Not my words but had to share:

Not my words but had to share:

“It always begins with a story we tell ourselves.

A story where “they” are not worthy of being treated with human dignity, where whole lives are flattened into headlines, where mothers and fathers become statistics, where children become shadows at the edge of a slogan.

We call them criminals.
We call them invaders.
We call them “the worst of the worst,”
as if they are all evil.

Dehumanization is never loud at first.
It arrives dressed as concern.
As “law and order.”
As reason.
As protection.
As common sense.
It asks us only to believe the worst about someone else, and promises it will benefit us and won’t cost us anything.

But it always does.

Because the moment we accept a lie about another person’s humanity, we loosen our grip on our own.

We begin to tolerate cages we would never enter, violence we would never excuse, and cruelty we would never survive.

We learn to look away.
And looking away reshapes us.

Once a group of people becomes a threat instead of a neighbor, anything can be done to them.

Their families can be torn apart.
Their bodies can be abused.
Their suffering can be explained away as necessary, unfortunate, but deserved.

History teaches this lesson again and again,
not in whispers, but in mass camps turned into museums, mass graves with monuments, and apologies written too late.

And still we say, this time is different.

It never is.

What dehumanization does most effectively
is not just harm its targets, it hollows out the soul of those who participate.
It trains us to distrust compassion.
To sneer at mercy.
To call empathy weakness.
To mistake dominance for strength.

It teaches us to survive by shrinking our moral imagination until only people like us can fit inside it.

And then we commit the greatest blasphemy of all: we drag God into justify it all.

We quote scripture to justify cruelty.
We baptize policies that break bodies and spirits.
We invoke Jesus while ignoring everything he said, everything he touched, everyone he loved.

The God who knit every human being together,
brown, black, documented, undocumented,
made in the image of divine dignity, is turned into a mascot for fear.

A weapon for exclusion.
A stamp of approval on violence.

We sanctify evil and call it righteousness.

This dehumanized mentality looks at the immigrant, the refugee, the outsider
and sees a problem to be solved.

It looks at someone like Jesus,
beaten by the state, criminalized by religious leaders, executed under the banner of law and order, and says, “He should have just obeyed the law.”

Jesus is always found among the dehumanized.
Not because he failed to rise above them, but because he refused to abandon them.
He is with the caged.
The scapegoated.
The lied-about.
The bodies treated as disposable.

So when we Christians participate in this dehumanization, when we strip others of their humanity, we also strip Jesus of his humanity,
denying that he would suffer where others suffer.

And then we strip him of his divinity,
by reshaping God into our own fearful image.

When we erase the humanity of others,
we erase our own reflection in the mirror of God.

A society cannot survive this forever.
A church cannot survive this at all.

Because the gospel does not begin with borders,
but with God and humanity.

It does not begin with exclusion, but incarnation.

God does not save us from a distance.
God becomes one of us.

And any faith that requires us to believe the worst about our neighbors
is not forming saints,
it is forming tyrants,
it is training us to forget who we are.

When we dehumanize others,
we don’t just harm them.

We become something less than human ourselves.

We must regain the story of our shared humanity.”

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