Almost all of us feel alienation if
we don’t find a place to call home

By David McElroy · November 18, 2018

As I observed the people around me in the restaurant Sunday afternoon, I felt annoyed. I didn’t like these people — and I don’t figure they would really like me.

If I described the things I didn’t like about these folks, you would probably feel as though I was being petty. Maybe even judgmental. They didn’t look like me, talk like me, or act like me. Everything about them rubbed me the wrong way.

I feel this way a lot lately. I suspect most Americans feel the same. In our own varied ways, most of us are asking, “How could this be possible in my country?”

Conservatives might look at gay marriage and marijuana legalization and an apparent flood of immigrants in their cities — and wonder what went wrong for the world they believe in. Progressives might look at neo-Nazis marching and “voter suppression” in elections and a flood of hatred for immigrants — and wonder what went wrong for the world they believe in.

In a world where the words and actions of people who disagree with us are slammed into our faces by 24-hour news media, most of us have a vague sense that something’s wrong. Some react by saying, “I want my country back,” but what they’re really saying is what we all feel. We all long for a place that feels like home.

I often say that I feel like a “stranger in a strange land,” which was the title of a Robert Heinlein novel. I feel much like the protagonist of the novel. Michael Valentine was a human, but he had been raised among aliens before returning to Earth as a young man. He had absolutely no understanding of the people he had to live among.

When I look back at my life, I see that the only places where I’ve ever really felt at home were among church families and in high school. I think a lot of people experience some nostalgia about high school for the same reasons I do. Even though my life was far from perfect then — and I would never want to return there — I knew where I stood. I knew what was expected of me. I knew how to fit into my social groups. All of that added up to a sense of belonging. I was still conscious of being different from most, but I felt accepted.

All of this was even more true among church groups. When I was in high school, my church group was more home than the place where I slept. I was there every time the doors opened. I had leadership positions. I sang in the youth choir. I had parts in all sorts of things which put me in front of these hundreds of people. I didn’t personally know all of those people, but I still had a place among them. I liked some people. I loved others. I didn’t care for some. But they felt something like an extended family. It felt like community. It felt like home.

I feel less at home among these sort of conservative evangelical church members today because I’ve changed and they’ve changed. They’ve tended to become strongly political in ways which I strongly disapprove of. And where I once shared the sense of certainty about some fundamentals of theology — things I later discovered were fairly modern additions to theology, not ancient understandings of the text — I now have disagreements with their certainty. I have more questions and far fewer answers. I retain a bedrock belief in a God I’ve experienced, but I no longer share their certainty about a lot of specifics.

Because of those changes, I don’t feel at home in the same congregations anymore.

As I thought about all this Sunday afternoon, I suddenly realized that my understanding of local church congregations has changed over the years. I once saw a local church’s purpose as saving souls through evangelism, which mostly meant preaching and teaching and door-to-door campaigns and supporting missionaries.

I have started to see that a church which mimics the New Testament model is less a multi-level marketing scheme and more of a simple community where people live together in love and support.

What is it that makes the people of Amish communities so generally happy with their lives? It’s not the ridiculous clothes they have to wear and it’s not being forced to ride in buggies rather than cars. In fact, I’ve concluded that the specifics of their way of life is almost irrelevant to their happiness and well-being. I think they’re happy because they live in communities in which they know who they are and where they fit in the community. They have a strong sense of a place where they feel at home.

I’m not saying that I want to become Amish. (In fact, I’d make a terrible member of an Amish community.) I’m simply suggesting that what we need is to be able to make community with people who are like us — people among whom we feel at home.

I don’t want to force other people to be like me. I don’t want to stop my friends who use all sorts of recreational drugs and live a “party life” which seems alien and disgusting to me. I don’t want to force everyone to read what I read and think about the things I think about. I don’t want to force others to speak as I prefer or teach their children what I believe they ought to be taught.

I simply want a place of community where I can feel at home. I want a place where other people voluntarily speak and act in ways that are familiar and reasonable to me.

Because of modern media and coercive politics, most people seem to believe that life is one long struggle to force others to be like them. There’s no reason to keep fighting this ridiculous battle. We all need to quit trying to force others to be like us — and we need to find voluntary community with others who are like us. (We also need to quit paying attention to coercive politics and quit swimming in the cess pool of modern news media.)

For me, a church is the right sort of environment. It’s trickier now to choose one that fits my beliefs, because the modern Christian world seems to be slowly splitting into those who are foot soldiers for the evangelical political right and those who are foot soldiers for the progressive political left.

I will not be part of either of those groups.

I just want to find community with decent people who are seeking God and who want to find love and life and fellowship with one another.

If I’m evangelical about anything these days, it’s the simple notion that we all have the right and responsibility to live as we choose and to associate with those of our choosing. But that also means we must leave other people alone to live as they choose and to associate with those of their choosing.

I need a place to call home right now. I need people who are thoughtful, intelligent, loving and open-minded to be community for me. I need this sort of community for myself, but I also need such a community for my future children, so they can grow up among a loving extended family — not grow up with random other children and media personalities shaping their lives instead.

I’m probably not ever going to like those people I saw in the restaurant this afternoon. They were foul-mouthed and ignorant. They weren’t educated and they seemed happy to be what they are. They’re comfortable within their own kind of people. I suppose they feel a sense of community with each other.

That’s not what I want, but thinking about them makes me realize how much I need a community of my own. I’ll have to either find one or build it and attract the people I need.

We all need to find or build this place of community for ourselves — instead of trying to change others through politics or shouting each other down on social media.

Note: The picture above is one I shot of Cedar Grove Baptist Church in Leeds, Ala., just before sunset in July 2018. The church is about a mile from my house.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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