The Signal Beneath Collapse
Conscience. Collapse. What endures.
[God and Country is available in print and ebook on Amazon]
There's a particular quality to the air in a room where God's name is used to justify cruelty. I learned to recognize it at sixteen, standing in Simon Paige's office while he beat me unconscious for oversleeping. The same air would find me twenty years later, sitting around a campfire in Texas while my Muslim brothers watched videos of American soldiers being shot by snipers, their laughter echoing off the trees.
God and Country traces that arc—from one kind of religious extremism to another, from being the victim to being the one who could stop it. It's not a comfortable story. Comfortable stories have clean breaks between before and after, clear heroes and villains, lessons that fit on bumper stickers.
The Education of a Twice-Broken Believer
The Christian cult taught me what happens when faith becomes a weapon. Not the obvious lesson—that's easy, anyone can see that beating children in God's name is wrong. The harder lesson was subtler: how good people become complicit, how silence becomes survival, how you can know something is deeply wrong and still wake up every morning and participate.
I escaped that cult with a shotgun at seventeen, but I carried its lessons in my bones. So when I converted to Islam on New Year's Eve 1996, I thought I knew what to watch for. I could spot authoritarian leaders, manipulative theology, the slow tightening of control. What I didn't expect was to find myself, years later, trusted and respected in my new community, watching friends plot murder while quoting the same verses I held sacred.
The Slow Recognition
Kurt didn't start as an extremist. He started as a friend who ran Islamic outreach programs, who taught media production, who worried about his community after 9/11. The transformation happened in increments—a video here, a hadith there, anger crystallizing into ideology and ideology into action plans.
By the time he told me about his plan to join insurgents in Iraq, we'd been brothers for years. I'd eaten at his table, taught alongside him, built programs that brought Muslims and non-Muslims together. The easy choice would have been silence. The FBI wasn't knocking. No one else knew. I could have let him disappear overseas, told myself it wasn't my business, preserved my standing in a community I'd spent years serving.
But I'd already lived through what happens when good people choose comfortable silence over difficult truth. The cult had taught me that lesson in blood and beatings. I couldn't unlearn it.
What the Book Actually Is
God and Country doesn't offer easy answers because I don't have any. It's not a conversion story or a deconversion story. It's not pro-Islam or anti-Islam, pro-America or anti-America. It's the record of someone who got caught between competing loyalties and chose conscience over community, truth over tribe.
The book exists because certain stories need to be told by the people who lived them. Not interpreted by journalists or academics or activists with agendas, but spoken directly from the scorched ground where principles met consequences. Where doing the right thing meant losing everything I'd built, everyone I'd loved, every community that had ever claimed me.
For Those Who Need No Explanation
If you've ever stood in the ruins of your own life knowing you did what had to be done, this book won't surprise you. If you've been called apostate by believers or extremist by patriots—not for what you've done but for what you've refused to do—you already understand why it was written.
It's testimony from the place where faith and nation both demand your loyalty, and conscience demands something else entirely. Where there are no good choices, only necessary ones. Where survival means more than keeping your body alive—it means keeping that part of you that knows the difference between what's preached and what's right.
God and Country is what remains after the fire of certainty burns out. After the institutions fail, the communities close ranks, and you're left with nothing but the truth you couldn't deny. It's not a comfortable book because comfort was never the point.
The point was to leave evidence: This happened. It mattered. Someone saw it all and refused to look away.
That's enough.
[God and Country is available on Amazon]
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