A nation that refuses to feel will always repeat what it refuses to remember.

There’s a particular brand of emotional distance that only religious certainty can create.

I’ve seen it. I’ve lived in rooms where pain was met not with comfort, but with scripture. Where doubt was pathologized. Where grief was interrupted by platitudes and moral detours. Where people who claimed to follow a gospel of love could not hold a single honest conversation about how their belief system hurt the people sitting across from them.

And we need to name this for what it is: not devotion, but disconnection.

Because somewhere along the way, large parts of American Christianity—especially the white evangelical kind—decided that obedience mattered more than awareness. That belief trumped emotional presence. That compassion had to be filtered through orthodoxy. That you could say you love your neighbor while voting for policies that destroy their lives.

That’s not love. That’s control.

What makes it worse is that so many of the people practicing this kind of faith truly believe they are being kind. They’re not trying to hurt anyone. They’re trying to “speak truth in love.” But love that cannot hold contradiction, that cannot tolerate someone else’s lived reality, isn’t love. It’s performance.

And performance is what a lot of modern religion has become. A performance of righteousness. A performance of care. A performance of piety that evaporates the moment someone asks a question it can’t comfortably answer.

But here’s the harder truth: a faith that cannot withstand emotional complexity will always default to cruelty.

Because emotional intelligence is the first casualty of spiritual absolutism. When you’re trained to see the world in binaries—good vs. evil, saved vs. damned, man vs. woman, us vs. them—empathy becomes a liability. It disrupts the hierarchy. It introduces doubt. It invites nuance. And if your faith depends on eliminating nuance to survive, then you’ve built your god in the image of your own fragility.

So what does this look like in real life?

It looks like a parent disowning their queer child but claiming to pray for them “every night.” It looks like Black pain being met with Bible verses about forgiveness instead of accountability. It looks like women being told their abuse was “part of God’s plan.” It looks like climate change being dismissed as “the Lord’s timing.” It looks like the rise of authoritarianism being welcomed as “prophecy fulfilled.”

In other words, it looks like spiritual detachment dressed up as moral conviction.

And yet somehow, the people harmed by this disconnection are always expected to be the emotionally mature ones. We’re the ones told to “lead with grace,” to “meet people where they are,” to “understand their good intentions.” But emotional intelligence isn’t about being endlessly tolerant of harm. It’s about being able to name what’s happening and preserve your integrity while doing it.

Which is why I’ll say this plainly:

If your faith teaches you to bypass someone’s pain for the sake of your own theological comfort, it is not a faith rooted in love—it is a cult of emotional denial.

And denial is fertile ground for cruelty. For policy. For power. For empire.

That’s how we get here. That’s how we get people who genuinely believe they are “saving America” while actively dismantling the soul of it. Because emotional disconnection is not a bug of authoritarian movements, it’s the software. It’s the emotional vacuum that allows people to dehumanize others while sleeping soundly at night.

But the work of being human, truly human, is not neat. It is not easy. It does not come with a bullet-point theology or a convenient scripture for every moment. It is messy. Tender. Brutal. Alive.

And it demands presence. It demands we stay with each other, not above one another.

I say this as someone who still believes in the sacred. But if we don’t disentangle faith from emotional disconnection, we will continue to raise generations who mistake obedience for wisdom and control for care.

Faith without feeling is just indoctrination.

And salvation that costs someone else their dignity is not salvation at all.

The deeper tragedy, and what may one day be studied as the emotional autopsy of a fallen empire, is not just the absence of emotional intelligence in these spaces. It is the elevation of its opposite as virtue.

In large swaths of American religious culture, particularly within white evangelicalism, emotional detachment is mistaken for spiritual maturity. The less you feel, the more you are praised. The more rigid your answers, the more solid your theology. Any sign of emotional vulnerability is viewed as weakness, deception, feminization, or sin.

We have raised generations on that doctrine. We are now watching the consequences unfold in real time—across pulpits, protests, courtrooms, and classrooms. You cannot teach people that emotions are dangerous and then expect them to respond to human suffering with compassion. You cannot raise boys to believe empathy is emasculating, then be surprised when they grow into men who legislate from fear. You cannot promote a faith where grief is silenced by doctrine and expect anything that resembles justice to emerge.

Because justice, real justice, requires the capacity to feel. To listen. To mourn. To change.

Jesus understood that. But the Jesus worshipped in much of modern American Christianity has been sanitized and militarized. The weeping Jesus has been edited out. The brown-skinned rabbi who fed the poor and flipped tables in the temple has been replaced by a weaponized mascot of Western supremacy—pale, armed, and draped in nationalism.

That version of Jesus does not cry. He conquers. He does not break bread with the rejected. He builds walls to keep them out. He does not bless the meek. He blesses the armed. He does not welcome the stranger. He deports him.

This is not religion. This is empire performing holiness.

The sobering part is that it works. American supremacy has long mastered the art of co-opting symbols of love and turning them into tools of domination. The Bible. The flag. The Constitution. The nuclear family. All treated as sacred. All weaponized in service of exclusion and control.

This is not just a theological problem. It is a national pathology.

At the center of American identity lies a dangerous belief: that we are chosen. Not in the shared-purpose sense, but in a divinely sanctioned, immune-to-consequence, manifest-destiny sense. That belief is rooted in conquest, baptized in slavery, and reinforced by generations of cultural propaganda. When you combine that belief with emotionally disconnected theology, you end up with people who cannot distinguish between moral clarity and moral superiority.

We have confused being right with being righteous. Righteousness, divorced from emotional awareness, becomes brutality wrapped in scripture.

But perhaps nowhere is this disconnection more clearly seen than in how this nation remembers, revises, or erases the history of the people it has harmed most. The emotional illiteracy that governs modern faith and politics is the same force that allows entire populations to live under the illusion that American greatness has no victims. It is the same willful blindness that turns atrocity into anecdote and oppression into oversight. Not just overlook it, but moralize the denial. Frame its omission as patriotism. Rebrand its violence as “what had to be done.”

There is no honest conversation about disconnection without naming what has been done to Black Americans. And more specifically, what continues to be done in how our story is taught—or not taught at all. American Christianity, American education, and American nationalism have all worked in tandem to produce a kind of curated forgetting. Slavery is softened into "labor." Reconstruction is framed as unstable. Jim Crow is condensed into a few bullet points. The Civil Rights Movement is edited into one soundbite about dreams while the surrounding nightmare is blurred beyond recognition.

This is not just academic malpractice. It is spiritual anesthesia. It is cultural gaslighting. And the church, in many cases, has been its most loyal PR department.

Too many Christians inherited a gospel that can celebrate resurrection without ever confronting lynching trees. They can exalt the story of Exodus while ignoring the bodies that drowned in the Atlantic. They can preach deliverance without ever confronting the fact that they were the Pharaohs.

But this historical detachment is not unique to the Black experience. It is a pattern.

It happened to Indigenous communities, whose genocide was rebranded as manifest destiny. A mass erasure renamed as providence. Children stolen. Land taken. Languages lost. Ceremonies criminalized. Entire cultures destroyed—and then caricatured. And still, there are people who call that progress. Still, there are school boards today debating whether it’s appropriate to teach that any of it was wrong.

It happened to Japanese Americans during World War II, when entire families were ripped from their homes and forced into internment camps simply because of their ethnicity. Their existence was criminalized in the name of national security. Their loyalty questioned. Their dignity erased. And all of it was legal. All of it was applauded by the masses. All of it was framed as necessary for “the greater good.”

It happened to Muslim Americans after 9/11, who were vilified in airports, in classrooms, in neighborhoods across the country. Islam itself was marked as a threat. Mosques were surveilled. Families were torn apart. And millions of people, overnight, became suspect.

It happened—and is still happening—to trans and queer youth whose very presence is politicized in state houses and pulpits alike. Their rights debated like abstract theories. Their survival dismissed as “social contagion.” Their bodies legislated out of existence in the name of protecting someone else’s child.

And all of this cruelty—every chapter—was justified under the same script: a myth of threat. A belief in order. A devotion to purity. A mass willingness to protect the illusion of safety over the truth of someone else’s pain.

This is not just historical. It is active. It is ongoing. And it reveals something terrifying about our emotional architecture as a nation.

Because for this kind of violence to take root again and again, it requires more than corrupt leadership. It requires a mass collective of people so emotionally underdeveloped, so disconnected from their own humanity, that they cannot recognize it being stripped from others.

It requires citizens who have been taught to confuse silence with peace.

It requires congregations who equate righteousness with rules, not relationship.

It requires neighbors who prioritize comfort over conscience.

It requires voters who prefer myths to memory, and policies to people.

That is how empire sustains itself. Not just through systems of power, but through spiritual numbness. Through an internalized hierarchy of worthiness so deep that most people never question who has to suffer in order for them to feel secure.

But what if we did question it?

What if we asked why so many Americans are taught to grieve statues more than stolen children?

What if we told the truth about how white fear has been consistently rebranded as righteousness?

What if we admitted that the greatest American delusion is not that we are free, but that we are forgiven?

This is the emotional rot beneath our national myth. The refusal to feel. The refusal to remember. The refusal to sit in the discomfort of who we’ve been and what we continue to enable.

And until we reckon with that, we will keep choosing disconnection over healing. We will keep mistaking forgetting for forgiveness. We will keep baptizing our worst instincts in patriotic language and calling it faith.

There is no moving forward without naming this.

There is no redemption without remembering.

And there is no resurrection without grief.

This is not theoretical. It plays out every day.

It looks like a pastor preaching against abortion while ignoring the woman silently bleeding in his pew. It looks like a father disowning his gay son but posting Bible verses about love from a mission trip overseas. It looks like a senator quoting scripture before voting to cut food assistance for children. It looks like a judge invoking divine will while sentencing a Black teenager to decades behind bars.

This is not emotional immaturity. This is emotional anesthesia. And this is how cruelty becomes policy.

So what is missing? What questions are we still avoiding?

What happens to a nation that no longer knows how to grieve? What becomes of a people who cannot tolerate ambiguity, contradiction, or complexity? What is the long-term cost of teaching millions to prioritize belief over relationship? How does an empire collapse when its people believe they are too exceptional to fail? What does resistance look like in a culture that celebrates detachment? Most urgently, can emotional literacy be taught after generations of denial?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are survival diagnostics.

If we do not learn to feel again—if we do not interrupt the generational cycles of denial and dominance with something deeper—we will continue to replicate the systems that destroy us. The solution is not more ideology. It is more capacity.

Capacity to sit in discomfort. Capacity to stay with others in their grief. Capacity to hear harm without deflecting to scripture. Capacity to be changed by what we witness.

We need to reimagine spiritual formation as something rooted not in authority, but in presence. Not in hierarchy, but in shared humanity. Not in certainty, but in truth that can breathe.

This is what Jesus embodied. A God who cried. A man who did not preach over grief but sat beside it. A teacher who did not protect power but disrupted it. A faith that did not silence pain but entered it.

We need more of that Jesus. The one who loved without needing to win. The one who showed us that divinity is not domination. It is proximity—to pain, to truth, to each other.

If there is any future for this country, not just socially but spiritually, it begins with reclaiming that kind of faith. The kind that can still feel. The kind that makes space for contradiction. The kind that can grieve what we have done and remain present for what must come next.

This is not a call to tear down for the sake of rebellion. It is a call to rebuild the muscle of emotional truth. Because if America falls, it will not be because we lacked the facts.

It will be because we lost the feeling.

And no empire survives once it forgets how to cry. 

 

Tasha Monroe

Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.

Editor & Writer, The Commons Dispatch

This piece is part of The Commons Dispatch.

Twice a month, we sit with the hard stuff that require reflection, resistance, and viewing the world as it actually is. It’s not perfect, but it’s honest. From Simply Edyn & Co., for whoever’s still listening.  

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