their child. For them, an election might as well be a debate over airline regulations. They’ll be perfectly fine no matter who wins, even if they act like it's the end of the world, so it’s just hot takes and intellectual exercise over dinner.

But for the rest of us, politics is the dirt floor we stand on, or the concrete wall we’re being backed into.

When you say we have a "difference of opinion" on immigration, you aren’t talking about processing timelines. You are saying it’s acceptable to hunt down, cage, and deport human beings who fled unfathomable horrors to claim legal asylum. You’re shattering families based on the easily disproven, xenophobic myth that they’re stealing from an economy they actively keep afloat. Look at the numbers. Study after study from places like the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that undocumented and asylum-seeking populations contribute billions more in taxes than they ever consume in public services. But the Right doesn't care about the data; they care about the cruelty. At this point it’s a game. It’s winner takes all and I will lie, cheat, and steal to win. A powerless person doesn't hear a policy nuance; they hear: “I support jailing your family.”

When you say we "disagree" on women’s rights, you are declaring that an entire gender should be stripped of self-ownership, reduced to state-mandated vessels, and forced to carry pregnancies to term under the threat of criminal prosecution. This isn't an academic stance. It’s a hand on the neck.

And don't tell me this is just hysterical hyperbole. Look at the fucking map. The Guttmacher Institute reports that 41 states now have some form of abortion ban in effect. The Movement Advancement Project (MAP) reports that 26 states ban standard puberty blockers or hormones for trans youth. Nineteen states explicitly censor LGBTQ content in schools. Twenty-one states have passed laws telling trans people they can’t even pee in peace. Six states have made providing gender-affirming care a literal felony. In Texas, schools can now replace trained counselors with uncertified volunteer chaplains. In Minnesota and across the country, local school boards are practically turning classrooms into Sunday schools by lunchtime.

Most Americans don’t even want this extremist garbage. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 61% of Americans support abortion legality and 72% support LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections. Yet state after state jam these laws down our throats. And then plead victimhood the second we get angry and protest. The map is completely out of sync with public opinion because raw power writes the rules and writes them so they favor the minority, not the majority. When one side’s favorite dinner topic literally becomes your body, your family, or your kid's survival, it is not a symmetric debate. It is one side preserving their comfort while pushing the other side into the street.

II. The Cage of Codified Belief

When cornered on the visceral cruelty of these positions, the immediate defense mechanism is to retreat behind the shield of private conscience. “It’s just my spiritual belief,” they whine. “Why are you persecuting me just because I have a different faith?”

Let’s pierce through that delusion once and for all: Fine. Your church walls can have any words you want written on them. No one is storming your church. You may scream and yell that’s exactly what’s happening, but it’s complete bullshit and you know it. But the exact millisecond those words grab a government badge, they turn into shackles. A belief has zero legal effect until it’s inked onto a statute or signed by a governor. Once it’s enacted, it isn’t private faith anymore. Now, it’s the raw, coercive, violent force of the state.I really don’t care what you think in the quiet of your own mind. You aren’t being judged for the thoughts rattling around in your skull; you ARE being judged for the systemic cage you feel you have the right to build around other people’s lives.

This isn't just a localized American problem, either. This is a highly coordinated, well-funded, systemic operation sweeping across the entire Western world. Look at the data compiled by organizations like the Global Philanthropy Project. Hundreds of millions of dollars are funneled across international borders by ultra-conservative, right-wing Christian networks to deliberately destabilize human rights. They write the model legislation. They gerrymander the districts. They pack the courts.

Let’s look at what "just a belief" actually does when it becomes policy. Take abortion. Before 2022, it was medicine; now it’s politics in the streets. The Turnaway Study, a massive longitudinal project out of UCSF, tracked the reality: women denied an abortion face four times greater odds of ending up below the federal poverty line, suffer vastly more health complications, and remain trapped in abusive situations. A 2025 Johns Hopkins analysis directly linked these abortion bans to spiking maternal death rates. Another study found 478 excess infant deaths in ban states, heavily concentrated among Black infants.

In plain terms: your "belief" has a body count. If your spiritual position means real people get sick, bleed out, or die in a hospital parking lot, it went way beyond a sermon. It became a death sentence and the blood is on your hands.

It's the exact same story with trans healthcare. Major medical associations, the AMA, the AAP, and every other legitimate provider on the planet, explicitly state that gender-affirming care is medically necessary and drastically improves mental health. A 2022 study published in JAMA found that access to puberty blockers markedly reduces depression and anxiety in trans youth. You think that’s just a personal opinion we can politely disagree on? In 26 states, it’s a crime. When the belief that "trans kids should not exist" lives in the governor's office, healthcare providers get subpoenas instead of prayers. It is not a benign faith; it’s a tool of medical coercion.

And look at poverty. Ten states have flatly rejected Medicaid expansion, forcing 1.4 million low-income people into a total coverage gap. Arkansas and other states have slapped draconian “work requirements” on food stamps and Medicaid—provisions that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) explicitly found make people poorer without doing a single damn thing to boost employment. In the name of "Christian responsibility," people are being systematically starved and denied healthcare.

From the rolling back of reproductive healthcare and trans rights across US state houses, to the sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ "family values" laws pushing through Eastern Europe, to the surge of far-right, anti-asylum nationalism creeping through the UK and Western Europe—it is the exact same playbook. They use the raw, coercive power of the state to enforce a narrow, sectarian dogma on a pluralistic world.

And then, while the ink is still wet on the oppressive legislation they just jammed down our throats, they turn around, put their hands over their hearts, and cry that they are the ones being bullied because someone called them a bigot on the internet.

What the serious, absolute fuck? You are using the police, the prisons, and the statutory code to persecute your neighbors, and you expect a shield of social politeness to protect you from the linguistic fallout of your own malice?

This isn't belief in God. It’s belief in harshness, codified into law. People aren’t upset about your Sunday morning thoughts. They are furious about the cages you build on Mondays.

III. The Gospel of Exclusivity

This brings us to the core spiritual rotting mechanism of the Christian vs. Non-Christian dynamic. There is a profound, cosmic irony in a religious demographic that claims a monopoly on absolute truth and eternal damnation, yet acts completely shocked and victimized when the earthly world pushes back against its cruelty.

They have weaponized a selective, distorted theology to justify a zero-sum political warfare strategy. They have transformed the radical, poor, marginalized itinerant preacher of first-century Judea into a corporate, borders-and-barbed-wire, punitive executioner.

They are completely obsessed with the minutiae of law, purity, and external compliance, while completely abandoning the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and human dignity. They will build massive, multi-million-dollar structures to worship a God of love, and then walk into a voting booth to ensure a family fleeing violence is met with razor wire. They will preach about the sanctity of life while actively stripping away the food, healthcare, and social safety nets that keep infants alive after they are born.

Their entire theological framework has become an architecture of exclusion. It is a system designed to look down on the uninitiated, to cast out the non-believer, and to force compliance through either cultural hegemony or legal incarceration.

I have to be super clear about who I’m talking about here. This isn’t every Christian. Millions of Christians oppose forced-birth laws and absolutely hate the idea of state-mandated prayer in public schools. This is specifically about Christian Nationalists. That super toxic faction that insists America was founded exclusively as a Christian nation. The one that says our laws must reflect one specific, hyper-conservative denomination's values, and that secularism is a systemic sin. They wrap themselves in the cross, waving the flag, constantly crying about how they are being "persecuted," while they simultaneously hold the levers of power in Congress, 25 statehouses, and dozens of school districts.

And they are dangerous. PRRI’s data shows that about 11% of Americans qualify as Christian nationalist adherents, and another 21% are sympathizers. Among those true adherents, an absolute horror-show statistic emerges: 30% explicitly agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

That is not your quiet, weekly parishioner who just wants to do charity work. This is a prequel to a civil war running on a loop inside someone’s head. And it is a millions-of-miles cry from the “turn the other cheek” core of the actual Jesus narrative.

The hypocrisy of this modern Phariseeism hangs heavy enough to choke you. If you claim a monopoly on absolute truth, cosmic love, and the sanctity of life, why does every single one of your policies end up being punitive on Earth? Why vote to rip away healthcare and school lunches from hungry kids? Why fund NRA lobbyists while gutting housing budgets? Why loudly preach charity on Sunday and wire your own yard with triple-lock security and razor wire on Monday?

They want the glory of the religion—the "love, joy, peace" billboard—without doing a single ounce of the work. They want pride parades to quiver but demand kneelers in public classrooms. Christian nationalism is a political domination project, not a personal creed. It explicitly states that if you don’t worship at their altar or comply with their preacher’s political agenda, you are a second-class citizen at best.

Yet, they want to sit in the room with you, smile, pass the salt, and pretend that none of this matters. They want the social validation of being "good people" without doing any of the actual, difficult, terrifying work of love. They want the benefit of your civility while they vote to systematically erase your peace.

And when those laws punish you, strip your rights, and threaten your family, and their followers still demand that you smile and be kind to them? That is straight-up, old-testament authoritarian gaslighting.

IV. Refusing the Premise

Listen to me very carefully: You do not owe respectability to those who are actively fighting to strip you and the people you love of their fundamental rights. You do not owe a soothing, inside-voice tone to politicians who treat your body like public property, your kids like sermon examples, or asylum seekers like subhuman criminals. Your anger isn’t a character flaw. It’s the only sane, human, moral reaction to having your life objectified and dismantled by law. It is justice roaring.

We have to completely blow up the worst lie of all: “We’re all on the same side, we’re just disagreeing.”

No. We are not on the same side. You can’t “sit down together” and find a healthy compromise on whether women are full human beings. You cannot have a polite debate about whether trans youth deserve life-saving healthcare, or whether religious freedom means the state gets to prefer one aggressive faith over everyone else. These aren’t policy debates between equals. These are structural attacks by the powerful on the powerless.

So the next time someone offers you the “civility card,” the next time Sharon or anyone else asks you to sit quietly in the room and "respect their positions," you have every right to flip the fucking table. Remind them exactly what their "opinions" do to actual, breathing people. Look them dead in the eye and remember who walks away safe after the coffee is cleared. The people who aren't getting the bills, the subpoenas, or the medical complications are the ones asking you to smile and nod.

That’s not the moral high ground. That is privilege refusing to get dirty.

Sitting quietly in the face of this is done at your own peril. I, for one, absolutely refuse. Because sometimes, the only appropriate answer to a monster trying to consume your life is to look it square in the eyes and say: Not today.