At a nightclub located in central Colorado Springs, on one of the busiest streets in our entire city, a twenty–two–year–old man clad in body armor and carrying an AR–15 assault rifle, a pistol, and multiple magazines of ammunition walked through the front door at two minutes before midnight. Immediately he began shooting employees and partygoers indiscriminately, stopping only after being subdued by two patrons at the club, one of them a US Army veteran who tackled the man and then hit him in the head with the shooter’s own handgun, rendering him incapacitated until officers arrived.

Before the man could be stopped, five people lost their lives. Another twenty–five were injured, nineteen of them by gunfire. And yet another city in this country was left shaking its head in disappointment and reeling from horror and trauma and fear. Exacerbating the devastation was that the club where people were shot was quickly associated with a vulnerable people group in our community.

Several hours later, on a Sunday morning, I woke up to the news of the tragedy and felt my heart sink lower in my chest. Such senselessness. Such devastation. Like so many people who were also learning what happened, I lay there feeling helpless and deeply sad.

Not knowing what else to do, I prayed for the families of those who had been subjected to the obscene act of violence the night before. Then I opened my Twitter app and posted the following tweet: “As Christ followers, we condemn violence anytime against any group of people. Our hearts are broken for those who lost their lives last night in our city. Lord, be near them.”

That was it. There was no virtue signaling. No “our thoughts and prayers are with you.” Just a genuine response from what I sure hope was a genuine heart. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and the air was turning cold. The families who had lost loved ones had just had their holidays wrecked for decades to come. I felt awful as I thought about the ramifications of that singular, dreadful choice. What a terrible thing to occur.

You should have seen the comments I got.

In edited form, they said this:

“Your heart isn’t broken! You’re probably happy. All you do is preach hate!”

“You’re the problem in this city!”

“You and your stupid followers are the ones who deserve to be shot!”

The following day, I received a direct message: “You’re to blame for all this,” it said. I stood there, phone in hand, shaking my head, thinking, What in the world is happening to us as a society? Where do we go from here?

As calmly as I could, I typed, “With all due respect, can I ask you a question? Have you ever even heard me preach?”

“No,” he replied. “Why would I ever do that?”

“I’ve preached nearly four hundred sermons at New Life Church,” I wrote, “and not once have I called for hatred. Not once from the pulpit have I breezed past the devastating prejudice and violence so many people and groups in our community have faced over the years, as though they somehow had it coming. Not once.”

I wouldn’t say the exchange exactly went anywhere from there, but at least the guy eventually conceded that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t the cause of the horrific violence that had taken place.

The rest of the afternoon I was revved up—and not in a good way. It felt so awful to be misunderstood, to be mislabeled, to be prejudged by someone I’d never even met. Couldn’t he have asked even one question to try to get to know me and to understand my views before wagging a finger in my face and declaring that everything was my fault?

Flash forward a few years, when I was having lunch with a friend. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of being partway through a conversation when it feels like you rise out of your body and can observe yourself from above. As I did just that, I realized that I was telling this friend a story I’d told a hundred times before, an old favorite, one that always got a good laugh, when it hit me: Wait. Aren’t I doing the same thing I was so mad at the guy on Twitter for doing to me? Where is my curiosity for my friend? Where are the questions? Where is the genuine interest? What am I even doing right now?

Yes, maybe my offense could be considered less grievous. I mean, I wasn’t wagging any fingers. I wasn’t laying any blame. But equally true, I wasn’t making any connections either. I was just delighting in the sound of my own voice. “We can become certain about things that don’t warrant certainty and doubtful of documented facts,” writes Bonnie Kristian. “In the throes of epistemic crisis, we look like nothing so much as the fool critiqued throughout the book of Proverbs: always seeking out information that pleases us (17:24), . . . lacking common sense (10:21), quick to quarrel (20:2), and too happy to hear ourselves talk (18:2).”

I could try to cherry–pick my way out of that rundown, but the older I get, the more I realize that when a sin you do commit is highlighted in a list of lots of other sins, it’s likely you’re guilty of them all. Or guilty of the spirit of them all, anyway. Something needed to change, and I knew it. And the change needed to start with me.

In our present outrage culture, I can’t be the only one who is struggling both with the aggravation of being prejudged and with the wild temptation to prejudge others. It’s a terrible plight, really, being caught from both sides in this way.

Prejudice—the act of prejudging—is forming a preconceived opinion of someone or a group of someones that is based on nothing substantive, such as firsthand experience or reason. It’s assuming that the other person thinks a certain way or talks a certain way or holds to certain beliefs or will respond to you according to your expectations, despite your never having met that person.

It’s determining in your mind and heart ahead of time that you have nothing in common with him because he votes for that party, or that you’ll never be accepted by her because she lives in that neighborhood, or that you absolutely don’t want to associate with them because they protested that one thing last year.

It’s walking through life constantly sorting: Are they in or out? For me or against me? Friend or foe? What about this person talking to me in the line at the bank? In? Yeah, maybe! Wait, no. Definitely out.

A woman I work with was telling me that she recently had dinner with a new acquaintance—her daughter’s friend’s mom, which is how so many female friendships begin. The two women had agreed to meet at a restaurant, but because the acquaintance was running late, neither saw the other’s vehicle until they were leaving the restaurant to head to their respective homes. Only then did my colleague notice the window stickers peppering the other woman’s car. They had enjoyed a fantastic conversation over a shared meal and had found all sorts of common ground on which to establish real camaraderie. But now that she knew what this new person in her life stood for, she decided a friendship just wasn’t meant to be.

Ridiculous, right? What about the congenial conversation? What about the connection made over a great meal? Nope. My colleague tossed it all out the window, convinced that the pair were at odds.

You want to know the truth? You and I do this too. We prejudge people and then stick to those assumptions, convinced in our heart that we’ve gotten it right. Even as a still, small voice inside of us whispers, “Those are lies you’re believing, you know.”

Sure, we say we’re lovers of truth. But do we live as though that is true?

If you’ve been paying attention to news coverage over the past several years, then you’re all too aware of the horrific dangers of prejudging people and groups, including even physical death. Let’s be honest: you and I can locate ourselves on the downward spiral that leads from everyday confirmation bias—such as seeing the same make or model as the car you just bought when you never really noticed them on the roads before—to biases that are far more pernicious—such as holding racist views. Let’s look at some of the dangers of our assumptions, starting with the rampant isolation that such an unhelpful posture creates.

When you and I approach every human being through prejudiced lenses, we drastically shrink the pool of available acquaintances, colleagues, and friends and thus cut off community at the root. The fact is, if everyone in your life or mine has to be 100 percent like us to be found acceptable, then we’re going to spend the sum of that life all alone.

Equally true, when we see the world through a preformed set of assumptions, we limit the flow of information into our lives. If I refuse to watch news coverage or read books to engage with people who hold views divergent from my own, then I will never have an informed perspective. I’ll be so one–sided I’ll topple right over.

In my prejudiced state of mind, I’m also far more likely to fall for manipulation and propaganda by those who control the information sources I’ve deemed worthwhile. Recently a wise and centered staff member from our church resigned because she was moving out of state with her husband; based on her social media posts, she has gone so deep into a fringe political group that she now seems unrecognizable to me.

Here’s one more, which is a by–product of the previous point: when we allow prejudice to shape our viewpoint, we abandon critical thinking in ever–worsening ways.

Listen, it’s tempting to live our lives in our little echo chambers— you do you, and I’ll do me—but this stuff I’m talking about is actually evil, in that it diminishes the God–given humanity in the real live human beings we meet.