JP Decker

Anyone else hearing the narrative being set across networks and platforms with no real evidence to support said narrative? Sorry, but I’m not buying it. Americans are not stupid. Stop it!

I lost my manufactured identity and almost every friend I had the year I stopped performing my politics. People say it’s tragic. It really wasn't. There is a hunger underneath almost everything ambitious people do, and it is the hunger to be inside the circle. I still feel it. Whatever the local circle happens to be. The group text. The dinner party. The right opinions at the right brunch. The terror of being left outside will make otherwise decent people do quiet, corrosive things, and the cruelest part is that the circle never delivers. You break your authentic self getting in, and once inside, you discover the real circle is one room further. It has no center. Only doors. Someone tried to warn us about this in 1944, in a lecture hall in London, to students he suspected were about to spend their lives chasing exactly what I chased. C. S. Lewis called it the Inner Ring, and he told them the desire for it "will break your hearts unless you break it." Mine broke. I wrote the long version of what that break cost, and what came after, in Confessions of a Liberal. But it's the other thing he said that I needed twenty years earlier: the surest way into the ring of people worth belonging to is to stop trying to get in anywhere. Do your work honestly, and one day you will look up and discover you are already inside something better, a circle of people who like each other for what they are, not for what they perform. He was describing my church before I ever walked into it. He was describing my inherited self that I had so easily minimized or even brushed aside. I still find myself considering the easy way out. One virtue signal to show my old friends or self identifying leftists that I’m not too different from them rather than just showing them who I actually am. I struggle with this every single day. In every single interview. In every single hateful comment. I have to stop myself every single time. I know now that is the devil trying to weaken my resolve and sneak back in my life. I will not let him. The best way we can stay strong is by doing this life together. Thanks to every one of you for helping to be my resolve and grow my faith. I will be your strength and your shield always.