How do we rebuild community after being divided by misguided leaders? (Photo by Timur Weber: https://www.pexels.com/photo/angry-couple-standing-back-to-back-8560709/)
Special to United Methodist Insight | June 10, 2026
A Letter to Everyone in the Room:
There’s a difference between being deceived and being innocent.
I want to talk to two groups of people at once, which is a risky thing to try. Bear with me.
The first group is people who supported Donald Trump and are now beginning to wonder if they got taken. Maybe it’s the tariffs hitting your wallet or something he said that finally crossed a line you didn’t know you had. Or maybe it’s just a slow, uncomfortable feeling that the story you were sold doesn’t quite match the reality you see all around you.
The second group is people like me, who’ve spent years calling this out and are now watching the first group arrive at conclusions we reached a long time ago. We have our own temptations in this moment, and I want to name them honestly, because they’re not necessarily flattering.
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To the people whose trust got broken:
What you’re feeling isn’t a mirage—the befuddlement, the anger, the embarrassment, maybe even the grief. Being deceived on this scale is genuinely painful, and it means you made a mistake. Humans are susceptible to stories that make us feel like we belong, like someone finally sees what we see. That susceptibility is how we’re built.
But I have to be honest with you, because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve comfort right now.
The damage that happened during these years wasn’t abstract. Real people paid real prices. People who were already vulnerable got more vulnerable because of the choices you made. And the people who suffered that stuff don’t get to un-suffer it just because you’ve had an epiphany about the fact that the president has been lying non-stop since he stepped on the stage.
Despite what it sounds like, I’m not saying that to make you feel terrible. I say it because I hope you’re capable of some necessary reflection. Because at this point, with all the water over the dam, it’s important to ask what accountability actually looks like for the harm your support made possible. What does repair look like? Who did you dismiss or demean that you owe something to?
Congratulations on your new view of the world and stuff, but that’s nowhere near the end of it. You get that, right?
The Hebrew tradition has a word for this: teshuvah. It’s usually translated as “repentance,” but that’s way too churchy and too focused on “feeling bad” for our purposes. Teshuvah indicates a change of direction proven by action. It’s less interested in your guilt than in what direction your Doc Martens are pointed.
Here’s why I’m asking what your new insight prompts you to do: A community that says, “Welcome back, all is forgiven, we’ll say no more about it” is rendering you a smaller version of yourself, one in which your choices don’t ultimately matter and the people you helped hurt don’t quite matter enough for the rest of us to require anything of you.
That’s not grace, at least not in any meaningful sense. And, quite frankly, low expectations are their own kind of contempt. That’s just wanting you to feel better, so the rest of us don’t have to sit with the discomfort of demanding more.
According to the faith I’m a part of, you’re worth more than that.
But so are the people who got hurt.
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To the people who’ve been right all along:
We have a problem too.
We’ve spent years being dismissed, mocked, and told we were overwrought and much too sensitive. We watched people we care about choose a story we knew was a lie, and then pay for it. But we’ve also watched other innocent people pay for it, too. And now some of those newly awakened from the Death Star are blinking in the bright light outside, and the temptation is to make their disillusionment partly about trumpeting our own moral vindication.
“What took you so long? We’ve been trying to tell you.”
Who doesn’t understand feeling like that? But if we let those vindictive feelings drive the bus, we’ve already lost something important. The question isn’t whether we were right. We realized from the jump that we were right. The question is what being right is for. If it’s primarily for the satisfaction of having been right, then... yay for our team?
But if that’s our only reaction, we’ve turned prophetic truth-telling into a pointless competition about who gets bragging rights.
The prophetic tradition was never about the vindication of the prophet. The hard word the prophets delivered was always on behalf of the people being injured, holding out hope that the powerful would turn around and go another way.
We also need to ask whether we called out what we took to be their obtuseness in ways that made what we were saying harder to hear. We have to do some honest reflection ourselves: Did we sometimes communicate in ways that made people feel their whole identity was under attack? Did we write off entire communities because it was easier than staying in relationship across our differences? (*unobtrusively as possible, raises hand*)
I’m not saying everyone’s equally to blame. I’m only saying that genuine love requires examining our own failures. And a movement that can only talk to people who already agree isn’t much of a movement.
Genuine love for people experiencing disillusionment definitely means holding people accountable. Because letting people off the hook without it doesn’t serve them, doesn’t serve the people they helped harm, and in a painful irony, confirms them in the very low expectations that made them susceptible to the lie in the first place.
If we love people, we have to try to love them enough to believe they can do the harder thing.
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Forgiveness, properly understood, was never the same thing as consequence removal. Desmond Tutu was relentlessly clear: you can’t have reconciliation without truth. Forgiveness means refusing to let the damage be the final word about the relationship. But we can’t elide the truth and casually wave as we pass by. And just as importantly, forgiveness can’t skip the part where we make things right with the people who got jobbed.
What the moment requires is truth told in love. But it also requires accountability held without contempt, and welcome offered without the pretense that nothing needs to change.
We’re all in this room together. The question is, after this nightmare ends, what are we going to do with that fact?
Be gentle and brave,
Derek
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent.