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I used to watch Barack Obama give a press conference and feel something close to contempt.

There he was, behind the podium, measured and careful and professorial, parsing every question with the kind of precision that made it clear he had thought about this longer than the reporter had. And something about that made my skin crawl. I read it as smugness, as arrogance, as a man who believed he was the smartest person in any room he entered and wanted everyone in that room to know it. I thought he was ideologically dangerous, theologically liberal, and determined to impose his vision on a country that hadn't really asked for it.

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My biggest specific policy disagreement was the Affordable Care Act. I felt like he was forcing it on the country, and in some procedural sense, he was. That feeling was real. What has changed is not the memory of it but the lens through which I'm looking back. I no longer see a healthcare model that works for everyone as a liberal carrot to dangle. I see it as something closer to what the Good Samaritan actually did: meeting the person in front of you who needs help, without calculating whether they've earned it.

I want to say all of this plainly, because the essay that follows depends on honesty about where it starts.

I was not a birther. Even at my most ideologically rigid, the conspiracy that Obama was foreign-born or somehow illegitimate struck me as overreach, the kind of paranoid tribalism I could distinguish from principled disagreement. My opposition was principled, I believed. Biblical, even. Obama's progressive theology, his social policies, his vision of government's role in human flourishing were, in my reading, antithetical to what Scripture actually taught. I was defending a faith and the truth it contained, or so I was entirely convinced.

That is what I thought I was doing. I was wrong, and the wrongness is interesting, because it is not the simple kind.