A UU minister walks into a Trump rally. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but it isn’t. Almost everyone believes every person matters. So why do so few of us act like it? Loving your own people was never the problem. The trouble starts when that love quietly becomes permission to care less about everyone else’s kids, safety, and dignity. From the inside, it never feels like cruelty. It feels like loyalty. This message, “A UU Minister Goes To A Trump Rally,” was delivered by Rev. Dr. Marlin Lavanhar at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, after he spent three hours outside a Trump rally in Durant, Oklahoma, talking to the people who showed up. He didn’t go to protest, and he didn’t go to cheer. He went to see for himself who was really there and came back with a harder question about how to hold people accountable without deciding they have stopped being human.

QUESTIONS TO SIT WITH:

• Who have you written off without ever really listening to them?
• Can you stay furious at someone’s actions and still see them as human?
• When you take care of your own people, who ends up outside the circle?
• Do you think of yourself as one of the good ones, and what does that let you ignore?