“How can you possibly call yourself a Christian?”

That was an email sent to me by someone I’ve never met in real life, but have corresponded with via social media.

Now, I have a whole host of answers ready (I Pet. 3:15, and you can look it up) when I think someone is seeking to judge my level of commitment, but I’m not sure the answers I shoot back are really all that scripturally based. Instead, they’re downright snotty.

“What’s it to you?”

“Fortunately, you don’t get a vote.”

“Shut up.”

I make no secret that I’m an ass on Twitter and sometimes Facebook but mostly on Twitter, and this weekend was more of the same, though after the “Hamilton” incident things got even more heated. I do not tend to engage regular folks on Twitter. I tweet messages to the president-elect and, this weekend, the vice president-elect, but the deplorables were quick to fire back. I was called several vulgar names and one guy tweeted that no one would care if I died.

That’s an odd thing to say to someone you never met so that didn’t bother me so much as my own reaction, which was, of course, to fire back.

This election is playing in to my worst qualities. I was spanked in first grade for getting into a fight. I did not tend to throw a punch because I had older brothers who’d punch back, but these kids were picking on a classmate named Mickey, who wore sweatshirts and smelled bad. I wasn’t particularly close to him but it seemed unfair, and so I waded in, for which I was spanked by Mrs. Taylor, my teacher. I was horrified and ashamed, as she spanked me in front of the whole class, but I look back on that as perhaps my finest hour.

For those of us who believe we were put here to fight, we (I’m speaking for myself) are going to figure out how to exist in a world where the opportunities are everywhere to put up our dukes, to fire back, to battle. If someone knows strategy, I’m all ears.