As we enter the era of Donald Trump, I have to confess that I only now understand how purely cruel my fellow Christians are. I find it hard to pray as a result.

White American evangelicals, who produced me, and among whom I must count myself, have thoroughly demonstrated how little we care about our representation of Christ to the world, how gleefully willing we are to put our own interests and grievances above the teachings of Jesus. And we have done that where we always do it: in the voting booth.

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Four in five white evangelicals who cast a vote last week did so for president-elect Trump, who repeatedly encouraged violence at his rallies and bragged that being a celebrity meant no one would stop him from grabbing women “by the pussy”. A dozen women came forward to accuse him of mistreating them. And Christians have such contempt for the work of government that we voted for him anyway.

Dismantle the social safety net, the argument goes, and let the church do the work it was called to do. God forbid the church simply express gratitude for aid in a work so infinite that Jesus himself said “The poor you will always have with you.”

But the words of Jesus are apparently worthless to people who are angry that immigrants might be made citizens without suffering enough. If you want your impoverished neighbor’s insulin supply cruelly torn away from her on the extremely slim chance that it might make your own monthly health insurance premiums go down, you will find little validation in the Sermon on the Mount. If you want to halt immigration for people who are fleeing persecution, you will have some trouble with the God of Zechariah, who tells you in so many words, “[D]o not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.”

Why must an abused child be forced to carry another child to term? Why shouldn’t women be able to easily access birth control or surgeries that will prevent them from dying of sepsis? I can’t find answers for these questions in my Bible.

Perhaps white Christians simply gave ourselves the extravagant gift of forgetfulness before entering the voting booth. Perhaps we simply didn’t care. A map circulated on Twitter showing all but one state blue, illustrating the youth vote, but I confess I find it cold comfort. Older voters can always be relied upon to value themselves and their bruised feelings over the arc of history, because they will depart from history sooner. They won’t need their portfolios and 401(k)s when the New York Stock Exchange is under water. And they don’t seem to care about those who will, especially if those people don’t look and sound like them.

I interviewed the Rev Alfred Young of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Covington, Louisiana, earlier this year for a hopeful story on the election, for which I talked to Christians and their leaders about the choice before them and what they believed they ought to do. Young is black and leads an integrating black church.

When we spoke, he was more concerned with individual racial reconciliation than he was with politics. Top-down race reconciliation, he said, was impossible. It could only be done person-to-person. “I have people who tell me all the time since president Obama was elected, racial relations have gotten worse and they thought they should have gotten better,” Young told me. “That’s because they expected corporate reconciliation, that the president could do that.” He paused for emphasis. “He could never do that.”

I told Young that I had been watching the rise of the alt-right movement around Donald Trump. “It makes me so ashamed,” I said.

“What can President Obama do about reconciliation between you and I?” Young asked me. “Nothing. What can Donald Trump do about some crazy white man who thinks because Trump is the president it gives him a license to go crazy with some black man? Nothing.” Jesus in him, he said, had given him the capacity to reconcile with white people. Jesus in his congregation had given them the capacity to be healed.

This was an election driven not just by race, but by class. To many being dragged out of the middle class and into the lower, the culprit was obviously Barack Obama, a black man who didn’t know his place and had to be shown it in the most self-destructive way. If it hurt those below them, perhaps that would teach them where they belonged.

But class can be transcended in the church. “The model for class transition has always been the black church,” Young told me. “In the black church, traditionally over the years, you had the janitor of the school and you had the president. You had the guy who was the drug addict, or back then the alcoholic, and you had the PhD and the corporate executive.” Not much of that had changed over the years, he said.

“And when they came to church,” Young said, “none of that mattered.”

That sentence now makes me want to flee to Young’s church, to kneel within its walls and never leave, to pray with and for the people who will suffer most, no matter who they voted for.

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I am under no illusions that the black church is perfect, or that Young himself is perfect, or that reconciliation is inevitable. But within the walls of a real church, barriers of class and race are forbidden by a God who sees every parishioner as equally sinful, and equally beloved. I’m understanding now how very rare those churches are, and how easy it is to increase your congregational attendance by cleverly exploiting those barriers.

At the time, when the primary was still running, Young disappointed me. I wanted the barriers taken down by executive order.

In this new, awful moment, when white Christianity has expressed its contempt so harshly, the possibility of a true house of God finally makes my hope in Jesus less profane. But it is the hope of a hope, now.